Remi Kanazi’s second, and most recent collection of poetry, Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine, could be summed up with the line: “the world is a messed up place,” the first line of the poem, “Nothing to Worry About.” Is the line fitting? Yes, and, no. Most poems, after all, are connected by themes of exile, displacement, colonialism, homelessness, violence, and police brutality, themes that, at first glance seem bleak. Nonetheless, to the attentive reader, these themes are the building blocks of a larger argument, an argument that calls for human solidarity against oppression of all kinds.
Read moreYour Lunacy Fits Nicely With My Own
Robert Wyatt, now in his 70s, is surely one of the most intriguing, distinctive and sometimes infuriating musicians born out of 1960s Britain. His musical output has been intermittent, not surprising for someone suffering depression throughout his life, as well as the consequences of an accident in 1973 that left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Yet his recorded output contains many wonders. The surrealist psychedelia of the early Soft Machine and Matching Mole, the intensely personal bittersweet Rock Bottom, the series of Rough Trade singles which include his forlorn interpretation of Chic’s “At Last I am Free”, his version of Elvis Costello and Clive Langer’s anti-war “Shipbuilding” about the Falklands War as well as an eclectic series of collaborations with musicians such as Bjork, the Raincoats, Carla Bley and Brian Eno.
Read moreCorpocracy: Engaged Art In Practice
"Corpocracy,” currently at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, provides another opportunity to reexamine important questions of a genuinely militant and engaged art practice. The show features political, mostly contemporary work by artists such as Michael D'Antuono, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, Packard Jennings, Eugenio Merino, Yoshua Okón, Stephanie Syjuco, and Judi Werthein. One arts collective is featured as well: the Beehive Design Collective.
Modeled on retro, aluminum signage, with chasing lights that flicker on and off in different patterns, Steve Lambert’s Capitalism Works For Me! True/False (2011) spells out the work’s exclamatory title...
Read moreA Festival of Color and Glam
Diversity and tolerance were major elements of this year’s Afropunk in New York City. It was a kaleidoscope of musical styles that oscillated between rap and electronic dance music sampling heavily from traditional African drumbeats and popular music. During the weekend of 22-23 August 2015, Afropunk took pace at Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn — a park wedged between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Clinton Hill’s predominantly black and working class community.
For two days, musicians, artists, and their spectators engaged in a festival with quirky and alternative people from various walks of life. One could find an attendee with green hair, metal chains, and nothing else.
Read moreRevolution and the Avant-Garde
In his ambitious defense of a contemporary avant-garde conceived as an open-ended research program, critic and theorist John Roberts weaves together a theoretically heady prescription of its conceptual methodology, analyses of several exemplary praxes that adapted pertinent avant-gardist questions to their own social conditions, and an account of dynamics of art production and reception in late-capitalism that seem to demand the advance of a contemporary avant-garde.
Roberts inevitably confronts the nearly hundred-year-old conceptual problems embedded in the historical avant-garde, along with the plethora of pertinent critical and art historical scholarship that has emerged in the meantime.
Read moreNo More Daydreaming?
“Look what's happening out in the streets
Got a revolution! Got to revolution!
Hey I'm dancing down the streets
Got a revolution! Got to revolution!”
The lyrics to the Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers” boomed out of the oversized speakers set in the 2nd floor window of the 6th Sense Boutique in College Park, Maryland. Below were rows of grim faced police in riot gear faced thousands of University of Maryland students occupying Route 1, the main road through College Park.
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