Issue 6, Fall 2016

Mean Streets: Viewing the Divided City The Common Reader's Essays for the 2016 St. Louis International Film Festival

Five essays to accompany and complement your journey through this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival, Nov. 11-13 at the Missouri History Museum. Find a full programming schedule here.

Dance and the Divided City

To anyone who asked, Katherine Dunham repeated a consistent message: training in the performing arts prepared people to face life’s problems. Too often, she felt, individuals wandered through life unaware of how the world worked and how they fit into it.

Touring the Divided City

Neighborhoods United for Change frames St. Louis not just as a divided city, but also as one that yokes dispossession in North City to growth in South St. Louis, revealing how both North and South share similar goals.

“Don’t do day here”

At the end of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie—all night scenes, of course—Cosmo, John Cassavetes’ grand and expansive character of a Hollywood club owner, is hiding his wound and still trying to run the show, but the sense is that he will bleed out before the dawn. They “don’t do day here.”