The ostensible arc of The Poison Tree takes us from a child’s domination by a ruthless, unyielding father to a successful adult’s enlightenment and forgiveness. But the actual course of the narrative is less straightforward and, as with the poem from which it takes its inspiration, far more unexpected in its outcomes.
Whether as audience members, scholars, or performers, women have been in short supply throughout jazz history. The representation of jazz in the films La La Land (2016) and Whiplash (2014), by director and writer Damien Chazelle, demonstrates this problem clearly.
The world that compositions about Joan of Arc evoke is filled with angels and demons, kings and clerics, bells and disembodied voices, and their musical interpretations reveal striking details about how the modern age looks back on the mysterious medieval world Joan inhabited.
Rapper T.I. tunes listeners’ ears backward in time, to the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the death of Martin Luther King Jr., but also forward to our current time in which he believes white supremacy “is covertly done.”
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.
The Wire would not necessarily be described as a series about race. But that was the beauty of it.
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.
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.”
By the time my family moved into Pruitt-Igoe about 10 years after its opening, I had no idea the “solution” had already morphed into a nightmare.
Trump’s slash-and-burn march to the White House, one of the most stunning accomplishments in the annals of American politics no matter how loathsome the man may be to so many, ended the dynastic claims of two powerful political families: The Republican Bushes and the Democrat Clintons.
