Anthony Davis’ 2019 opera tells the story of five boys from East Harlem, New York, wrongly convicted of the beating and rape of Trisha Melli. The composer blends an incredible range of musical styles in a “frank engagement with race, gender and power in America.”
Spiced with clever dark humor and depicted through beautiful cinematography, endearing acting and a powerful soundtrack, ‘Humanist Vampire’ is a modest masterpiece, especially recommended to dreamy, romantic, humanist spirits—that is, to the ones who still believe that, despite this shattered society, human relationships should be put front and center on our agenda.
Susan van Gelder reviews ‘Peregrina,’ a multimedia 80-minute one-woman performance, telling the story of femicide in Mexico and the movement of Mexican women to combat it.
Poem read by the author, Sunshine Lombré, at an abortion rights demonstration in Evanston, Illinois.
Takes up: In memoriam Faith Ringgold, a seven-decade Black American artist; research by Dr. Debby Herbenick about violent sexual behavior among college students; a paper by the Snow Leopard Trust about “Applying a Gender Lens to Biodiversity Conservation in High Asia”; and the documentary ‘You Are Not Alone: Fighting the Wolf Pack’ (2024) about the trial inspiring Spain’s #MeToo movement.
Can dialectics be expressed musically? ‘Internal Melodies,’ the new album from pianist Dan Tepfer and saxophonist Miguel Zenón, is a journey from one’s outermost external reality to one’s closest self, from reason to emotion, from the social to the individual and back again.
Takes up: International Safe Abortion Day; elections in Poland; ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–1990’, the first major art museum show covering the feminist art movement; and El Salvador’s anti-abortion laws.
Review of the multimedia exhibit: “Stories Never Told: Yemen’s Crises and Renaissance,” in which Yemeni artists and hundreds of others spoke truth to power through their art.
Review of Robert Taliaferro’s wonderfully illustrated book, “Always Color Outside the Lines: Freedom for the Artist Within”–a book that shows his philosophy of art and his expertise with different media and techniques.
A view of the fire at the Ghost Ship that takes into account the capitalist nature of rents, evictions, land use, and how youth, by the way the live their lives, are fighting back.
From the September-October 2014 News & Letters
THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT AND THE BLACK REVOLUTION
I am in the movement still because of the Free Speech Movement (FSM)—it turned my life around. I studied everything about the New Left. I came to Berkeley and decided this is where I needed to be. [=>]
“Creative Dissent: Arts of the Arab World Uprisings” is an exhibit which magnificently captures the voices, images and revolutionary ideas of participants in the Arab Spring.
Warner Brothers presents Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser directed by Charlotte Zwerin. Produced by Charlotte Zwerin and Bruce Ricker. Executive Producer Clint Eastwood.
Art is the eternal particular, the unmediated, mediating term in which the human face is recognized. A familiar tune, like a familiar face, catches us unawares and we smile in recognition. We find ourselves whistling.
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