Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Performance arts, music, film, drama and literature, creative expressions presented on the world stage seeking earth balance, harmony, dissonance, abstraction and concept.
Idrissa Ouédraogo, whose simple, carefully observed movies about cultural change in Burkina Faso and elsewhere in Africa, brought him international acclaim and a top award at the Cannes International Film Festival, recently died. We share his first film, Yam Daabo (The Choice) about a family facing famine in the Sahel.
His alter-ego Zuckerman, unconsciously frightened of success and of failure, frightened of being admired and also despised, frightened of being frightened, he unconsciously suppressed his talent, frightened of what it might do next. On the passing of Philip Roth, we look into his often black comic chronicles of an imagined life, his taking down and reshaping the meaning of ‘Jewish American’, and his play at historic re-creating the zeitgeist within the form of the novel.
Gene Krupa (1909 – 1973) pioneered orchestral jazz and Big Band from the flamboyant drum side, pounding tom-toms, high hats, and cymbals through the 30s, 40s, and 50s, as one of the most remarkable percussionists out there.
Iannis Xenakis, the Greek-French experimental composer and protege designer for the famous architect Le Corbusier, advanced theories of the vertical “Cosmic” city as the only sustainable way forward. Here, he wrote this essay in 1966, decrying decentralization (read: suburban sprawl) in favor of building up, up, up…5 million inhabitants to be housed in a single megastructure, a hyperbolic paraboloid of more than 3,000 meters high and 50 meters wide.
Somafm.com has streamed an inventive radio channel pioneered by Rusty Hodge featuring, as they called it “Dark industrial/ambient music for tortured souls.” The service was recently discontinued until October Halloween season, which to the Gothic-Ambient-Industrial music crowd signifies the end of an era. Following is a sample of sounds from the dark side.
“Everyone knows the Christmas Cat, he’s angry, huge, and mean,” begins the story of inequality and injustice for the poor, with the feline ogre who punishes those who fail to perform for their overlords. Retold in a shadow puppet play from the Icelandic story of Jólakötturinn, by Layla Holzer and Spike Dennis.
Paul Bowles during his life (1910-1999) remained aloof from all the hipsters and hypesters of U.S. letters. Living in self-imposed exile in Tangier, he had cast a spell over such talents as Tennessee Williams, Libby Holman, Truman Capote, and Allen Ginsberg. We revisit an essay penned by Jay McInerny in 1985, on how the inimitable expatriate writer-composer’s dark arts retain their power, even more so 32 years later.