culture Archive

Featured Stories

• Cinematic Cultural Change in West Africa with Idrissa Ouédraogo
  Posted on June 3, 2018 | No Comments

  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.

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• Mild Satire, Outrage and Hostility, with Philip Roth
  Posted on June 2, 2018 | No Comments

  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.

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• Big Noise from Big Band Drummer Gene Krupa
  Posted on April 10, 2018 | No Comments

  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.

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• Loose Nuts: Edison Reveals Huge Gap in Safety at San Onofre
  Posted on April 9, 2018 | No Comments

  Toonman Collamer opines: Work crews transferring radioactive spent fuel (nuclear waste) at the San Onofre nuclear plant from cooling pools into dry storage discovered a loose bolt inside one of the canisters, prompting Southern California Edison to temporarily halt the relocation effort.  -- Los Angeles Times

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• The US Shame of My Lai in Vietnam
  Posted on March 17, 2018 | No Comments

  On the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War, we honor the efforts of Army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson to stop the madness and endure the quest for truth, and share the Vietnamese-made documentary, 'The Sound of the Violin in My Lai'.

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• The Lucrative and Violent Curse of Coltan Mining in Congo
  Posted on March 3, 2018 | No Comments

  One of Africa's most rare-minerals-rich countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo, has endured Belgian colonization, slavery, and continuing atrocities, where militant groups control the extraction of "conflict resources." The tech industry turns these extracted raw materials into components of mobile phones and computers. Yet the cost is deadly.

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• Iannis Xenakis and the Notion of a Cosmic Utopia
  Posted on February 21, 2018 | No Comments

  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.

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• Anthropocene Arrives, Climate Collapses, and No One Cares
  Posted on February 17, 2018 | 2 Comments

  Clive Hamilton writes on how governments, people, corporations, the world continues to plan for the future as if climate scientists don’t exist. The greatest shame is the absence of a sense of tragedy.

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• Jean Jacques Dessalines and the Women Warriors who Liberated Haiti
  Posted on January 24, 2018 | No Comments

  Today's attempts to malign Haiti stand as only the latest in a long line of hegemony and oppression against this Caribbean island nation. January 1, 1804 is Haitian Independence Day, and Haitian attorney Ezili Dantò honors and remembers Janjak Desalin (Jean Jacques Dessalines), Haiti's Liberator and founding father, as well as the indigenous army, and women who influenced him. Janjak's ideals and legacy lives on - Nou la!

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• Tribute to SomaFM’s Darkwave channel ‘doomed’
  Posted on January 22, 2018 | 2 Comments

  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.

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