In my travels over the last few weeks, I’ve encountered quite a few arts advocates in the grip of a singular and persistent obsession, conveying art’s value through “hard evidence” such as numbers, graphs and charts intended to convince funders and policy makers to invest in cultural programs. The dean of an arts college confided …
In 1963, when I was a junior in high school, the late, great Nina Simone released a powerfully angry song called “Mississippi Goddam.” “The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam,” the song began, “And I mean every word of it.” Here’s the last stanza: You don’t have to live next to me Just give …
I’m off to Mississippi to visit with Thousand Kites, one of the projects described in my just-published book, New Creative Community. In prison slang, a “kite” is a message, such as a note or letter to a prisoner. The project is a collaboration between Holler to the Hood (H2H) and Roadside Theater, two groups based …
Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair added fuel to a red-hot cultural debate ignited by response to Muslim women wearing the niqab, a face-covering veil with no opening other than slits for eyes. “It is a mark of separation,” said Blair of the niqab, “and that is why it makes other people from …
“Not everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid,” said my friend, calibrating the precise level of fanatic devotion practiced by her colleagues on an especially consuming project. Then I heard it on a TV program: the mother-figure of a somewhat suspect group offered glasses of red liquid to two bright-eyed teenagers: “Kool-Aid anybody?” “Don’t worry,” she said, …
I’ve been chewing over a problem—an especially tough esthetic-political-spiritual problem—and I wonder if you can help. Let me explain. Whether you look at the news or at the new TV season, at the local multiplex or the art gallery, at the nightclub or the bookstore, there’s no denying that our culture is generating boundless imagery …
What do Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U. S. president George W. Bush have in common? Thrusting ego, overwhelming confidence in their own rightness (whether they believe themselves to be anointed by God or History) and belligerent readiness to get up in their opponents’ faces and give them what for. Last …
Monday’s New York Times carried a story of epochal significance: the town pool of Stonewall, Mississippi, which had been filled with dirt to avoid integrating it in the 1970s, is being excavated and reopened for the benefit of the entire community, black and white. More than 20 years ago, my partner and I were hired …
“The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.” Critic and novelist John Berger wrote those words more than three decades ago for a groundbreaking BBC series on art. I have quoted them ever since, never surfacing them in my awareness without the …
A friend sent me the link to a story on NPR about Juan Williams’ new book condemning what Williams perceives as the stuck irrelevance of entrenched African American leadership and calling for a new leadership paradigm. “Have you thought about blogging on” this book? “It would be good,” she wrote, “to see what you have …