When Sharon Jones tapped her feet on stage, singing and shaking in a glitter dress, the dust from everyday life turned into sparkle to let us shine. Backed by the Dap-Kings, her powerful yet kind voice, energy, and down-to-earth attitude… Read More
Watching Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion (2011), in light of a year of COVID-19, I was struck by the accuracy of much of the writers’ vision. A zoonotic disease crosses over from increasingly under pressure animal populations, trapped in the ever-shrinking… Read More
“I think the idea of the leather jacket-wearing, womanizing, drug-fuelled rock star should be burned,” Charlie Steen, the frontman for London’s Shame, told The Guardian back in 2018. It was just a few days before their debut, Songs of Praise… Read More
One of the first sequences in the documentary series City So Real shows the mayoral candidates in Chicago marching in the 2018 Bud Billiken Parade, a celebration for the start of the back-to-school season in the storied Black neighborhood of… Read More
Balothizer – Cretan Smash (Louvana) <a href=”https://balothizer.bandcamp.com/album/cretan-smash”>Cretan Smash by Balothizer</a> Full disclosure: I’m cheating a bit. Balothizer’s Cretan Smash was released back in November, but the album is such a gem that it deserves everyone’s attention. Three factors make this… Read More
Kevin Godley has been a vital part of some of the most innovative music of the last six decades. As a quarter of the original lineup of 10CC, he had hits worldwide but jumped ship with his long-time creative partner,… Read More
German actress Nina Hoss’ lengthy collaboration with German director Christian Petzold, from Wolfsburg (2003) to Phoenix (2014), saw the pair become inseparable. The characters she played showed the diversity of her onscreen presence, with her talent for conveying nuance in… Read More
Éric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor lifts readers from the contemporary battlegrounds of class struggle and deposits us in the frenzy of the 16th century. The Protestant Reformers had declared war on the privileged elites of Catholicism, but the… Read More
“A man alone always talks too much.” — Ferdinand Griffon Pierrot le fou (1965) was the tenth 10th feature film in five years from French enfant terrible Jean Luc-Godard, working at a blinding rate mostly unseen in contemporary cinema. Adapted… Read More
On 20 January 2021—in the shadows of the terrorist attack on the US Capitol just 14 days earlier—Amanda Gorman became the United States’ sixth inaugural poet. At 22-years-old, Gorman became the youngest inaugural poet, but more important than her age… Read More