Rap as News or Art?

“Rap music is the CNN of the ghetto.” – Chuck D

Rap began — Chuck D nailed it — as news from the streets. Rap riffed ghetto life, syncopated in hard rhymes and dense metaphor the raw reality of the ghetto. In Ronald Reagan’s America, blacks in the ...

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9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster

I remember the week after September 11, 2001, when the subway from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan was back in limited service, getting off at Broadway-Lafayette and feeling somewhat disoriented when my usual landmark indicating south, the World Trade Center, was missing from the downtown skyline. The specter of the World ...

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9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster

How I Got Over

Like most people in the arts, for many years I supported my artistic activities, along with the rest of my life, by holding down a day job. Corporate communications and advertising primarily in financial services were not such a bad gig, actually, and, in fact, were what I trained to ...

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How I Got Over

Pizzas for the People

Directed by Hwang Kim and produced by Festival Bo:m

In the course of a long running ideological conflict North Korea is one of the most culturally isolated countries in the world, which rejects any foreign influences through a tight control of media and communication equipment. To protect the North Korean identity from potential damaging western influences, short wave radios, ...

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Pizzas for the People

Why Comedy Matters

When moral or political decisions are at stake, we often make use of catch-phrases drawn from a repertoire of available drama and literature. For we understand that both our actions and how they are perceived depend on how we frame them. Comedy, of all genres, appears to be the one ...

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Why Comedy Matters

Krzysztof Czyzewski and Czeslaw Miłosz Meeting in their Native Realm*

On May 18, 2014, for his contributions to understanding history and for his creative confrontation with memory, Krzysztof Czyzewski was awarded the Dan David Prize along with the French historian Pierre Nora and the Israeli Holocaust scholar Saul Friedlander. Of these three, the two distinguished historians and the theater practitioner-publisher-memory ...
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Krzysztof  Czyzewski and Czeslaw Miłosz Meeting in their Native Realm*