Rabindranath Tagore

Satyajit Ray's 1961 documentary on Tagore:

Tagore's Gitanjali is here; Ernest Rhys's biography is here.

Kara Walker

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) on Bix Beiderbecke

Corey Kilgannon, who seems to have an ongoing fascination with jazz musicians' final residences, writes about the apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, where Bix Beiderbecke died, eighty years ago today.  Amiri Baraka's thoughts on Beiderbecke, published in Blues People (1963), are worth reflecting on:

Afro-American music did not become a completely American expression until the white man could play it!  Bix Beiderbecke, more than any of the early white jazzmen, signified this development because he was the first white jazz musician, the first white musician who brought to the jazz he created any of the ultimate concern Negro musicians brought to it as a casual attitude of their culture.  This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man's only way into it).  The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned.

Here's Cindy Marvel juggling to Beiderbecke's "Ostrich Walk":

McDonald's: Four Views

Eddie Murphy:

José Bové:

Morgan Spurlock:

Rémi Gaillard:

The Merry Pranksters Were Lame

Well Steven Holden doesn't think much of the new documentary about the Merry Pranksters' bus trip.

Almost a half century later, these pranksters come across as a bunch of spoiled immature white guys fiddling around while the world was burning..

Even back home in the U.S.... four days after the Pranksters set off on June 17, 1964, three civil rights workers—Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner—were reported missing in Philadelphia, Miss.  For some historical perspective, one might compare the pranksters' day-glo-colored bus with the bus that's pictured on this web page's account of the 1961 civil rights "Freedom Rides."

How was the pranksters' bus trip subsidized, anyhow?  Did Kesey pay for it?  How could those folks afford to spend their summer goofing around?

Lila Azam Zanganeh

She's just published a book about Vladimir Nabokov.

Peter Brötzmann

Martha Nussbaum

An excerpt from Astra Taylor's documentary Examined Lives:

Frank Stella's Scarlatti K Series

In this review of a 2009 show, Roberta Smith explains that Stella's "new material is ProtoGen, a white resin that comes in sheets of varying thickness, used in making detailed architectural models that can be cut and twisted into often spiral-like forms. It allows an illusion of weightlessness that is new to Mr. Stella's work, and welcome. Worked by hand and refined on the computer, the pieces are dominated by coiled and spiral forms that levitate, billow and curl, suggesting sails, colored ribbons, the robes in old-master painting and free-form architectural elements."

Read the Washington Post review of the current show at the Phillips Collection here, and the curator's notes here.  An ArtNews piece on a show from 2008 is here.

Here's Stella on NPR's Studio 360 show (more photos of the sculptures here), talking about being inspired in his early years by jazz pianists like Lennie Tristano. and Jelly Roll Morton:


An article by Robert Hughes is here, and one by Deborah Solomon here.  And here's a public conversation with Stella from last spring (at 12:00 Stella demonstrates geometric structures at the blackboard):

Here's Ralph Kirkpatrick playing Domenico Scarlatti:

Some of Scarlatti's scores are available here.

Steve Reich: 9/11 Album Cover Controversy

Well Nonesuch Records' controversial album cover for the upcoming Steve Reich release, WTC 9/11 (listen here), has been a great success if the company's goal was to draw lots of publicity.  But critics of the distasteful photograph of the burning twin towers (such as this, this, and this) would probably find it worthwhile to dig a little deeper into Reich's increasingly conservative politics over the years.  The album cover's just a crass publicity gambit; Reich's opinions are what really warrant a thoughtful critique.  Here's what Sumanth Gopinath has to say in his recent article on Reich's early work Oh Dem Watermelons:

Reich's conservative leanings have not been extensively discussed in print, but they may be pieced together from the following bits of information, as part of a very gradual process: Reich's move away from San Francisco to New York in 1965 and his extraction from the New Left/proto-counterculture of that moment; his near-complete abandonment of African American concerns after Come Out in 1966; his (re)discovery of Judaism in the early 1970s with his wife, video artist Beryl Korot and their affirmation as modern Orthodox Jews as early as 1981; his growing interest in addressing subject matter of a politicized-religious sort in the 1980s and early 1990s (first arguably starting with the Holocaust treatment of Different Trains in 1988 and then more evidently with the Israel-Palestine conflict inThe Cave, 1990–93); the unveiling of a significantly antimodern religious worldview (as expressed in Three Tales, 2002); and a growing preoccupation and developing concern with the politics of Islamic fundamentalism, dating as far back as The Cave and City Life (1994), which uses voice samples of firemen responding to the 1993 bombings of the World Trade Center, and more recently including an in-progress (and possibly withdrawn) choral work titled “9-1-1” in response to the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, informal reports of his support for the ongoing Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and his recent composition The Daniel Variations (2006) based on the words of Daniel Pearl, the Jewish-American journalist kidnapped and murdered by al-Qaeda members in Pakistan in 2002.