Archive for July, 2011
On the Occasion of a First Anniversary
by Adam Leipzig
It’s traditional to give paper on a first anniversary, but what do you give a website – a website that, by its very nature, replaces paper as a medium for the written exchange of thought? Do you give an iPad 2? A tutorial in HTML5? Here at Cultural Weekly, we’ll be quite pleased with your good wishes and continuing readership.
Wh More...
Summer House Books
by William Zinsser | The American Scholar
There’s nothing like the library of a summer house to reverse the tides of literary improvement. How the nation’s English teachers must sigh, having assigned as summer reading such edifying works as 1984 and Lord of the Flies, to think of their charges curled up with the glorious chestnuts of yesteryear that line the shelves o More...
Leimert Park Artwalk
by Jade Miller | Our Weekly
Every last Sunday of the month, it is not a surprise to see Leimert Park – Los Angeles’s center of the African-American arts scene – bustling with traffic featuring a variety of people from all over the city. Whether they are vendors, artists, musicians, residents or art lovers, they come from near and far to experience the welc More...
R.I.P., Michael Cacoyannis
I didn’t discover the Greek tragedies by reading them, or by going to the theatre. I first experienced them through Michael Cacoyannis’s stark, black-and-white films, where the gritty simplicity of the terrain contrasted with the characters’ primal dramas. While Cacoyannis was most well known for directing Zorba the Greek (1964), he wa More...
ETC
by Susan Griffin
Go on
with life
cook dinner
etc.
Because of course
it’s become that--
etc.
Everything is etc, as I
think of this.
This
what?
None of the old words,
the ones that came
slowly to
us over
the years,
while we gathered &
cooked
etc,
fit.
Though recently
we’ve learned to say:
split
atom, meaning
fission More...
The Majesty of Lucian Freud
by Edward Goldman | Art Talk
The death of great cultural figures always prompts us to assess their impact on art and, ultimately, on the way we perceive ourselves. The recent death of the great painter, Lucian Freud (1922 –2011), at the age of 88, is definitely one of these occasions. Through more than six decades of his career, he stubbornly clung to the p More...
Carmageddon Cannot Crush Communist Caper-Ballet
by Debra Levine | artsmeme
Despite best efforts, California authorities (the people who brought you Ronald “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev!” Reagan) could not put the kibosh on American Ballet Theatre’s “The Bright Stream,” choreographed by their new in-house guy, Alexei Ratmansky. Clearly controlled by Soviet agents, ABT foisted a clever piece of communist More...
I am no longer afraid of mirrors
by Center for the Study of Political Graphics
I Am No Longer Afraid of Mirrors
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville; Peace Press
Photograph by Hella Hammid
Los Angeles, California
1981
To commemorate the death of Betty Ford (1918-2011), an outspoken and gutsy Republican first lady who dared to break many national taboos—including talking about her breast cancer and her addictio More...
