15 Bytes

Dance

NOWHERE at Libby Gardner Concert Hall

Before collaborative was compelling marketing it was embedded in the making of concert dance. In the ’30s Martha Graham worked with Isamu Noguchi on Frontier and he went on to design the seat for Appalachian Spring. Merce Cunningham, who performed as “the Revivalist” in that work, went on to have collaborations from Andy […]

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

Untamed Rebellion: The Custom Car Art of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth

America has a way of normalizing rebellion. Beat poets in smoky coffee shops turned into hipster coders in Starbucks; the opt-outs of surf culture were transformed into commercial commodities packaged by Gidget and The Beach Boys; and the body art once reserved for sailors has become a rite of passage for 21st-century housewives. Mid-century hot-rod culture has gone through a similar domestication: vestiges of its fiery independence and outsider quality can be found in the low-rider tradition of Mexican Americans, but hot-rods are now a matter of nostalgic collecting for graying baby boomers, and the “weirdo” vibe of Kustom Kulture has become normalized to the point that the bulgy-eyed, adrenaline-fueled monsters that were once synonymous with the rebellious nature of the subculture have become part of the mainstream: you’ll see similar characters on almost any program of the Cartoon Network.

Literary Arts

A Tale of Two Readings

Literary readings are curious animals. They’re the writers’ primary public event to see and be seen, hear and be heard. But what are they really? Theater? A discussion? Celebrity sighting? Two readings in April, one following the other, became a study in contrasts for me. The first, the […]

Translate »