Black Vinyl: Confessions of a Music Collector
When I touched a copy of the Beatles’ Rarities from the odd, older man’s box of records, the hair stood on the back of my neck. These are the tales of a record collector.
Culture
‘All the Streets Are Silent’ Celebrates the Cross-Fertilization of Hip-Hop and Skateboarding in Pre-Gentrification New York
Elkin’s All the Streets Are Silent shows how skate crews and rappers picked up the mantle of guerrilla art and commerce in the post-Warhol and Basquiat years.
AIDS Activism and Sarah Schulman’s Joyous Anger
Schulman’s Let the Record Show argues that AIDS continues to kill queer, drug-addicted, brown, black, undocumented, and uninsured people.
The Exoticized Gaze in Lawrence Durrell’s ‘The Alexandra Quartet’
Durrell’s unquestioned assumption of superior European culture paradoxically allows him to be keenly responsive to Alexandria’s multinational mix.
Whatever USA–or–Is It Time for a New Federal Writers’ Project?
State by State (2008) is rife with jaunty attacks, superficial panegyrics, random reportage, and puberty memoirs. Isn’t it time for a comparable update?
The Long Hard Way through ‘Mississippi Prison Writing’
The harrowing quality of incarcerated existence is compounded by the persistent and heartbreaking presence of injustice in Mississippi Prison Writing.
Lecklider’s Historical Work Love’s Next Meeting Examines Homosexuals and Communism in the US
In the virulently anti-Communist and homophobic climate of the postwar era many feared any association between the emerging lesbian and gay cause and Communism.
James Baldwin Digs Into the Roots of American Music
James Baldwin’s writing about music illuminates the significance of racial slavery for all American music.
‘Blue’, ‘Tapestry’, and Oil: Or, Oil Capitalism in Two Key Singer-Songwriter Albums
Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Carole King’s Tapestry were fueled by petroculture, which powered the rise of feminism in music. How? Read on.
What Queen Anne Boleyn Can Teach Us About Duchess Meghan Markle
There are distinct similarities between the ways we perceive the historical figure of Anne Boleyn and the contemporary figure of Meghan Markle, and that’s a shame.