Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Performance arts, music, film, drama and literature, creative expressions presented on the world stage seeking earth balance, harmony, dissonance, abstraction and concept.
Paul Bowles during his life (1910-1999) remained aloof from all the hipsters and hypesters of U.S. letters. Living in self-imposed exile in Tangier, he had cast a spell over such talents as Tennessee Williams, Libby Holman, Truman Capote, and Allen Ginsberg. We revisit an essay penned by Jay McInerny in 1985, on how the inimitable expatriate writer-composer’s dark arts retain their power, even more so 32 years later.
We feature the popularized story version of the French fairy tale ‘La Belle et La Bête’ (Beauty and the Beast), which became a classic 1946 Jean Cocteau film accompanied by composer Philip Glass’s mesmerizing 1994 score.
The timeless brilliance of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, illuminated by the mysterious art of Balinese shadow theatre, enacted to the percussive metallophones of traditional gamelan ensembles.
Watch the 1967 supernatural horror story “Viy” based on the 1835 novella by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, where a student philosopher from the Christian seminary encounters a young woman with dark powers who can summon the ogre, King of the Gnomes, which the author claims comes from Ukrainian folklore tradition.
Living and dying close to the edge in the 1980s Manhattan world of art and culture, Jean-Michel Basquiat moved from guerrilla street artist to producing innumerable works worth millions, until his drug-induced end in 1988.
In “Angel Baby Blues,” from Wanda Coleman’s collection Heavy Daughter Blues, she offered a take on the failed promises of her home in Southern California. A prolific poet, fiction writer, and journalist, she was considered for a time Los Angeles’ unofficial and controversial Poet Laureate.
Antonio López won the Poetry Award at the 2017 Santa Barbara Writers Conference with ‘Which Cobija Feels Most Comfy?: A Letter to Sister Nabra’, about the murder of a teenage Muslim girl beaten and killed by a bat-wielding motorist near a Virginia mosque.