How It Would Feel to Be Free: Olivia Laing’s Everybody
Pleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.
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Posts Tagged: Nina Simone
Swinging Modern Sounds #104: Paradise
For me, performance is a conversation with the sacred and timeless, the sublime.
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Silence Is the Fertile Field: Talking with Fenton Johnson
Fenton Johnson discusses his new book, AT THE CENTER OF ALL BEAUTY.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #92: Perfection
You will now find some version of the list below. It is imperfect.
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Equal Rights Never Go out of Style: Talking with Monica Prince
Monica Prince discusses writing, advocacy, and the art of the choreopoem.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #125: Tyree Daye
“I think if you are really doing the work, you can’t write about America and not explore race and slavery, and that goes for any writer.”
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To Look for America: A Road Trip, a Soundtrack
One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
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The Driving Thing of It: A Conversation with Mick Harvey
Mick Harvey discusses his decades-long music career, working on cover songs written in another language, and finding longevity in the music business.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Erika T. Wurth
Erika T. Wurth talks about her latest book, Buckskin Cocaine, persevering through rejection, and white writers writing Native characters.
...moreNotable San Francisco: 6/21–6/27
Wednesday 6/21: Cuban writer Achy Obejas (The Tower of the Antilles—our June book club pick!), currently Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College, reads from her forthcoming story collection. Free, 7 p.m., City Lights. Charif Shanahan, Nancy Patrice Davenport, André Le Mont Wilson, Andrew J. Thomas, and Nick Johnson are the featured readers for the June edition of popular reading […]
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My Life with Annie Lennox: Nostalgia
I don’t use the term “lifelong hero” frivolously. There are a lot of people I respect and wish to emulate; Annie Lennox, however, is the only “lifelong hero” I’ll ever have. I need her.
...moreSong of the Day: “Gin House Blues”
Nina Simone’s troubles were highlighted in the recent gripping documentary by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? Though Simone had her fair share of challenges, it was her incredibly resonant voice and musical genius that contributed to the gradual accumulation of legends surrounding her. These talents are bursting from the seams of “Gin House Blues,” Miss […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tara Betts
Tara Betts discusses her newest collection, Break the Habit, the burden placed on black women artists to be both artist and activist, and why writing is rooted in identity.
...moreMood Music
At Largehearted Boy, essayist, literary experimentalist, and scholar Mary Capello shares an annotated playlist for her new essay collection, Life Breaks In (University of Chicago Press). She describes mood as the “companion and muse” for her writing: If there is one subject under the sun that defies our ordering systems even as it tempts us […]
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America Again
I felt urgently that it was the moment to tell the story of what I’ve learned about American music—or maybe about being an American.
...moreSong of the Day: “Black and Blue”
Given the anarchic, traumatic, and deeply worrying events of recent months, some might begin to lose hope. However, music—and especially jazz, the most particularly American music—never seems to lose its power to soothe and calm us. Louis Armstrong, in a special song that might sound deceptively typical to the hasty listener, made a groundbreaking statement on race relations in […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Max Ritvo
Max Ritvo passed away on August 23, 2016. Earlier this summer, he spoke with Sarah Blake about his debut collection Four Reincarnations, writing with and about cancer, and how language is a game.
...moreThis Week in Posivibes: Songs for Survival
In addition to his song “Spiritual,” which deals with the issue of police brutality, Jay Z has released a playlist of songs to get us through the crushing violence lately exposed by social media. “Songs for Survival” includes music by Beyoncé, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Common, Outkast, Gil Scott-Heron, Fela Kuti, Kendrick Lamar, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Kanye West, and others. You can listen to […]
...moreBroadway-Blues-Bad Casting
Ever since Zoe Saldana was set to play Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic Nina, controversy has surrounded the casting choice. Writing in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates says that the issue isn’t just about Saldana’s lighter skin tone, but the erasure of Simone’s facial features and what it says about America’s racist beauty standards: Saldana […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With Camille Rankine
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Camille Rankine about her new book Incorrect Merciful Impulses, history, and trying to be a writer every day.
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Diamonds & Rust: Let’s Revel in This Messy Splendor
Refusing to be tragic, and eventually, within the deep lost, the deepest I’ve known, comes rebirth.
...moreWhat Happened, Miss Simone?
The much-anticipated documentary of soul genius Nina Simone is available from Netflix starting today, with its rare archival footage and new interviews with family and colleagues, including the artist’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, and music director, Al Schackman. As the date has approached, tracks have been popping up from RCA Record’s upcoming album Nina Revisited: A Tribute to Nina Simone, […]
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Diamonds and Rust: Nostalgia, Form, and Noise
There’s always that longing to say everything and nothing at once, that yearning for the moment I forget I am myself.
...moreArt as Witness
“I believe Nina Simone tried to build that gun because that night she realized what all other-ed bodies eventually realize: a gun was already at her head. She feared a song might not be enough. The fact that this gun could not be seen didn’t make it any less real or lethal. And I wonder […]
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