Gideon Leek rewatches King Vidor’s classic, in which a young man with big dreams moves to New York City and becomes an identical cog who learns to love the machine of modernity.
The Man and The Crowd (1928) Photography, Film, and Fate
Triumphant Woe: Reimagining Climate Lament with Andromeda Turre
In our age of environmental collapse, socio-political polarization, and brutal warfare, the jazz composer Andromeda Turre has created a new album that pulls the listener into “a dark night of the senses” and configures a space of hope.
Magpies Mix Tape: The Merry Blues
A mix tape of the music of Manu Chao and friends
Olive Borden (on Fig Leaves)
“A month later I am dead. So, girls, if you want my advice, never play Eve, the mother of all men.”
Fruits of Labor: The Beginning of The Cinema of Moral Concern
Agnieszka is battling a country that refuses to accept its past, and thus cannot learn from its repeated mistakes.
Dorothy Arzner and Jill Craigie’s Working Girls
Perhaps in another universe “Cynthia, Dorothy, and Jane are marching side-by-side somewhere, dressed chicly, placards raised, fighting for the freedom to do their work.”
Rai Tide Rising
Two Algerian rai tunes made the top ten of the Village Voice music critics’s poll in 1989. Why were post-liberation Algerian pop singers winning a wide Western audience while an earlier generation of popular Arab singers like Umm Kulthoum, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Fairouz never did?
Magpies’ Mix Tape: A different kind of protest song
“Let’s call things by their name!
If we don’t break the silence
we will die in silence
Against fear is life,
against fear is love,
against fear we are,
against fear without fear.”
Taken in by Mercutio: on Carlos Gonzalez Olivo in Romeo & Juliet
From the moment Gonzalez made Mercutio real for me, I was inside the story, experiencing it as if for the first time. I was affronted: the cost of hate was too high, the sacrifice of youth beyond justifiable.
Mind Your Manners: I Am Cuba
“As a form of resistance to the unblinking long take, Maria smashes her eyelids tightly shut, inhabiting her own privacy for the first time that night.”
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