How 1940s American pop songs framed the world beyond the United States as exotic playgrounds or lands of folly and belittled non-Europeans. The songs discussed: “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo),” “The Coffee Song,” “The Maharajah of Madagor,” “Managua, Nicaragua,” and “Rum and Coca Cola.”
Categories: ZiR • Tags: colonialism, Donald Trump, international relations, neo-colonialism, popular music, songs
By Walter Cummins Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. … In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. — Walter Benjamin, as translated by Harry Zohn The other day when I asked Alexa on an Amazon Echo to play John Coltrane’s “Wise One” and, a split second later, when McCoy Tyner’s piano chords filled the room, two references […]
Categories: Essay • Tags: Beethoven, cultural criticism, Donald Trump, jazz, Jean Baudrillard, John Coltrane, movies, televison, Walter Benjamin
Speeches of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, in the Company of Consonant Words from Patrick Henry, Karuna Ezara Parikh’, Martin Luther King, Jr., Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shakespeare 29 September 2017, as revised 4 October 2017 San Juan Mayor Cruz’s speeches to cable-news reporters and the world were heroic and heart-rending, and examples of great leadership in a time of crisis. If and when documentaries come to be made of the Trump years, sadly, these clips […]
Categories: ZiLL • Tags: CNN, death, disaster, Donald Trump, hunger, Martin Luther King, Paris, Patrick Henry, Puerto Rico, Shakespeare, Shelley, speeches
In the aftermath of Trump’s election, artists and writers have had the feeling that all is changed, and their work, too, has to change somehow; they—we—have to come up with an effective response. One way I have approached this is, in my museum wanderings, to see which works from the past seem most right to me now. My two top choices from the modern-art galleries—Pierre Bonnard’s portrait of himself as a boxer (which he wasn’t) and Joan Miró’s Ceci est […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: African art, Bonnard, collage, David Koch, Donald Trump, James Baldwin, Marcel Duchamp, Mirό, Rosalind Krauss, Vladimir Mayakovsky
To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aleppo, Camus, Donald Trump, Freud, Goya, hell, Hillary Clinton, La Fontaine, Marx, politics, Susan Sontag, Sympathy for the Devil, war
by John Sumser
The famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson writes that the attraction of a photograph is not that it captures reality but that it just barely glimpses it. His photograph Derrière la Gare Saint-Lazare captures, in mid-air, a man in a suit and hat attempting a hopeless leap over a large puddle of water.[1] If we had been standing behind the Saint-Lazare train station we would not have been able to see what the photograph shows us—we cannot register images in 1/64th of […]
Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Donald Trump, Henri Cartier-Bresson, meaning
Review of H.L. Hix, American Anger: An Evidentiary (Etruscan Press, 2016). “I’ve got a family to feed, a neighborhood to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, a principle to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, my honor to defend.” — H.L. Hix, American Anger These lines taken from separate poems in the first section—“Aggression Cues”—of H. L. Hix’s recent poetry collection, American Anger, can serve as elements of a mantra for the entire book. The voice […]
Categories: Review • Tags: anger, Donald Trump, poetry, United States of America
by Ed Mooney
Mr. Trump hangs scapegoats like piñatas and invites people to take a swing. — Arizona Republic, September 28, 2016, lead editorial A friend is watching the PBS series, The Roosevelts. She’s taken in by the first episodes. I find myself pushed back in time, reliving the powerful impact of the series when I first viewed it two years ago. Back then, I was a complete fan, a true believer. I was abroad, and no doubt nostalgic for a number […]
Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiLL • Tags: decency, Donald Trump, History, politics, Roosevelts
by Martin Green
Stanching the Flow By Martin Green The emergence of immigration as a major issue worldwide and especially in the presidential campaign—thanks to Donald Trump’s vociferous attack on alleged rapists, drug dealers, and other criminals sneaking across the southern border, to say nothing of the threat posed by terrorists hiding among Moslem refugees—is not, of course, the first time Americans have debated the issue of access to American society by aliens. The early 1920s was the decade in which […]
Categories: Article • Tags: American history, anti-Semitism, Donald Trump, immigrants, immigration
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