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Chicago Tribune
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Chicago Humanities Fall Festival faces the decline of the humanities with lineup including Margaret Atwood, Kate McKinnon
The Chicago Humanities Festival began in 1989. As the longtime nonprofit arts and culture organization announces its signature fall schedule this week, let us pause a moment and consider what a difference 36 years makes. That year, 1989 — not insignificant in the history of free expression in the United States — was the thick of the late 20th century 'culture wars.' Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center were entrenched. Robert Mapplethorpe (who died that March) and other transgressive artists provoked front-page outrage. Jesse Helms argued for 'family values' even as he sought to deny AIDS funding. The Supreme Court decided whether it was OK to burn American flags. The Moral Majority disbanded that year, but not before setting a table that led to budget cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts. You probably don't remember this part, those days long since obscured by much uglier times, but, in the end, only $45,000 of the NEA's $171 million proposed budget was cut. Three and a half decades later, the Chicago Humanities Festival faces a country in which universities, nevermind bureaucrats, want to demolish humanities curricula, and where many cultural institutions face a bleak future of almost zero public funding and the White House itself has made clear its intentions to eliminate the NEA altogether. How does an organization with 'humanities' right there in its name respond? By scheduling weeks of talks, readings and performances in the heart of some of the most impacted local communities. The day ends at Rockefeller Chapel with Nick Offerman, actor and Minooka native, on woodworking — but expect the never-politically-shy Offerman to weigh in on what ails us. On Sept. 21, the festival hosts a 'Pilsen/Little Village Day' throughout two of the Chicago neighborhoods most impacted by ICE raids. That day includes a chat with chef Rick Bayless and Jesse Valenciana, the Chicago-raised chef and journalist whose work focuses on Mexican cuisine. Also that afternoon, Cheech Marin (of Cheech & Chong) on Chicano art (and his California museum of art); and a conversation about Teen Angels magazine, the beloved (now defunct) zine often credited with spreading the culture of lowriders, tattoos and Latino aesthetics. On Oct. 13, the Morton Arboretum, to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day, hosts Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Potawatomi member and famed botanist whose 'Braiding Sweetgrass,' a book of meditations on the environment, became an unlikely blockbuster. As for old-school activism: On Oct. 4, tucked into a lengthy day of events on the Bronzeville campus of Illinois Institute of Technology, there's Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble playing a composition for the famed intellectual and activist Angela Davis, followed by a chat with Davis. 'People can frame this (festival) however they want, I guess,' said Phillip Bahar, executive director of the Humanities Festival, 'but I don't think of what we do as go-march-in-the-street activism but closer to 'Here are a bunch of ideas relevant in our society and might be personally relevant within your family or community…' And so some of those events become political by chance. But we do focus on topics specific to the moment, and we do care about a diversity of ideas and those who shape ideas — left, right, female, male, any combination you can think. If we're trying to do a festival in Chicago that shows what the world is now, we have to reflect and show different sides.' Not that any of this means a lack of marquee names. Kate McKinnon returns to the festival; as does controversial statistician Nate Silver (both Oct. 4). Salman Rushdie — on a creative streak since recovering from his stabbing in 2022 — appears at the Athenaeum Center on Nov. 13. Margaret Atwood — whose speculative fiction gets less speculative by the day — appears Nov. 8. Roxane Gay talks about the 10th anniversary of her contemporary classic 'Bad Feminist' on Oct. 18; same day, Stephen Dubner talks about the 20th anniversary of 'Freakonomics.' As for local flavor, among other events, there's a conversation on architecture and society with the Floating Museum art collective (Oct. 4); walking tours of Bronzeville (Oct. 4) with Sherman 'Dilla' Thomas; the Lyric Opera performing 'Medea' (Oct. 18); and an afternoon festival in North Lawndale (Oct. 12) devoted to the design of sukkah, the temporary pavilions and structures created for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. For decades, the festival's fall schedule was a beast, held largely across downtown venues and far too vast to expect anyone to catch even a modest number of offerings. Now it's a touch smaller. These days, Bahar said, their events — 80 to 100 a year — are divided almost equally between fall and spring schedules. He also noted that the kind of philanthropic funding that cultural organizations like his once relied on has been shifting away from the arts. Plus, after the pandemic, audiences just don't leave home as often. 'Now we feel like the right size,' he said. Staying relevant could be the easy part. There was a time, not long ago, when Harvard's Jill Lepore on the U.S. Constitution (Nov. 5) and Stephanie Burt on Taylor Swift (Oct. 18) and Padma Lakshmi on the food of American immigrant communities (Nov. 11) would be mostly about what it sounded like they are about. On Oct. 15, Cory Doctorow and Kara Swisher talk about the decline of almost everything. The air, in 2025, is too charged to take events like that at face value anymore. 'Novelist Gary Shteyngart (Oct. 18) just wrote a book about a family that's trying to stay together while everything around them is coming apart,' Bahar said. 'And look, I mean, I have no idea — no idea whatsoever — where he possibly got that idea from!'
Telegraph
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The insider secrets to avoiding Venice's summer crowds
There are days when visitors to this exquisite jewel box of a city outnumber locals two-to-one, and when getting from the station to St Mark's Square is a battle. But despite this, Venice never loses its capacity to enchant: stepping out of the station to be greeted by a glittering canal with the dome of San Simeon Piccolo beyond remains heart-stopping, whether you're doing it for the first time or the 100th. Even at peak visitor periods, the worst excesses can be avoided and you're never more than a bridge away from secluded Venice with its quiet campi (squares), churches concealing luminous Madonnas, handsome Gothic palazzi – and bustling neighbourhood hangouts. Because there's more to Venice than peerless artistic riches from centuries past: it's also a hive of contemporary activity (not to mention its recent role playing host to the wedding of the century). Beyond the alternating Art and Architecture Biennale shows, which showcase all that's cutting edge internationally, the city's dwindling population works hard to keep contemporary Venice creative, productive and very vibrant. For further inspiration, explore our guides to the city's best hotels, restaurants, nightlife, shopping, attractions and free things to do. What's new in Venice this summer See: Photography exhibition Le Stanze della Fotografia, on the island of San Giorgio, is hosting the striking, provocative and occasionally shocking works of American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. This major exhibition examines the sensuality of the human body, the beauty of flowers and the dialogue between photography and classical sculpture, and is running from April 10 to November 23. Relax: Greenery at the Redentore church Venice's tantalising gardens are mostly behind high walls, in private hands. The Hortus Redemptoris – a glorious hectare of vegetable and herb beds behind Palladio's superb Redentore church on Venice's Giudecca island – has been restored and opened to the public last autumn. It's open from Thursdays to Saturdays, between 10am and 5.30pm. Discover: Intelligence at the architecture exhibition Intelligence in various forms – natural, artificial and collective – is the theme of this year's international architecture exhibition, running from May 10 to November 25, from the Biennale organisation. Architects and designers from 66 countries push the bounds of conceptual research in exhibits inside Venice's Arsenale and in the charming national pavilions dotted around the Giardini della Biennale. How to spend your weekend Day one: morning Start the day in Da Bonifacio, a tiny café with a lovely crazy-paving mosaic floor, hidden away behind the Doge's Palace. The coffee's good – ask for the very Venetian macchiatone if you like the idea of a cappuccino with less milk – and it's difficult to resist cakes like the pasta con le mandorle (almond slice). The wondrous, mosaic-studded interior of Venice's mother church, St Mark's Basilica doesn't open to visitors until 9.30am (2.30pm on Sunday), but anyone is welcome to attend morning mass. Take your pick between the 8am and 10am slots. On Sundays and feast days, the 10am event is a sung mass in the central nave, and there's nothing like plainsong to bring out the magic of St Mark's. Afterwards, visit the Museum of St Mark's, which affords spectacular views over the piazza; entry is €7.
New York Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Overlooked No More: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Whose Camera Sought a Truer Image of Black Men
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. In the photograph 'Snap Shot,' soft light elegantly caresses an anonymous standing figure in a sensual pose. The figure, who is nude, holds a camera in front of his genitals with the lens pointed at the viewer. The image is striking in its careful balance between strength and fragility: The subject takes the risk of being seen while disrupting the viewer's otherwise voyeuristic gaze. In another photo, a man wearing a birdlike mask kneels and touches his head while his penis, painted gold, is accentuated by a glowing light. Both images were created by the photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and both were intended to celebrate and reclaim Black male sexuality in the 1980s. It was a time when renowned artists like Robert Mapplethorpe were building a narrative that fetishized Black men by reducing them to erotic objects devoid of individual identities, as noted by scholars like the feminist writer bell hooks. Instead, Rotimi Fani-Kayode placed Black men at the center of his images and presented them with emotional depth and a sensitive intimacy. 'I was used to seeing gay men in terms of popular culture, but they were always white gay men, while Black men were always seen in terms of fear and threat,' the British photographer Ajamu X said in an interview. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘Fight Back,' the Audience Learns to Act Up
On Monday evening at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, anyone entering Room 101 would step directly into March 13, 1989. Thirty-six years ago, the AIDS activist group Act Up New York had the space that night for its weekly meeting — an event that David Wise's immersive theater experiment 'Fight Back' seeks to recreate. Audience members are by definition participants, too. Each has been assigned the persona of someone who was involved with the organization early on. Act Up was in emergency mode then, trying desperately to get the culture to treat the catastrophic epidemic with greater urgency. Just days before the meeting, AIDS had killed Robert Mapplethorpe at 42. Within a year, it would claim Alvin Ailey at 58, Keith Haring at 31 and many thousands more. For the people in the room, death had become a far too frequent part of life. That is the cauldron in which the real meeting took place, and into which 'Fight Back' means to drop its audience, as an exercise in empathy. As Wise, 47, explained by phone, he doesn't expect people in 2025 to be able to access the breadth of emotions the activists felt in 1989. 'But I do think that there's something about inhabiting with your body,' he said, 'and doing the actions that someone was doing, and saying the words that someone might have been saying, that is really effective, and affecting.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Sex and Religion Collided in 1980s Culture
What, you thought our long national nightmare of celebrating the 50th anniversary of 'Saturday Night Live' was finally over? Keep dreaming. Paul Elie's new book, 'The Last Supper,' is gilt-framed by two musical performances on that show: Bob Dylan singing 'Gotta Serve Somebody' in 1979 during his evangelical Christian period, and Sinead O'Connor, in 1992: doing an a cappella version of 'War,' then ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II to protest sexual abuse of children within the Roman Catholic Church. Just as anniversaries are arbitrary, overmemorialized round numbers, no decade is merely 10 years. Elie extends 'the long sixties' (identified by the literary critic Fredric Jameson) through the beam projector of religion. In his '60s-inflected 1970s, 'American Catholicism became thoroughly ordinary, the old works and pomps yielding to trapezoidal churches, felt banners, leisure suits, strummed guitars, Palm Sunday processions around the parish parking lot, and confession brought out of the booth and into folding chairs.' In the nasty and brutish '80s, however, Catholicism roared back in new, subversive forms, with retaliation from the establishment trailing close behind. Andres Serrano's photograph 'Piss Christ' and Robert Mapplethorpe's 'The Perfect Moment' retrospective had both been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and many in Congress rained hellfire and brimstone once they were on view. It was an origin story of the culture wars that have, lo these many years later, come to seem perpetual. Also playing a sometimes contested role as interfaith change agents: Morrissey and Toni Morrison, the Neville Brothers and Salman Rushdie. Elie is a senior fellow at Georgetown University who contributes regularly to The New Yorker and has written lauded books about Bach and four Catholic authors. The title of his new one, taken from Andy Warhol's final series, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's depiction of Jesus and his Apostles, also suggests a closing feast for the monoculture, before the internet inexorably hacked it to bits. 'The Last Supper' is really a progressive dinner, as Elie visits figure after figure and place after place — though again and again touching down in New York. 'A symbolic landscape out of Dante,' he writes. 'Famed for hedonism, it was a hive of asceticism, too.' Where else do so many people live alone in what is romantically called a studio? As AIDS invaded, of course, swaths of the city also then became the second circle of hell. Elie writes about the high-level clergy who so gravely failed the sick and dying, in their insistence on continuing to denounce homosexuality as a sin, and the few who stuck their necks out, like the draft-record-burning Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan. ('Warhol's radical double,' Elie calls him, 'elfin, tricksterish, a master of the mass media, always ready with an apt comment.') 'The Last Supper' is preoccupied with a then-emergent sensibility that Elie terms 'crypto-religious,' a term borrowed from the poet Czeslaw Milosz. Crypto-religious works use the language and symbols of faith outside their conventional context — in theory inviting the audience to consider the artist's beliefs, and their own. A white flag draped around Bono's shoulders? 'A cloak of crypto-religiosity.' Leonard Cohen's 'Everybody Knows'? 'A tutorial in crypto-religiosity.' Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'? 'A crypto-religious leap of faith.' Prince's eight-minute anthem 'The Cross'? 'Crossing over into the crypto-religious once and for all.' Madonna seeing stigmata on her hands and boogieing with a gospel choir in 'Like a Prayer'? Crypto-religious to the max. Anyone who lived through the period will summon their own examples. Anna Wintour putting a model in a sweatshirt with a bedazzled cross on her first Vogue cover in 1988. The 1990 Life magazine photo of David Kirby looking Christlike on his deathbed that roiled the Catholic Church and was later used in an ad for Benetton. This was also the time when celebrities were elevated to 'icons,' a religious term — and a movie star celebrity was elected to the White House. Another C-word Elie has us puzzle over is 'controvert'; usually a verb, it's used here to describe someone who, as opposed to a convert, is divided within, arguing with himself. Warhol and Berrigan, John Lennon, Bono and Scorsese's Jesus all qualify. 'The Last Supper' is incontrovertibly erudite and panoramic, but also crowded, sometimes confounding and walled off from the present moment — when crypto is actual currency — to which its subject matter is so foundational. One notable empty seat at its groaning table: Donald J. Trump.
