In recent memory, there’s been a never-ending deluge of bad news for the arts and humanities in the U.S.: government support, which is already low, may be cut entirely; universities, facing budget crises, have axed language and arts programs; prominent professors spend their time writing books defending the basic value of humanistic inquiry, while their pecuniary graduate students fight for poverty wages as adjuncts, and earn a little money on the side writing articles about their plight. In the midst of all this, I was struggling to put together a dissertation proposal — it was something on the history of […]
by Carmine Grimaldi on Jun 16, 2017Yesterday Pitchfork Media posted a downloadable mixtape created as a “musical response” to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing by the rightly well-regarded DJ /Rupture. Stage Boundary Songs is a terrific 53 minutes and 50 seconds of (largely) Indonesian music old and new interspersed with poetry by Wiji Thukul, a poet believed to have been “disappeared” by the Suharto regime in 1998. Last December, Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) wrote a brief blog post cheering on Killing, noting that acclaim for the film was “particularly delightful” because “Josh and I went to college together, and for a year or two we […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 29, 2014