Required Reading
This week: movie poster art, the typist behind Henry James’s novels, Gisèle Pelicot’s new memoir, indie rock in “Heated Rivalry,” and are we in an arts and crafts renaissance?
At long last, the state of California is officially recognizing South Los Angeles as a hub of Black art and music. The LA Times's Kailyn Brown reports on the next step, which is to establish a monument to the newly minted cultural district:
“Black people have experienced quite a level of erasure in South L.A.,” added Karen Mack, founder and executive director of LA Commons. “A lot of people can’t afford to live in areas that were once populated by us, so to really affirm our history, to affirm that we matter in the story of Los Angeles, I think is important.”
The Historic South L.A. Cultural District spans roughly 25 square miles, situated between Adams Boulevard to the north, Manchester Boulevard to the south, Central Avenue to the east and La Brea Avenue to the west.
Now that the designation has been approved, Smallwood-Cuevas and LA Commons have turned their attention to the monument — the physical landmark that will serve as the district’s entrance or focal point — trying to determine whether it should be a gateway, bridge, sculpture or something else.
Critic Anthony Lane visited an exhibition dedicated to Peter Strausfeld's unmistakable movie poster art and its role in film, writing in the New Yorker:
Photographic imagery forms no part of a typical Strausfeld poster, even though he often based his designs on production stills. His medium was the linocut print—clean, strong, and scornful of embellishment. Every edge is hard, every shadow is hatched; colors are kept to a minimum, but those which are deployed make a formidable impact. There is none of the delicate feathering of a drypoint etching, and, because linoleum is bereft of knots and rings, there is no grain, such as you might expect in a woodcut. Information is delivered with a shock. Consider the 1973 poster for Claude Chabrol’s “Red Wedding,” which consists of two staring figures and three hues: black, white, and blood. Above the title are the words “Academy Cinema Two, Oxford Street - 437 5129.” Offhand, how many works of art do you know that give a phone number? Imagine Edward Hopper adding a Zip Code to “Nighthawks,” for anyone who couldn’t sleep, wanted a cup of coffee, and didn’t know where to go.
As with too many art forms, several now-classic books by male authors would not have been possible without the women who typed and often edited them. Rare book curator Christine Jacobson explains in the Public Domain Review:
In 1897, Henry James found himself in need of an amanuensis after he began to suffer from a debilitating rheumatism in his right wrist, telling a friend that “all writing is the crazy pain you see proof of. I shall soon take to dictating to a typist.” He found Mary Weld by writing to a local secretarial college, and after settling on what she would wear — dark coat, skirt, sailor hat — the two settled down to work. Soon after Weld started, James wrote to his brother William, comparing her with a former male secretary: “MacAlpine’s lady successor is an improvement on him! And an economy!” In other words, Weld was much better at her job than her predecessor but was likely paid less.
Palestinian student Leqaa Kordia, who participated in the Gaza protests at Columbia, has been held in ICE detention for almost a year. Sam Judy reports for Mondoweiss on her recent seizure and the fight to bring her home:
“While we are relieved that Leqaa is out of the hospital, we still have no idea what her medical condition is and what happened to her for the last 3 days. Now she is forced back to the nightmarish conditions of ICE detention that put her in the hospital. It has never been more urgent to call for her release,” Abushaban said on behalf of the family.
Sadaf Hasan, another member of Kordia’s legal team, said her disappearance was “straight from ICE’s playbook” to “isolate, conceal, and punish whomever it disfavors.” Fife said it “reflects both the inhumanity of Leqaa’s experience in detention, but also the emotional trauma of family separation in custody.”
"Shame must change sides," Gisèle Pelicot said in 2024 during the infamous trial of 50 men, including her husband, who assaulted her over the course of nine years. Emma Brockes reflects on her poignant new memoir for the Guardian:
After her husband’s arrest, she moved from Mazan to the Île de Ré, where in an effort to share her state of mind with new friends she told them she’d “been struck head-on by a high speed train”. (In a moment of grim humour, one neighbour took her literally and remarked, “the surgeon who had rebuilt my face had done an excellent job”.) Detailing what it took to emerge from this state to become a national – if not global – icon is the unsparing mission of the book.
Part of Pelicot’s renewal entailed confronting a question that lurked in the minds of millions of observers during her husband’s trial: how could she not have known? She writes wretchedly of “the shame of having understood nothing – of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own.”. To that end, the book is a detective story in which the reader accompanies Pelicot back through her memories in search of clues overlooked.
Civil Rights leader, minister, and political luminary Jesse Jackson died this week at the age of 84, and David Cohen looks back on his prodigious career for Politico:
“Even though he did not win the Democratic Party presidential nomination,” Marxist activist Angela Davis wrote in an introduction to her autobiography, “Jesse Jackson conducted a truly triumphant campaign, one that confirmed and further nurtured progressive thought patterns among the people of our country.”
Before his presidential bids, Jackson was a civil rights activist and organizer who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and founded Operation PUSH, an organization designed to improve economic opportunities for Black people and other minorities.
Niko Stratis writes about queer indie rock in Heated Rivalry, and why it's so overlooked, for the Walrus:
To some, this may seem like a wild swing, using an indie rock song from the early 2000s whose audience is, I would imagine, largely comprised of heterosexual millennials to accent queer love and longing. But this is a wilful misunderstanding of what legacy has been built by the peerless queers who poured our foundations. Indie rock, itself born of alt-rock, punk, and post-punk, has long been informed and built by queerness. R.E.M., led by Michael Stipe, has been a lasting influence on countless ramshackle bands in garages hammering out the chords to “Orange Crush.” Queercore, a subculture created by influential queer icons, like G. B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, was an active effort to defy the rampant homophobia and bigotry in punk rock.
Stephen Colbert calls out CBS — famously now under the control of Bari Weiss — for cutting an interview with a Democratic Texas state representative. The lawyers explicitly told him not to talk about it, so, of course, he talked about it:
Kathy Pham explains what bell hooks teaches us about "eating the other" in the context of the objectively creepy "I'm Chinese now" trend:
@kalinaxkathy My comments on the “being Chinese” trend applies to non-Asian Americans as well but if it doesn’t apply, let it fly~ #asian #chinese #chinesetiktok #bellhooks #foryou ♬ original sound - kathy “kalina” pham
Love this take on our collective turn toward handmade, personalized home decor:
High at the art museum (not to be confused with the High Museum of Art):
