“On July 14, 1970, members of the Young Lords occupied Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx — known locally as the ‘Butcher Shop.’ A group of activists, many of them in their late teens and 20s, barricaded themselves inside the facility, demanding safer and more accessible health care for the community. Originally a Chicago-based street gang, the Young Lords turned to community activism, inspired by the Black Panthers and by student movements in Puerto Rico. A Young Lords chapter in New York soon formed, agitating for community control of institutions and land, as well as self-determination for Puerto Rico. Their tactics included direct action and occupations that highlighted institutional failures. Through archival footage, re-enactments and contemporary interviews, the documentary above shines a light on the Young Lords’ resistance movement and their fight for human rights. The dramatic takeover of Lincoln Hospital produced one of the first Patient’s…

Like many aspects of Muhammad Ali’s life, this photo of him defeating Sonny Liston in 1965 transcended boxing. A new documentary assesses Ali’s impact inside the ring and out.

“There it was, legendary frame by legendary frame, frozen in time — continual snapshots when gladiators armed with red gloves and the power to persuade either championed the twisted hearts of this country, or drew the endless ire of it. And to think: This film reel of immortals was rescued from being dispatched to a landfill. If not for one Pennsylvania archivist, 38 reels of 16mm color reversal film of the best, most brutal boxing match in history would’ve landed in a sea of rubbish. Untouched, unseen, unfulfilled. Years earlier, Janice Allen salvaged a number of boxes tossed in a dumpster outside a film lab that had recently shut up shop for good. One box had ‘Ali’ written on it. She…

“A writer’s perfunctory yet absorbing diary of his life in Tangiers. Lifelong ÇmigrÇ and novelist Hopkins (The Flight of the Pelican, 1984 etc.), fresh out of Princeton and convinced that Wall Street and the professions were not for him, jaunted around South America and Europe before finally pitching up in Morocco. There, on and off for 17 years, he pursued with gathering success his literary ambitions. Cheap, exotic, permissive, Morocco (especially Tangiers) was one of the places to be in the early ’60s, especially for writers and artists and American millionaires. Now it all seems almost mythic, a great, outlandish American Bloomsbury. Hopkins delivers all the expected goodies and more: the requisite desert meditations (‘This is what the desert does. It leaves you with a terrible nostalgia for the purity you left behind. That purity was you”), the kef-censed evenings in the kasbah, the celebrity sightings. Beyond the…

“Literary statements about the nature and purpose of art constitute a genre unto themselves, the ars poetica, an antique form going back at least as far as Roman poet Horace. The 19th century poles of the debate are sometimes represented by the dueling notions of Percy Shelley — who claimed that poets are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ — and Oscar Wilde, who famously proclaimed, ‘all art is quite useless.’ These two statements conveniently describe a conflict between art that involves itself in the struggles of the world, and art that is involved only with itself. In the mid-twentieth century, Albert Camus put the question somewhat differently in a 1957 speech entitled ‘Create Dangerously:‘ Of what could art speak, indeed? If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation. If it blindly rejects that society, if…

“Folk baroque or baroque guitar, and also sometimes called chamber folk, is a distinctive and influential guitar fingerstyle developed in Britain in the 1960s, which combined elements of American folk, blues, jazz and ragtime with British folk music to produce a new and elaborate form of accompaniment. It has been highly important in folk music, folk rock and British folk rock playing, particularly in Britain, Ireland, North America and France. Particularly notable in the folk baroque style was the adoption of DADGAD tuning, which gave a form of suspended-fourth D chord, usefully neither major or minor, which could be employed as the basis for modal-based folk songs. It is uncertain who first developed this tuning, as both Davy Graham and Martin Carthy attributed it to each other, but it has been speculated that Graham may have acquired it from the oud while visiting north Africa…

“Between us we can change this rotten society. Now, put on your coat and make for the nearest cinema. Look at their deadly love-making on the screen. Isn’t it better in real life? Make up your mind to learn to love. Then, during the interval, when the first advertisements come on, pick up your tomatoes or, if you prefer, your eggs, and chuck them. Then get out into the street, and peel off all the latest government proclamations until underneath you discover the message of the days of May and June. Stay awhile in the street. Look at the passers-by and remind yourself: the last word has not yet been said. Then act. Act with others, not for them. Make the revolution here and now. It is your own. C’est pour toi que tu fais la révolution. — Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative”
The Tragedy…

“The setting is a ballet class, and the year is 1974. George Balanchine throws up his arms in exasperation at the sight of a dancer executing a step incorrectly at the barre. We may not be able to see her, and what she’s doing wrong, but we feel how hard Balanchine is taking it. It’s not just his words — ‘that’s bad’ — but the punctuation of his body, emphatic, agile, alive. His hands slap his thighs. He raises an arm like a stiff branch to show how far a leg should be raised. It’s not high; it’s parallel to the floor. … The new film ‘In Balanchine’s Classroom,’ directed by Connie Hochman, focuses on the teaching of the groundbreaking choreographer — and how it instilled his dances at New York City Ballet with articulate, musical brilliance. It’s both enthralling and heartbreaking. To love Balanchine is to love this film…

“Little of San Francisco today is as it was half a century ago. But at the corner of Turk Boulevard and Lyon Street stands a true survivor: the Church of St. John Coltrane. Though officially founded in 1971, the roots of this unique musical-religious institution (previously featured here on Open Culture) go back further still. ‘It was our first wedding anniversary, September 18, 1965 and we celebrated the occasion by going to the Jazz Workshop,’ write founders Franzo and Marina King on the Church’s web site. ‘When John Coltrane came onto the stage we could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit moving with him.’ Overcome with the sense that Coltrane was playing directly to them, ‘we did not talk to each other during the performance because we were caught up in what later would be known as our Sound Baptism.’ Or as Marina puts it in…

W – Wynn Handman

“In 1963, a small not-for-profit theater called the American Place Theatre was founded in St. Clements Church, a Victorian Gothic church tucked away in Manhattan’s Theater District. The theater was founded by the minister and actor Sidney Lanier, acting teacher Wynn Handman, and actor Michael Tolan. Their goal was to foster good writing for theater by providing a place where American writers, both emerging and established, could find support in writing new works for the stage. Their vision shines through the entirety of the American Place Theatre records, recently opened to the public at NYPL’s Billy Rose Theatre Division. A notable characteristic of this fledgling theater was that it sought to give a stage to poets who wished to use the dramatic form. While poetic dramas are not revolutionary, modern verse poets who also wrote plays were a bit of a rarity. Ezra Pound…