“Lowell Fulson was one of the most important figures in post-war West Coast blues, a guitarist, singer, and songwriter who was active from the late 1940s to the mid-’90s. While Fulson seemed willing to do a little bit of everything over the course of his career, his best-known work was informed by jump blues and the polished, impassioned, big-city sound typified by his fellow California bluesman T-Bone Walker. However, Fulson also cut spare, rural blues-styled material, strong soul-styled sides in the mid- to late ’60s (1967’s Tramp, including the hit title track), a smattering of funky, rock-infused blues (1970’s In a Heavy Bag), and barroom-style guitar workouts (1995’s late-era Them Update Blues). Lowell Fulson was born on March 31, 1921 in Atoka, Oklahoma on a Native American reservation; his father was of Cherokee heritage. He was just six years old when his father died, and his…

“byrdwoMAN” at Robert Wilson’s Loft in 1968.

“‘The Theatre of Images’—a term coined in the early 1970s by Michel Guy, director of the Avignon Festival in France, and popularized by Bonnie Marranca in Performing Arts Journal—was, along with performance art, the major development in the live arts of the ’70s. The surge of theatricality in the postwar avant-garde had opened tremendous reservoirs of collective feeling across the performing arts of Lower Manhattan, climaxing in the visionary theatre collectives of SoHo, the capstone of one of the great eras in 20th-century American theatre history. It was an era of formal precision, ritual enchantment, therapeutic play, and public participation, reflecting powerful communal urges in a world that seemed to many to be on the verge of some cataclysmic upheaval. … Equal parts countercultural fantasist, wild child, and visionary saint, [Meredith] Monk at age 25 was an American original. Her theatrical vision…

Heather Cox Richardson wrote early today about the GOP’s irresponsible politicization of the defense budget. Typically the defense budget passes with a bipartisan vote. But not this year because the House GOP majority is completely cowed by the hard-right extremists. The Republican crazies inserted all their anti-WOKE priorities into the bill, which will not be passed by the Senate. Marjorie Taylor Greene owns House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Richardson writes:

Traditionally, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds the annual budget and appropriations of the Department of Defense, passes Congress on a bipartisan basis. Since 1961 it has been considered must-pass legislation, as it provides the funding for our national security. For all that there is grumbling on both sides over one thing or another in the measure, it is generally kept outside partisanship.

Late last night, House Republicans broke that tradition by loading the bill with a wish list…

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: “I’m Gonna Say a Black Ave Maria For You”. “My mother was not having it. Still not having it. Her memories of being dragged to see Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) by my father (of course) remain quite visceral, and I adore her attempt to sleep it away. For many, the film is still difficult to process, and that may very well have everything to do with its seemingly irreconcilable assertion of both revolution and pornography. Arguably, the film—and all Black films, for that matter—may be best appreciated with a deliberate suspension of authenticity fantasies or demands for definitive answers about Black life. Black film criticism needs more productive ambivalence than truth claims or approaches strictly governed by Sociology 101. Messy and riveting, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’s style and politics continue to compellingly challenge assumptions about the idea of Black film and American film history. The film…

“Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category ‘crime’ and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages. Prisons thus perform a feat of magic. Or rather the people who continually vote in new prison bonds and tacitly assent to a proliferating network of prisons and jails have been tricked into believing in the magic of imprisonment. But prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big…