4 Crucifixions: Music and Art
Anne and Abel Meeropol
NPR: “The Strange Story of the Man Behind ‘Strange Fruit,’” includes footage of Billie Holiday performing “Strange Fruit”
“Strange Fruit,” dir. Joel Katz (California Newsreel, 2004).
Phil Ochs (1940-1976)
Stephen Biko (1946-1977) Peter Gabriel, “Biko” – one of my favorite live concert performances ever
Madres del Plaza de Mayo U2- “One/Mothers of the Disappeared”
“They Dance Alone” – Sting and Peter Gabriel, with Mothers of the Disappeared, live at Amnesty International 1988
“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet.”
“Angelus Novus,” Paul Klee. “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” wrote Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). Benjamin’s haunting meditation on Klee’s painting, which he had purchased in 1927, leads this retrospective on “The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin’s Vision of Hope and Despair,” by Raymond Barglow in Tikkun magazine.
“To encourage individuals to have more imagination.” A conversation on art and politics with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, arrested in April 2011. An account of the making of Weiwei’s “Sunflower Seeds” exhibition.
“A Dream of Life: Revisiting Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Rising,’” Christopher Pramuk, America online, Sep. 11, 2011. Examines the boundary in Springsteen’s music between justice and vengeance, memory and hope, the living and the dead, especially those lost through senseless violence.
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