Black Power and the Arts, Yesterday and Today

This summer I took an African Amerian Lit course, and I was particularly fascinated by the Black Arts Movement.  The movement, as the Norton puts it, aimed "to create works that would be--in the words of Maulana Karenga--'functional, collective, and committing.'  Hence, the Black Arts of the 1960s proposed to create politically engaged expression as a corollary to the new black spirit of the decade."

Amiri Baraka is one of the most recognized Black Arts writers, and his poem "Black Art" gets at the heart of the period, I think.  Here are a few excerpts:

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step.  Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down.
...
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns.  Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.
...
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly.  Let Black People understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world


We want a black poem.  And a 
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD

Baraka's poem resonates with the same violent anger that propelled Black Power during the sixties and seventies.  Today marks the official release of Göran Olsson's documentary The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975; you can read the NPR review here.  It looks pretty interesting--it's a take on the movement from Sweden, which apparently was pretty anti-US at the time.  Check out the trailer below:

George Harrison + Martin Scorsese...Yes, Please!

Premieres October 5 & 6 on HBO...a channel I don't have.  What to do?!

Upcoming Concerts I Want to Go See (But Most of Which I Can't Afford)

First off, I actually do plan on attending Andrew Bird's sound installation at the MCA (Alexa, I'm hoping you can get me the member discount?!).  Also, speaking of AB: he's written the score for the upcoming indie film Norman. Check out both a sample of his exhibit and the trailer for the movie below.

Other Concerts I Want to Check Out and May or May Not Actually Attend:

• Pearl Jam 20th anniversary concert @ Alpine Valley on Labor Day Weekend (instead of that, I'll probably resort to watching their documentary, Pearl Jam: Twenty, coming out September 20--trailer below)
• The Civil Wars @ The Vic Theatre on November 6 (right now tickets are just $20!)

A Synesthesia Experience: Ken Kesey on LSD

Seeing as I recently watched the film adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I decided it would be appropriate to share this particular video, an eerie fusion of sound recording and animation.  Open Culture's summary explains the story behind the clip:

"Back in 1959, Ken Kesey, then a grad student in Stanford’s creative writing program, started participating in government-sponsored medical research that tested a range of hallucinogens — LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and the rest. As part of the research project, Kesey spoke into a taperecorder and recounted the ins-and-outs of his hallucinations. These tapes were eventually stored away, and Kesey went on to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a book that now sits on TIME’s list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels since 1923.

A half century later (and ten years after Kesey’s own death), the LSD tapes live again. This week, the filmmaker Alex Gibney will release Magic Trip, a new documentary that revisits Kesey’s fabled road trip across America with the Merry Pranksters and their psychedelic “Further” bus. (Tom Wolfe, you might recall, famously covered this trip with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968.) Taken from the new film, the sequence above mixes the rediscovered tapes with some artful animation, and it captures the whole mood of Kesey’s first trip …"