Culture : TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews

James Charles and the Odd Fascination of the YouTube Beauty Wars | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-odd-fascination-of-the-youtube-beauty-wars

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Watching Westbrook’s video, I might have felt boredom (forty-three minutes?), but, instead, I felt the excitement that must overwhelm an anthropologist discovering a lost culture, obscure but oddly fascinating, with its own dramas, alliances, and enmities. Added to this effect was the comedy of the gaping chasm between the flimsiness of the conflict and its melodramatic presentation. Speaking directly to the camera, her hair and skin smooth and gleaming and her legs drawn up to her chest, Westbrook’s tone often seems more appropriate for a bereavement support group than a skirmish kindled by a supplement sponsorship. At one point, she claims that she feels betrayed because she and her husband helped Charles with business decisions for years, without expecting payment in return. “Life will never stop being painful,” she says. “No matter where in the world you are, no matter your circumstances, you are always going to experience heartbreak, and that’s part of being human.” Viewers responded enthusiastically. “Tati is no longer a beauty guru… she’s a freaking legendary life guru,” a fan wrote, in a comment that received a hundred and seventy-four thousand likes. In response, Charles came out with his own YouTube statement, in which he appears weepy and makeup-less, apologizes in vague terms to Westbrook and her husband for “everything I have put you through over the last few weeks,” and promises, in possibly even vaguer terms, to “continue to learn and grow every single day.” (He also said that he didn’t receive any payment for his SugarBearHair promotion and instead did it as a favor to the company; SugarBearHair, he said, had recently given him an artist pass when he felt “unsafe” in the less secure V.I.P. area at the Coachella music festival—the traditional ground zero for influencer drama.)

In an Instagram post from the Met Gala earlier in the week, Charles had written, “Being invited to such an important event like the ball is such an honor and a step forward in the right direction for influencer representation in the media and I am so excited to be a catalyst.” His suggestion that influencers are a marginalized group that deserves affirmative-action-style media attention was justifiably met with derision, but it did evoke the strange, liminal position that they occupy. On the one hand, people like Charles and Westbrook—so-called civilians who have amassed millions of followers through a combination of relentless vlogging and a savvily fashioned persona—now wield enormous financial power by using their accounts to promote brands. (One report predicts that the influencer economy will be worth ten billion dollars by 2020; Instagram recently partnered with several prominent influencers to test out a program that would enable direct sales on the social-media platform.) On the other hand, influencers’ power relies on their relatability. (“I want to show you guys that, no matter who you are, you can make it,” Westbrook says, feelingly, toward the end of her “Bye sister . . .” video. “I had freaking nothing, nothing, when I started out.”) Traditional celebrities serve as powerful marketing tools precisely because, though we are enticed by the fantasy that they offer, we understand that we could never really be like them. With influencers, conversely, it feels like, with a little help and a little of their product, we could be. Influencers: they’re just like us.

An influencer is, by definition, a creature of commerce. Unlike with a traditional celebrity, there is no creative project necessary to back up the shilling of products (say, a movie franchise used to promote merchandise)—the shilling is the project. But, paradoxically, the commercial sway that influencers hold over their fans depends on their distinctive authenticity: the sense that they are just ordinary people who happen to be recommending a product that they enjoy . Charles’s sin, according to Westbrook, was trading their friendship for lucre (or at least a Coachella pass). “My relationship with James Charles is not transactional,” Westbrook says in her video. “I have not asked him for a penny, I have never been on his Instagram.” Railing against Charles’s SugarBearHair sponsored post, she continues, “You say you don’t like the brand. You say that you’re the realest, that you can’t be bought. Well, you just were.” Later in the video, she takes on a Holden Caulfield-like tone: “You should have walked away. You should have held on to your integrity. You’re a phony.” She, herself, she claims, would never pay anyone to promote her beauty supplement in a sponsored post: “My product is good enough on its own. We’re selling like hot cakes.” Indeed, one shouldn’t underestimate the value that authenticity, or at least a performance of it, carries in the influencer marketplace. Since “Bye sister . . .” was posted, it has been viewed a staggering forty-three million times, and Westbrook has gained three million subscribers. Charles has lost roughly the same number.

#Culture_numérique #Influenceurs

The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-urgent-quest-for-slower-better-news

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In 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article with the headline “Overload!,” which examined news fatigue in “an age of too much information.” When “Overload!” was published, Blackberrys still dominated the smartphone market, push notifications hadn’t yet to come to the iPhone, retweets weren’t built into Twitter, and BuzzFeed News did not exist. Looking back, the idea of suffering from information overload in 2008 seems almost quaint. Now, more than a decade later, a fresh reckoning seems to be upon us. Last year, Tim Cook, the chief executive officer of Apple, unveiled a new iPhone feature, Screen Time, which allows users to track their phone activity. During an interview at a Fortune conference, Cook said that he was monitoring his own usage and had “slashed” the number of notifications he receives. “I think it has become clear to all of us that some of us are spending too much time on our devices,” Cook said.

It is worth considering how news organizations have contributed to the problems Newport and Cook describe. Media outlets have been reduced to fighting over a shrinking share of our attention online; as Facebook, Google, and other tech platforms have come to monopolize our digital lives, news organizations have had to assume a subsidiary role, relying on those sites for traffic. That dependence exerts a powerful influence on which stories that are pursued, how they’re presented, and the speed and volume at which they’re turned out. In “World Without Mind: the Existential Threat of Big Tech,” published in 2017, Franklin Foer, the former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, writes about “a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook” and “a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms.” Newspapers and magazines have long sought to command large readerships, but these efforts used to be primarily the province of circulation departments; newsrooms were insulated from these pressures, with little sense of what readers actually read. Nowadays, at both legacy news organizations and those that were born online, audience metrics are everywhere. At the Times, everyone in the newsroom has access to an internal, custom-built analytics tool that shows how many people are reading each story, where those people are coming from, what devices they are using, how the stories are being promoted, and so on. Additional, commercially built audience tools, such as Chartbeat and Google Analytics, are also widely available. As the editor of newyorker.com, I keep a browser tab open to Parse.ly, an application that shows me, in real time, various readership numbers for the stories on our Web site.

Even at news organizations committed to insuring that editorial values—and not commercial interests—determine coverage, it can be difficult for editors to decide how much attention should be paid to these metrics. In “Breaking News: the Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters,” Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, recounts the gradual introduction of metrics into his newspaper’s decision-making processes. The goal, he writes, is to have “a data-informed newsroom, not a data-led one.” But it’s hard to know when the former crosses over into being the latter.

For digital-media organizations sustained by advertising, the temptations are almost irresistible. Each time a reader comes to a news site from a social-media or search platform, the visit, no matter how brief, brings in some amount of revenue. Foer calls this phenomenon “drive-by traffic.” As Facebook and Google have grown, they have pushed down advertising prices, and revenue-per-click from drive-by traffic has shrunk; even so, it continues to provide an incentive for any number of depressing modern media trends, including clickbait headlines, the proliferation of hastily written “hot takes,” and increasingly homogeneous coverage as everyone chases the same trending news stories, so as not to miss out on the traffic they will bring. Any content that is cheap to produce and has the potential to generate clicks on Facebook or Google is now a revenue-generating “audience opportunity.”

Among Boczkowski’s areas of research is how young people interact with the news today. Most do not go online seeking the news; instead, they encounter it incidentally, on social media. They might get on their phones or computers to check for updates or messages from their friends, and, along the way, encounter a post from a news site. Few people sit down in the morning to read the print newspaper or make a point of watching the T.V. news in the evening. Instead, they are constantly “being touched, rubbed by the news,” Bockzkowski said. “It’s part of the environment.”

A central purpose of journalism is the creation of an informed citizenry. And yet––especially in an environment of free-floating, ambient news––it’s not entirely clear what it means to be informed. In his book “The Good Citizen,” from 1998, Michael Schudson, a sociologist who now teaches at Columbia’s journalism school, argues that the ideal of the “informed citizen”––a person with the time, discipline, and expertise needed to steep him- or herself in politics and become fully engaged in our civic life––has always been an unrealistic one. The founders, he writes, expected citizens to possess relatively little political knowledge; the ideal of the informed citizen didn’t take hold until more than a century later, when Progressive-era reformers sought to rein in the party machines and empower individual voters to make thoughtful decisions. (It was also during this period that the independent press began to emerge as a commercial phenomenon, and the press corps became increasingly professionalized.)

Schudson proposes a model for citizenship that he believes to be more true to life: the “monitorial citizen”—a person who is watchful of what’s going on in politics but isn’t always fully engaged. “The monitorial citizen engages in environmental surveillance more than information-gathering,” he writes. “Picture parents watching small children at the community pool. They are not gathering information; they are keeping an eye on the scene. They look inactive, but they are poised for action if action is required.” Schudson contends that monitorial citizens might even be “better informed than citizens of the past in that, somewhere in their heads, they have more bits of information.” When the time is right, they will deploy this information––to vote a corrupt lawmaker out of office, say, or to approve an important ballot measure.

#Journalisme #Médias #Economie_attention

The Chaos of Altamont and the Murder of Meredith Hunter | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-chaos-of-altamont-and-the-murder-of-meredith-hunter

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A great deal has been written about Altamont in the years since, but so much of the language around it has the exonerating blush of the passive: the sixties were ending; the Angels were the Angels; it could only happen to the Stones. There may have been larger forces at work, but the attempt to see Altamont as the end of the sixties obscures the extent to which what happened that night had happened, in different ways, many times before, and has happened many times since. “A young black man murdered in the midst of a white crowd by white thugs as white men played their version of black music—it was too much to kiss off as a mere unpleasantness,” Greil Marcus wrote, in 1977. Hunter does not appear in Owens’s photos and he is only a body in “Gimme Shelter.” It is worth returning to that day and trying to see Meredith Hunter again.

Altamont, fin du rêve hippie ou début de la violence raciste ? Un tournant dans l’histoire US... et celle du rock. Plein de magnifiques photos et une histoire terrible.

#Musique #Stones #Altamont

Dick Dale, the Inventor of Surf Rock, Was a Lebanese-American Kid from Boston
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/dick-dale-the-inventor-of-surf-rock-was-a-lebanese-american-kid-from-bost

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Dale died on Saturday, at age eighty-one. It’s perhaps curious, at first glance, that a Lebanese-American kid from Boston invented a genre known as surf rock, but such is Dale’s story. He was born Richard Monsour in 1937; several decades earlier, his paternal grandparents had immigrated to the U.S. from Beirut.

[...]

Dale’s work was directly and mightily informed by the Arabic music that he listened to as a child. “My music comes from the rhythm of Arab songs,” Dale told the journalist George Baramki Azar, in 1998. “The darbukkah, along with the wailing style of Arab singing, especially the way they use the throat, creates a very powerful force.”

l’histgeobox : Soul Train ou l’émission la plus branchée d’Amérique.
▻http://lhistgeobox.blogspot.com/2019/03/soul-train-ou-lemission-la-plus.html

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Lorsque Soul Train déferle sur les petits écrans américains, les programmes musicaux ne manquent pas ; certains d’entre eux connaissent même un succès prodigieux à l’instar du Ed Sullivan Show ou d’American Bandstand qu’anime Dick Clark depuis 1952. (4) Or, dans tous ces programmes, seuls les artistes noirs dont la musique se trouve en tête des classements peuvent espérer se produire sur les plateaux de télés. Dans ces conditions, de nombreux musiciens, pourtant très populaires, n’ont jamais droit de cité. De la même manière, le public de danseurs présents lors des enregistrements est alors exclusivement composé de jeunes blancs. Une situation somme toute peu surprenante si l’on considère que la discrimination raciale reste omniprésente dans les têtes, bien qu’officiellement proscrite par la loi. Pour vendre des disques, certaines compagnies n’hésitent alors pas à « blanchir » les pochettes des artistes soul ou rythmn and blues (le « Otis blue » d’Otis Redding est un des exemples les plus connus).

Do We Write Differently on a Screen? | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/do-we-write-differently-on-a-screen

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But, before that, I published my first short novel, “Tongues of Flame.” I continued to write fiction by hand and then type it up. But, at least, once it was typed, you could edit on a screen. What a difference that was! What an invitation to obsession! Hitherto, there was a limit to how many corrections you could make by hand. There was only so much space on the paper. It was discouraging—typing something out time after time, to make more and more corrections. You learned to be satisfied with what you had. Now you could go on changing things forever. I learned how important it was to keep a copy of what I had written first, so as to remember what I had meant in the beginning. Sometimes it turned out to be better than the endlessly edited version.

We had personal computers at this point, but I still wrote fiction by hand. The mental space feels different when you work with paper. It is quieter. A momentum builds up, a spell between page and hand and eye. I like to use a nice pen and see the page slowly fill. But, for newspaper articles and translations, I now worked straight onto the computer. Which was more frenetic, nervy. The writing was definitely different. But more playful, too. You could move things around. You could experiment so easily. I am glad the computer wasn’t available when I started writing. I might have been overwhelmed by the possibilities. But once you know what you’re doing, the facility of the computer is wonderful.

Then e-mail arrived and changed everything. First, you would only hook the computer up through your landline phone a couple of times a day, as if there were a special moment to send and receive mail. Then came the permanent connection. Finally, the wireless, and, of course, the Internet. In the space of perhaps ten years, you passed from waiting literally months for a decision on something that you’d written, or simply for a reaction from a friend or an agent, to expecting a reaction immediately. Whereas in the past you checked your in-box once a day, now you checked every five minutes.

And now you could write an article for The Guardian or the New York Times as easily as you could write it for L’Arena di Verona. Write it and expect a response in hours. In minutes. You write the first chapter of a book and send it at once to four or five friends. Hoping they’d read it at once. It’s impossible to exaggerate how exciting this was, at first, and how harmful to the spirit. You, everybody, are suddenly incredibly needy of immediate feedback. A few more years and you were publishing regularly online for The New York Review of Books. And, hours after publication, you could know how many people were reading the piece. Is it a success? Shall I follow up with something similar?

While you sit at your computer now, the world seethes behind the letters as they appear on the screen. You can toggle to a football match, a parliamentary debate, a tsunami. A beep tells you that an e-mail has arrived. WhatsApp flashes on the screen. Interruption is constant but also desired. Or at least you’re conflicted about it. You realize that the people reading what you have written will also be interrupted. They are also sitting at screens, with smartphones in their pockets. They won’t be able to deal with long sentences, extended metaphors. They won’t be drawn into the enchantment of the text. So should you change the way you write accordingly? Have you already changed, unwittingly?

Or should you step back? Time to leave your computer and phone in one room, perhaps, and go and work silently on paper in another. To turn off the Wi-Fi for eight hours. Just as you once learned not to drink everything in the hotel minibar, not to eat too much at free buffets, now you have to cut down on communication. You have learned how compulsive you are, how fragile your identity, how important it is to cultivate a little distance. And your only hope is that others have learned the same lesson. Otherwise, your profession, as least as you thought of it, is finished.

Tim Parks, a novelist and essayist, is the author of “The Novel: A Survival Skill” and “Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books.”

#Ecriture #Ordinateur #Edition

“The American Meme” Records the Angst of Social-Media Influencers | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-american-meme-a-new-netflix-documentary-records-the-angst-of-social-m

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The new Netflix documentary “The American Meme,” directed by Bert Marcus, offers a chilling glimpse into the lives of social-media influencers, tracking their paths to online celebrity, their attempts to keep it, and their fear of losing it. Early on in the film, the pillowy-lipped model Emily Ratajkowski (twenty million Instagram followers and counting), who first became a viral sensation when, in 2013, she appeared bare-breasted in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” video, attempts to address a popular complaint raised against social-media celebrities. “There’s the attention argument,” she says, as images of her posing in lingerie and swimwear appear on the screen. “That we’re doing it just for attention . . . And I say, what’s wrong with attention?” “The American Meme” can be seen, at least partly, as a response to Ratajkowski’s question. It’s true that the model, with her superior bone structure, lush curves, and preternatural knack for packaging her God-given gifts into an enticingly consistent product, is presented to us in the limited capacity of a talking head, and so the illusion of a perfect influencer life—in which attention is easily attracted and never worried over—can be kept. (“Privacy is dead now,” Ratajkowski says, with the offhanded flippancy of someone who is only profiting from this new reality. “Get over it.”) But what is fascinating, and valuable, about “The American Meme” is its ability to reveal the desperation, loneliness, and sheer Sisyphean tedium of ceaselessly chasing what will most likely end up being an ever-diminishing share of the online-attention economy.

Khaled, his neck weighted with ropes of gold and diamonds, is one of the lucky predators of the particular jungle we’re living in, but Bichutsky isn’t so sure whether he’s going to maintain his own alpha position. “I’m not going to last another year,” he moans, admitting that he’s been losing followers, and that “everyone gets old and ugly one day.” Even when you’re a success, like Khaled, the hustle is grindingly boring: most of it, in the end, consists of capturing Snaps of things like your tater-tot lunch as you shout, “We the best.” And, clearly, not everyone is as blessed as the social-media impresario. During one montage, viral figures like the “Damn, Daniel” boy, “Salt Bae,” and “Chewbacca Mask Lady” populate the screen, and Ratajkowski muses on these flash-in-the-pan meme sensations: “In three or four days, does anyone remember who that person is? I don’t know.”

The idea of achieving some sort of longevity, or at least managing to cash in on one’s viral hit, is one that preoccupies the influencers featured in “The American Meme.” “I’m thirty; pray for me,” Furlan mutters, dryly, from her spot posing on her bare living-room floor. In that sense, Paris Hilton, an executive producer of the film and also one of its subjects, is the model everyone is looking to. Hilton has managed to continue playing the game by solidifying her brand—that of a ditsy, sexy, spoiled heiress. Rather than promoting others’ products, like most influencers, she has yoked her fame to merchandise of her own: a best-selling perfume line, pet products, clothes, a lucrative d.j. career, and on and on.

#Influenceurs #Instagram #Culture_numérique

Bob Dylan’s Masterpiece, “Blood on the Tracks,” Is Still Hard to Find | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/bob-dylans-masterpiece-is-still-hard-to-find

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In September, 1974, Bob Dylan spent four days in the old Studio A, his favorite recording haunt in Manhattan, and emerged with the greatest, darkest album of his career. It is a ten-song study in romantic devastation, as beautiful as it is bleak, worthy of comparison with Schubert’s “Winterreise.” Yet the record in question—“Blood on the Tracks”—has never officially seen the light of day. The Columbia label released an album with that title in January, 1975, but Dylan had reworked five of the songs in last-minute sessions in Minnesota, resulting in a substantial change of tone. Mournfulness and wistfulness gave way to a feisty, festive air. According to Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard, the authors of the book “A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of ‘Blood on the Tracks,’ ” from 2004, Dylan feared a commercial failure. The revised “Blood” sold extremely well, reaching the top of the Billboard album chart, and it ended talk of Dylan’s creative decline. It was not, however, the masterwork of melancholy that he created in Studio A.

Ultimately, the long-running debate over the competing incarnations of “Blood on the Tracks” misses the point of what makes this artist so infinitely interesting, at least for some of us. Jeff Slate, who wrote liner notes for “More Blood, More Tracks,” observes that Dylan’s work is always in flux. The process that is documented on these eighty-seven tracks is not one of looking for the “right” take; it’s the beginning of an endless sequence of variations, which are still unfolding on his Never-Ending Tour.

#Bob_Dylan #Musique

What Public Life Used to Look Like in San Francisco’s Mission District | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/what-public-life-used-to-look-like-in-san-franciscos-mission-district

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Fabuleuses photos de The Mission à San Francisco

The photographer Janet Delaney first came to San Francisco in 1967, for the Summer of Love. By the time she began living in the Mission, in the nineteen-eighties, she had learned Spanish and trained herself to recognize moments of quiet revelation in the streets. “I’ve always seen San Francisco as a small place where big things happen,” she says. “There’s a kind of freedom in being on the West Coast, as if your parents aren’t around.” She was an interloper in the Mission, not having been raised there. And yet, like many new arrivals, she found her place—and her subject—by studying the people for whom it was home.

The area was busy and fast-moving then, with domestic culture spilling out onto the public turf. Photographing life in the streets was fluid and spontaneous work—“like shooting from the solar plexus,” Delaney says—and often it was unclear what she had until she got back to her darkroom. In this way, she was capturing, not composing; gathering, not trying to bear out a story. In time, though, a story did form in her photographs, much as a drift grows from accumulated flakes of snow. The story was about the inflow of culture that kept a pluralistic district alive—and the way that this flow drove life into the local streets, and then beyond them, toward a bigger world.

#San_Francisco #The_Mission #Photographies

Aretha Franklin’s Astonishing “Dr. Feelgood” | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/aretha-franklins-astonishing-dr-feelgood

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On peut voir la vidéo à : ▻https://youtu.be/V2x8zpoHkTU

The passage (of what, in a black religious context, might be called “tuning up”) extravagantly justifies Franklin’s claim that, although she recorded secular music, she never left the Church; she took it with her. But the very structure of this performance, from blues to prayer, makes an additional case: that a woman’s sexual authority need not compromise her spiritual leadership but might actually fuel it. There is apprehension, too. Franklin “gets a little worried” and “fearful” like everyone else. But she knows that “everything’s gonna be alright.” “Don’t put worry on you before worry gets to you”: she repeats the injunction twice, so that what begins as an admonition becomes an assurance of divine clemency, of a force that might take you beyond where you thought you could go—“You’d be surprised what big bridges you can meet when you get there.”

Franklin often said that she didn’t put her politics into her music, but her public support for black radical figures meant that she didn’t have to. She was a tireless fund-raiser for Martin Luther King, Jr., a family friend; in 1970, she offered to post bail for Angela Davis. These social commitments add depth to her music. They allow us to hear in her reference to bridges, for instance, such tortured, bold crossings as that of the Edmund Pettus Bridge by civil-rights activists marching to Selma. They allow us to hear, in her reference to fear for one’s children, a moment when black youth were on the front lines—integrating schools, joining freedom rides, or simply navigating hostile home towns.

This was the promise of soul: that pain granted depth, and that one was never alone but accompanied by a vibrant community that had crossed too many bridges in order to survive. Franklin was the queen not only of soul music but of soul as a concept, because her great subject was the exceeding of limits. Her willingness to extend her own vocal technique, to venture beyond herself, to strain to implausible heights, and revive songs that seemed to be over—all these strategies could look and sound like grace. She knew that we would need it.

#Musique #Aretha_Franklin

Will the Benalla Affair Sink Emmanuel Macron?
The New Yorker- By Alexandra Schwartz - August 2, 2018
►https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/will-scandal-sink-emmanuel-macron

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What followed was a tangle of denials, accusations, recriminations, and non-apology apologies: in other words, politics. Benalla was fired. The Assemblée Nationale and the Senate both launched official hearings. Through it all, Macron kept curiously silent, refusing to speak to the press, tweeting only to express sympathy for Greece as it battled wildfires. Finally, after nearly a week of furious news coverage and speculation, the President got around to saying his piece. Standing in front of a phalanx of deputies from his political party, he delivered a typically Macronian speech, flecked with irony, rhetorical flourish, and a certain steely self-regard. Macron, who once recited Molière from memory on the campaign trail, is highly attuned to dramatic cadence, the theatrical power of rhythm and repetition. “Alexandre Benalla has never had the nuclear codes,” he said, as he began to work his way through the catalogue of rumors that had been circulating. “Alexandre Benalla has never earned ten thousand euros a month. Alexandre Benalla has never been my lover.” (Capped with a little smile: I went there.) What had happened was serious, a deception, a treason, but, Macron said, it was ultimately his own fault. He had trusted the wrong man. “If they want to find the person responsible, he’s before you.” Macron spread his arms. “Let them come and find him. I answer to the French people.”

The President was right. The Benalla Affair is not about Alexandre Benalla. It is about Emmanuel Macron, and the brash, self-confident manner with which he has blasted through his first year in office. As a candidate, Macron promised the modernization, and the liberalization, of the French state.

#Benalla

Barry Blitt’s “Yearning to Breathe Free” | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2018-07-02

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In recent years, the artist Barry Blitt has become known for his satire, which skewers, in soft watercolors, those in or adjacent to power. But Blitt, who began working for the magazine in 1992, has always been more than a comic artist, and this week’s cover features a sombre touch. We recently talked to Blitt about his art and his approach.

A lot of your work is funny. How do you adjust that tone when tackling serious political issues?

Yeah, my first instinct is to try to make a joke, and it’s not always appropriate—though those are the moments when a laugh might be most appreciated. Still, I’m not so far gone that I can’t tell when a gag isn’t the right response. And I’m always second-guessing myself anyway, so the process is messy and unappealing to talk about.

How do you get ideas when responding to current events? Is it calculated or more subconscious?

I have no idea where ideas come from. It does seem like a mysterious, unconscious thing. Though I’m pretty sure that most of my lousy ideas—when no inspiration makes itself available—are the result of calculated, paint-by-numbers thinking.

What are your sources for keeping up with politics?

Well, I can’t watch TV news anymore; it’s always people yelling at each other or—worse—people agreeing with each other. There’s always a background drone of outrage, it seems. Stories like this, obviously, are different. The outrage and disgust is justified and real, and needs to be paid attention to.

Is it weird, as someone who grew up in Canada, to be known for your American satire?

I don’t think that’s too unusual—this is a nation of immigrants. And I’d have to think that half the world is sort of obsessed with American politics, especially now.

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Three of the many sketches Blitt sent to be considered for this week’s cover.

#graphisme #news_design #The_New_Yorker #Trump #séparation #enfants #enfance #réfugiés #migrations #asile #USA #famille

A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone | The New Yorker
►https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-new-history-of-arabia-written-in-stone

A few years ago, Ahmad Al-Jallad, a professor of Arabic and Semitic linguistics at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, opened his e-mail and was excited to see that he had received several photographs of rocks. The images—sent by Al-Jallad’s mentor, Michael Macdonald, a scholar at Oxford who studies ancient inscriptions—were of artifacts from a recent archeological survey in Jordan. Macdonald pointed Al-Jallad’s attention to one in particular: a small rock covered with runelike marks in a style of writing called boustrophedon, named for lines that wrap back and forth, “like an ox turning in a field.” It was Safaitic, an alphabet that flourished in northern Arabia two millennia ago, and Al-Jallad and Macdonald are among a very small number of people who can read it. Al-Jallad began to transcribe the text, and, within a few minutes, he could see that the rock was an essential piece of a historical puzzle that he had been working on for years.

A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone | The New Yorker
►https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-new-history-of-arabia-written-in-stone

Not all of them will be pleased by the way that new research rewrites old understandings. In traditional historiography and common lore, southern Arabia is believed to be the primeval homeland of the Arabs and the source of the purest Arabic. In this telling, Arabic was born deep in the peninsula and spread with the Islamic conquests; as it made contact with other languages, it gradually devolved into the many Arabic dialects spoken today. Classical Arabic remains the preëminent symbol of a unified Arab culture, and the ultimate marker of eloquence and learning. To Al-Jallad, the Safaitic inscriptions indicate that various ancient forms of Arabic were present many centuries before the rise of classical Arabic, in places such as Syria and Jordan. He argues that the language may have originated there and then migrated south—suggesting that the “corrupt” forms of Arabic spoken around the region may, in fact, have lineages older than classical Arabic. Macdonald told me, “His theory will inevitably meet a lot of opposition, mainly for non-academic reasons. But it’s becoming more and more convincing.”

Si l’histoire de la #langue_arabe vous intéresse... Tout juste passionnant ! (via Angry Arab)

The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa” Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-overwhelming-emotion-of-hearing-totos-africa-remixed-to-sound-like-it
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D__6hwqjZAs

he street lights are out. The porch lights are off. The empty houses and vacant lots are illuminated by headlamps and siren strobes and police-cruiser searchlights, flashes of color amid myriad shades of gray. The murder victims are both black and white, as are the perps, in handcuffs, and the cops, in blue. For all of them, living in Flint, Michigan, is a story of the struggle to survive.

Inside a Broken Police Department in Flint, Michigan.
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/inside-a-broken-police-department-in-flint-michigan?mbid=social_facebook

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The Mapping of Massacres in Australia | The New Yorker
►https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/mapping-massacres

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From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire—Columbus, Rhodes, Cook—have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled. The fate of these statues—and those representing white men of a different era, in Charlottesville and elsewhere—has ignited debate about the political act of publicly memorializing historical figures responsible for atrocities. But when the statues come down, how might the atrocities themselves be publicly commemorated, rather than repressed?

#australie #aborigènes #massacres #cartographie #art

Mapping Massacres

In Australia, historians and artists have turned to cartography to record the widespread killing of Indigenous people.

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How Men Like Harvey Weinstein Implicate Their Victims in Their Acts | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/how-men-like-harvey-weinstein-implicate-their-victims-in-their-acts

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There are also, already, so many women accusing Weinstein, all speaking of such similar incidents, which occurred at such similar places within their respective careers, that the comet trail of each act contributes to a collective pattern. The case has illuminated the very ordinary reality of being a young woman with a desire to succeed, perform, and please others, who is sexually targeted by a powerful man in her field—a man who aims to use his position in a way that will affect her career and her selfhood whether she relents or escapes. These, too, are open secrets among women: what that moment feels like, what you think about when you consider your options, why you carry this stuff with you for so long.

This is, I think, the primary reason that some women maintain relationships with their attackers. When you are treated like an object, things about you that you cannot change are reframed. If a man interprets your youth as sexual vulnerability, he can make it seem that you have no choice but to be sexually vulnerable—after all, you have no choice but to be young. And so you might conclude that you need to redeem the encounter within a narrative that you may not like but in which you can at least actively participate. This might mean engaging in consensual sex afterward, to make you feel like you wanted it the first time, though you know you didn’t. Or staying friendly with the man in the hopes that you’ll find out that he actually did value you, and he wasn’t just hoping for access to your body. Or even trying to get something out of the transaction, whatever you can. This looks like weakness, but it’s an attempt to gain control. The Weinstein case has reminded me of how hard, maybe impossible, it is to separate yourself from all the things that have been forced on you—an encounter, a body, a sense of complicity, or simply the banal old scripts that make it all seem so sickeningly predictable. You were young and he was powerful; the story writes itself.

#Feminisme #Culture_du_viol

Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?

In the late nineteen-thirties, as Benito Mussolini was preparing to host the 1942 World’s Fair, in Rome, he oversaw the construction of a new neighborhood, Esposizione Universale Roma, in the southwest of the city, to showcase Italy’s renewed imperial grandeur. The centerpiece of the district was the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a sleek rectangular marvel with a façade of abstract arches and rows of neoclassical statues lining its base. In the end, the fair was cancelled because of the war, but the palazzo, known as the Square Colosseum, still stands in Rome today, its exterior engraved with a phrase from Mussolini’s speech, in 1935, announcing the invasion of Ethiopia, in which he described Italians as “a people of poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, scientists, navigators, and transmigrants.” The invasion, and the bloody occupation that followed, would later lead to war-crimes charges against the Italian government. The building is, in other words, a relic of abhorrent Fascist aggression. Yet, far from being shunned, it is celebrated in Italy as a modernist icon. In 2004, the state recognized the palazzo as a site of “cultural interest.” In 2010, a partial restoration was completed, and five years later the fashion house Fendi moved its global headquarters there.

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