Archive for January, 2009

Louis Chude-Sokei

Posted By Zócalo On January 20, 2009

louischudesokei

Louis Chude-Sokei was born in Nigeria, spent his early childhood in Jamaica, and moved to Los Angeles after that. “I’m still working out how I’ve taken to America,” he said. “Much of my work is about how I’ve taken to America and whether I’ve taken to it.” And though his subject and inspiration may come from that move to the U.S., Chude-Sokei always knew what work he wanted to do. “There’s a family story about how I was writing books before I knew how to write,” he said, scribbling in the air with imagined pen and paper. “I spent hours just writing.”

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January 18, 1979

Posted By Zócalo On January 20, 2009

January 18, 1979

So often artists have painted a woman
washing, or combing her hair.
And nearby is a mirror.
And there you were, crouched in the tub.
It was cold in the apartment.
It is always cold in winter.
But you were brushing out your hair
and singing to yourself.

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Martin Luther King’s Legacy in the Age of Obama

Posted By Zócalo On January 20, 2009

Martin Luther King's Legacy in the Age of Obama

Louis Chude-Sokei gave it to the audience straight.

“We’re in quite a celebratory mood,” he said, speaking with Robin D.G. Kelley at the Hammer. “Neither of us wants to ruin anybody’s buzz, but we might in fact do just that.”

And so the two scholars began to burst the country’s bubble, on the day of honor for its greatest civil rights leader, and on the eve of the inauguration of its first black president. Beyond their ability to mobilize activists — albeit for different ends and in different ways — Barack Obama and Martin Luther King have little in common but their messianic characterization

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Seven Days in the Art World

Posted By Zócalo On January 19, 2009

Seven Days in the Art World

Seven Days in the Art World
by Sarah Thornton

Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World could be called demystifying. And in some ways, it is. Thornton flits around the globe, dropping into seven spots that are generally velvet-roped off: behind the scenes at a Christie’s auction; at the awarding of the Turner Prize; inside a CalArts crit; observing the Artforum offices; peering into the studios of Takashi Murakami; and touring Art Basel and the Venice Biennale.

But Thornton maintains the glamour of the art world as much as she exposes its workings. For all the times her interviewees compare dealing and collecting in the contemporary art market with whoring….

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Statues in the Park

Posted By Zócalo On January 18, 2009

by Billy Collins

I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

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Feuilleton
Friday, December 3, 2010
How One Family Created Chinese America
Zócalo

The Lucky Ones, by Mae Ngai The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America by Mae Ngai Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.

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