When the Memphis design group turned up at the 1981 Milan Furniture Fair with their plastic laminated, brightly colored and highly patterned furniture, the exhibition was reportedly mobbed and streets were blocked as people tried to cram into the tiny exhibition space. In an effort to explore how this and other examples of postmodernism...
Because of the million or more people who attend it, the Notting Hill Carnival, an annual celebration of Caribbean culture, can feel overwhelming to say the least. Sprawling over roughly 20 miles of West London, the carnival is often cited as one of the largest street festivals in Europe. This year’s festival takes place...
When performing live, Galactic makes playing funk music look easy. It isn’t. Delivering precise, tight funk is hard work, but this five-piece New Orleans band seems to power through their shows as if they could keep it all going endlessly. Their most recent album, “The Other Side of Midnight: Live in New Orleans”, captures...
Evan Parker, a saxophonist from Bristol, England, who helped shape the improv-heavy sound of European free jazz through the ’60s and ’70s, told an interviewer in 2003 that “you can make just as bad a mistake when you think you are doing absolutely the right thing as you can when you just make a...
When I ask my university journalism students why exactly they want to be journalists, a majority tell me it’s because they “like to write.” Considering most of them are in their 20s and grew up with the Internet, this response always surprises me. With a seemingly endless supply of emerging technology and digital storytelling...
The Barbican Art Gallery is offering a glimpse of life in downtown Manhattan in the early 1970s — at least through the eyes of a particular group of artists. The “Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s” exhibition, at the gallery through May 22, features sculptures, drawings, photographs, documentation of performances, and mixed-media...