Daily Archives: March 19, 2017

Stuart Miller, Los Angeles Times 11:05 p.m. ET March 18, 2017

Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Rosalee in the TV series Underground. The show on WGN is one of many projects telling the story of how the railroad helped 30,000 to 100,000 (of the millions of enslaved blacks) to escape to Canada.(Photo: Steve Dietl/Sony)

When WGN Americas drama Underground debuted last winter, it seemed like a cultural outlier. Stories from the Underground Railroad had long been relegated to nonfiction or the broad and simplistic brushstrokes of childrens books. Even as stories about the horrors of oppression (12 Years a Slave) and the civil rights movement (42, Selma, All the Way) entered the mainstream, the Underground Railroad remained overlooked.

Lately, however, slaves flight to freedom has became a jumping off point for an array of creative endeavors. A few weeks after Underground, with its soundtrack curated by executive producer John Legend, came Barbara Hamblys mystery novel, Drinking Gourd, and Robert Morgans escape saga, Chasing the North Star. Last summer Ben Winters counterfactual noir novel, Underground Airlines, hit bestseller lists; then came Colson Whiteheads The Underground Railroad, the years National Book Award winner for fiction.

Underground executive producer John Legend also curated the series soundtrack.(Photo: Valerie Macon/AFP-Getty Images)

In the fall, the surreal and subversive Underground Railroad Game opened to rapturous reviews off-Broadway. (The New York Times called it in-all-ways sensational.) Set in the present, the play depicts two teachers, one white and one black, stumbling along the treacherous path of educating children about slavery and racial oppression.

The topic hasnt been explored enough so Im not surprised people are finding new and different angles, says Underground co-creator Joe Pokaski.

The exterior of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitors Center in Church Creek, Md.(Photo: Brian Witte/Associated Press)

This month brings a new season of Underground, the opening of the National Park Services Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center in Cambridge, Md., and Through Darkness to Light, a photographic essay of the Underground Railroad by Jeanine Michna-Bales. The Underground River, a novel by Martha Conway, hits in June, and Viola Davis is developing a Tubman film for HBO.

Academy Award winner Viola Davis is developing a series on the Underground Railroad for HBO.(Photo: Paul Buck/EPA)

The Underground Railroad came at a time when our country was so polarized that there was no understanding on either side so the fascination with it now might be because were back in that situation, says Michna-Bales, adding that the movement also blurred lines, bringing together white and black, and people from different religions and socioeconomic groups, while also giving women previously unheard of roles in public life. Her pictures aim to provide a first-person perspective on what a slave would have seen on the long and dangerous journey north.

Many more slaves actually attempted escape without the aid of the Underground Railroad, at least initially. The phrase Underground Railroad first appeared around 1839 but slaves had, naturally, been trying to escape since the implementation of this horrific institution. Many initially tried for Mexico or the Caribbean. Historians estimate that the railroad helped 30,000 to 100,000 (of the millions of enslaved blacks) to escape to Canada. But for the most part the railroad really ventured only about 100 miles into the South, so the first season of the TV series and Morgans novel also explore the experience of slaves running without outside help.

Underground co-creator Misha Green puts all these new works in the larger context of publishers and producers recognizing the value artistically and commercially in stories about minorities, from the Roots remake to Oscar best-picture winner Moonlight. She points particularly to ones with characters seizing control of their own narrative, whether thats Straight Outta Compton or Hidden Figures. Indeed, last year also begat a movie (Birth of a Nation) and a play (Nathan Alan Davis Nat Turner in Jerusalem) about Turners slave uprising.

Author Morgan, a professor at Cornell University, says the trends roots stretch back decades.

Fiction is the way we learn about others, he says, pointing to waves of groups laying down their markers, from Southern writers in the 1930s to Jewish writers in the decades after World War II. The original Roots was the building block and writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and August Wilson then paved the way, he says, so that these Underground Railroad stories are a natural evolution.

I think its a good thing any time people are interested in history, says Eric Foner, a leading scholar of 19th century America, whose 2015 book, Gateway to Freedom, focused on the Underground Railroad. Foner understands artists taking liberties with the facts, and he admires Whiteheads fantastical creation of an actual railroad that runs underground. Its fantasy but Whitehead also gives a kaleidoscope of black history. Its very informed.

Most of the current projects began a few years ago, so Green says the zeitgeist partially reflects the rise of the tea party and birther movement followed by the spate of police shootings and the birth of Black Lives Matter.

These stories, like police brutality, have always existed but now the public might finally be primed and open to step outside its own orthodoxy and turn its gaze to them, adds Underground Railroad Game co-writer and costar Jennifer Kidwell.

Even as these stories make history more accessible to mainstream audiences, theyre refusing to whitewash the grim realities, striving instead to demolish the traditional narrative. This is not your grandfathers history that helps paint a rosier picture of historical atrocities, says Scott Sheppard, co-writer and costar of Underground Railroad Game, which will tour to as-yet-undetermined destinations in late 2017 and 2018.

We often use narratives as balms to sooth our concerns and fears about where we are now, Sheppard adds. The number of escaped slaves is minuscule compared to the systematic destruction of the millions of lives throughout slaverys history, so we want to remove that layer of romanticism and make everyone question their beliefs and values in as destabilizing a way as possible.

Underground may be slickly produced adventure TV yet one main character after another gets recaptured or killed. In Drinking Gourd, protagonist Benjamin January, a thoughtful and well-educated free black man, reflects on how he has come to hate virtually every white person, especially after learning the white abolitionist he encounters rapes the girls he helps to freedom. Whiteheads and Winters novels are even darker.

Underground Airlines takes place in the present but imagines a world that had no Civil War, where slavery was only gradually abolished and where it still thrives in four Southern states. Im hoping the book is a reminder of the presence of the past in our lives, says Winters, who connects a nation built on slavery to the institutionalized racism that persisted through Reconstruction and Jim Crow and that continues today. My alternative history isnt alternative enough.

Underground Railroad Game also ties the sins of Americas past squarely to the present day.

Our play explores the myths of the white savior and of romanticized American history, Kidwell says. We just happened to set it against the Underground Railroad.

That is a recurring theme in interviews with the writers, especially those who are white.

Its important that these stories are not, Oh, these nice white people are helping these poor black slaves get away and are instead about free blacks and slaves taking agency, Hambly says.

In Winters novel, the idea of whites as nobles rescuing the helpless is derisively called the Mockingbird mentality, in reference to Harper Lees Atticus Finch.

We are not just telling a black story, Winters says. Slavery is a story about white America; its about the role that people who looked like me played and still play in oppressing people who look different. The effects of and resistance to that oppression and the lasting legacy are a foundation of who we are as a people.

Although these works were all conceived before Donald Trumps election, the current climate will influence the audiences perceptions. I reread my own book in November and it read differently, says Conway, whose book is about a Northern white woman dipping her toe in the water of activism. Its about how people change and how she went from being a bystander to a participant.

They will resonate differently, says musician Legend, who not only served as music curator and executive producer on Underground but also plays Frederick Douglass this season. We have a president who doesnt know anything about American history or black history, and people are starting to realize how important it is to understand our history so we can fight back.

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Underground Railroad inspires a wave of books, plays, TV - Detroit Free Press

Women who identify with Zionism are free to participate in the feminist protest movement. But, rightly, it's a space in which supporters of a Jewish ethno-nationalist state should feel uncomfortable.

In a recent New York Times opedDoes Feminism have Room for Zionists?Emily Shire, who identifies as a feminist and a Zionist, argues that her belief in Israels right to exist as a Jewish state should not be at odds with her feminism. She suggests that women who sought to be included in the International Womens Strike and in the women's protests against the current U.S. administration more generally should not have to face a 'critical of Israel' litmus test. She takes issue with theStrike's platform, which specifically calls for the decolonization of Palestine, but which doesn't mention the myriad other injustices inflicted on women across the world.

But Shire herself brings up her own Zionism. She states her relationship to Israel shouldnt be a factor for the women's protest while simultaneously demanding a space for it - Zionism being a giant, pertinent caveat. Ironically, Shire is subjecting women active in the movement to her own litmus test.

The op-ed asks the wrong question. It is not whether feminism has room for Zionists but whether Zionism has room for equal rights.

Zionisms manifestation as a political system operating for almost 69 years now has thus far proven it does not have that room. The State of Israel was founded as a safe haven for Jews and is premised on privileging Jews over all others. It is not a country for all its citizens over 20 percent of whom are not Jewish at all - but for all Jewish people (and increasingly, onlycertain kinds of Jewsto boot).

Shire gives the impression that she hasnt sat down to consider how Palestinian womens rights, in Israel and in the occupied territories, are systematically affected by Israels very raison detre. (The fact that they are also trampled within Palestinian society does not absolve Israel of responsibility). Instead she insists on Israels right to exist as a Jewish state. But if you don't define what that should mean for Palestinians, you are evading the core issue. So far, it has de facto meant Israel has had the right to exist as a system of supremacy of one group over another.

I also support the right of Jews to self-determination. But as a Jewish ethno-nationalist state, Israel cannot uphold equal rights. That is a fact. So the question then, is, can a Jewish state exist that doesnt systematically violate basic human rights?

Im not sure. Its a worthy and challenging question - one that American and Israeli Jews were grappling with to an extent during the period surrounding Israels establishment but it quickly vanished. What should a Jewish state look like? How can it function as a democracy?

This is an important debate about nationalism and civic democracy, but it is primarily an intra-Jewish issue and has nothing to do with the current wave of feminism in the U.S. It is not Linda Sarsours job to make Zionist women feel more comfortable about the contradictions they are facing. If anything, considering Israels track record, it is up to Zionist women to take efforts to assure non-Zionist feminists of their commitment to equal rights.

I agree that all forms of violence and oppression against women should be called out and opposed. The International Womens Strike platform could have mentioned all forms of oppression against women, not just Israel. That only Israel was mentioned is part of the zeitgeist. It cannot be seen in isolation from the context in which Israel oversees the longest-standing military occupation in history and is simultaneously the largest beneficiary of U.S. foreign aid, acting with near total impunity and with no end in sight.

As an Israeli Jew who actively opposes Israels system of rule and supports Palestinian human rights, I may not agree with every tactic employed by the Palestinian resistance movement. But who am I to tell them how to resist their own oppression? As Linda Sarsour said in her interview inThe Nationresponding to Shires piece feminism is a movement and BDS is a tactic. If you dont support BDS, you can choose to not take part in it, but proactively opposing BDS because it is an alienating tactic for a Zionist is misguided.

Shire states that she draws a "hard line" atRasmea Odeh.Her argument about Odehs illegitimacy as a convicted terrorist is highly problematic. It not only overlooks the role of Israels military courts as judge, jury and executioner of the stateless Palestinians tried in them, but also the fact that Israelis in the military and the government themselves engage in acts of terror - and have never been tried. Israel's own founders engaged in acts of Zionist terror against British and Arab targets and then went on to become prime ministers. While I dont think Odeh is the best choice as the Strike's poster woman, calling her out without holding Israelis to the same standard is one-sided.

In the age of Trump, in which the current feminist forces are operating, many liberal American Jews are finding themselves increasingly pushed into a corner, forced to choose between their liberalism and their support for Israel; between the motto never again to Jews and never again to anyone.

Jews, of course, have the right to equality, self-determination and dignity, like all other human beings. No one in the feminist movement not Rasmeah Odeh or Linda Sarsour or anyone else has denied this. But as long as Israel, in its current construction, continues to be a fundamentally unprogressive entity that is incompatible with equality, Zionists in the feminist camp are going to continue to feel rightly uncomfortable.

Mairav Zonszein is an independent journalist and translator. She blogs at+972 Magazine. Follow her on Twitter: @MairavZ

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Linda Sarsour Doesn't Need to Make Zionist Women Feel Comfortable - Haaretz

Sex trafficking and an art exhibition may seem like an incongruous pairing.

In May, though, the Patan Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Nepal, will host The True Stories Project, presented by Art Works for Change, a nonprofit based in Oakland, California, in collaboration with the Siddhartha Foundation, based in Kathmandu. The exhibition aims to address the disturbing and often below-the-radar problem of the trafficking of girls as sex slaves.

This is a human rights issue and a womens issue, said Randy Jayne Rosenberg, executive director and chief curator of Art Works for Change. Its an uncomfortable, powerful art exhibition. And its a way to raise awareness on this serious global problem of abuse and exploitation of children.

Although Rosenbergs group has been around for 10 years, the work it does has probably never been more relevant. In addition to the project on sex trafficking and exploitation of women and girls, her organization works on projects that focus on biodiversity and the importance of nature; shelter in response to climate change; ethics; and the extinction of animal species.

When we started Art Works for Change, there werent a lot of content-driven or thematic shows, Rosenberg said. There was this impression that those types of exhibitions sacrificed the art for the theme, and the art may not be museum-quality.

That has changed significantly. Today, theres a lot of great work with artists addressing critical issues of our time, Rosenberg added. There are social situations in the world that are deeply affecting people. Our goal is to use art that is engaging emotionally and intellectually to inspire viewers to be agents of change.

In recent years, museums have been making a greater effort to have a voice in social activism and respond to pressing problems of the day. The big question is when and how art museums should take a public position and try to effect change, or at least initiate a community discussion on a topic.

Many museum specialists are guarded about their public relationship with contentious social issues and have usually refrained from taking a stand. To do so could close them off to potential audiences who might sense bias, or put their institutions at risk of being identified by potential donors as supporting politically offensive viewpoints.

Still, Jen Mergel, senior curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said: My job as a curator is to make decisions about what to include, or what to show and what not to, and who to represent in our galleries for our public, and I see that as a political decision. The role of the museum is to present art, prompt dialogue.

In February the Museum of Fine Arts began exhibiting a rotation of posters from its collection by the Guerrilla Girls, the feminist activist artists group, whose members have always been anonymous. Collaborating since 1985, the Guerrilla Girls offer commentary on gender and racial discrimination in the art world, but also make observations on topics like homelessness. Their imagery and commentary originally appeared as advertisements, signs, placards and fliers for buses and bulletin boards.

Eight posters from the museums 88-piece portfolio have gone on view as part of the exhibition Political Intent. Mergels favorite is an enlarged print of a dollar bill with a dotted line marking off about one-third. The text below is: Women in America earn only two-thirds of what men do. Women artists earn only one-third of what men artists do.

Mergel said: You cant un-see it. Its not just the condition of women artists, but women across the country. To me, artists like the Guerrilla Girls are putting an idea forward that is timely and urgent, manifestations that really speak to the zeitgeist of the time.

New museum-sponsored activism is showcasing art not just in museum settings, but also on the streets.

The community becomes part of the process, part of the storytelling, said Rosenberg of Art Works for Change in Oakland. When we bring a show to a museum, we look for community-based partners, or ask museums to play that role in the outreach and utilize what activist groups already exist in the community. Were not an activist group. We are an arts group.

In Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation is showcasing how more than 50 international artists engage with communities in Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flanerie, through May 22. The artists works touch on such issues as gentrification, gender politics, globalization, racism and homelessness.

Person of the Crowd also includes a series of performances on the citys streets by artists like Sanford Biggers, an interdisciplinary artist based in Harlem, New York, who works in film, video, sculpture and music, and Tania Bruguera, a Cuban performance artist. Billboards and street poster projects by artists are also part of the exhibition and entertainment.

Man Bartlett, a New York-based multidisciplinary artist, is recording the street performances throughout the run of the exhibition and inviting people to share their opinions of city life via social media, using the hashtag #personofthecrowd.

Bartlett is also working alongside Philadelphia-area teenagers to create videos documenting their experiences, inspired by visits to the citys public spaces. The evolving work is available on the projects website, personofthecrowd.org, and projected inside the Annenberg Court of the Barnes Foundation.

One challenge for museums in calibrating their social activism is the patina of elitism that clings to them.

We, of course, are aware of the perception of institutions like museums as being elite and not for all audiences, Mergel said. I personally believe were already acting on this. The partnerships we reach out to in our community are already bringing a more diverse audience into the galleries.

Mergel described an archival pigment print of a transgender woman, CeCe McDonald, made by Andrea Bowers, an artist based in Los Angeles. In 2012 McDonald was sentenced to 41 months in a mens prison in Minnesota for manslaughter. Called Trans Liberation: Building a Movement, its an arresting photograph, nearly 8 feet high by 5 feet wide, which was acquired by the museum last June.

What we put on view does matter, Mergel said. Bowers uses this image to raise awareness of the social discrimination against transgender women. Amazing conversations between our museum visitors happen just in front of CeCe. If the image can make someone see something more discerningly, and with curiosity, instead of phobia that translates into our social lives. And that makes me feel very hopeful.

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New Message at Some Museums: Don't Just Look. Do. - NRToday.com

It is the stuff of U2 legend. Anxious to reinvent themselves after the 1980s had seen them become the biggest band in the world - and the most po-faced - Bono and friends took one of the last ever flights into Berlin before it was officially reunified to try and hoover up some of the cultural gold dust that has long been associated with Germany's largest city - whether divided, or not.

Bono had quipped from that they would "go away to dream it all up again" from a Point, Dublin stage on the second last night of the 1980s. He was as good as his word. U2 returned with arguably their most critically acclaimed album, Achtung Baby, and the bitterly cold winter they spent in a studio near the collapsing Berlin Wall would play its part on songs that were dark, hopeful, playful and, well, sexy. As a career reinvention, it was pretty special - and it's hardly a surprise that U2 have subsequently regarded Berlin with great fondness.

They're not the only artists who have decamped to Berlin in search of inspiration. David Bowie made the same pilgrimage towards the end of the 1970s and emerged with Low and "Heroes" - fan-favourites that are far removed from his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane personas of earlier that decade. The latter's distinctive cover image was inspired by an expressionist painting Bowie had seen in a left-field art gallery the city, but Berlin was all over the album sonically too - particularly in its experimental, largely instrumental second half

In an astonishingly fertile period of creativity, he also found time to produce two brilliant albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life, for his mate - and Berlin flatmate - Iggy Pop. Having been addled by the effects of cocaine in Los Angeles during the middle years of the 70s, Bowie went to one of the most decadent cities in Europe to get clean.

All those albums - and Achtung Baby too - were largely recorded in Hansa Studios, a fine old building in crumbling West Berlin that had been used as a Nazi ballroom during World War II. History reverberates in this great space as I discovered in 2015 when I went on a guided tour in advance of U2's four-night stand at the city's spanking new Mercedes-Benz Arena.

Thilo Schmied, the founder of Berlin Music Tours, had obsessive detail about the recording of all those storied albums and he spoke with real passion about the old ballroom where U2 had first given life to 'One' and the side room from which Bowie had spied "Heroes" co-producer Tony Visconti meeting a lover next to the Berlin Wall. Visconti was married at the time and the clandestine image burned itself into Bowie's imagination and the rousing title track of "Heroes" was born.

I remember Thilo - a child of the former East Berlin - pointing out this very window to where the Berlin Wall had stood, but it was impossible to imagine it such was the rate of change over the preceding quarter-century. The streets surrounding Hansa were like that of any modern capital, but it had all been so different when Bowie - and Depeche Mode in the 1980s - had first ventured here. Photos from the time show a building seemingly marooned in no-man's land.

Now, there are occasional street markings to denote where the wall had stood for 28 years, but often it's very difficult to tell whether you're in the old West or East.

For much of the 20th century, Berlin was synonymous with edgy art and culture. The artists of the Weimar Republic were a daring lot who took visual art into a bold new place. Germany led the world in architecture and its Bauhaus movement would leave a lasting impression on the built environment of the city - and much further afield.

It was also a capital famed for its cabaret clubs and the risqu, sexually open and gay-friendly culture here in the 1920s and 30s would mark the city out as Europe's most permissive.

The era is captured in vivid detail by the English author Christopher Isherwood, who lived in the city in the 1930s around the time the Nazis were coming to power. His classic book, Goodbye to Berlin, would spawn a hugely successful musical, Cabaret, and a film of the same name. For many, Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles embodied everything that was thrilling and erotic about pre-war Berlin.

The art-hating Nazis - ironic considering Adolf Hitler had been an art student - did all they could to suppress subversive painting, theatre and music. Their systemic vandalism would be felt for decades.

But Germany - and Berlin - began to reassert itself as a cultural force towards the end of the 1960s thanks to a golden wave of young directors. Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders helped change the course of art-house cinema thanks to films that captured life in West Germany and hinted at the complex relations with the Communist East.

One of Wenders' key films, the romantic fantasy, Wings of Desire, would prove to be influential to U2 when making Achtung Baby and they recruited the director to shoot the video for 'Stay (Faraway So Close)', the standout track on follow-up album Zooropa.

German music had its moment in the 1970s. Kraftwerk - from industrial Cologne - did more than anyone to invent electronic music and it can be argued that their influence on the charts today is every bit as significant as the Beatles.

And they weren't alone. Bands such as Can, Cluster, Neu! and Tangerine Dream were at the cerebral end of music in the 1970s and influenced a legion of contemporaries like David Bowie and Brian Eno. The London music press glibly dubbed the scene 'Krautrock', but this was music that broke down boundaries and expanded horizons.

It's difficult to argue that Germany and its capital have had quite as much of an influence on the cultural zeitgeist since the Berlin Wall tumbled as they had before, but there have been some wonderful exceptions. Goodbye Lenin from 2003 explored the curious phenomenon of Ostalgie - former East Germans being nostalgic for the foods, customs and way of life of the old Communist regime - while a much more sobering film, The Lives of Others, offered a chilling portrait of surveillance society in the Stasi-controlled East.

More recently, German TV drama has been in the ascendant. Deutschland 83 was a hit on Channel 4 last year and a new season will arrive by year end, and there's considerable excitement surrounding a new German-language series, Dark, which is soon to air on Netflix. And yet, serious aficionados of German drama will tell you that nothing will beat the scope or ambition of the 1980s and 1990s series, Heimat.

Today, the cost of living may not be quite as affordable as it was even a decade ago, but Berlin remains one of the least expensive capitals in Europe, especially when it comes to rent. It's still a magnet for Europe's bright young things and those hoping to make their mark on the arts.

A new generation of Irish artists and musicians have, at one stage or another, called Berlin home including Mick Flannery, Wallis Bird and Mano Le Tough.

The Irish population in Germany is up 50pc in a decade and Dublin entrepreneur and literature lover Orla Baumgarten is typical of the new breed making their mark in Berlin: she opened her bookshop, Curious Fox, in the once tough, now hip Neukln four years ago, and it's much admired.

Seasoned David Bowie admirers will be familiar with the district. It was the title of one of "Heroes" startling instrumentals. Like so many short-term immigrants - whose number includes U2 - Bowie took from the city, but he gave back too. Deutschland ber alles, indeed.

Indo Review

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Berlin: a soundtrack to history - Irish Independent