EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Lonnie Holley’s life began at an impossible place: 1950, seventh among his mother’s 27 children, in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Ala., the air thick with violent racism toward him and everyone he loved. Things got even worse as he grew up. At four years old, he said, he was traded for a bottle of whiskey by a nurse who had stolen him away from his mother. Later, as the story goes, he was in a coma for several months and pronounced brain-dead after being hit by a car that dragged him along several blocks. Then he spent time in the infamous Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children until his paternal grandmother — he refers to her simply as “Momo” — was able to take him away at the age of 14. He forged his way out of the miry roads of his origins, becoming a musician and filmmaker, and teaching himself to make visual art. Since then, he has come far, far enough to have just completed a residency as an artist at the Elaine de Kooning House in this celebrity-filled … [Read more...] about Lonnie Holley’s Life of Perseverance, and Art of Transformation
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Scrap-Iron Elegy
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For a long time, Joe Minter managed to share a yard with his wife, Hilda, their two sons and 100,000 of their neighbors. His scruffy three-bedroom house filled up most of a small city lot, just up the hill from Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. But somehow he made it work. When these souls began to cry out for their own lawn ornaments, however, he realized he would have to find more room. The sloping land to the south and west of Mr. Minter’s dooryard belonged to the two historically black graveyards called Grace Hill and Shadow Lawn. “We are in the presence of about 100,000 African ancestors,” Mr. Minter will tell visitors who drop by on a Sunday morning. These are the emancipated slaves and farmers and steelworkers who made Birmingham: the muscle that built the “Magic City.” The dead weren’t going anywhere, but the rest of the neighborhood was thinning out, Mrs. Minter said. Some homeowners died off; others drove north and never came back. So the Minters began … [Read more...] about Scrap-Iron Elegy
Lonnie Holley, the Insider’s Outsider
One night in October, just a couple blocks from Harvard Square, a young crowd gathered at a music space called the Sinclair to catch a performance by Bill Callahan, the meticulous indie-rock lyricist who has been playing to bookish collegiate types since the early ‘90s. Callahan’s opening act, Lonnie Holley, had been playing to similar audiences for two years. A number of details about Holley made this fact surprising: He was decades older than just about everyone in the club and one of the few African-Americans. He says he grew up the seventh of 27 children in Jim Crow-era Alabama, where his schooling stopped around seventh grade. In his own, possibly unreliable telling, he says the woman who informally adopted him as an infant eventually traded him to another family for a pint of whiskey when he was 4. Holley also says he dug graves, picked trash at a drive-in, drank too much gin, was run over by a car and pronounced brain-dead, picked cotton, became a father at 15 (Holley now has 15 … [Read more...] about Lonnie Holley, the Insider’s Outsider
Russia and Ukraine again trade blame for shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
At least a dozen shells exploded at a large nuclear plant in southern Ukraine on Sunday, Ukrainian and Russian authorities said, damaging equipment in attacks that the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency called “extremely disturbing.” Russian and Ukrainian nuclear energy authorities each blamed the other side’s forces for the strikes, the latest to hit the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is the largest in Europe. The attacks have raised fears of a serious nuclear accident at the plant, which is occupied by Russian forces, although so far there have been no reports of any leak of radiation. “Explosions occurred at the site of this major nuclear power plant, which is completely unacceptable,” the director general of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said in a statement . “Whoever is behind this, it must stop immediately.” Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear company, said on Sunday that the shelling continued “all morning” and damaged … [Read more...] about Russia and Ukraine again trade blame for shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence
The drab free port zone near the Geneva city center, a compound of blocky gray and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence, looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than a million of some of the most exquisite artworks ever made. Treasures from the glory days of ancient Rome. Museum-quality paintings by old masters. An estimated 1,000 works by Picasso. As the price of art has skyrocketed , perhaps nothing illustrates the art-as-bullion approach to contemporary collecting habits more than the proliferation of warehouses like this one, where masterpieces are increasingly being tucked away by owners more interested in seeing them appreciate than hanging on walls. With their controlled climates, confidential record keeping and enormous potential for tax savings, free ports have become the parking lot of choice for high-net-worth buyers … [Read more...] about One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence
Welcome to Immortality. Your Body Can’t Come With You.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF LIVING FOREVER , by Jaroslav Kalfar Jaroslav Kalfar’s first novel, “ Spaceman of Bohemia ” (2017), was about a vaguely bewildered Czech professor of astrophysics who blasts into space on an urgent mission. Once up there, his wife back on Earth leaves him and (worse?) a giant, hairy spider latches onto his spaceship. The spider, unlike his wife, can read his mind. The first half of “Spaceman of Bohemia,” which was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction and is being made into a film with Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan, is inventive and charming: It makes you smile. The book reminded me of Victor Pelevin’s short, absurdist and moving Russian space novel, “ Omon Ra ” (1998). Pelevin’s book is about a soul sitting in a tin can, and it is ripe for rediscovery. In the second half of “Spaceman in Bohemia,” the spider probes into deeper matters, such as the professor’s history and the Czech Republic’s, and the novel slowly grows leaden. The … [Read more...] about Welcome to Immortality. Your Body Can’t Come With You.