Patti Smith will be the recipient of the 2020 PEN America Literary Service Award. The musician and poet will be awarded at the organization’s annual gala, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on May 19th. PEN America is an organization that unites literature and …
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Orchestras are indie rock’s new Marshall stacks. That’s fitting on a lot of levels — as a satisfying class-action appropriation of elitist cultural tropes, as a deconstruction of those same tropes, and as an elevation of collectivism over American myths of individualism and exceptionalism that’ve lately been twisted into such …
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Robert Mapplethorpe shot flowers, children, celebs (Warhol, Capote, the young Arnold Schwarzenegger) and himself in high-contrast black-and-white that commanded attention. But what made him infamous and iconic were his portraits of nudes, often reduced to body parts (a hand, a torso, a black penis enveloped in white hands) and often …
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