Word: tricksters
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...seems primitive and, in its way, hilarious that the Americans and Chinese should be stuck at the equivalent of Bugs and Daffy's "Duck Season! Wabbit Season!" - a stalemated schoolyard argument. You will recall that in the cartoon, Bugs Bunny, the great American trickster, won that exchange by the simple expedient of reversing the order and insisting that it was, indeed, wabbit season. Which led the witless Duck to insist, in his turn, that it was, damn it, duck season. BLAM...
...party culture into a massive music phenomenon, starting when Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks" went all the way to No. 1 hard on the heels of "Rapper's Delight." Acts such as Eric B. and Rakim took the art of rhyming to a new level of profundity, their trickster lyrical gymnastics cutting up and reordering the world, while others, such as Public Enemy, used the format as a platform for social criticism and a revival of the nationalist politics of Malcolm X. De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest were among the leaders of an imaginative school of abstract poetics...
Dedicated by Ellison "to that Vanished Tribe into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes"--he proudly and defiantly resisted the successive fads to rename that tribe--Juneteenth turns on the complex relationship between an ex-jazzman and trickster turned preacher, Alonzo Hickman, and his white--or nearly white--foster child, Bliss. Hickman reluctantly agrees to midwife and then raise this child of a white woman whose false accusation of rape had caused his brother to be lynched. Bliss, though lovingly nurtured by his stepfather, eventually runs away in search of his lost mother and later transforms himself into Senator...
...cartooning, the works. Invigorating and annoying, Lola could use a dose of Ritalin. Best to take this 76-minute riff on alternate destinies as an antidote to Europe's minimalist art-house cinema and to enjoy Potente's sweaty radiance. With her guile and loping intensity, she's part trickster, part track star...
...younger American painters, and been hailed as the man who set painting in the '80s free--as if it had been languishing in bondage before!--by reviving, once more, the spirit of Dada that breathed through such movements as the Fluxus group in the '60s. He's the arch-trickster, mocking all art styles, sending up the dreaded Canon. (The fact that no work of art by a famous artist these days can safely be considered really and truly outside the Canon seems not to have dawned on those inside the Museum of Modern Art.) His strategy, according to MOMA...