Homegrown Democrat By Garrison Keillor Viking Books, 237 pp., $19.95 First, I must admit: I am not a big fan of Garrison Keillor’s NPR variety show, A Prairie Home Companion. I can see that it’s funny to some people–say, grandparents who miss the good ol’ days, or farmers from Minnesota, or grandparents who want to […]
Alex Leviton
Posted inArt
Any human to another
Swarms of Brazilian men raise rusted scythes and fists in the air. It’s the takeover of the Cuiab plantation in rural Brazil in 1996, which helped bring about worker-owned cooperatives. Near this image of celebration is the bloodied face of a farmworker as he rests in a coffin, buried along with 18 others murdered in […]
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The Indy Bookshelf
Third Eye Open: Unmasking Your True Awareness By Susan Reintjes Third Eye Publishing, 202 pp., $16.95 “Since I had been exploring spiritual practices, I decided to ask for a past life to help me heal my eating issues. At the time, I was reading Shirley MacLaine’s book Dancing in the Light … ” (From Third […]
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In burlesque
Who knew burlesque was having a twenty-first century revival? Check out why this weekend as The Rebelles, 15 sexy women, striptease their way through popular culture, society, and politics, in g-strings and fishnets. Ringleader Frau Lippenstift is the residing German dominatrix in charge of this underground rebel troupe in search of “The G.” The Asheville […]
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Vehicular Progression
When I first moved from San Francisco to Durham last August, I kept seeing a pickup truck with some sort of sculpture on its roof. For the first few sightings I thought the pickup to be what I knew in San Francisco as an “art car.” The third time I got a closer look. This […]
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Afghanistan in Black and White
In 1998, I hitched a ride with two American grad students through Bosnia. I had been traveling through Roman ruins in the relatively intact countryside of Croatia, before I took my most memorable detour. In a rented eggplant-colored Daewoo Tico, my traveling companions and I traversed villages that were now piles of rubble instead of […]