We featured the mud stencils of Milwaukee artist Jesse Graves in the November-December 2009 issue of Utne Reader:

There are no laws against playing in the dirt, the messages are no less powerful than those from a can of paint, and if the neighbors don’t like it—well, they can just apply water. The technique is also non­toxic, an eco-advantage those hauling aerosol cans down alleys or atop buildings can’t claim.

Graves was generous enough to let us share a few photos of his work and the group stenciling he's done on issues of environmental plunder and the criminal justice system. Enjoy!

Americans are peculiar. We like ethnic food, as long as it’s not too ethnic. We like foreign films, as long as they’re not too foreign. But we draw the line more starkly at non-English pop music. We don’t widely embrace music that is not sung in our tongue.

What is it about non-English lyrics that so repels us? Elyse Franko proposes on the travel website World Hum that we’re driven by overblown fears:

We English speakers are terrified of not understanding. We’ve gotten so used to speaking the coveted lingua franca that we’ve neglected to give other languages a chance—even if doing so would somehow benefit us. At this point, neglect has turned to fear: fear of miscommunication; fear of traveling outside the realm of English-language tours; fear of ordering the wrong dish from a non-English menu; and fear of misunderstanding the non-English lyrics to an otherwise excellent song.

Franko notes that many artists seeking a large audience are pressured to learn English, and that 19 of last year’s 25 Eurovision song contest finalists sang in English. But she also holds out hope that the tide is turning. After all, she notes, the Swedish “swing-rap-jazz combo” Movits recently performed on The Colbert Report—in Swedish!

OK, so maybe it wasn’t a cultural watershed, but Franko’s central point is well taken: “In this, the Age of the Internet, new music can travel over continents in seconds—why should we ignore good tunes just because they’re not performed in a language we can understand?”

To do our part, we’ve included two songs with non-English lyrics on our downloadable October Utne Reader music sampler: “Culpa de la Luna” by Rupa and the April Fishes, which is in Spanish, and “Surprise Hotel” by Fool’s Gold, which takes the multicultural prize: It’s African-style music played by non-African Los Angelenos and sung in Hebrew by the Israeli-born son of parents from Iraq and Russia. Touché!

Source: World Hum

Image by pocuswhiteface, licensed under Creative Commons.

The legendary Nigerian musician and dissident Fela made big, powerful music that celebrated a reborn Africanism and made funky fun of colonial powers. But he also had plenty of rough edges, and they are on display right away—along with his caustic, critical sense of humor—in the 1982 authorized biography Fela: This Bitch of a Life by Carlos Moore, which has been out of print but has been newly republished by Lawrence Hill Books. Here is how it starts:

After three years of waiting, my mother and father really wanted a baby. But it wasn’t me they wanted. No, man! No! They wanted any fucking baby.

You know, the meek, quiet type. Well-mannered. Yes-Sir this. Yes-Sir that. They didn’t want a motherfucker like me, man! Well, here I am now. I came. In spite of them. . . .

When I was born my father wanted to imitate his own father. They were both Protestant reverends. So to make some white man happy, my father asked this German missionary to . . . name me. Can you imagine that, man? A white man naming an African child! . . .

You know what that motherfucker named me? Hildegart! Yes, man. Hildegart! Oooooooooh, man! That’s how much I wasn’t wanted. Me, who was supposed to come and talk about Blackism and Africanism, the plight of my people. Me, who was supposed to try and do something to change that. Oh, man. I felt that name like a wound.

Fela’s sense of destiny, along with his arrogance and aggrieved psyche, continues to drive the narrative throughout This Bitch of a Life. It’s a riveting read as Fela describes the police-state brutality that only solidified his political opposition and drove him to ever-more intense personal and political extremes—and eventually wore him down.

One disturbing undercurrent is Fela’s over-the-top sexism and patriarchy. Sam Baldwin at Mother Jones notes that “Sexism, sadly, is what comes through most strongly” in the book, adding, “Well, sexism and police brutality.”

A new epilogue by Moore adds valuable perspective on Fela’s legacy, which has taken on Marley-like proportions and spawned a string of reissues such as the impending 45-album onslaught from Knitting Factory Records, tributes such as the multimedia Fela Project, and even a Bill T. Jones-directed Broadway musical, which opens November 23. As Fela’s legend grows ever larger, This Bitch of a Life reminds us that the man behind the music was full of mystery, paradox, and pain.

Sources: Fela: This Bitch of a Life, Fela Project, Mother Jones, World Music Central, Playbill

Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen are not given to extensive introspection. Ask why they created The Dude character in The Big Lebowski, and they’ll reveal that it simply amused them to envision a detective whose “mind is so befogged by dope” that he can’t put basic clues together. Ask why they set Blood Simple in West Texas, and they’ll explain that they knew people in the area who could help them make the film. Ask why the main character in Miller’s Crossing listens to a phonograph recording of “Danny Boy,” which then becomes the soundtrack for a brutal shootout, and they’ll just say, “Well, he’s Irish.”

Given this lack of self-analysis, it’s easy to understand why there were few instances of deep, sustained insight in the Coens’ two-and-a-half-hour conversation with journalist Elvis Mitchell before an audience at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where their work is being feted in a retrospective. Anyone expecting pearls of wisdom came away with pebbles of knowledge—but fascinating pebbles nonetheless, especially for fans of the Coens’ work. Here are a few of them:

Joel on their artistic inspirations: “Many people think we’re always referencing movies, but it’s the books those movies are based on that are more influential to us.”

Joel on the tortuous writing process behind O Brother Where Art Thou: “Sometimes you just figure out where to go . . . It took us a while to figure out we were writing The Odyssey.”

Ethan on their films’ tendency to have a strong regional flavor: “It’s hard to develop a story without seeing where it starts.”

Ethan on his son’s reaction to his films: “He says, ‘Is this going to be another one of your depressing movies where everyone dies at the end?’ ”

Joel on moviemaking: “One of the pleasures of movies is creating a world . . . it gives you a license to do certain things.” And: “Every movie ever made is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz.”

Ethan on “motormouth” characters who won’t shut up: “Whenever we write for George Clooney, he’s that guy.” Joel says that after wrapping up shooting on Burn After Reading, Clooney turned to them and said, “All right, boys, I’ve played my last idiot.”

Joel on the inspiration behind A Serious Man, which is set in a Midwestern Jewish community: “A lot of it was thinking about and reading Isaac Bashevis Singer stories.”

Joel on the operatic feel of some of their musical scenes: “It’s a direction we sometimes go even with subjects that don’t seem to call for that kind of treatment.”

Ethan on why there’s no soundtrack in No Country for Old Men: “It suffered with whatever [music] we put against it.”

Ethan on their films’ treatment of race and other sensitive topics: “We don’t give a shit about people’s sensitivities.”

Joel on movies with a message: “It wouldn’t be interesting us to make a movie to make a specific social comment.”

Joel on their early filmmaking attempts, which comprised single takes shot in linear order on a cheap movie camera: “The big advantage of that is that when you get it back from the drugstore, the movie is finished.”

Image by Wilson Webb, courtesy of Walker Art Center.