Quickie links

The first Broadway revival of an August Wilson play since his 2005 death has a white director. Wilson himself insisted that only a Black director could helm his plays, and now many Black directors and other theater artists are outraged at Lincoln Center Theater's selection of Bartlett Sher for this new production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone. What I find interesting in the New York Times story is how every white person who's involved in this claims like um total sympathy for and understanding of how the Black directors feel, and like um total sadness that African Americans don't get more jobs, and like um totally would be for African Americans directing Shakespeare and whoever. Yet there Sher stays in the director's seat. Hypocrisy.

Today is the grand opening ceremony for Fort Lauderdale's Stonewall Library and Archives, "a collection of gay-themed materials that was the subject of political controversy [that is, an anti-gay mobilization] two years ago," according to a report at the Gay Books Blog.

Film director Ken Loach, among whose many wonderful movies the most recent one I've seen is The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a stunningly powerful story of the early-20th-century Irish republican struggle, is in my opinion exactly right:

I think in these dark times it's very important that we have parties of the left that stand on the principled opposition to capitalism, that explain why what is happening to our economies, what is happening internationally, comes from the capitalist system. It isn't something independent, it isn't an act of god, it comes from the economic system. The oppression of the Palestinians arises from economics because the U.S. needs a strategic base in the Middle East, i.e., Israel. Therefore the oppression of the Palestinians and everything flows from that.

More here.

Tayari Jones calls them the Amazing Eight. She's posted pix of and congratulations to eight authors of upcoming first books. This is a nice boost of hope for the rest of us, and I'm looking forward to the details.