Today is James Baldwin's birthday

He was born in Harlem in 1924, became an accomplished writer in his twenties, moved to France and got involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank, achieved massive success in his thirties with Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room, returned to the United States and became a social and political activist. Aside from novels, Baldwin wrote tons of essays, plays, and poetry during his lifetime. He died from Esophageal cancer in 1987 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and was buried in New York.

To commemorate Baldwin's birthday, here's I Heard It Through the Grapevine, a free-form, feature-length documentary produced in 1982. The film, made by Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, follows the writer as he revisits the settings of civil rights struggles of the 1960s in the Deep South and reexamines the movement's ideals twenty years later.

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Italy's True Movie Poster King

What you see here is the hand-crafted magic of Renato Casaro, the late Italian designer who practically defined an era of cinematic cool. His work wasn't just advertising; it was art. Casaro's journey into becoming one of the most recognizable poster artists wasn't by chance; it was a pure obsession. As a kid, he was fascinated by billboards, trying to mimic the styles of Norman Rockwell and Angelo Cesselon. Think of a teen so determined that he was drawing right onto the walls of a local cinema just to snag a few free tickets. Casaro created posters for a lot of Spaghetti Westerns. His big break came with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. The movie starred Clint Eastwood and was directed by Sergio Leone. The poster didn’t just promote the film; it helped make it a global hit. Naturally, Leone came calling again, commissioning posters for My Name Is Nobody (1973) and the epic crime saga, Once Upon a Time in America (1984). A Casaro poster is easy to spot because of his uniqu...

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I'm currently obsessed with Pon Arsher . Her paintings are like a stylish cage fight between realism and abstraction, and every human figure seems to be nursing a perfectly haunting and beautiful existential hangover. On my computer, it's cool. But I want to see the real deal. The internet is probably the greatest gallery humanity has ever created. But sometimes, a piece of art leaps off the screen and refuses to be contained by your monitor. Anyway, when she was young, the self-taught Moldovan artist found drawing in silence more fulfilling than socializing. But she wasn't avoiding life; she was capturing it. Drawing wasn't an escape from friends, but an intense conversation with the most essential, silent part of her soul. Her art looks like an emotional x-ray, and it lulls me into a dream state. It's also a reminder, for herself and viewers, that our feelings—even the bad ones—are valid. Ms. Arsher proves that art only needs an authentic voice and the courage to ...

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