We speak with actress Susan Pourfar of Meet the Cartozians, currently playing at New York City’s Second Stage Theater until December 14.
Continue reading “Susan Pourfar on the Cultural Resonance ‘Meet the Cartozians’”
Raffi Barsoumian, of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow fame as Bishop, among other roles, steps into his Armenian heritage in playwright Talenene Monahon’s magnificent play, Meet the Cartozians, currently playing at New York City’s Second Stage Theater until December 14.
Continue reading “Raffi Barsoumian on Embodying the Armenian American Struggle in ‘Meet the Cartozians’”
In the 1925 Oregon District Court case, United States v. Cartozian, Tatos Cartozian and his family argued that they, and by extension all Armenians in America, should be considered “white,” driven by the purpose to gain citizenship, per the Founding Fathers’ conception of only white men being full citizens with rights.
Continue reading “‘Meet the Cartozians’ is an Incisive Love Letter to the Armenian American Experience”
On this month’s Southern Fried Asian, Keith sits down with The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino about her new book, Trick Mirror and life on the internet in the 21st century.
Earlier I wrote about the endless narrative possibilities available in the superhero comics genre. Of course, comics are not the only medium to enjoy the fractal narrative. Philip Marlowe, the Continental Op, and Sherlock Holmes are ageless detectives forever solving crimes in short stories and novels. If Jet Li had so desired it, Tsui Hark would probably have made fifty more Wong Fei-Hong movies. And the Brits have the idea down with James Bond and Doctor Who.
But while the fractals can expand forever, artists given to make their own new stories and interpretations can sometimes make changes that are so drastic that they change the nature of the character the audience has come to know. Artists should of course be able to bend and experiment with characters to find new avenues, but there must be limits, no? Because the danger in the course of bending a character is the potential of breaking it.
When I was a teenager, I liked to skip church.
My parents attended different Baptist churches in my hometown, vibrant, bright places of worship where suburban Blacks developed a respectful, life-affirming, joyous relationship with a living God. Each Sunday meant uptempo gospel music, dedicated Bible study, and hour-long sermons on the spiritual uplift offered through Christian precepts. This was the Black church: fine clothing, expensive hats, smiling children, gaunt deacons, relaxed tresses, choir robes, public praise, Negro spirituals, religious supplication, spiritual uplift. For my neighbors, for my mother, church was the emotional recharge, the soul cleansing needed before Monday morning’s journey into corporate White villainy. I don’t pretend the same of my father; I always found his belief an extension of his duty to family and country. Still personal, but reserved, stately, imperial.
Continue reading “The Sisko, Part One: Our Living Black Manhood”