Spare Change News

Category: Arts & Culture

  • A Review of Herman’s House by Angad Bhalla

    Solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary is among the most desperate and forlorn places on Earth. The prison—better known by its nickname, “Angola”—is the largest maximum-security prison in the country, with 5000 inmates. It is a place largely indistinguishable from the slave plantation it once was—a place where sexual slavery and rape are endemic,…

  • Meeting My Father For the First TIme, Again

    A gentleman and I recently had a brief conversation about an article I had written for Mother’s Day. He congratulated me on the article, and suggested I write one on behalf of Fathers. Upon hearing the mere suggestion of paying homage to fathers, I experienced a barrage of emotions. I felt anger, sorrow, hurt and…

  • Fathering: A Short Story

    When I was asked to write something about my father, I first thought to myself, “That will be a short story.” See, there isn’t much I can tell you about my old man because I never really knew him. I don’t remember him as a child, and I only saw him once or twice when…

  • The Poetry of Martin Espada

    Sheep Haiku Achill Island, Ireland A lone sheep cries out: There are more of us than them! The flock keeps grazing. —– Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 For the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack…

  • Art That Moves

    Human Geographer Fabrizio Eva comments, in the documentary film The Possibility of Hope (companion piece to the theatrical release Children of Men) that “‘one of the primary characteristics of human beings is that they have always moved.’” Homeless artist Darcy DeSouza embodies that human trait in both physicality and imagination. For the past fifty years…

  • Talking About Revolution

    Tufts, President Lawrence S. Bacow presents Tufts graduate, singer songwriter and four time Grammy winner Tracy Chapman, with an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts during the universities 2004 commencement in Medford, MA. Recognizing her for social activism, music and community work. Growing up in a poor, working class family, raised by a single mother in…

  • Orwell's Economy

    The Price of Inequality, by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton & Company). While reading The Price of Inequality, one seems confronted by a society that was merely imaginative in Jack London’s 1908 dystopian novel The Iron Heel. Rampant poverty, political and economic imbalance, entrenched class divisions, and middle class evaporation, all engendered by an oligarchic…

  • In the Grip of the Possible

    At the center of Bread and Puppet Theater’s performance on Cambridge Common on Sunday, September 2, and reaching into all the troupe’s high-spirited paraphernalia (magically painted school bus, raucous parade), are the Possibilitarians (ie. all of us) who make up the performance’s “Complete Everything Everywhere Dance Circus.” The famed political puppet collective, started in 1963…

  • Strike Up the Chorus

    “Who wants to read a poem?” Saul Williams asked the audience. The crowd gathered at the Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., was small, just a couple hundred people, but it appeared to be made up of devout fans. Many people clutched dog-eared copies of Williams’ books of poetry to their chests. The audience froze…

  • Torture Survivors' Dance

    “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or…