On my radar: Audrey Niffenegger’s cultural highlights

Charlotte Salomon made her extraordinary graphic memoir, Life? Or Theatre?, to stave off despair during her exile from her native Berlin to her grandparents’ home in France during the Nazi occupation. [In hundreds of paintings and drawings] she recounts the suicides of family members, the disastrous effect of the Nazis on her life, and the philosophical education she receives from her stepmother’s singing teacher. I have seen this several times, most recently at the Royal Academy. It is now at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, with extra, revelatory pages that have been in her family’s collection.

I’ve always liked jazz, especially early New Orleans and Chicago style jazz, but I never felt knowledgeable about it, not in the deep way I know about rock’n’roll. My collaborator and husband, Eddie Campbell, loves it, knows about it and is always playing it at our house, and so it seemed desirable to improve my sense of jazz history. Ken Burns’s documentary TV series did the trick. It’s not light-hearted: racism, drug abuse and poverty have informed this divine music. Watching the series has intensified my respect for jazz musicians. It’s a place to begin to listen.

I have fallen in love with the House of Illustration, near King’s Cross in London. This beautiful new gallery, founded by Quentin Blake in 2014, is dedicated to illustration and the graphic arts. At the moment they have a quirky exhibit of North Korean graphics – until 13 May. They have a charming bookshop, and they want you to draw. To help, they have loads of fun workshops: Medical Illustration, Creating Graphic Novels, Illustrating the Animal Kingdom. It’s easy to be happy there.

I did not own a TV until two years ago and so I never had a clue about television shows – and I was pretty snobby about that. Now I watch TV and some of it is delightful. Anyway, I am a devoted fan of author Lev Grossman’s beautiful Magicians Trilogy – he gets at the yearning confusion of late adolescence, the need to transcend our human limitations and the certainty that we will fail at this. But, oh, wait: magic is real. The TV show – The Magicians, on Syfy – is fun, occasionally brilliant, and diverges from the books in interesting ways.



Source: theguardian

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