Darryl Pinckney

Darryl Pinckney (born 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist.

Early life

Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City.

Career

Pinckney became a writer. Some of his first professional works were theatre texts, plays developed in collaboration with director Robert Wilson. These included the produced works of The Forest (1988) and Orlando (1989).

His first novel is High Cotton (1992), a semi-autobiographical novel about "growing up black and bourgeois" in 1960s America. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Granta, Slate, and The Nation. He frequently explores issues of racial and sexual identities, as expressed in literature.

He returned to theatre with Time Rocker (1995).

In the 21st century, Pinckney has published two collections of essays on African-American literature. He has expressed his admiration for the writing of the long-running American CBS soap opera, As the World Turns.

Turn on the Bright Lights

Turn On the Bright Lights is the debut studio album by the American rock band Interpol, released in August 2002. The album was recorded in November 2001 at Tarquin Studios in Connecticut, and was co-produced, mixed and engineered by Peter Katis and Gareth Jones. It was released on August 19, 2002 in the United Kingdom and August 20 in the United States, through independent record label Matador Records. Upon release, the record peaked at number 101 on the UK Albums Chart. It reached number 158 on the Billboard 200 in the United States, as well as spending 73 weeks in the Billboard Independent Albums, peaking at number five.

"PDA", "NYC", "Obstacle 1" and "Say Hello to the Angels" were the singles from Turn On the Bright Lights, and a video was shot for each with the exception of "Say Hello to the Angels".

The album was certified Gold by the RIAA on August 29, 2011 for shipments of 500,000 copies.

A remastered version of the album was released in 2012 to commemorate its tenth anniversary. It featured additional material including demo recordings of several tracks, the bonus songs previously available on international releases and a DVD of live performances and music videos.

The New School

The New School is a university in New York City, United States, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York educators, and for most of its history, the university was known as The New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University. The university and each of its colleges were renamed in 2005.

The university became renowned for its teaching and its open intellectual environment, especially after it set up the University in Exile in 1933 as a graduate division to serve as an academic haven for scholars escaping from Nazi Germany and other anti-intellectual regimes in Europe. It has launched or housed a range of institutions such as the international think tank World Policy Institute, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the India China Institute, the Observatory on Latin America, and the Center for New York City Affairs. Parsons The New School for Design is the university's highly competitive art school.

Cornel West

Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, academic, social activist, author, public intellectual, and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The son of a Baptist minister, West received his undergraduate education from Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1973, and received a Ph.D from Princeton University in 1980, becoming the first African American to graduate from Princeton with a Ph.D in philosophy. He taught at Harvard in 2001 before leaving the school after a highly publicized dispute with then-president Lawrence Summers. He was Professor of African American Studies at Princeton before leaving the school in 2011 to become Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He has also spent time teaching at the University of Paris.

The bulk of West's work focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism. Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters (2004).

The Black

The Black is a rock band from Austin, Texas that formed in 2002 when singer/songwriter David Longoria began collaborating with drummer Andy Morales. The two were later joined by renowned guitarist Alan Schaefer (son of famous guitar maker Ed Schaefer) and Nick Moulos of the Austin band The Crackpipes.

History

The group began playing regularly at Emo's and house parties until Schaefer moved to France to teach English in 2004. Longoria joined major label act ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead during the band's hiatus, his first performance with them on the Late Show with David Letterman in January 2005. Schaefer joined the rest of the band to support Trail of Dead on their European Worlds Apart tour. During the tour Trail of Dead was the band's backing band for a handful of shows.

Their full-length album Tanglewood was recorded in 2004 and released the spring of 2005 on their own record label K Woo.

The band's next release, titled Donna, was released in the summer of 2007.