Showing results for "Emily Pennant Rea" in Arts & Entertainment

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

From Georgian London’s gaudy pleasure gardens to the glamor of Studio 54 to the birth of techno in post-industrial Detroit, a brilliantly researched history charting four centuries of nightlife There is a specific energy to it. Cafes and shops close their shutters. Darkness descends. “The...