Things are not what they seem in Richard Shepard’s sharp and sinister thriller The Perfection. Get Out’s Allison Williams stars as Charlotte Willmore, who was a child prodigy on the cello until her path to greatness was thwarted by a family tragedy. Ten years later, Charlotte is finally free. And the first thing she does is reconnect with her former mentor Anton (Steven Weber), and Lizzie, the pretty protégé who took her place (Dear White People’s Logan Browning). Initially, it seems this might be a tale of ruthless rivalry between Lizzie and Charlotte. But that’s just the beginning of this masterful thriller that throbs with suspense and surprises. [Read More…]
art
Running Toward Nothing: A Journey Through The Evocatively Feminine
Closing May 25th at Night Gallery, U.K.-based artist Laura Lancaster’s Running Toward Nothing is absolutely heading toward a highly fluid “something.” Perhaps it is the passage into a void we cannot control or fathom, perhaps it is the way through or into a dream, or just possibly, it is the outcome of memory and a passage through this life. [Read More…]
film
Stirring And Explosive, Wild Rose Has A Softness That Stings
Country music comes alive in the poignant coming-of-age drama Wild Rose. Irish ingénue Jessie Buckley stars as Rose-Lynn Harlan, a Scottish singer with dreams of being the next Nashville star. With an outlaw’s heart and an angel’s voice, Rose-Lynn strides down the streets of Glasgow in white cowboy boots and a matching leather jacket, in search of a good time or some stage time. She’s the kind of rough-and-tumble girl who enjoys a rowdy night out, a wild adventure, or a quick shag in a public park. And while this lifestyle led to jail time, now that’s she’s out, the greater obstacle to her could-be career as a country singer is being a single-mom to her young children, Winona and Lyle. [Read More…]
art
Bereavement Of The Felled: New Works By Trisha Donnelly
at The Shed, NYC (through May 19)
Reviewed by John Haber
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound? At the very least, it can make art. For Trisha Donnelly, it must make a sound as well, for art is always listening, even as so many refuse to hear. Much of the planet may be dying, like her two fallen trees at The Shed, but art can speak to that as well. She has the very first show in the cultural center of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, and it makes quite an impact. It puts to the test a gallery with, as yet, too few visitors, next to a shopping mall serving too little of New York. It looks beyond that very concentration of wealth to a fragile state of nature. It also risks drowning global warming and goodness knows what else in sounds of its own. [Read More…]
thought
Don’t Call Me A Person of Color: I’m Black
A strange thing happens when you say the word “Black” as it pertains to race. People will often curl their lips up, as if you’ve said something distasteful or inappropriate; the color might drain from their faces in an expression akin to dread. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” triggers the knee jerk response of “All Lives Matter.” The FBI identifies those that fight for Black American rights as a terrorist group under the title of “Black Identity Extremists.” And. increasingly, “Black” is used interchangeably with “Person of Color,” POC, which ostensibly is much less racially charged. This is a strange and disturbing phenomenon, since Black is not synonymous with POC: all Black people are persons of color, but all persons of color are not Black. And non-Black persons of color, or NBPOC, still benefit from and can practice anti-Black racism. [Read More…]
That Evening Sun
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
“Live free” read the tattoos on his face. He and his travel companion are down from Spokane Washington and plan to travel to Arizona after spending a few days in Los Angeles. They told me they’ve been on the road for most of the last eight years. We spoke briefly of Kerouac and I told them I hoped they were keeping a journal of their travels. I’d love to read their story one day. [Read More…]
Breadcrumbs For The Disenchanted: Peg Alford Pursell’s A Girl Goes Into The Forest
A Girl Goes Into the Forest
by Peg Alford Pursell
Dzanc, 200pp., $16.95
In the dream I was sitting with my mother in a restaurant lobby, waiting to be seated for dinner. The hostess came over, asked me my name, which I confirmed, then told me to follow her — I had a phone call. At the hostessing station, I took the black phone with the cord and on the other end of the line was my sister’s voice: tremulous, distraught. [Read More…]
Mythological Jazz Asteroids in the Afro Futurist Space Belt
Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery: The Comet is Coming
on Impulse!
Experience by itself, the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl said, is not science. In the hands of London band The Comet is Coming, experience is a strict adherence to improvisation and exploration that filters the scientific process into a musical call and response. It has purified their sound. So perhaps Husserl is only part right. Maybe some experience is scientific. Maybe some music is science. [Read More…]
The Line
Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction: A Cinematic Essay About The Digital Onslaught
Few can deny that we are currently passing through a historical epoch in terms of technological evolution. Like the generation that endured the Industrial Revolution, we are faced with new machines and inventions which promise both a leisurely future but the dismantling of modern industries. The world is changing fast for the characters of Non-Fiction as well, even as they keep the flame burning for the art of print publishing. This is the new and playful film by Olivier Assayas, one of France’s great modern directors, who has spent his last few movies pondering questions of identity and placement. Actresses facing middle age, radicals seeking nihilist satisfaction in the heated 1970s, these have been some of Assayas’s recent profiles. A drama that could also function as a cinematic essay, Non-Fiction profiles a small group of people inter-linked via their social circles in Paris. What binds them together is the world of book publishing, and even as their own lives experience small earthquakes, they find themselves consumed by the debate of whether the printed word will even survive another century. [Read More…]
Radiant Poetic Shadows And The Timeless Framings Of Roy DeCarava
Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through June 30)
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Despite a couple of career retrospectives and a small handful of books, the late photographer Roy DeCarava is one of the most overlooked photographers of his era. His photos are among the few photographic equivalents to sound. Somehow, in spite of this majesty, his obscurity persists. But this spring, across Los Angeles, his work is being well served. DeCarava is represented by 21 photographs in the Broad Museum’s Soul of a Nation show, where the late photographer is one of many voices. While several of his disciples are part of the Annenberg Space for Photography’s Contact High show dedicated to the documentation of hip hop, it is the Underground Museum’s Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, on view until June 30th 2019, where DeCarava gets the best chance to imprint his genius upon the next generation. [Read More…]
In Fabric Is A Decadent Horror About A Dress That Kills
Glamorous. Daring. Sexy. A new dress can feel like a promise to yourself that you’ll become the woman fit to wear it. But in writer/director Peter Strickland’s twisted horror-comedy In Fabric, a dress becomes something sinister. With a knee length skirt with flowing long sleeves, the “Ambassadorial Function Dress” offers elegance with a streak of sex appeal. But danger lurks in the details. A “dagger neckline” and its “artery red” color warn that this dress is a slasher. Seriously, like Michael Myers, Chucky, or Jason Voorhees, the Ambassadorial Function Dress will stalk, torment, and kill any who dare wear it. And while this garment may be battered and brutalized, it will rise again, renewed and ready for more carnage. [Read More…]
Gan Bi’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night Floats Along The Back Rivers Of Memory
It is difficult to describe the experience of watching Long Day’s Journey Into Night without sounding as if you are remembering a dream. The new film by China’s Gan Bi is more about ambiance than plot, more about the hazy feeling of attempting to travel back in time through the eye of mind. It is the very texture of the film that weaves a strange spell. Bi is one of the emerging new voices of Chinese cinema, which is already renowned for visual inventiveness. [Read More…]
The Un-Man Falleth
“The Un-Man Falleth” is from Martin’s forthcoming book,
The Way of the Zen Cowboy: Fireside Stories From A Globetrotting Rhythmatist
Out May 10 on Sunyata Books
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
—Abraham Lincoln
President Lincoln’s quote above is probably more true today than it was when he said it back in the mid-19th century, and this is evidenced in the rampant corruption that has seized Lincoln’s own party today, at every level of government, from the lowest municipal bureaucrat up to the White House. Over the last 50 years, and long before the presidential election of 2016, I’ve watched as the United States devolved into a wave of angry male misogyny, bigotry, and outright racism that has embarrassed our country to a degree that I didn’t think was possible—until it became a reality. [Read More…]