Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Riot Material in Bed (tap here)

riot material arts foundation

RCA The Indian-head test pattern

RIOT MATERIAL is cruising in low gear through this long stretch of Covid shutdowns and the calamitous effects on each of us in all areas of incoming cash. You may or may not be aware that RIOT MATERIAL does not accept advertising, nor will we ever. Advertising is antithetical to our mission, to our singular and interpretably radical expression. We are strictly a non-commercial operation relying solely on self-funding and the tax-deductible contributions from our readers, as well as organizations sympathetic to the cause. What is that cause? To critically, articulately and insightfully cover the diverse range of Art throughout Los Angeles, New York City and London; to identify, bring to the fore and support the local jazz scenes in all … [read more]

books

Losing the Writer in the Personality: A Review of Sontag: Her Life and Work

Reviewed by Michael Gorra

Sontag: Her Life and Work
by Benjamin Moser
Ecco, 816 pp., $39.99
New York Review of Books

Susan Sontag began to read philosophy and criticism as a teenager at North Hollywood High, when she still signed her editorials in the school newspaper as “Sue.” She read Kant and La Rochefoucauld, Oswald Spengler and Rudolf Steiner. She read Kenneth Burke, who would become her teacher at the University of Chicago, and of course many novels, Thomas Mann above all; an entry in her diary recalls getting caught stealing a copy of Doctor Faustus at a Los Angeles bookshop. One day at a newsstand she picked up Partisan Review and began to tremble as she read Lionel Trilling’s “Art and Fortune,” his 1948 attempt to determine if the novel remained a living form. That set her future. That was when she began to dream of New York, and even of writing for that very journal. And Trilling, a critic forever “talking about the things that mattered,” became a model for her own work.1 [Read More…]

books

Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People

Reviewed by Patrick Lohier

Heads of the Colored People
by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99
Harvard Review

In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” The heart of this collection of twelve stories, the thing that Thompson-Spires communicates with great verve, humor, and empathy, is the answer to that question—a booming “Yes!”—especially as experienced by Black Americans. [Read More…]

♥

Check out the Riot Material Gallery on Instagram. Cappuccinos on the house.

from the shelf

Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita
Translated by Eknath Easwaran
Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00

Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked the man next to me if something had happened. “Kurukshetra!” he replied. “The next stop is Kurukshetra!”

I could understand the excitement. Kurukshetra, “the field of the Kurus,” is the setting for the climactic battle of the Mahabharata, the vastest epic in any world literature, on which virtually every Hindu child in India is raised. Its characters, removed in time by some three thousand years, are as familiar to us as our relatives. The temper of the story is utterly contemporary; I can imagine it unfolding in the nuclear age as easily as in the dawn of Indian history.

The Mahabharata is literature at its greatest – in fact, it has been called a literature in itself, comparable in its breadth and depth and characterization to the whole of Greek literature or Shakespeare. But what makes it unique is that embedded in this literary masterpiece is one of the finest mystical documents the world has seen: the Bhagavad Gita. [Read More…]

books | the new word

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor

Brown: Poems
by Kevin Young
Knopf, 176pp., $19.29
Harvard Review

In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” shadowed recollections of boyhood, and culminating with “Field Recordings,” somber reflections on the recurring traumas of African American social history. In its progression toward a more experienced vision, this brilliant and moving collection is structured as a coming-of-age chronicle. Young’s poetry on social issues tempers a tragic sense of outrage with a blues-based ethos which, as Young points out in a recent review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, is “embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston … [and] sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as ‘an act of resistance.’” In these poems, the expression of “hard-earned joy” in the face of unspeakable injustice is an ennobling challenge. [Read More…]

books | the new word

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Reviewed by Flora Field

Dispatch
by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Persea, 80pp., $12.69
Columbia Journal

In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities? [Read More…]

The Line –>

Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

by Max King Cap "My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that's why darkies were born." -- Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933 He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below the knee. Young and fit but unidentifiable, their fingertips rasped smooth. When first put on display, tens of thousands saw this pair of dismembered bodies and admiringly walked right by them. … [Read More...]

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters Race Matters by Cornel West Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60 Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves -- psychic violence -- reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion — physical violence -- for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years. The unique combination of American terrorism … [Read More...]

The Line

Corporate Fascism And The Aesthetics of Politics

by Johanna Drucker

Corporate fascism. We know the term. Now we will see the full ugly face of its wrath in the vengeful fury of Trump. Trump, like all opportunistic social phenomena, is an expression of a  trending wave of collective sentiment and will. He is neither sole cause (autonomous agent) nor simple effect (isolated outcome) of a deliberate plan of action on his own part. But the specifics of his own psychopathology optimize his virulent capacity for destructive impact. Watching and listening to the monster speak in the state of His Union address would be sufficient, even without other mountains of evidence, to feel the grotesque distortions of the personality in all of its many disorders. Now his rabid vengeance is unleashed and unrestrained. [Read More…]

The Unbound Promise Of The Full Five-Hour Masterwork Until The End Of The World

by Henry Cherry

Until the End of the World is a film, like the best of them, that stands outside of genre. Part sci-fi epoch, part love story, part road movie, it begins and ends with an image of the Earth’s curvature. Made by director Wim Wenders, it is the culmination of his most successful period as a filmmaker, a truth made all the more striking in that upon its initial release, Until the End of the World was a failure.
[Read More…]

The Exploratory Instincts Of Shabaka And The Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here By History

on Impulse! Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Shabaka Hutchings, the London based musician behind The Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet, had just  released a second recording with his South African based project, Shabaka & the Ancestors when Covid-19 canceled the promotional tour along with everything else in the world. Hutchings spoke with NPR about the illness, its impact on touring musicians and the financial hit the quarantine has put on those musicians. “Literally, all my gigs in the next two months have been canceled. And everyone I know is in the same boat.” Questions surround the entire world as markets crash, people lose jobs across every sector, and the illness continues to mount. Hutchings isn’t a doomsayer. “We have to make the best of the situation, or the situation will just be tragic. And all situations have the potential to be tragic, or the potential to be tragic and transformative.” [Read More…]

The Painter and The Thief Offers The Best Kind Of True-Crime Bait-And-Switch

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Is there a word for cinema that lures you in with a dark promise, then delivers something profound, surprising, and humane instead? When I first saw the trailer for The Painter and The Thief, I thought I had its number, having seen myriad of true-crime docs. The tantalizing trailer teased a tale of two sides: the painter and the thief. I assumed theirs would be a story of victim and criminal, hero and villain, saint and sinner. However, what documentarian Benjamin Ree offers is far more compelling and so exhilarating that made me relish being wrong. [Read More…]