Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Riot Material in Bed (tap here)

riot material arts foundation

RCA The Indian-head test pattern

RIOT MATERIAL is on short sabbatical following the once-in-a-lifetime Covid Pause and the havoc it’s wreaked for 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 three cities, with particular emphasis on Los Angeles, our hometown; to seek-out and showcase off-the-grid or aggressively underground sounds by explorative musicians around the globe; bring greater awareness to exciting and often spectacular niche cinema via Cinema Disordinaire while also highlighting sonically/philosophically delighting, infectious, and at times exhilarating new tracks via Riot Sounds.

Take a moment to look back through our archives to see if our magazine is worthy of your support. If you love it, believe in it, see it in line with your intellectual wants, then please contribute by donating whatever you can. If you’re feeling fortunately flush, then a generous donation would be greatly appreciated — our writers will be most grateful, the artists they write about will be ever-so thankful as well as the galleries who represent their distinctive visions and essential expressions, not to mention the filmmakers, musicians, poets and penmen and avant-garde innovators who equally seek audience and affirmation for their work. RIOT MATERIAL takes a unique and elevating approach to each of these men and women, these all-important artists, these spokesmen for an historically disordered time, and we do so both critically and editorially, which gives our take on Art, Identity, and Individuality a truly incomparable slant.

As said, your contribution will be tax-deductible. RIOT MATERIAL ARTS FOUNDATION – The Mother Ship – is a 501c(3) organization which allows State and Federal exemptions for every dollar you donate. To that end, we thank you so much in advance!!!

Meantime, RM will still be publishing (see below for the latest), though for the moment we will be doing so far less frequently, so please look out for occasional new essays and reviews as they go live on the site. Announcements of all new publishings will be made on our Medium and Facebook pages. 

Much love from Editorial —
Be safe! Remain engaged!!
C

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…]

♥

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

thought

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…]

thought

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 — Jim Crow and lynching — as well as American barbarism — slave trade and slave labor — bears witness to the distinctive American assault on black humanity. This vicious ideology and practice of white supremacy has left its indelible mark on all spheres of American life — from the prevailing crimes of Amerindian reservations to the discriminatory realities against Spanish-speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes against Asians. Yet the fundamental litmus test for American democracy — its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture — remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the prob­lem of the color line. [Read More…]

art

Another Week in the Death of America

Samantha Fields, American Dreaming
at LSH CoLab, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The first verse of the Mamas and the Papas seminal 1960’s anthem California Dreamin’ begins with “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” at once establishing an atmosphere devoid of color, hope and youthful abandon, and certainly not a description one would associate with the sunny, carefree lifestyle that has become emblematic of the quintessential California experience. Ultimately the song is a lament, a yearning to return to a brighter, more hopeful landscape, if only in the songwriter’s mind. Samantha Fields solo exhibition, American Dreaming, could be said to expand on this longing, albeit taking a darker more ominous approach. [Read More…]

The Line –>

Reckoning Race in Eudora Welty’s Photographs

by James McWilliams Two portraits; two men. Both are from 1930s Mississippi. The men are situated together, photos 22 and 23, both from Eudora Welty’s only published book of photographs, simply titled Photographs. If you could put a frame around both images it would be the Jim Crow South. … [Read More...]

A Gathering Of Ruins, And Simmering Consciousness, In Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London by Zadie Smith Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission edited by Clara Kim Tate Publishing, 144pp., $24.95 New York Review of Books Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less … [Read More...]

The Line

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…]

Quentin Tarantino Pure Cinema Podcast

Elric, Brian, Phil and Jules are joined remotely by Quentin Tarantino himself for an epic discussion about a great feature on the New Beverly website called “Tarantino’s Reviews” where QT has been writing his own articles on movies and TV episodes. He also offers five of his own picks in response to our “Ripoffs” from way back in 2017.

John Bradford: By Land And By Sea

at Anna Zorina Gallery, NYC (through 25 April — view this exhibition online at annazorinagallery.com)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
— Herman Melville, from Moby Dick

The latest John Bradford exhibit at Zorina Gallery shows works in a style, history painting, that’s been out of favor with the art establishment for many decades. All the paintings’ subjects come from the 19th century or before, and relate to momentous events relating to the USA and the Americas: arrival of the Mayflower, of Columbus, Washington’s revolution, Lincoln’s wars. Bradford’s technique, thick impasto, has also fallen out of favor and is found more often in street market art: think Paris-view at sunset.  What is a blueblood painter, if ever there was one — he is a descendant of William Bradford, the English Puritan separatist who escaped persecution from King James I on the Mayflower and became the longstanding Governor of the Plymouth Colony, known thereafter as the Pilgrim Fathers — doing producing low art? [Read More…]

Moving Room To Room, Tentacle By Tentacle: Michael McCall’s Long Strange Trip

By Peter Frank
Forward to:
Captain Squid & The Tentacle Room:
Adventures in Life, Love & Art
by Michael McCall
Fabrik Press, 260 pp., $35.00

Michael McCall came of age at a time when it was cool to live your art. That time may be coming back (no little thanks to McCall’s example, I’ll wager), but between coming of age and compiling this account, McCall’s lifestyle came to be regarded as more vagabond than renegade, more hippie than hip, more irresponsible than irreverent. Plenty of wannabe art-lifers gave the art-life a bad name. McCall – always an art maker, not just a goof, and always answering to aesthetic and ethical standards – wasn’t one of them, and he was brave enough to stick to his guns, keep on living his life as if it were an artwork, and keep on being committed to that life/art.  [Read More…]