Choosing music outside of the constraints of marketing and modishness is a difficult practice that for some is an absolute chore. In this technocratic age of curated playlists, there is less exploration among individuals. While online encyclopedias continue to define and annotate the music of the past along with current releases, it is sometimes easier to plug into the mindless algorithmic bliss provided by streaming services. That is NOT wrong. Everybody wants some simplification in these complicated times. [Read More…]
twenty que
Twenty Que With J. Matthew Thomas
The appearance of J. Matthew Thomas on our Earth is a rare and fortuitous event, akin to a special comet or eclipse that occurs once every 500 hundred years or so. He is the DaVinci of our day-and-age, a true Visionary bringing together community, education, environment and art with international events such as the PASEO, programs such as Studio TAOS and Pecha Kucha nights. His tenure at the Harwood Museum in Taos has seen him at the curatorial Vanguard in featuring previously unknown or undervalued works by Women, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and other underrepresented artists. [Read More…]
books
Hazards Of Alienation In The Fool (and Other Moral Tales)
The Fool (and Other Moral Tales)
by Anne Serre
Translated by Mark Hutchinson
New Directions, 228pp., $13.97
Among the linty cling of rumors and backwashed gossip spread around the barrooms and laundromats of the universe, circulates this mortuary nugget: Hey, did you know that Ego, when it dies, would love nothing more than to attend its own funeral? Ego, in brazenly counterpointing Woody Allen’s proclamation — “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens” — would happily play the role of phantom witness while enjoying the privileged position of being able to float above its own death. It could view itself through the ceremony of mirrored eyes, and gauge its impact upon the audience gathered in its name. Ego, or the I-self, aspires to dream itself into a permanent narrative, to secure tenancy in a time-loop — it longs to know its movements are in accord with something lasting. This fretful existential dilemma, as it relates to writing, to functioning as a writer, and to the amorphic realm of stories and narrative, finds itself swaddled in the gallows’ silk of Love and Death, in Anne Serre’s new book, The Fool (and Other Moral Tales). [Read More…]
art
Memory Palaces & The Hidden Art: Works And Studies Within The Collection Of Audrey B. Heckler
an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC, January 26, 2020
by Valérie Rousseau with Jane Kallir, Anne-Imelda Radice, and others
American Folk Art Museum/Skira Rizzoli, 272 pages, $50.00
Review courtesty of The New York Review of Books
film
Into the Abyss With Jonathan Glazer’s Feral Short: The Fall
Jonathan Glazer emerges every so often with work that above all is constructed by a powerful aesthetic. More than narratives, what Glazer crafts are images combined with soundscapes which immerse the viewer in moments of dread, hallucination and discovery. Moments which could have the feel of a common day action suddenly take on a dreamlike ambiance. In Glazer’s underrated 2004 film, Birth, Nicole Kidman plays an upper class New Yorker confronted with the possibility that a young boy is her reincarnated husband. His 2013 Under the Skin finds a silent woman played by Scarlett Johansson, an extraterrestrial in human form, drives through grey streets seeking male prospects for the purpose of consuming their physical essence for an unclear plan. In both films familiar settings, whether upscale dinner parties or gritty alleyways, are touched by extreme possibilities. But how does the artist respond to the world when it actually does become extreme? [Read More…]
Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again
at The Broad, Los Angeles (through February 16) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted." --Edward Said "To stay alive you must slay silence" --Simin Behbahani Shirin Neshat’s dense and nearly overwhelming exhibition I Will Greet The Sun Again interrogates the very nature of reality, myth, perception and memory with her piercing portraits of women whose face, hands and feet … [Read More...]
A Portrait Of Bolivian Heartbreak
By Alci Rengifo An Associated Press photo by Natasha Pisarenko shows an indigenous Bolivian woman standing amid clouds of tear gas, holding the national flag and at its tip, the Wiphala flag of the nation’s indigenous peoples. Her society is again a victim of history. Its dreams vanished in acrid smoke. The photo’s aesthetic is both human and brimming with intensity. … [Read More...]
The Line
Errol Morris On Sitting Down With Alt-Right Nationalist Steve Bannon In American Dharma
Errol Morris, one of the great documentary filmmakers, has sat down with men from the halls of power for years. In his new film, American Dharma, Morris faces Steve Bannon, one of the darker lingering figures of our very recent collective history. If some of the world’s major publications were a bit more astute they would have long ago tagged Bannon as the person of the year, if not the decade. An argument can be made that Bannon is the most dangerous man in the world. Known primarily as the odd right-wing firebrand who helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and before that as the head of the infamous website Breitbart News, Bannon’s shadow casts over every major gain by an emerging, new proto-fascism. In Brazil he consulted the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, in Europe he rubs shoulders with Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, power players united in their paranoid policies aimed at immigrants and leftists. What sets Bannon apart from the stereotypical Trump aficionado, if not Trump himself, is that he is an actual ideologue, a reactionary internationalist designed for a postmodern world. [Read More…]
Cross Colours: Black Fashion In The 20th Century
at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through March 1, 2020)
Reviewed by Seren Sensei
Everything old is new again. This motto has held steady for years in the world of fashion, with it’s here-today-gone-tomorrow trends, and nowhere has it rung more true than in the waves of 1990’s urban culture that are currently enjoying a huge resurgence on runways. As numerous high fashion and luxury brands clamor into the billion dollar market for streetwear, Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century, showing at the California African American Museum (CAAM), is a fresh and dynamic exhibit examining the history of the recently rebooted Cross Colours: a Black-owned brand that was one of the first to cater exclusively to a young, Black, and ‘urban,’ i.e. inner-city, customer who predominantly wore streetwear. A testament to its culture-shifting perspective, the retrospective opens with the story of how the line came to be, and then moves through its brand history and significance in time as viewers explore the gallery. [Read More…]
Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels
at National Portrait Gallery, London, through 5 January 2020
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
In her new solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, New York artist Elizabeth Peyton offers a procession of glistening vignettes, portraits of famous and not-so-famous faces, whose cool freshness leaves the visitor with an excited, if slightly outmoded sense of pursuit. Many of her male subjects carry a melancholy, morning-after expression that signals an unabashed adoption of the female gaze. Peyton has painted Kurt Cobain and David Bowie, David Hockney and scenes from the Twilight films, as well as personal friends and lovers. Her eye tends towards the sheen of beauty, where cheekbones are elevated and noses are streamlined. [Read More…]
David S. Ware New Quartet’s Théâtre Garonne, 2008
Out November 15 on Aum Fidelity
Reviewed by John Payne
When David S. Ware passed away in October of 2012, the world lost a sound it’s never getting back again. That sound was revolutionary, it was a tough sound, a punk-jazz sound that asks a lot of questions and can’t wait around for answers. Ware’s sax tone was a raspy, ragged, haaard-blowing, Ayler-ish thing that frequently produced a kind of fear – fear that the man was gonna explode, he’s blowing so hard. That concern is palpable on this live concert recording, Théâtre Garonne, 2008, the latest issue from the David S. Ware Archive Series on the ever-righteous Aum Fidelity label. The set showcases the fact that Ware had already been suffering the strains of the illness that eventually killed him. [Read More…]
Joker Resurrectus: Pop Iconography Fills The Nihilist Void
As these words are written the streets of Santiago, Chile and Beirut, Lebanon are ablaze with the fury of thousands of voices raging against an irrational economic system. It is a world of tremors at the moment, with riots serving as a conduit for the general mood of vast communities. Significant is the fact that we are also living through a moment devoid of political vision or revolutionary alternatives. The old icons have receded in the public consciousness. Who are the thinkers of our time brushing away the old world? The cost of living hurtles upwards and an economically stable life becomes elusive for the young. Who speaks for them? Within the current void the masses instead lose themselves in the comfort of fantasy and caricatures that symbolize their despair. [Read More…]