Will we ever see the likes of Bob Dylan again? It is a question easily inspired by Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a sprawling, indeed thundering chronicle, now streaming on Netflix, of one of the American bard’s most legendary travels across the United States. What made this particular venture unique was the transitional phase the country was enduring, emerging from the tumult of the 1960s, its self-trust scarred, possibly beyond repair. Fittingly, this tale is told by Martin Scorsese, not only a great filmmaker but an artist obsessed with the past. Scorsese’s own works of dramatic cinema have functioned as portraits of the country, framing its beauty as founded by personalities both visionary and violent. Additionally, Scorsese was also one of the key directors to pioneer the use of rock n’ roll as the driving force of a movie’s soundtrack. But unlike his previous chronicles of bands like the Rolling Stones, Rolling Thunder Revue is almost an elegy for a bygone era. [Read More…]
cinema
The Last Black Man In San Francisco
Life is stranger than fiction. Things happen without rhyme or reason, and we, the living, are pulled along, anchoring ourselves to friends, family, lovers; people, places, and things in an effort to stay afloat, to make sense of it all. In The Last Black Man in San Francisco the protagonist, a Black American named Jimmie Fails (played by himself and loosely based on his real life), is anchored to a house. His grandfather built it, he insists, and he’s drawn to it, returning repeatedly despite the fact that his family lost it in a wave of gentrification and it has had new owners for the last 12 years. They’re well-meaning older white liberals that were clearly beatnik artists once, dropping “hey man” into their sentences and saying they don’t want to call the cops if they catch him on the property again — but they will. It’s a thinly veiled threat couched in the kind of casual racism that hovers throughout the film, even after said owners lose the house themselves in a serendipitous twist of fate. [Read More…]
theater
The Primal Delights Of Gather: Surprising Stories and Other Mischief
at the Carrie Hamilton Theater at Pasadena Playhouse
Reviewed by Hoyt Hilsman
One of the unsung heroes of American theater is Paul Sills, whose groundbreaking Story Theater technique re-invented dramatic storytelling and influenced a generation of actors, directors and playwrights. Sills, who co-founded the famed Second City theater troupe in Chicago and directed performers from Ed Asner and Alan Arkin to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, used improvisation, mime and dance to dramatize fairy tales, folk stories and ancient myths. Sills’ vision was to revisit the ancient traditions of oral storytelling for modern audiences. [Read More…]
film
The Apocalypse Is Agreeably Upon Us In The Dead Don’t Die
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we say, ‘Fine.’ That’s the criticism that cuts through Jim Jarmusch’s star-stuffed zombie-comedy The Dead Don’t Die, where the undead not only feast on human flesh but also gravitate toward the distractions they were obsessed with in life, be it coffee, cell phones, or Chardonaaaaaaay! It’s a strange journey that is savagely funny, sophisticated and unnerving. [Read More…]
artist
Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn
at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (through 20 October)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
There is something hypnotic about the work of Luchita Hurtado. She has mastered the art of suggestiveness, and much as dreams do, her works win our attention because of their peculiar logic. [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
Theresa shooting up crystal methamphetamine on a public sidewalk near the outskirts of Skid Row. From my perspective the amount of hard drug users has only gotten worse over the last couple of years. The drug epidemic is real. [Read More…]
Christina Quarles And The Aesthetics Of Ambiguity
Christina Quarles is at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists who are making ambiguity the aesthetic of our time. Few artists can incorporate as many painting styles as fluidly as Quarles does because few artists have the chops to paint and draw as well as she does. Even fewer have the philosophic rigor and intellectual muscle to upturn the cultural assumptions underlying the history of painting – and have such obvious pleasure doing it. [Read More…]
Ross Bleckner’s Burnt Offerings
Pharmaceutria
at Petzel Gallery, NYC (through June 15)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
Ross Bleckner’s luminous canvases of the 1980s and 90s, often rendered in grey and evoking distant galaxies, possess an otherworldly light, which is apt, since many of his paintings of that time memorialize those lost to the relentless onslaught of AIDS.
Bleckner, whose first show in five years is on exhibit at the Petzel Gallery through June 15, is still making elegiac, gauzy images of loss. But this time, the loss that plagues us is, sadly, self-inflicted: our current political and social divisiveness, and more portentously, the plight of our planet, that Garden of Eden we have managed to more or less destroy. [Read More…]
The Line
Into The Mythic With Rebecca Farr’s Animal Love Thyself
at Klowden Mann (through June 15)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell
When I wrote about Rebecca Farr’s fourth solo exhibit in November of 2016, I said it was everything. I saw the show immediately following the 2016 presidential election and Farr’s show created a nurturing embrace and a place for soul-and nation-searching. In her fifth solo exhibit at Klowden Mann, Animal Love Thyself, Farr’s exhibition again feels like everything we need in an age that is amidst Trump’s presidency, amidst the wake of #MeToo and #TimesUp, and amidst a time that is more and more against the rights of people who are not hetero, cis, white men [Read More…]
Dreaming Toward Redemption In A Great Lamp
Festival Winner at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival
Opens July 8 at the Arclight
by Genie Davis
The narrative feature A Great Lamp is a beautiful black and white film from director Saad Qureshi and his highly collaborative cast and crew. The film has a real heart as well as a beautifully defined artistic aesthetic. It’s the meandering story of three almost-lost souls seeking redemption: not from others, but from themselves, or the spiritual glow of that riverfront street lamp they hover under. There’s Max, an open-hearted, non-binary street kid posting flyers as a tribute to his late, much loved grandmother throughout the town; Gene, a drop-out from his job as an insurance processor – something he hated, but he still hides the fact that he left from his father; and Howie, an out of towner who fears a recurring dream, and whose mother may or may not have died, and who above all else hopes to view a rocket launch through binoculars. [Read More…]
A Conflation of Dueling Sentiments In Alexandra Grant’s Born to Love
at Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles (through July 6)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Artist Alexandra Grant refers to herself as a “radical collaborator,” a dualistic thinker, a synthesizer of textual images into visual form as for many years she has worked closely with both writers and scholars to create luminous paintings that both incorporate and re contextualize the words of others. In the case of her most recent body of work however, Grant has chosen to turn inward, mining a more personal landscape that encompasses the written texts from Sophocles’ Antigone. At the core of Sophocles’ play is the radical iteration, given the year in which it was written and the fact Greece was a patriarchal society, that a woman can have a voice, an identity, a deeply personal conviction, insisting, as Antigone does, on divine altruism and the healing power of love. Love is the driving force that fuels Grant’s work, so it only seems natural that she would gravitate to the prescient words spoken by Sophocles heroine — “I was born to love, not to hate.” [Read More…]
Our Future Revisited In Paula Rego’s Untitled: The Abortion Pastels
During a time in which eight U.S. states have passed bills to limit women’s rights to abortions, Paula Rego’s Untitled: The Abortion Pastels seem timely and relevant. Made between July 1998 and February 1999, this series of ten works features personal and quietly anguished portraits of women who have just undergone or are undergoing, at-home, illegal abortions. Rego, born in Portugal and living in Britain, was motivated to create this series about her home country after a referendum to liberalize existing abortion laws was proposed and defeated in Portugal during the summer of 1998. She saw this as a rallying cry for change and used her art as a response and motivator. [Read More…]
The Flawed Yet Fine Gem Of All Creatures Here Below
All Creatures Here Below is a Midwestern tragedy that, scene by scene, grows incrementally more horrific. Tearing open the wounds of childhood trauma, the director, Collin Schiffli, and his writer, David Dastmalchian, immerse us in the desperate acts of a young runaway couple, then dare us to condemn them. [Read More…]