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March 18, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

For most people in Los Angeles, the rain is a blessing. For those who are homeless, it only makes a hard life that much tougher.

Suitcase Joe is a Los Angeles photographer who lives anonymously in our amongst. His Instagram page is an important document of our times. @suitcase_joe

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,” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms

Reviewed by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell Oxford University Press, 443 pp., $34.95 . The Romare Bearden Reader edited by Robert G. O’Meally Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper) New York Review of Books Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Coronation, The Relinquishing Of Fear And The Way As A Species Forward

The Coronation by Charles Eisenstein For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling […]

Charles Eisenstein On “The Coronation” And An Epidemic of Control

Interview by David Fuller

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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), […]

Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Yet Miraculous Retrospective, Painting After All

at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020) Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl The New Yorker “Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The […]

Cinema Disordinaire: A List Of Infectiously Strange Must-See Films For The End Times

Cinema Disordinaire, aka Riot Cinema, is a uniquely selective entry of films that showcase the singular in all of cinema, the seminal, and the utterly sublime come to screen this past half century. For these particularly disordinary times, where self-isolation is our newly mandated norm, we offer up a distilled list from Cinema Disordinaire’s five-decade accounting. […]

The LA Times And The Question Of Crisis Deliverance

by C von Hassett The LA Times, once a towering, globally respected newspaper, has become a click-bait web of invasive ads and circus-style barking for subscription servicing that, though intolerable even when things in our city were on the norm, now come across as shark-like and ravenous, a dubious entity profiteering its wares much in […]

On Lessons From August Wilson’s Jitney

at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles By Seren Sensei Jitney ran for a limited revival at the Mark Taper Forum prior to the quarantines that recently swept through L.A. County. A protective measure against global pandemic COVID-19, the lockdown effectively shut down bars, restaurants, movie theaters, plays and gatherings; while leaders felt this was […]

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