Riot Material

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Archives for June 2017

Loren Janes, Stuntman And Legendary Driver In Bullitt

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from the LA Times

Though his name was largely known only within the industry, Loren Janes appeared  in “Spartacus,” the “Magnificent Seven,” “The Ten Commandments,” “How the West Was Won,” “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “The Graduate,” “Planet of the Apes,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Back to the Future,” “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “Spider Man,” hundreds of movies and television shows in all.

He doubled for Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra, Charles Bronson, John Wayne, Debbie Reynolds, Yul Brenner and McQueen over and over again.

The car chase scene in “Bullitt” — a jarring 10-minute adrenaline rush across the streets of San Francisco — became such a classic that it spawned its own subculture, websites, Google forums on where the scenes were shot, and an overlay for Google Maps that lets motorists retrace the chase route. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal even rented a Ford Mustang — albeit not the 1968 Ford Mustang GT used in the film — and took Janes on a slow-speed reenactment of the chase.

“Steve was a great driver, but he was only behind the wheel for about 10% of what you see on screen,” Janes confided during the reenactment. “He drove in scenes that required close-ups — but not in the ones that could kill him.”

–excerpted from Steve Marble’s LA Times obit

Cracked Actor To Cracked Actor

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Cracked Actor (Live, Los Angeles ’74)

Sweet Thing/Candidate (Live, Los Angeles ’74)

In honor and in celebration of Cracked Actor, the new live release from David Bowie’s infamously depraved yet musically stellar ’74 tour (the new album narrows in on one evening, his September 5th show at Los Angeles’ Universal Amphitheater, which I had the blearied pleasure of attending!), Riot Material scratched up a BBC documentary from that same tour, titled Cracked Actor: A Film About David Bowie. The 1975 film, viewable below, is directed by Alan Yentob: [Read more…]

Igor Posner’s Past Perfect Continuous

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by Jason Eskenazi

Doctor Walker was a cold incisive surgeon; he went by the book. He was one of the first that created to-do lists and this made the operations run smooth. The scalpel has no heart. He was a sort of literalist. And Bob, as they called the anesthesiologist, came always rumpled with the same plaid shirt everyday and seemed to click the gas just at the right time to put the patient under the spell. There was an ether about him.  [Read more…]

Twin Peaks: Episode 8

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Episode 8
by Alci Rengifo

Madness grips the airwaves like a deafening transmission, and the overlords of the earth seem to speak in terrifyingly grim visions. Thank the gods that every age produces its own soothsayers. It is fitting, then, that just as a surreal state of affairs takes hold, David Lynch returned to us with Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), a continuation of his landmark cult 1990s series that combined melodrama with the director’s brand of surrealist imaginings. But not only did Lynch return, he also shows himself to be fully in tune with these new dark ages. Episode 8 of the revival in particular goes beyond television or even cinema — it is one mad flow about our civilization’s communion with dark forces to unleash absolute destruction. [Read more…]

The Boats

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by Colin Dickey

The final scene of 1973’s cult horror film The Wicker Man was inspired by an aside in Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars, which screenwriter Anthony Shaffer claimed he fixated on because it was “the most alarming and imposing image” he had ever seen. Caesar, traveling through Gaul, remarks on how the people are “extremely devoted to superstitious rites,” so that when they are troubled with severe disease or engaged in battle, they often resort to human sacrifice, “because they think that unless the life of a man be offered for the life of a man, the mind of the immortal gods can not be rendered propitious.” Among the various means of sacrifice Caesar had heard about, it was one in which figures of vast size were constructed, “the limbs of which formed of wicker they fill with living men, which being set on fire, the men perish enveloped in the flames.” While, Caesar concludes, they “consider that the oblation of such as have been taken in theft, or in robbery, or any other offense, is more acceptable to the immortal gods; but when a supply of that class is wanting, they have recourse to the oblation of even the innocent.” [Read more…]

Ellsworth Kelly’s Plant Drawings

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at Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

This exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s plant drawings is a companion exhibition to Ellsworth Kelly, Last Paintings, shown at the Matthew Marks space directly next door on West 22nd Street. The late Ellsworth Kelly’s oeuvre is unusual in that he pursued quite various themes and ways of artmaking in a range of media, including painting, drawing, prints, and photographs. Ellsworth Kelly had wanted to pursue art from a young age, and following a tour of service in the Army during World War II, he studied art in Boston and then Paris. He began making drawings of plants in the late 1940s in both of these cities, and his fascination with plants as subject continued throughout his career. [Read more…]

Savage And Lovely: The Bad Batch

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Reviewed by C von Hassett

The Bad Batch (2016) is a stark and stunning new film by Ana Lily Amirpour. And timely too, considering every effort by our current regime to cast those of seeming naught into the desperate oblivions of a world only slightly less unhinged than the one depicted in this film. With a nod to the current depravity of our day, the film opens (forgive my indulgence) in the wet dream of said regime whose spooging head is our ever-ranting, ever-pissy Child-in-Chief — let’s call him Boy — he who nightly wets his bed and in the dreamy slosh fingers blindly for his own plundered asshole. Were the Boy blessedly in this film, he’d be swiftly on a sizzling spit: fatted swine for its flesh-hungry natives. 

We first meet our protagonist, a wordless Arlen May Johnson, aka Inmate 5040, as guards walk her to desert’s edge, to the kingdom’s unceremonial gate (American chain link), to literally lock her away from fair society. She stands, indifferent to her plight, with only a backpack, a burger (which she promptly eats) and a half-filled jug of water. Ignored is the wooded post which reads: 

Warning: Beyond this fence is no longer the territory of Texas. That hereafter no person within the territory beyond this fence is a resident of the United States of America or shall be acknowledged, recognized or governed by the laws and governing bodies therein. Good luck. 

There, she is loosed into a blistering landscape of sand and sunbaked clay, and she walks straight in as would a schoolgirl through a noonday park, though there is little question here of her arrival into something far more suspect. Arlen’s first encounter is with a tribe of desert body builders — a brutish, body-ripped band in need, naturally, of good supply of protein. Stray travelers seem their sole course, and these luckless lie chained and limbless in what unremittingly comes as another feed, one body part at a time. Arlen, freshly snatched from the feral barrens, no sooner meets with a hacksaw than she wiles a witting escape, and face-up to the blazing sun, a snapped up skateboard as her ride, she pushes into a fevered dream one foot, and only one foot, at a time. What follows is a love story.

[Read more…]

Eric Fischl’s Late America

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at Skarstedt Gallery Chelsea, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Few contemporary painters nail the zeitgeist as pointedly as Eric Fischl. The artist is in top form at his current show “Late America;” five large-scale canvases that pack a paunchy punch: the Hamptons’ haute bourgeoisie, magnified poolside by harsh daylight in the full flawed glory of their middle-aged decadence.

Fischl’s merciless vision is equally unkind to the men and women in these works, but here the men fare slightly worse. This is the decline of the American empire in painted Technicolor, and its various iterations depict the nominal heads of household as gracelessly aging emperors without any clothes. Although the show’s press release states that the pieces are not political, it is hard not to think of the wizened white patriarchs currently in power. [Read more…]

On the Rule of Law and the Rule of Loyalty: The Political Epistemics of Trump and Communism

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by Michael D. Kennedy

June 15, 2017

Socialism was to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a consciousness-driven model of social transformation but without the processes that would allow it to validate its understandings against how the world really worked. Focused more on mobilization against an enemy than understanding itself and its society, the Communist Party and its state were both constituted through mechanisms they also made. The way in which they were made also prevented authorities from recognizing the real problems they faced.

I wrote that paragraph to describe Andreas Glaeser’s book on the political epistemics organizing the East German society communists ruled. One can understand Trump Rule better in light of that work, as well as of others illuminating communist rule.

It’s not only the pervasiveness of the lie. Do we need to trust authorities to act on our behalf and require no evidence that they do? Do we need to emulate the sycophancy of the leaders’ lieutenants in order to find our place in the new order? If we challenge authority, do we risk becoming an enemy? In this kind of order, it’s not the rule of law but the rule of loyalty that determines trustworthiness and truthfulness. [Read more…]

Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry

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at the Jewish Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In 1916, when Florine Stettheimer was 45 and had been painting for over 20 years, she had her first solo show at the Knoedler Gallery in New York. Half way through the show, she wrote in her diary: “I am not selling much to my amazement.” And, at the end, “Nothing sold.” She did not get the recognition she expected as an artist through the sale of her paintings. Reviews were derisive or indifferent at best. It must have hurt. Had her paintings sold, she would have joined the ranks of painters such as O’Keeffe and Aaron Douglas and Arthur Dove and Gaston Lachaise, her Modernist friends who lived from their art. Instead, she was denied an escape from her position as an upper class idler. From then on, she refused all solo shows. She embraced brazenly her identity as upper class, at least publicly. She overpriced her paintings to prevent any sales. [Read more…]

Icons & Avatars

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at David Krut Projects, NYC
Reviewed by Robin Scher

Since the days of cave paintings, the human need to represent and be represented has served as a powerful impulse to create art. This desire has manifested in many forms and been fulfilled in various fashions. Icons and Avatars, a current group show at New York’s David Krut Projects, presents five international contemporary artists who continue this tradition through portraiture. [Read more…]

All the Lonely People: Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Was it all a dream—
I mean those old bygone days—
Were they all what they seemed?
All night long I lie awake
listening to autumn rain.

This poem from the Zen monk, Ryokan, could serve as an emblematic preface to Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women. Claustrophobic poignancy and stringent wistfulness, shot through with quirky humor, characterize the autumn-flavored tone of the seven stories comprising the collection. [Read more…]