Featuring Alain Chamfort
Archives for December 2017
New Work From Yaeji: “Feel It Out”
Nick Godmode Remix
New Work From Moby: “Like A Motherless Child”
New Work From Tee Mango: “Confused”
On I, Tonya And Playing By The Rules
There is a scene in the film I, Tonya where Tonya Harding, played by Margot Robbie, has just skated a stellar performance. It is clear she possesses more athleticism and raw talent than the skaters before her, yet she receives low marks across the board. She approaches the judge’s table in anger. Admitting to the strength of her routine, they then criticize her nail polish (blue) and her choice of music (Zeppelin). She is told her scores would improve if she worked harder to fit in. Her response? “Suck my dick.” She then fires the well-dressed coach who sided with the judges and advises her to “lose the nail polish.” [Read more…]
Radical Melodies: From The French Revolution To Star Wars
There are links between eras so subtle we barely detect them in the fabric of the times. We enter the movie theater and are swept away by the images and the aural force of the music score. But in the films we see we can also find the interesting threads that bind us to past histories. Listen closely to the harmonies propelling a scene forward, and the ear will catch the whisper of a previous era aflame with powerful ideals. At the closure of the film season, audiences have recently flocked to the polarizing new Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, the latest, bombastic addition to the canon. In addition to Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, there was another returning marquee name essential to the identity of this franchise, or better put, the pop mythology of the times. I mean, of course, composer John Williams. Audiences may have little way of realizing as they are experiencing a film that they are participating in one of the last stands of the great Romantic period. If we are at the dawn of new revolutions, then in the cinema we find traces of one of the grandest revolutions to have re-shaped culture. [Read more…]
Andy Robert: LAKOU: One Two Five
At Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (Through February 17, 2018)
By Emily NimptschHailing from the picturesque seaside town of Les Cayes, Haiti, conceptual painter Andy Robert has built a career on exploring notions of community. As a graduate of the prestigious Whitney Independent Study Studio Program, this assemblage and found object artist has depicted the human side of such monumental and important issues as the Flint Water crisis and poverty in exhibitions past. His latest series, Lakou: One Two Five currently on display at one of Hollywood’s avant-garde art meccas, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, this poignant collection delves into the ideas of heritage, society, and place. These intimate, heartfelt cityscapes and portraits connect the viewer to the Caribbean and its culture, people, and its tragic history. [Read more…]
Molly’s Game Is An Exhilarating Watch, But Ultimately Fails
After decades of winning praise as a screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin makes his directorial debut with Molly’s Game, a bold biopic about a resilient and notorious poker entrepreneur. Electric with Sorkin’s signature wit and fronted by Jessica Chastain in a powerhouse performance, the film has a sharp and undeniable charm. Then Sorkin gambles away audience good will with a stupid, ham-fisted ice rink sequence. [Read more…]
Ken Burns And Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War
Reviewed by Frances FitzGerald
An extract from “The Pity of It All,” courtesy of the New York Review of Books
Ken Burns achieved renown with lengthy film histories of the Civil War, World War II, jazz, and baseball, but he describes his documentary The Vietnam War, made in close collaboration with his codirector and coproducer Lynn Novick, as “the most ambitious project we’ve ever undertaken.” Ten years in the making, it tells the story of the war in ten parts and over eighteen hours. Burns and Novick have made a film that conveys the realities of the war with extraordinary footage of battles in Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations in the United States. [Read more…]
The Will to Deceive: On Robert B. Pippin’s The Philosophical Hitchcock
The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Reviewed by Martin Woessner
One of the benefits of living in New York City is that on any night of the week you can find a decent film to see on something other than the tiny screen of your laptop and in something other than a sprawling, suburban multiplex. Thanks, in part, to longstanding institutions, such as Anthology Film Archives and Film Forum, or upstarts, such as Metrograph and the newly remodeled Quad Cinema, cinematic culture survives, even thrives, here in a way that is increasingly impossible to find anywhere else. And it is a good thing, too, because the apartments are small and overpriced, the subways are irregular and overcrowded, and the pizza, dare I say it, is overrated. Something has to make up for the daily struggle. [Read more…]
Rising (SHADED’s Realized Dreams Remix)
Anabel Englund, Matt Ossentjuk, Human Life & Mont Blvck
New Work From Nabihah Iqbal: “Zone 1 to 6000”
New Work From Total Control: “Vanity”
From their recently released EP, Laughing At The System
Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx
While individual galleries throughout this fine exhibition at The Met lie hushed in low-light to preserve these truly masterful drawings—their nuanced hatchings, their delicate shadings, their refined, ephemeral colorings—the pièce de résistance of Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer will stun the visitor: The Sistine chapel’s ceiling frescos projected on an upside down screen. The flawless, backlit surfaces convey most effectively the colossal composition, and reproduce with accuracy the gaudiness of the original. This technological marvel might be perceived as preposterous by the more discerning modern visitor, but is likely to have been applauded by Michelangelo and the public of the Renaissance. [Read more…]
Monstrosity of Love: The Shape of Water and Cinema as Romantic Subversion
One sits in the dead of night, listening to Dvorak, while attempting to form thoughts on a strange, beautiful film. Guillermo Del Toro’s sensuous new film, The Shape of Water, is love as monstrosity, as a distortion of a conformist view of love. Del Toro could not have known how timely his parable would become. If the arts can interpret the psyche and the mood of a time, then Del Toro is but one of several artists and filmmakers who is producing art that responds to our predicament with a radical heart, but a radicalism based on the revolutionary act of seeing the other beyond their veils. [Read more…]
Roque Dalton’s “Toward a Better Love”
“Sex is a political condition.” — Kate Millet
No one disputes that sex
is a condition in the world of the couple:
from there, tenderness and its wild branches.
No one disputes that sex
is a domestic condition:
from there, kids,
nights in common
and days divided
(he, looking for bread in the street,
in offices or factories;
she, in the rear guard of domestic functions,
in the strategy and tactic of the kitchen
that allows survival in a common struggle
at least to the end of the month). [Read more…]
New Work From Oneohtrix Point Never: “The Pure and the Damned”
Shadowman Is As Intense And Infuriating As Its Protagonist
This movie is intense. But then again, Richard Hambleton was kind of intense. Also much like the artist, the documentary itself is infuriating at times, emotionally compelling, and a bit sad. As an early pioneer of the legendary Lower East Side art scene of the early 1980’s, Hambleton cut quite a figure. Stylish, handsome, brilliant, and troubled. He had demons and great ideas. He was friends with Basquiat and Haring. He basically invented a genre — conceptual graffiti. He was famous at home and abroad, in the galleries and the glossies. He had great clothes and gave extensive interviews. He had a slow-moving drug problem that eventually became unmanageable. He disappeared. He was homeless, addicted, evicted. He never stopped painting. “He followed his muse I guess,” says performance artist Penny Arcade at one point in the film. “But Richard’s muse was a cracked out junkie ho.” [Read more…]
P.T. Anderson’s Phantom Thread Couldn’t Come At A Worse Time
In the post-Weinstein era, we look around at the carnage of shattered lives and wonder how we got here. What a poor time for the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, which pushes the narrative that geniuses are on some level allowed to be abusive. If your work is beautiful enough, your soul can be made of scabs and darkness. The world excuses so much if you’re talented and male. [Read more…]
Charles Bukowski’s Storm for the Living and the Dead
A New Volume Of Uncollected And Unpublished Poems
Reviewed by John Biscello
“Baby . . . I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.” — Bukowski, Factotum
As a bottom-feeding, hardscrabble Walt Whitman, Bukowski sang of himself, incessantly, with a volcanic chip on his shoulder. He was determined to be heard, recognized, affirmed—Charles Bukowski Wuz Here stamped on Eternity’s forehead. He coerced you to see life as a cruel and dirty joke that he was in on, and often felt himself to be the butt of, and he would play the page like a blowsy stand-up comedian with too much acid in his diet. He was a living room Pulcinella with a beer-gut, a literary W.C. Fields tossing water balloons and Molotov cocktails with sardonic glee. [Read more…]