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Archives for December 2017

a cop-out to a possible immortality

December 7, 2017 By Riot Material 1 Comment

From Charles Bukowski’s just released collection of rare and never-before-seen material — poems from obscure, hard-to-find magazines, as well as from libraries and private collections all over the country — Storm for the Living and the Dead.

if we can’t make literature out of our
agony

what are we going to do with 
it?

beg in the streets?

I like my minor comforts 
just like any other
son of a
bitch

Filed Under: The New Word

A Word With Performa 17 Artists Kemang Wa Lehulere & Nicholas Hlobo

December 7, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

I cut my skin to liberate the splinter, at Connelly Theater, East Village;
umBhovuzo: The Parable of the Sower, at Harlem Parish, Harlem
Part of Performa Biennial, NYC
by Robin Scher

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” begins Charles Dickens’ epic A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens goes on to describe the novel’s period, set against the French Revolution, as an age of “wisdom” and “foolishness.” The context may have changed since those words were written, but the sentiment remains true. Here we are in 2017, arguably more conscious than ever to the plights of the dispossessed, yet somehow still stuck in the mires of narrow mindedness. Why do we seem doomed to repeat the errors of our ways? How can we better draw on lessons from history? In November, at New York’s Performa Biennial, these were questions at the heart of at least two South African artists’ commissioned performances. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, Interview, The Line

That Loftily-Roofed Monument: The Palindrome

December 6, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Colin Dickey

In the strange annals of medieval manuscripts is one held by the British Library designated as Royal 2 A XX, which contains the Lord’s Prayer, sections from the Gospels, several hymns and litanies—and several “Blutsegens,” or “blood charms”: series of prayers and magical incantations to ward against excessive and painful menstruation. The manuscript, which dates to the ninth century, contains at least three different blood charms, though the second is what concerns us here. The passage begins by calling three times on Beronice, an apocryphal figure who was supposedly cured by excessive bleeding after she touched the hem of Jesus’s garment. There is a line from Psalm 51:14: “Deliver me from bloods, O God, thou God of my salvation,” and transcriptions of some older chants and spells, once passed down orally, resulting in an odd blend of early Christian belief and pagan magic. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Thought

An Interview With Petra Volpe, Director Of The Divine Order

December 6, 2017 By Cynthia Biret Leave a Comment

by Cynthia Biret

Inspired by true events, The Divine Order tells the story of a housewife’s servitude and her quest for emancipation in a remote part of Switzerland. She rallies other women to fight for the right to vote, shifting the scales of power politically and domestically, while awakening to her own sexual potential. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, Interview, The Line

New Work From LCD Soundsystem: “I used to”

December 5, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

From their recent release, American Dream

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

How do we describe buddha nature?

December 5, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

How do we describe buddha nature? Buddha nature is said to resemble space. Can we say that space exists? Can we say that it doesn’t? We cannot, because space itself does not comply with any such ideas. Concepts made about space are merely concepts. Space, in itself, is beyond any ideas we can hold about it. Buddha nature is like this. If you say that space exists, can you define it as a concrete existent entity? But to say there is no space is incorrect, because space is what accommodates everything — the world and beings. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mind

Lou Reed: A Life

December 4, 2017 By Riot Material 4 Comments

A New Biography By Anthony DeCurtis
Reviewed David Yaffe

An extract from “Lou’s Wild Side,” in the November 23 issue of The New York Review of Books

“Just a perfect day/You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/Someone good.” These lines—sung indifferently over swelling, glam rock strings—are from “Perfect Day,” an achingly gorgeous and brutally honest song by Lou Reed, who died of liver disease four years ago at the age of seventy-one. Some people thought the song was about addiction—how a junkie escaping from reality also feeds on the escape of romance. But the song could also be about how pleasurable, yet impossible, it is to escape from your true self, and about how easy it is to deceive yourself when you’ve disappointed your own expectations. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

Anarchy & Desire: The Cinema of Luis Buñuel In Our Time

December 1, 2017 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

by Alci Rengifo

It is quite possible that the most fitting work of art to premiere onstage this year as an appropriate expression of the times is Thomas Ades’s searing opera, The Exterminating Angel. Apocalyptic, cataclysmic, it tells the story of a group of wealthy dinner guests who cannot leave a mansion, pushed back by an invisible force. Civilization soon crumbles and they become savages. The opera is noteworthy as both a work by Ades, certainly one of the great modern composers, and because it is an adaptation of a film by Luis Buñuel. More than most filmmakers, Buñuel’s cinema endures as both landmark filmmaking and as a powerful set of visions which interpret the human condition. His body of work spans from 1929 to 1977, yet feels even more at home now, in this age of surreal gestures and civilization as madhouse. Buñuel was keenly aware that humans are driven by desire, tribalism, and the power of fantasy. It is when these three mix within his cinema that even his lesser films maintain a dangerous undercurrent. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line, Thought

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The New Word

New Poems from John Biscello

Excerpted from Moonglow on Mercy Street
forthcoming on CSF Publishing

Birthing Pains

To see, everywhere,
brave little lights going up,
flares of hope and justice,
holding hands
to tip the scales
in a bond of solidarity,
a fire-chastened purge
and desire for change’s
holy golden grail,
the quest,
a blessed rhyme
and legacy,
with each and every
one of our hearts
breaking open
to scale the ribs of light
and become radical midwives
to a collective rebirth.

[Read More…]

The Line

Oliver Stone in Vietnam. A review of his new book, Chasing the Light, is at Riot Material

Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light Chronicles the Great Director’s Journey Against a Raging Historical Backdrop

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $25.20 If there is anything the year 2020 has shaken into the very fabric of our imperial society, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan, rarely is anything absolutely assured. While a biological threat has upended not only our […]

Toyin Ojih Odutola's wonderful exhibition, A Countervailing Theory, at Barbican Centre, London, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory

at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and […]

Driving Whle Black, two books reviewed at Riot Material

Segregation on the Highways: A Review of Driving While Black and Overground Railroad

by Sarah A. Seo Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95 Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00 The New York Review of Books In 1963, after Sam Cooke was […]

A review of Sontag: Here Life and Work is at Riot Material

Losing the Writer in the Personality: A Review of Sontag: Her Life and Work

Reviewed by Michael Gorra Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser Ecco, 816 pp., $39.99 New York Review of Books Susan Sontag began to read philosophy and criticism as a teenager at North Hollywood High, when she still signed her editorials in the school newspaper as “Sue.” She read Kant and La Rochefoucauld, Oswald […]

Darkness Half Visible In Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

Reviewed by John Biscello The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina Two Dollar Radio, 353pp., $12.74 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again In the name of nursery rhyme remixology, first let us […]

Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, is reviewed at Riot Material

Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People

Reviewed by Patrick Lohier Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99 Harvard Review In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” […]

Lord Krishna speaks to Prince Arjuna about the Gita

Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita Translated by Eknath Easwaran Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00 Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked […]

A review of Kevin Young's Brown is at Riot Material

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,” […]

Dispatch: Poems, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

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 […]

The Monument to Joe Louis, aka "The Fist," as sculpted by Robert Graham

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 and his 2001 Preface to Race Matters: "Democracy Matters in Race Matters." At Riot Material.

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 […]

Through the Lens of Race, and Jim Crow South, in Eudora Welty's photographs

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.

Kara Walker's Fons Americanus (2019) at Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

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's Pittsburgh Memory, 1964. Two books on Romare Bearden, "An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden" and "The Romare Bearden Reader" are reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

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 […]

Donald Trump and the Corporate Fascist Takeover

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 […]

Wim Wenders Until The End Of The World Directors Cut. An in-depth review is at Riot Material Magazine.

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 […]

Shabaka and the Ancestors, We Are Sent Here by History, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

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 […]

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art. word. thought.