Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for March 2018

The Great Crime Decline, Yet The War On Crime Rages On

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by Adam Gopnik

Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence
by Patrick Sharkey
W. W. Norton & Company. 272 pp. $26.95

Excerpt courtesy of Adam Gopnik and The New Yorker

[…]

In the United States over the past three decades, while people argue about tax cuts and terrorism, the wave of social change that has most altered the shape of American life, as much as the new embankments of the Thames changed life then, has been what the N.Y.U. sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls “the great crime decline.” The term, which seems to have originated with the influential Berkeley criminologist Franklin E. Zimring, refers to the still puzzling disappearance from our big-city streets of violent crime, so long the warping force of American life—driving white flight to the suburbs and fuelling the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the career of Martin Scorsese. (“Taxi Driver” is the great poem of New York around the height of high crime, with steam coming out of the hellish manholes and violence recumbent in the back seat.) No one saw it coming, and the still odder thing is that, once it came, no one seemed adequately equipped to praise it. [Read more…]

The Chosen One: A Conversation With Celebrated Photographer Gusmano Cesaretti

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by Pancho Lipschitz

Gusmano Cesaretti pulls a book off the shelf in his South Pasadena studio and hands it to me. The book is on Chaz Bojorquez, the Godfather of East L.A. graffiti. He opens the front cover and shows me where Chaz has written in beautiful stylish script, “To El más chingón. You started my career. Thank you. Chaz.” The story of how an Italian kid obsessed with American culture ended up documenting the birth of East L.A. graffiti culture is just one chapter in the crazy fairy-tale that is Cesaretti’s life. [Read more…]

Self Excavating In John Biscello’s Raking The Dust

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Reviewed by Ashleigh Grycner

Raking the Dust (forthcoming on Unsolicited Press–April 3) 
By John Biscello
452 pp.

Raking the Dust, John Biscello‘s masterful second novel, is first and foremost a novel about second chances. It’s about addiction, obsession, and ultimately, salvation. It’s about the fact that “all roads lead to Heaven,” and sometimes one needs to get lost in order to get found. That things at times need to get crazy, hairy, utterly confused before arriving  face to face with that which we most fear. Ultimately, it is in the grip of our own terror that we find the courage to say the brave No that is a Yes to our own Innocence. [Read more…]

X Artists’ Books: Literatures Of Displacement And Permission

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By Shana Nys Dambrot

“What is your secret book?” Alexandra Grant asks the assembled audience. “Everyone has one.” This was in response to a question from the evening’s moderator, as to how and why she as an artist and actor Keanu Reeves came to be partners in the limited-run indie publishing company, X Artists’ Books, XAB for short. They, along with author Sylvan Oswald, gathered under the aegis of the PEN USA Center to present their project and celebrate its newest title, Oswald’s High Winds. It’s the last in what may be the only four titles they’ll present. As of now it’s unclear if they have another one in mind; when they undertook the task, they had four, and that was supposed to be that. But considering the critical and even popular (for arcane avant-garde literary art projects at least) acclaim, and that one of their mantras is “honoring the compulsion to create,” it seems likely we will hear from them again before too long. [Read more…]

November

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Cinema has the capacity to become a conduit for dreams and nightmares, combining both into something the ancients could have scarcely imagined- the physical manifestation of myth. If critics such as Roland Barthes and Octavio Paz are correct, then the ritual of cinema or television has replaced the pagan rituals of old. Yet the primitive force of myth remains embedded in human expression, no matter if the medium has changed. Estonian filmmaker Rainer Sarnet’s new film, November (2017), is pure myth, a fairy tale lifted from the page and given life by moving images, the reverie of cinematography and the atmosphere of music. It is imagined and produced with a vivid sense of time and place, yet creating an environment outside of time. And like all myths, its grand and magical flourishes are decorations for a story that is simple in its evocation of human feelings, desires and experiences. [Read more…]

Love in the Shadowland of Myth: Rainer Sarnet’s November

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Cinema has the capacity to become a conduit for dreams and nightmares, combining both into something the ancients could have scarcely imagined- the physical manifestation of myth. If critics such as Roland Barthes and Octavio Paz are correct, then the ritual of cinema or television has replaced the pagan rituals of old. Yet the primitive force of myth remains embedded in human expression, no matter if the medium has changed. Estonian filmmaker Rainer Sarnet’s new film, November (2017), is pure myth, a fairy tale lifted from the page and given life by moving images, the reverie of cinematography and the atmosphere of music. It is imagined and produced with a vivid sense of time and place, yet creating an environment outside of time. And like all myths, its grand and magical flourishes are decorations for a story that is simple in its evocation of human feelings, desires and experiences. [Read more…]

Judy Chicago’s PowerPlay: A Prediction

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at Salon 94, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Consistently miles ahead of the curve, the uber-feminist Judy Chicago has been so prescient that it has, at various key moments, worked against her. It sometimes seemed—and certainly must have felt—that despite presaging much of our current predicament, she was, unfortunately, pissing into the wind for entirely different reasons than the super-hero-sized malevolent male in her series, PowerPlay: A Prediction, shown at Salon 94. This evil-looking, nearly headless giant boasts a six-pack and a relatively small member, which he sprays like a brainless hose, heedlessly poisoning the hills and valleys of our planet. The painting, done in 1984, is called, appropriately enough, Pissing on Nature. [Read more…]

Emmeric Konrad: Walking On Thin Ice Just To See My Reflection

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at Tieken Gallery, Los Angeles (through March 31, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

Emmeric Konrad paints angels with dirty faces, serafim porn stars, saints with reality-hangovers, and refugees from justice in rags of former couture. Chainsmokers at church, day-drinkers at Disneyland. His fraught and tectonic compositions are like stream of consciousness literature or automatic drawing, a madman writing complex pictographic equations. One imagines him painting in a trance, a frantic archeological dig for visions that spring forth; however almost nothing you see is random. Any given 12 square inch passages of a single panel contains multitudes enough to make a fine painting on its own, already as dense with detail as a neutron star is packed with atoms and also infinite invisible unfathomable emptiness.  [Read more…]

The Nightmare of History: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

The spirit of an age is best captured in the artistic visions inspired by the times. This rings true in both the visual and literary arts. The Middle East has been the center of the world situation for so long that in the West we cannot think of the region without evoking words such as “crisis” and “war.” Since 2001 the region has experienced the crucible of foreign occupation, the eruption of revolutions and civil wars. But from the fire is emerging a new generation of authors grappling with the collapse and reshaping of their region via some of the most impressive literature being produced in the world today. A renaissance in Middle East fiction is upon us, and like the Latin Boom of the 1960s, it is literature magical in its creativity and haunting in its statements. Just published for the first time in English is one of this movement’s great achievements, Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi. [Read more…]

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?

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an exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, (through March 25, 2018)
Reviewed by Lisa Appignanesi

Life? or Theatre?
by Charlotte Salomon
Overlook Duckworth, 815 pp., $150.00

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?: A Selection of 450 Gouaches
Taschen, 599 pp., $35.00

Excerpted from Painting on the Precipice, in  the 22 February issue of  NYRB 

A woman walks down the red stairs of a tall roofless building. Her dress is almost black. Her hair is pulled back, her arms crossed against the cold, her face melancholy. She walks past denuded trees up a darkened street, curves into another, and another. The wind seems to be propelling her, tugging at her, so that at one point her hair tumbles free, her dress whirls. Lamplight turns pavement and road a stormy sea blue. As she comes closer her path is outlined in blood red, until red takes her over to transform her into a drowning figure in a blackened lake. [Read more…]