All hail Lupita Nyong’o, the Scream Queen of SXSW! On Opening Night, the Academy-Award winning actress shocked and awed the packed house at the Paramount Theater with Us. In dueling roles, she gracefully and ruthlessly filled the audience with tension and terror. The following day, she returned to the Paramount for a victory lap, fronting the outrageous zombie-comedy Little Monsters. It was a one-two punch that deftly establishes Nyong’o’s range as well as her status as modern-horror royalty.
Archives for March 2019
No Fuck Heart! Bow To “Boss.” Kiss Finger. No You Die!
From Little Simz’s Grey Area
on Age 101 / AWOL
Riot At The Astor Place Opera House
My first historical theater experience was at 16, when my mom took me to see Jason Robards star as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neil. The dialogue was deep, fast-paced, dramatic, the characters themselves characteristically downmarket. The play, in brief, revolves around a classic crew of bottom-of-the-barrel drunks, has-beens who never were, pimps who claimed they were bartenders and their sleazy whores in a bar at the bottom of a flophouse in lower Manhattan in 1907. Harry Hope, the benevolent proprietor of the Greenwich Village Saloon, had not been outside the establishment in the years since his sainted wife had met her maker. [Read more…]
4.13.19
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
“You can take pictures of him, but don’t pet him. He’s not here to be friendly.” The owner of this pit bull told me the dog listens well, but warned me not to get too close to him, either. This dog, like many of the dogs that live in Skid Row, has been trained to be a guard dog and to protect his owner. [Read more…]
Fresh Throwback Funk In Bibio’s “Old Graffiti”
From the recent Ribbons
on Warp
Jordan Peele’s Us Is a Bold And Brilliant Follow-Up To Get Out
Jordan Peele has done it again. In 2017, the comedian turned filmmaker with a blisteringly funny and soul-rattlingly scary directorial debut Get Out. The horror film was universally praised, instantly iconic, and went on to win Peele an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. So, anticipation has been through the roof for his follow-up, Us. As SXSW’s Opening Night film, Us drew crowds that wrapped around the city blocks of downtown Austin. People lined up for 2 to 6 hours just in the hopes they’d get to be in the room for its world premiere. After over two hours in line, this critic barely made the cut. I was number 21 of the last 75 people who would gain entrance. As soon as I walked through the doors of the Paramount, the excitement in the air was electric. The whole theater throbbed with anticipation. When Peele took to the stage to introduce the film, the audience erupted in cheers and applause. Over the next two hours, we would gasp, scream, laugh, and pulse together with tension as Us barreled into a mind-bending third act. Which is to say, it was a huge hit with us. [Read more…]
Honeyed Strings And Sanguine Pop To Boot: “In The Capital”
The flavorful new single from Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
on Sub Pop
The Kids Are Not Alright In Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary
The Emissary, by Yoko Tawada
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
New Directions Publishing, 128 pps. $14.95
I have seen the future and it’s murder — Leonard Cohen, “The Future”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Death walks into a bar, wielding a scythe, which he intends to use in shaving God’s face. Death, in his wanderings, has been hearing rumors about the wooly burning bush that covers God’s face like topographical phenomena, and he has made it his self-directed duty and obligation to give God a clean shave. The thing is, Death doesn’t find God in the bar, so he begins using his scythe on all the people he encounters in the bar, and then continues his bloody shave-fest out in the real world, as he continues searching for God’s hairy, burning beast of a face. In the end, Death is a misguided barber, and God an absentee with bigtime street cred. To dance the razor’s edge between vaudeville and nightmare requires a certain sense of marvel and precision, a certain joie de vivre to keep one company while suspended over an abyss, and this is the sensibility that Yoko Tawada exacts with finesse and fluency in her satirical timebomb, The Emissary. [Read more…]
Shining Light On Luchita Hurtado’s Dark Years
at Hauser & Wirth, 69th Street, NYC (through April 9)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell
Hauser & Wirth’s exhibit, Dark Years, features three gallery floors of work from painter Luchita Hurtado. Venezuelan-born and Los Angeles-based, Hurtado is 98 years old and beyond deserving of the show and recognition. This is a real celebration story of a life-long artist finally getting her due, with many solo shows in the works for the coming years, including her upcoming exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery in London. [Read more…]
Jan Švankmajer’s Insects: On Meaning in Surrealist Film
Last year, Jan Švankmajer, the great master of surrealist cinema, returned to his roots with another stop-motion film mixed with live footage in the same vein as his classics Alice (1988) and Faust (1994). Yet there is something that is immediately striking in Insects (2018), namely that it keeps breaking the fourth wall and working with meta-levels. There is, first, an introduction where Švankmajer speaks directly to the audience, offering cues to how the movie is supposed to be understood. Then, throughout the film we see how the practical and stop-motion effects were created; we witness various stage directions to the actors, who each talk about their dreams to the camera. Finally, as Insects is somewhat of an adaptation of a play by the brothers Čapek, we ourselves witness an amateur theatre group working on its adaptation. [Read more…]
The Variant Hands Of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye And Wilmer Wilson IV
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, In Lieu of A Louder Love
at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC
&
Wilmer Wilson IV, Slim…you don’t got the juice
at Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC (through March 16)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye follows in the steps of late 19th century European masters, and makes no mystery about it. They favored the wet-on-wet application of paint, more poetically known as Alla Prima, that demands quick work in one sitting, or one day. When Dutch painters first invented it in the 1600s, the impossibility to render small, time consuming details such as luxurious fabrics and jewels, veered the focus to the sitter’s interior life. Instead of stressing status (rich, powerful, respectable), the protestant artists questioned what it means to be a human being. Manet reintroduced it to his followers in the late 19th century by using the technique to great effect. His work is also instantly recognizable for its deep, unctuous blacks. [Read more…]
Who Holds The Stag’s Head Gets to Speak
Dear God who lives inside the stag’s head
even after the stag’s shot and lies slumped and abashed
on the forest floor. Protect him.
Even after he’s been heaved onto the car’s dark roof.
Forest Green. Or Pacific Blue. Nowhere he can see.
His body stiffens like a trellis above the driver.
Help him. Hold him in your sight. [Read more…]
Norman Rockwell v. The State Of Public Art
Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, & The Four Freedoms
A traveling exhibition, with Reimagining the Four Freedoms
currently at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Washington, DC (through April 29)
Reviewed by Kevin Baker
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine
The fight over which of our public monuments should remain where they are is as complicated as the American past they commemorate. For all the fighting over who and what we should not honor from our past, there is one vital element that has been missing from the argument: that is, what we should honor and aspire to now. [Read more…]
Wyn Cooper’s Mars Poetica
Mars Poetica, by Wyn Cooper
White Pine Press, 76 pages, $16.00
Not everyone knows the sun moves around the Earth. To prove it, simply extend a line between the two largest stars in Orion. It will take you to another constellation, Pegasus. Draw another line between the winged horse’s brightest stars, and you’ll find another mythological tribute, and so forth. Find one constellation, and you can find them all. In this way, the hunter, the dog, the bear, the goat, and others can always guide us because Earth is the center.
From time to time, a random star appears which seems out of place. [Read more…]
Caramelized Onion, Mushroom, Kale & Aged Gruyere Quiche
1 Trader Joe’s pie crust
1 big or two small sweet yellow onions
4-5 leaves Tuscan kale
1 pack 3/4 oz Oyster mushrooms
1/2 pack 3/4 oz Shitake mushrooms
1 1/4 cup grated Cave aged Gruyere cheese
2 sprigs fresh thyme
Butter, as needed for sautéing
3/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup whole milk
4 eggs
Salt to taste
Ground White pepper to taste
Fresh cracked Black pepper to taste
9-10” pie dish for baking
Remove pie curst and let sit at room temperature for an hour or hour and a half. Unroll pie crust without removing the plastic film on both sides. If you see cracks take a rolling pin and smooth out the cracks and the edges rolling over the plastic films. Remove one side of the plastic film and place the crust facing down in your pie dish. Remove the other side of the film and bake the pie crust as instructed on the Trader Joe’s pie crust package. Do not forget to prick holes in the crust before baking as suggested. After baking let cool at room temperature. [Read more…]
Brain Mites On Sonic Move In Tamburi Neri: “Pechino (Original Mix)”
from the Works #1 EP
on Optimo Music
Paradox California: Two Artists, One State of Mind
at Launch LA (through March 23)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
If California is in many ways a state of mind, as well as a state in the western continental U.S., Paradox California exemplifies its mystique. The California dream depicted in this lush and burnished exhibition from photographic artist Osceola Refetoff and mixed-media artist Chelsea Dean is desiccated by desert heat, burnished gold and amber and brown by desert sun, and crested by dry blue skies as vivid as a Mojave wildflower. [Read more…]