A strange thing happens when you say the word “Black” as it pertains to race. People will often curl their lips up, as if you’ve said something distasteful or inappropriate; the color might drain from their faces in an expression akin to dread. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” triggers the knee jerk response of “All Lives Matter.” The FBI identifies those that fight for Black American rights as a terrorist group under the title of “Black Identity Extremists.” And. increasingly, “Black” is used interchangeably with “Person of Color,” POC, which ostensibly is much less racially charged. This is a strange and disturbing phenomenon, since Black is not synonymous with POC: all Black people are persons of color, but all persons of color are not Black. And non-Black persons of color, or NBPOC, still benefit from and can practice anti-Black racism. [Read more…]
Archives for May 2019
Breadcrumbs For The Disenchanted: Peg Alford Pursell’s A Girl Goes Into The Forest
A Girl Goes Into the Forest
by Peg Alford Pursell
Dzanc, 200pp., $16.95
In the dream I was sitting with my mother in a restaurant lobby, waiting to be seated for dinner. The hostess came over, asked me my name, which I confirmed, then told me to follow her — I had a phone call. At the hostessing station, I took the black phone with the cord and on the other end of the line was my sister’s voice: tremulous, distraught. [Read more…]
2.3
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
It’s been over a year since I’ve seen Jerry. He said he was in the hospital for six months with some breathing problems. His deformation comes from surviving a shotgun blast to the face at point blank range. [Read more…]
Mythological Jazz Asteroids in the Afro Futurist Space Belt
Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery: The Comet is Coming
on Impulse!
Experience by itself, the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl said, is not science. In the hands of London band The Comet is Coming, experience is a strict adherence to improvisation and exploration that filters the scientific process into a musical call and response. It has purified their sound. So perhaps Husserl is only part right. Maybe some experience is scientific. Maybe some music is science. [Read more…]
Amon Tobin’s Fear in a Handful of Dust
On the occasions when he drops a new platter, the veteran producer/DJ-composer Amon Tobin can always be counted on to raise the sonic-magic bar several notches. From his early found-sounds ‘n’ beats productions such as Bricolage (1997), Permutation (1998), the magnificent Supermodified (2000) and Out From Out Where (2002), he progressed to things like Foley Room (2007), which explored the role of sound design and field recordings, and ISAM (2011), the titular acronym referring to “Invented Sound Applied to Music” and in which Tobin utilized advanced synthesis processing and production techniques traditionally reserved for sound design in film. [Read more…]
Artists As Keepers Of Radical Thought In The Weight of Matter
at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through June 15)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
The Weight of Matter, on view at Roberts Projects in Culver City, takes as it central premise the idea that artists are the keepers of radical thought, of dreams and incongruities, of nightmares and deepening schisms, and that these ideas are worth each and every dissection, no matter how minute or painstaking. On the surface, the exhibition appears to expand on the theme of materiality – how artists utilize their materials in new and inventive ways, yet if we look more closely, all the works included here begin with materiality as a central subject, and then deliberately and systematically subvert the process by which the works are imagined. [Read more…]
1.28
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Sharky, with his dog Buddy here, has been living on Skid Row consistently for the last three years with his wife. Together the couple has lived on and off Skid Row for many years, but normally for only three to four months at a time. Usually that’s all the time it takes for them to get back on their feet. This time, they say, it’s harder than ever to get into housing and find work. Sharky is a two striker, and because of his appearance, people won’t hire him. “I’ll shovel horse shit for eight hours a day, I don’t care. No one will hire me because of my record and the way I look.” He tells me the first time he came to Skid Row was with his Dad when he was thirteen. They came to score heroin together, and he himself used for many years. Sharky has been clean for awhile now and he and his wife were living in sober living facility, but it was putting a strain on their marriage. They decided they’d rather be happily married, even if it means living in a tent on the street, than continue to live in a sober house and have their marriage fall apart. [Read more…]
Head-Spinning Intrigue And Landmark Cinema In Zhang Yimou’s Shadow
After the limp 2017 film The Great Wall, the director Zhang Yimou was clearly looking to enact a return to form. With Shadow (2019), Zhang has done more than that: he’s created a martial-arts movie landmark, as strong in its performances as it is spectacularly novel in its violence. [Read more…]
Nari Ward: We The People
at The New Museum, NYC (through May 26)
Reviewed by John Haber
When it comes to Nari Ward, it can take a long time to hear so many voices. They are everywhere in his retrospective at the New Museum, fleshing out the sonic landscape amid (and from) the multiple installations. A tanning bed, for instance, made from oil drums, calls out not the work’s title, Glory, but an insistent “Hey, come on over here.” Sons recite their Miranda rights, in a muffled audio, to their very own father, in full dress as a retired policeman. Mahalia Jackson sings “Amazing Grace” over empty baby carriages in the outline of a slave ship. Just three words from the Constitution supply the show’s title, “We the People,” with every one of those people aching to be heard. In each case, the voices call attention to the silence that they can never quite break. And Ward has one listening to that as well. [Read more…]
1.24
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Recently Boxer here was telling me about some dope going around Skid Row that had a flesh-eating effect. After shooting up he could feel his veins beginning to irritate and itch. All through the night there was an uncomfortable burning where the drug coursed through him. Finally his hands and legs began to swell until his skin split open into bloody wounds. He showed me the sores on his arms and legs that had formed over night. Some were several inches long and an inch or more wide. Boxer said it reminded him of the Krokodil drug epidemic that broke out in Russia a few years back, which was a drug that caused a flesh-eating virus that was fatal. If you haven’t heard of the drug Krokodil, look it up, but be warned it is very grotesque. I found Boxer the next day and his wounds had gotten worse. Walking around I began to notice the same kind of wounds on others, seemingly everywhere I looked. Hopefully this is the worst of it and not the beginning of a new epidemic to plague Skid Row. [Read more…]
1.23
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
He went blind in one eye after getting jumped and hit across the face with a bottle. A year later he had to get staples in his head after getting jumped again. I see him on and off around the same haunts. His dog (Beast) is a new addition. [Read more…]
London’s Jazz Scene Is Burning
Theon Cross’s Fyah
on Gearbox Records
Theon Cross’s new album, Fyah, is a monument to the importance of the London Jazz Scene and, by proxy, that scene’s reliance on Tomorrow’s Warriors. Tomorrow’s Warriors is a musical education program Cross took part in that primarily focuses on youth of the city’s African Diaspora community, bringing them into music instrument by instrument, note by note. On Fyah, Cross delivers a hybrid of jazz influenced by electronic music, funk and reggae. The music is driven by the tuba, an oft over looked instrument, which Cross has mastered and which gives the songs within a fresh coat of innovation. [Read more…]
1.22
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Street hands. Only a person living on the streets who is constantly battered by the sun, can earn hands this beautiful. [Read more…]
Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories
You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories
by Kristen Roupenian
Scout, 225 pp., $24.99
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books
It has happened only twice in nearly seventy years: a short story appears in The New Yorker and goes viral, setting off an avalanche of responses. Some readers, fooled by its up-to-date style, misinterpret it as a piece of reportage. Others attack the author as a sadist or a misanthrope. And many more are simply confused about what it means. Is it an allegory for the suffering that women face under patriarchy? A screed that indicts contemporary society more generally? Or just a tale taken from everyday life in which something goes horribly wrong? [Read more…]
1.16
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
A wet and cold day in Skid Row. A man attempts to sleep with only a blanket to protect him from the rain. [Read more…]
Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction: A Cinematic Essay About The Digital Onslaught
Few can deny that we are currently passing through a historical epoch in terms of technological evolution. Like the generation that endured the Industrial Revolution, we are faced with new machines and inventions which promise both a leisurely future but the dismantling of modern industries. The world is changing fast for the characters of Non-Fiction as well, even as they keep the flame burning for the art of print publishing. This is the new and playful film by Olivier Assayas, one of France’s great modern directors, who has spent his last few movies pondering questions of identity and placement. Actresses facing middle age, radicals seeking nihilist satisfaction in the heated 1970s, these have been some of Assayas’s recent profiles. A drama that could also function as a cinematic essay, Non-Fiction profiles a small group of people inter-linked via their social circles in Paris. What binds them together is the world of book publishing, and even as their own lives experience small earthquakes, they find themselves consumed by the debate of whether the printed word will even survive another century. [Read more…]
1.14
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Shorty here was getting ready for the rains when I ran into her this past weekend. She’s a strong-willed lesbian who is constantly berated and threatened because of her sexual orientation. I’ve posted about her before and her struggles with being a gay woman living on the streets of Skid Row. Even while speaking with her, we had to move down the road a ways to avoid confrontation mounting from a man who let us know he didn’t like her because she is gay. Shorty didn’t let it bring her down. She told me, she may not like him and others like him for their views, but she doesn’t hate them. At the end of the day it’s all about One Love. Then she pointed to the sky, referencing to her higher belief, and I snapped this photo of her. It’s always a pleasure to speak with Shorty when I run into her. [Read more…]
Savoury New Work From Sault: “Think About It”
From 5
out today on Forever Living Originals
1.11
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Everyone reacts differently when you put a camera in their face. She goes by the name Beautiful, he goes by Lo. Our conversation was a little incoherent, but they were gracious enough to let me take some photos of them. [Read more…]
Radiant Poetic Shadows And The Timeless Framings Of Roy DeCarava
Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through June 30)
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Despite a couple of career retrospectives and a small handful of books, the late photographer Roy DeCarava is one of the most overlooked photographers of his era. His photos are among the few photographic equivalents to sound. Somehow, in spite of this majesty, his obscurity persists. But this spring, across Los Angeles, his work is being well served. DeCarava is represented by 21 photographs in the Broad Museum’s Soul of a Nation show, where the late photographer is one of many voices. While several of his disciples are part of the Annenberg Space for Photography’s Contact High show dedicated to the documentation of hip hop, it is the Underground Museum’s Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, on view until June 30th 2019, where DeCarava gets the best chance to imprint his genius upon the next generation. [Read more…]