Riot Material

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Archives for October 2020

Stalking Memory to Spy Out One’s Self in Patrick Modiano’s Invisible Ink

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Invisible Ink
by Patrick Modiano
Yale University Press, 176 pp., $24.00

If there is a suitcase, forged documentation, café-life and tons of mileage accumulated tramping the streets of Paris, it’s a pretty safe guess that you are inside a Patrick Modiano novel. The French writer, whose Nobel Prize in 2014 launched him into a new stratosphere of exposure, acclaim and readership (with many of his works now having been translated into English), has been haunting a familiar path, a twilit phantom territory all his own, for the past fifty-plus years. [Read more…]

Lockdown Be Damned! Raffaello 1520–1483: An Exhibition in Rome

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at the Scuderie del Quirinale
Reviewed by Ingrid D. Rowland

Raffaello 1520–1483
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lafranconi, with Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Vincenzo Farinella Skira
543 pp., €46.00 (paper) (in Italian; an English translation will be published in October 2020)
The New York Review of Books

Like the artist himself, the long-anticipated Raphael exhibition that opened in Rome on March 5, 2020, was struck down by infectious disease. Raphael succumbed to a sudden fever on April 6, 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday. The exhibition that marked the five hundredth anniversary of his death lasted only four days. On March 9, the Italian government issued a decree prohibiting “every form of gathering in public places” to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and every public institution in Italy shut its doors. Raphael’s birthday came and went with his legacy under lockdown. [Read more…]

Don DeLillo’s Engrossing Yet Oddly Frictionless New Novella, The Silence

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Reviewed by Dwight Garner

The Silence
by Don DeLillo
Scribner, 128pp., has $19.22
NY Times

Don DeLillo’s slim new novel, The Silence, is a pristine disaster novel with apocalyptic overtones. It’s a Stephen King novel scored by Philip Glass instead of Chuck Berry. A plane from Paris to Newark crash-lands. Two of the main characters are on this flight, and they survive. Power grids have gone down all over the world. Aliens? The Chinese? The Joker? QAnon? [Read more…]

Dismantling One of the Great Encyclopedic Museums in the Country: The Regrettable LACMA Redesign

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by Joseph Giovannini
NYRB Online

“This is a hostile takeover of the museum, and if the design succeeds in hijacking the institution, Los Angeles will be living for a long time with a wanton act of architecture, and the bitter memory of a very expensive betrayal of the public trust.”  —Joseph Giovannini

There are two demolitions going on at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi, with collections spanning many historical periods and cultures. Over the last several months, the museum has razed three of the four structures on the East Campus, the original core of the institution—themselves only sixty years old—and excavators are now polishing off the last and largest, the Ahmanson Building. The East Campus will soon be a bowl of dust. [Read more…]

Palo Alto Sees the Thelonious Monk Quartet at its “Final Creative High”

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Reviewed by Marty Sartini Garner

Palo Alto
on Impulse!
Pitchfork

Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, people hadn’t just gotten around to his oblong, minimalist take on jazz—they’d left it behind. After decades of toiling in New York’s clubs to little outside recognition, Monk had briefly tasted superstardom, culminating in a 1964 Time magazine cover. Less than half a decade later, he’d slipped to No. 6 on DownBeat’s International Critics Poll ranking jazz’s best pianists, and writers routinely dismissed his playing as stale and uninspired. Still, he was Thelonious Sphere Monk: If he was no longer weird, and no longer a superstar, he was still a legend. A legend who couldn’t afford to miss a $500 payday at a high school. [Read more…]

Possessor

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Glenn Kenny

Possessor (2020), about an assassin who works by taking over the mind and body of someone who can get close to the victim without suspicion, could have sprung from the imagination of David Cronenberg and, like his early films, Possessor is equal parts cerebral and visceral. But this film is the work of the writer-director Brandon Cronenberg, his son. It depicts horrific murders in appalling detail as it relentlessly interrogates the experience of inhabiting a foreign body. [Read more…]

Music for a Revolution: A Word with Jazz Great Archie Shepp

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Interview by Accra Shepp
NYRB

My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the details of melody, harmony, and rhythm are all improvised to create a grand conversation: voices rise and fall, sometimes echoing one another, sometimes dissonant and discordant. In the 1970s and 1980s he wove the blues into his music, extending our understanding of this tradition. His cultural influence reaches far beyond the realm of jazz, touching artists as diverse as Ntozake Shange and Chuck D. [Read more…]