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Words On Fire: The Literature Of The Doors

September 7, 2020 By Alci Rengifo 4 Comments

by Alci Rengifo

The music of The Doors seems to find its place in every era since the band’s stirring debut first appeared fifty years ago. Spawned in the era of Vietnam, revolution and technological innovation, The Doors dived into a dark, literary well that is timeless and always relevant. Jim Morrison alone introduced a manic onstage persona that has influenced every rock genre to emerge since the 60s. He was Dionysus meets Rimbaud, hedonistic jester meets feverish wordsmith. Because the band was fronted by a figure who viewed himself foremost as a poet — the rare rock star who even wrote fan letters to literary scholars — their music endures much the same way the edgiest of classical literature still finds devotees. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, Thought, Video

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

September 3, 2020 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

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 nationalist pride as a world hegemony, it no doubt has uprooted many personal obsessions with career paths and lifestyle. That most provocative of American film directors, Oliver Stone, has now released a passionate and absorbing memoir, Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador and the Movie Game, which in its own way, is fully apt for our time. More than any other work of autobiography to be released this summer, Stone’s account of going against the grain and demanding to be allowed to live off his vocation reads like a tonic. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

Memories and Despair: The 10 Best Films of the Year

December 18, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

by Alci Rengifo

The year 2019 was reflected in its cinema like few before it. Fittingly, the decade closes with movies that obsessively gazed upon the passage of time and the social realities which are setting parts of the world aflame. It is hard for the art of an era to escape its dominant forces. Since 2016, history has moved in a strange blur, the age of Donald Trump taking on a surrealist hue. From Jordan Peele’s Us to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, visions of class war and upheaval were expressed through dreamscapes both satirical and haunted. With another decade passing, this was also a year focused on the power of nostalgia and history’s darker edges. Martin Scorsese’s grandiose Netflix saga, The Irishman, followed a de-aged Robert De Niro through the shadowy underworld of American history. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was pure nostalgia in its reverie, working ever so hard to revive an idea of 1969 Los Angeles. Now the question is if the 2020’s will bring hope or more gazing at what has passed, with fear of what is to come. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Into the Abyss With Jonathan Glazer’s Feral Short: The Fall

December 9, 2019 By Alci Rengifo 1 Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Jonathan Glazer emerges every so often with work that above all is constructed by a powerful aesthetic. More than narratives, what Glazer crafts are images combined with soundscapes which immerse the viewer in moments of dread, hallucination and discovery. Moments which could have the feel of a common day action suddenly take on a dreamlike ambiance. In Glazer’s underrated 2004 film, Birth, Nicole Kidman plays an upper class New Yorker confronted with the possibility that a young boy is her reincarnated husband. His 2013 Under the Skin finds a silent woman played by Scarlett Johansson, an extraterrestrial in human form, drives through grey streets seeking male prospects for the purpose of consuming their physical essence for an unclear plan. In both films familiar settings, whether upscale dinner parties or gritty alleyways, are touched by extreme possibilities. But how does the artist respond to the world when it actually does become extreme? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

A Portrait Of Bolivian Heartbreak

November 27, 2019 By Alci Rengifo 1 Comment

By Alci Rengifo

An Associated Press photo by Natasha Pisarenko shows an indigenous Bolivian woman standing amid clouds of tear gas, holding the national flag and at its tip, the Wiphala flag of the nation’s indigenous peoples. Her society is again a victim of history. Its dreams vanished in acrid smoke. The photo’s aesthetic is both human and brimming with intensity. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Inside The Image, The Line, Thought

Errol Morris On Sitting Down With Alt-Right Nationalist Steve Bannon In American Dharma

November 8, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

By Alci Rengifo

Errol Morris, one of the great documentary filmmakers, has sat down with men from the halls of power for years. In his new film, American Dharma, Morris faces Steve Bannon, one of the darker lingering figures of our very recent collective history. If some of the world’s major publications were a bit more astute they would have long ago tagged Bannon as the person of the year, if not the decade. An argument can be made that Bannon is the most dangerous man in the world. Known primarily as the odd right-wing firebrand who helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and before that as the head of the infamous website Breitbart News, Bannon’s shadow casts over every major gain by an emerging, new proto-fascism. In Brazil he consulted the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, in Europe he rubs shoulders with Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, power players united in their paranoid policies aimed at immigrants and leftists. What sets Bannon apart from the stereotypical Trump aficionado, if not Trump himself, is that he is an actual ideologue, a reactionary internationalist designed for a postmodern world. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, Interview, The Line

Joker Resurrectus: Pop Iconography Fills The Nihilist Void

November 1, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

By Alci Rengifo

As these words are written the streets of Santiago, Chile and Beirut, Lebanon are ablaze with the fury of thousands of voices raging against an irrational economic system. It is a world of tremors at the moment, with riots serving as a conduit for the general mood of vast communities. Significant is the fact that we are also living through a moment devoid of political vision or revolutionary alternatives. The old icons have receded in the public consciousness. Who are the thinkers of our time brushing away the old world? The cost of living hurtles upwards and an economically stable life becomes elusive for the young. Who speaks for them? Within the current void the masses instead lose themselves in the comfort of fantasy and caricatures that symbolize their despair. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Thought

The Surreal Spirit Of Salvador Simo Busom’s Buñuel In The Labyrinth Of The Turtles

August 27, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

An animated movie by GKIDS Films about one of the great iconoclasts and rebels of the cinema is fittingly surreal when the subject in question is Luis Buñuel. The Spanish master has been conjured in numerous films about other people over the years, from his comic-light appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris to Little Ashes, an altogether not uninteresting drama about Buñuel’s broken friendship with Salvador Dali. That, too, was a surreal experience in that Dali was interpreted no less by Robert Pattinson. I have to report, however, that this new animated feature, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, is till now the best dramatization of Buñuel’s early years, since it’s illustrated approach is free to imagine the master’s mind as a landscape of distorting dreams while still wisely interpreting the world around him. Director Salvador Simo also understands something elemental about Surrealism as a movement: that it was not simply about trippy images but, perhaps more so, about the revolutionary transformation of life and the world. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

The Aesthetic Of Nostalgia In Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood

August 1, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

By Alci Rengifo

Nostalgia has replaced epochs in the modern culture. There is the increasing feeling that while technology certainly races ahead in its advancement, culturally we are obsessively looking to the past. Vinyl is sought after by the kids who are convinced it sounds better than digitally remastered albums on CD or streaming. The look of videotape is being recreated for music videos and even entire film projects. Music scores are reviving the techno sheen of the 1980s. Millennials, having just missed out on the 80s and consuming art while growing up highly influenced by the 70s, are desperate to reach back. With consumer culture now defining the times and creating stagnation in any new art forms or styles, the past takes on a new glow. But few filmmakers can make art out of nostalgia quite like Quentin Tarantino. His new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, defines nostalgia itself. In its look and sound it feels like a brain working in overdrive to recall a specific moment in its archived history. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line, Thought

David Crosby and Cameron Crowe on Capturing a Legendary Life in Remember My Name

July 25, 2019 By Alci Rengifo 1 Comment

By Alci Rengifo

At 77, the youthful fire inside David Crosby refuses to flicker out. The music legend makes this more than evident in the new, reflective documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name. A chronicle of his highs and lows, Crosby impressively allows this to be a work of complete, sometimes stinging honesty. Directed by A.J. Eaton with renowned director and journalist Cameron Crowe producing, Remember My Name leaves few stones unturned in Crosby’s life. In a sense he is a survivor from that last generation of creative minds who were heirs to the Romantic tradition. Born in the shadow of World War II, finding a voice in the tumultuous 60s, there’s more to a personality like Crosby than the mere tag of “old hippie.” From his drug abuse to writing iconic music and touring as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young before the group implodes amid intense squabbles, it’s all laid bare in this film. And that’s exactly how he wanted it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, Interview, The Line

Benjamin Naishtat’s Rojo And A Region’s Cinematic Reckoning

July 19, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

The cinema of the Andes is a haunted art form. Rojo is set in the Argentina of the 1970s, plotted and shot like a classic noir, with a dark political subtext. Like many of the best recent films from this particular South American country and its neighbor Chile, the crime genre is used to tackle the legacy of the neo-fascist military regimes that governed these countries during the Cold War. This adds a layer of richness to the storytelling you don’t find in most U.S. movies or shows about detectives and murder. Noir has of course always been a vehicle to express the deepest recesses of any society, going back to films made by German expatriates in the U.S. during and after World War II. Fleeing the Nazis, directors like Fritz Lang framed the American underbelly with titles like The Big Heat and Scarlet Street. Now it is Latin American directors coming of age in the lingering aftermath of political terror who are refurnishing the genre in new ways. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Nick Broomfield on Muses and Bohemian Memories in Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love

July 9, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

By Alci Rengifo

Nick Broomfield is now 71 years old, and while he has not lost the feisty, investigative energy of a born muckraker, he is now continuously traveling back into the past. In his memories, two figures have been manifesting themselves as of late: Leonard Cohen, poet, songwriter, almost mystical icon and Marianne Christine Ihlen, Cohen’s muse whom he first encountered on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s. Broomfield’s new documentary, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, chronicles not only Cohen’s development as an artist but his more intimate self as well, and the love affair that stayed with him until the very end. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, Interview, The Line

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

June 19, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Will we ever see the likes of Bob Dylan again? It is a question easily inspired by Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a sprawling, indeed thundering chronicle, now streaming on Netflix, of one of the American bard’s most legendary travels across the United States. What made this particular venture unique was the transitional phase the country was enduring, emerging from the tumult of the 1960s, its self-trust scarred, possibly beyond repair. Fittingly, this tale is told by Martin Scorsese, not only a great filmmaker but an artist obsessed with the past.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction: A Cinematic Essay About The Digital Onslaught

May 6, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

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…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Gan Bi’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night Floats Along The Back Rivers Of Memory

May 1, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

It is difficult to describe the experience of watching Long Day’s Journey Into Night without sounding as if you are remembering a dream. The new film by China’s Gan Bi is more about ambiance than plot, more about the hazy feeling of attempting to travel back in time through the eye of mind. It is the very texture of the film that weaves a strange spell. Bi is one of the emerging new voices of Chinese cinema, which is already renowned for visual inventiveness.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

The Storm of History: Sergei Bundarchuk’s War and Peace

April 4, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

By Alci Rengifo

The movies now give us an “epic” nearly every week of the year. Digital technology, corporate budgets and the public’s own current thirst for shallow escapism have paved the way for visions both ludicrous and wondrous. Chiseled, tattooed ruffians bestrode kraken-like monsters in Aquaman, cyborgs levitate from futuristic cities buried in trash in Alita: Battle Angel. But what do these films have to say? As we wallow in popcorn excess, Janus Films restores and re-releases the grandest, deepest epic of all, Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. Made in 1967, it shames everything, and I mean absolutely everything, playing at the ArcLight today. Slated for a June release on DVD and Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection, it is touring various arthouse spots and must be seen on a proper, wide canvas. Your humble correspondent was lucky enough to catch such a screening at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. It will grace the Egyptian in Hollywood on April 27. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Alone Within the Revolution: Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment

February 12, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

by Alci Rengifo

The writer wanders the seaside of a great island lost in his own thoughts, lovesick and grappling with a changing world. Such is the enduring image of Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s masterpiece Memories of Underdevelopment, which remains the greatest jewel of Cuban cinema. First released in that fevered year of 1968 to worldwide acclaim, it remained largely unavailable in the United States for decades, eternally referenced in film scholarship yet not easy to actually view. Now thanks to the Criterion Collection, it has returned to us, beautifully remastered and stunningly relevant. Made when the Cuban Revolution was merely a decade old and still enflaming passions in the hemisphere, it now speaks to us in a restless yet post-revolutionary moment, when its audience sees it from a the vantage point of dashed dreams and uncertain hopes. When Alea first made this movie his protagonist was an intellectual questioning himself within a society determined to inaugurate a Marxist future, today he would feel at home in a world where nobody can say what is coming. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line, Thought

Dick Cheney’s Imperial Shadow Looms Large in Adam McKay’s Vice

December 21, 2018 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

One can only imagine what the great Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius would write about our own imperial moment. From rugged colonial stock the union sprout, liberated itself from the British crown, declared itself the United States, expanded in both territory and military might, and birthed characters like Richard Bruce Cheney. Forever imbedded in the world’s bloody consciousness as “Dick,” Cheney’s shadow looms large over the last 40 years of American history in Adam McKay’s brilliant, savagely insightful Vice. It is both a biography of power and a reckoning with the republic’s spiral into a capitalist behemoth straddling the globe. Some may be taken aback by McKay’s sense of dark comedy, in which the halls of power are exposed as a nest of minds which are not particularly cultured, but ruthlessly focused on the wielding of influence for profit and control. In that great American tradition going back to Mark Twain and Gore Vidal, McKay is using his own art form as a tool of scorching iconoclasm, rendering official histories to dust and transforming Dick Cheney himself into a figure both titanic and tragic. It falls on Christian Bale and Amy Adams’s shoulders to embody figures full of pain and ravenous villainy who perform their drama on the world stage. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Visions of the Age: A Top 10 Of 2018

December 19, 2018 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

by Alci Rengifo

It is the cinema which chronicles the passions, nightmares and dreams of an era. To look back at the movies of any given decade is to peer into the very fabric of an age’s consciousness. We are currently living through a period of historical transition, a moment Gramsci would recognize as a moment when an old world is beginning to die and what will come forth we do not yet know. Paris is burning, new parties worship the cult of blood and land. This helps explain why much of the year’s defining cinema obsesses itself with the past, the present and an aching uncertainty over what is to come. Yet some movies were also full of hope and tenderness, wisdom and the reverie of romance. I spent much of this year in darkened screening rooms all over Los Angeles. Whether in a hidden corner of Rodeo Drive or in some distant multiplex in Burbank, I found myself moved, exhilarated or challenged with despair. Here are ten offerings which defined the year in film, and crystalize our place in this current passage of time. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism

November 29, 2018 By Alci Rengifo 1 Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism
by Timothy Denevi

PublicAffairs, 416 pp., $18.30

Timothy Denevi's Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American FascismOn a cloudy Tuesday afternoon I found myself by a train station in Santa Monica ordering an Uber ride. To ride the train through the bowels of the city can be a daily reminder that quite a sector of our civilization has gone completely insane, but the Uber ride itself put the icing on the cake and confirmed this dark suspicion. The driver, who shall remain unnamed, was a jolly type with a curious name. I have a bad habit of getting easily into conversation with any human who crosses my path and asked where the driver hailed from. Poland was the answer. Ah yes, Poland. I mentioned that Poland has been undergoing quite the political sea change, using those words as to not say the current government as right-wing and nationalist. This was my second mistake. The driver quickly announced himself as a partisan of the ruling Law and Justice Party (what a shudder to even type such a name) because, hey, they were getting rid of “the Communists still left over from the past,” who are inevitably “controlled by the Jews.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

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Riot Sounds

Sleaford Mods, "Force 10 From Navarone," featuring Florence Shaw, can be listened to at Riot Material magazine -- in the exclusive Riot Sounds.

New From the Mods: “Force 10 From Navarone”

Sleaford Mods
feat. Florence Shaw (of Dry Cleaning)
from UK Grim

on Rough Trade

Dean Blunt's "The Rot." Listen at Riot Material under the exclusive Riot Sounds.

“The Rot” — Though A Rose By Any Other Name

by Dean Blunt
feat. Joanne Robertson
from BLACK METAL 2

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/10-the-rot.m4a

on Rough Trade

The Line

A poetic interpretation of Anselm Kiefer's Exodus, at Los Angeles Marciano Art Foundation, is at Riot Material.

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023) by Rachel Reid Wilkie Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in […]

Songbook of a Bygone Dead: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Reviewed by Dan Chiasson The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93 NYR Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the […]

Grant Wallace, “Through Evolution Comes Revelation.” at Riot Material magazine.

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022) By Michael Bonesteel Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” […]

Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

Smoking the Bible Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99 HR Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along […]

Yehonatan Koenig. "Shulamith" (2022). At Riot Material Magazine

Yehonatan Koenig’s Subversion of the Ordinary

Knowing Not Knowing, at Matt Drey Arts (presenting with the Kava Collective) by Mat Gleason The art of Yehonatan Koenig is a subatomic soiree, every mark-making molecule involved in contributing to a higher purpose along the way. There is form and structure revealed here, an elegant point in the digressions of a thousand or more […]

The Joshua Tree Talk

A Conversation on Dzogchen C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie at Joshua Tree Retreat Center 

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Idris Khan's The Pattern of Landscape at Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles. An interview with Idris is at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Idris Khan

The Pattern of Landscape, at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles (through 5 November 2022) by Ricky Amadour Opening on the corner of Highland and De Longpre Avenues in the heart of Hollywood, Idris Khan’s The Pattern of Landscape is the inaugural exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Khan investigates color theory, text, and musical concepts through […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

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