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The LA Times And The Question Of Crisis Deliverance

March 20, 2020 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

by C von Hassett

The LA Times, once a towering, globally respected newspaper, has become a click-bait web of invasive ads and circus-style barking for subscription servicing that, though intolerable even when things in our city were on the norm, now come across as shark-like and ravenous, a dubious entity profiteering its wares much in the way of the two deplorables who stocked up on some 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizers with full intent of selling off all to the fearful for a handsome profit. They, if you recall, were swiftly booted from Amazon for price-gouging and were universally demonized in numerous news outlets around the world. Is not the sanitized LA Times, in this perfect viral storm, hawking their wares much the same? Are they not hording the gold of crisis-era information and, rather than sharing it without charge — as is their civic duty — they instead frontload every headline, every one-sentence introductory blurb, with either an onslaught of ads or swift delivery to a paid subscription page. No Corona updates without cash in hand for those of us living under its singular mantle, for no longer in this city is there a competing newspaper to call them in check. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Thought

Angela Davis On What It Means To Be A Revolutionary

March 20, 2019 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

One of the videos on view at the entrance of The Broad’s exceptional new exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (opening March 23), is Angela Davis speaking to the idea of what it means to be a revolutionary. It is a timely reminder and an historical call to hone once-again one’s revolutionary teeth. A review of Soul of a Nation is forthcoming.

Angela Davis (1972)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Video

Nan Goldin Breathes Word Into Her Seminal Work, The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency

November 16, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

On view at Matthew Marks, Los Angeles, are a selection of photographs from Nan Goldin’s hypnotic and haunting series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which in its original format is a 48 minute slideshow documenting Goldin’s life in over 700 photographs and 30 songs, the text of which, those songs, acting as the narrative for the “film.”

In her introduction to the book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin writes:

I was eleven when my sister committed suicide. This was in 1965, when teenage suicide was a taboo subject. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, Interview, The Line, Video

The Seditious, Colorless Eye Of Richard Avedon and James Baldwin

November 13, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

1964. Richard Avedon and James Baldwin publish their spare yet radical treatise shot through to the arrow’s heart of America and much-adored Americana. Their collection, perhaps even more radically, was titled  Nothing Personal, and nothing at the time could have been further from the blood-slaked truth. One can only imagine how so very personal, and how lacerating, these images must have been in the high epoch of Jim Crow, where the unsilenced shot of pistol, the swift stroke of knife, the snap of rope, the strike of skin-crackling fire were the unmitigated and unmediated means of cage-keeping of the day. This fall Taschen will republish a facsimile edition of  Nothing Personal, with unpublished photographs and a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als. Als’ introduction is excerpted below. An exhibition of images from Nothing Personal will be on view at Pace Gallery, NYC, from 17 November through 13 January, 2018. — CvH

Nothing Personal
by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin
Introduced by Hilton Als

I am about thirteen years old and my body and mind are carried along by the energy that thinking engenders in me—the nearly phosphorescent ideas and possibilities I find in books, looking at pictures, and whenever I visit a museum. Some of the photo books I covet the most can’t be checked out from the Brooklyn Public Library, so, day after day, I duck out of my junior high school, in Crown Heights, and, walking past the Brooklyn Museum, then through the Botanic Garden, I go to look at them in the stacks. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, Image, The Line, Thought

The New Avant-Garde: David Lynch’s Glorious Late-Career Vision

August 24, 2017 By C von Hassett 5 Comments

Episode 3
by C von Hassett

The new Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) finds David Lynch working in fresh and sublimely haunting domains, ones that pleasurably flirt or unnervingly skirt the spectral drop-offs of some charged and sinister abyss. This seems no visional or evolutional change of tack, nor does it appear, at least in these early episodes, Lynch is newly surveying unmapped terrains. Rather, there is something more elevated in this late-career landscape, and something far more intimate as well. One senses, when viewing this new series, particularly his excursions into Lynchian Other-Realms, that his articulation of these doppelgänging worlds feel more experiential than conceptual, more occupied than conceptualized.

Cinema Disordinaire: Twin Peaks, Episode 3
Cinema Disordinaire: Twin Peaks, Episode 3

Less dream (or dreamy) than earlier movements into surrealist expression, the first quarter of Episode 3, for instance, shows Lynch, in an extraordinary way, to be as clear-eyed and sure-footed as he’s ever been in these ghostly yet thoroughly gripping realms. It’s as if, rather than imagining, some doppelgänger of himself now inhabits these realms, sending in return faint coordinates and word; or Lynch, figuratively, has set foot in them himself, excursioned through them in a near-corporeal way, and now with intimate familiarity he is able to speak cinematically to their airy constructions, and he does this with such nuance that they feel like alternate extents of consciousness and being: expansive, elusive, wholly mercurial states of mind-borne self. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line

David Lynch’s The Amputee

July 13, 2017 By C von Hassett 2 Comments

1973. David Lynch had been shooting Eraserhead for roughly one year when he ran out of cash. The film was suddenly and indefinitely on hold. It was, he says, “a depressing time.” It was also this time that the American Film Institute asked a friend of his, Fred, to shoot a test using two different black and white video stocks to determine which stock was best, because, as Lynch tells it, “they were going to buy a bunch.” Lynch says when he heard AFI was buying video tapes, “it gave me a sadness, and I worried they were going to have to change the name of the place” (from American Film Institute to American Video Institute). “So I looked at Fred, and I got an idea, and I said, um, ‘Fred, does it matter what you shoot?’ And he said, ‘Well, what are you talking about?” And I said ‘Could you shoot anything you want? Twice. One with one stock and one with the other, and go like that, for the test?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’ So I said, ‘Could I write something and make something for tomorrow?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’”

That evening Lynch wrote The Amputee. The next day he shot this video:

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line, Video

The 1978 Paper That Predicted Our Nearing “Disaster”

July 12, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

C von

If the greenhouse warming effect of the resultant increasing atmospheric CO2 is as great as the most advanced current models suggest, a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress. De­glaciation would probably be rapid once it had started, and when complete would have led to a rise in sea level of about 5m along most coasts.  

–Prof. John H. Mercer, 26 January 1978

12 July 2017

A trillion-ton iceberg totaling 2,240 square miles, or 12% of the Antarctic peninsula, and 40 trillion cubic feet of ice — a volume twice that of Lake Erie — today broke free from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. Following the collapse of the Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, today’s calving further weakens the entire continental glacier and sets in motion what scientist believe is the first stage of total glacial collapse. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, The Natural World, Thought

Cracked Actor To Cracked Actor

June 29, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1-10-Cracked-Actor-Live.mp3

Cracked Actor (Live, Los Angeles ’74)

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1-05-Sweet-Thing_Candidate_Sweet-Thing-Reprise-Live.mp3

Sweet Thing/Candidate (Live, Los Angeles ’74)

In honor and in celebration of Cracked Actor, the new live release from David Bowie’s infamously depraved yet musically stellar ’74 tour (the new album narrows in on one evening, his September 5th show at Los Angeles’ Universal Amphitheater, which I had the blearied pleasure of attending!), Riot Material scratched up a BBC documentary from that same tour, titled Cracked Actor: A Film About David Bowie. The 1975 film, viewable below, is directed by Alan Yentob: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, Interview, Records, The Line, Video

Savage And Lovely: The Bad Batch

June 23, 2017 By C von Hassett 1 Comment

Reviewed by C von Hassett

The Bad Batch (2016) is a stark and stunning new film by Ana Lily Amirpour. And timely too, considering every effort by our current regime to cast those of seeming naught into the desperate oblivions of a world only slightly less unhinged than the one depicted in this film. With a nod to the current depravity of our day, the film opens (forgive my indulgence) in the wet dream of said regime whose spooging head is our ever-ranting, ever-pissy Child-in-Chief — let’s call him Boy — he who nightly wets his bed and in the dreamy slosh fingers blindly for his own plundered asshole. Were the Boy blessedly in this film, he’d be swiftly on a sizzling spit: fatted swine for its flesh-hungry natives. 

We first meet our protagonist, a wordless Arlen May Johnson, aka Inmate 5040, as guards walk her to desert’s edge, to the kingdom’s unceremonial gate (American chain link), to literally lock her away from fair society. She stands, indifferent to her plight, with only a backpack, a burger (which she promptly eats) and a half-filled jug of water. Ignored is the wooded post which reads: 

Warning: Beyond this fence is no longer the territory of Texas. That hereafter no person within the territory beyond this fence is a resident of the United States of America or shall be acknowledged, recognized or governed by the laws and governing bodies therein. Good luck. 

There, she is loosed into a blistering landscape of sand and sunbaked clay, and she walks straight in as would a schoolgirl through a noonday park, though there is little question here of her arrival into something far more suspect. Arlen’s first encounter is with a tribe of desert body builders — a brutish, body-ripped band in need, naturally, of good supply of protein. Stray travelers seem their sole course, and these luckless lie chained and limbless in what unremittingly comes as another feed, one body part at a time. Arlen, freshly snatched from the feral barrens, no sooner meets with a hacksaw than she wiles a witting escape, and face-up to the blazing sun, a snapped up skateboard as her ride, she pushes into a fevered dream one foot, and only one foot, at a time. What follows is a love story.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Lovely New Work From Kamasi Washington: “Truth”

April 17, 2017 By C von Hassett 1 Comment

Though New York for years has had an inspiringly lively and progressive jazz scene, Kamasi Washington, approaching the American cultural front, is singlehandedly making the form relevant once more. His forthcoming EP, Harmony of Difference, currently (and exclusively heard) in its own room at the Whitney, will surely set the stage for the long in coming Jazz Renaissance. 

Hands down the best collaborative work at this year’s Biennial, and in fact the single best piece in the exhibition (no diss on an otherwise excellent affair, particularly floor 6), is Washington’s stellar “Truth” and the equally affecting film in accompaniment, Harmony of Difference, written and directed by AG Rojas.

— the video, as you can see below, has been scrubbed from the internet, so below is the actual track —

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/06-Truth.m4a

Kamasi Washington, “Truth”

 

According to the Whitney press release, “Harmony of Difference is an original six-movement suite that explores the philosophical possibilities of the musical technique known as counterpoint, which Washington defines as ‘the art of balancing similarity and difference to create harmony between separate melodies.’

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, The Line

Painting The Elephant In The Room: A Conversation With Justin Lyons

March 8, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Justin Lyons is a mixed media artist living in the Florida panhandle. We spoke with him on the eve of his solo exhibition at the Bruce Lurie Gallery in Los Angeles.

CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: Before addressing your most recent work, I wanted to briefly touch on a few signature elements in what is considered to be pivotal career pieces, elements which not only define but help flesh out your global visual language. This language, by the way, initially and superficially registers as being quite primitive, even crude, but upon spending time with these pieces it becomes apparent that something more thoughtful and sophisticated is taking place. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

An Interview With Neville Wakefield, Curator Of Desert X

February 22, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Neville Wakefield is the Curator and Artistic Director of Desert X, a site-specific contemporary art exhibition
 ongoing throughout the Coachella Valley from February 25 to April 30, 2017. RIOT MATERIAL spoke with Neville on the eve of Desert X’s launch. 

CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: What is it about these artists you’ve selected for Desert X that speak to you personally, or speak to a greater vision you’re trying to articulate through the exhibition, and I refer to them more as an inter-connective group as opposed to distinct individuals?  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

An Envisioned Aftermath: Four Years Into A State of DTs

December 11, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

In 2012 Justice David Souter anticipated an “invasion of ignorance” which a mere four years on, at the close of 2016, bares its unsightly teeth. RIOT MATERIAL, lacking all the foresight of the good judge, holds out its own prognosticatory lens and aims it four years further. That lens, naturally, peers through art, and though art has the timeless ability to show the way forward, it can equally enlighten as to which way we should not go. 

Below is one scenario of a nation, 2020, gone prophetically grate.  

Many thanks to the great artist Roger Ballen for this apocalyptic short, Outland.

Filed Under: Artist, The Line

The Moment Worth Struggling Toward

December 10, 2016 By C von Hassett 1 Comment

The Event of Literature

An Interview with Erin Currier

CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: There seems to be an explicit call to action in much of your work, or at the very least the demand that one take note of some supreme injustice in the land or amongst peoples. Yet what I appreciate about your work is that, more than it being mere critique or some one-dimensional, stop-action capture, it instead offers a way forward, and in my mind that way forward is dependably the right way forward. I’m thinking of, as an example, a new work of yours titled American Women (Dismantling the Border). Can you speak more to this idea of there being a constructive framework or, rather, this inherently optimistic baseline level of production which seems not only to shape but lay a distinctive stamp across your entire arc of expression? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

A Tribe Manifesto and Masterwork of the Moment

November 16, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service
Reviewed by C von Hassett

A Tribe Called Quest just dropped their first album in 18 years, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Released mere days after the Great Debacle of 2016, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service is remarkably, if not thrillingly present tense. Wholly animate in both sound and vision, it is a record that is also uniquely relevant — as much for being in essential response to the angst and rancor of the day as it is for inspiring, as good art tends to do, a requisite spark that might yet ignite conscientious action in the days and months ahead.

Theirs, with this exceptional release, is the resounding shot of this new cycle, and it is one which heralds little quarter. Straight-in they reject a presidential promise that unblushingly assures “all you Black folks, you must go / all you Mexicans, you must go / all you poor folks, you must go / Muslims and gays…” The vitriol, borne high on foul national sentiments, amounts to a kind-of maniacal voodoo, to use their image, and they counter the venom with their own dream serum of living in a world inclusive of all, one without division “no matter the skin tone, culture or time zone.” We are long on a grim horizon from there, but in the storm that is surely in approach, “young leaders will rise / in the eyes of despair and adversity.”

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/1-03-Whateva-Will-Be-copy.m4a

Whatever Will Be

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, Records, The Line

Pipilotti Rist Dreams Us In Return

November 15, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Pixel Forest
New Museum, NYC

The New Museum’s three-floor exhibition, Pixel Forest, from Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, is an immersive wonder. If you’re looking for an enchanting, into-the-wilds experience where you can literally lie around — beds and floor cushions are in plenty — then this is the show for you.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Claws Out, Bristow Draws Sonic Blood

November 13, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Jackie Bristow Live 
at Piano Bar, Los Angeles
Reviewed by C von Hassett

Look out Lucinda. The heir to blistering Americana is honing her craft and unleashing some heat on LA’s pulsing musical fringe, known otherwise as its de facto center. New Zealand-born, Los Angeles-based Jackie Bristow sculpts out some distinctive terrain with the formative blade of her exemplary band and the clement heart of her winsome songcraft.

Bristow on record is rather in the tradition of the lovestruck or lonely, a sultry, mid-tempo sound that has as its subject a woman vulnerable yet invincibly strong, a woman to worship were it not for ill-fatings or a misalignment in the stars. Unsurprisingly on stage her presence is one of tenderness and backcountry charm, her voice both sweetly raw and refreshingly unrefined.

Her band, however, at least the one in current support, is an urban fur that wraps her and warms her to those more in want of a good sonic mauling. They, this connective quartet, are muscular and fierce and sculpt out a body of sound rooted deeply in country, blues, rock and roll, and perhaps something more distinctively Los Angeles, that of great session players coming together for an evening on stage or, that rarer wed, a lasting incarnation that not only translates but transforms one artist’s vision into a leaner, dare I say meaner, more enduring sound.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, The Line

Eileen Quinlan at Miguel Abreu

November 1, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Reviewed by C von Hassett

The appropriately titled Curtains, Eileen Quinlan’s spare exhibition at Miguel Abreu, unsettles in ways few shows dare. The 24 black-and-white prints, all gelatin silver, communicate a spirit that is both cryptic and choleric. They dampen, these images, as in deaden. They silence. One feels in their presence as if having stepped into the afterings of a wake, casket still open, all guests gone. Something yet lingers.

Part of what disquiets in this utterly hushed series is the spectering of Quinlan’s own aggressive hand, which haunts in ways comparable to the cramping of a limb not long ago severed. It manifests as fitful revenant in openly hostile attacks against the negatives themselves, which are scarred with slashings and steel wool scourings and experimental broodings borne of plain artistic urge. A good dozen-plus prints in the show reflect the latter. As fly to wonton boys, killed solely for the sport, the negatives for these prints were left for hours or days in chemical baths, eroding or outright obliterating any image that might have been and erasing with it any expectation as to what a photograph should even minimally convey. To that end, these prints merely allude to photography, working as they do in the same medium. They are acting, however, in an alternate other: as medium in a kind of necromancy. They conjure rather than represent.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

Ascension at Rox Gallery

November 1, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Reviewed by C von Hassett

The press release for Ascension describes an exhibition where “fragmentation abounds in multitudinous ‘selves’, highlighting large-scale interactions between national and, arguably, mystical realms.”

Moving through the Rox Gallery’s two-level group show, however, my impression was that the artists in the gallery’s meandering lower level were engaged in a far more interesting and urgent discussion about a virulent kind of masculinity that is proving to be not just failed but fatal to the longterm existence of our species. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist

Corpus Americas at Driscoll Babcock

November 1, 2016 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

Reviewed by C von Hassett

I’ve not been to a wax museum but I can imagine the Frankenstein on display might look something like Corpus Americus, the new group exhibition at Driscoll Babcock. Then again, the better analogy might be in the source material itself, in Shelly’s nameless creature who to this day stalks the starless wilds of our imaginations. For beneath the patchwork of skins stitched loosely into an ungainly whole, there is indeed something alive at the heart of Corpus Americus.

The animating strike is the question, “what does it mean to be an American today,” an idea that resides as much in abstract notions of America as in a chimeric Americana, those fabled high periods of yore. America today is a country far downwind from those onetime peaks, and in the lowlands things have begun to smell a bit foul. The stench no doubt lifts from the Corpse Politicus, our national institution that’s been so supremely bungled by the very leaders we entrusted with its care. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist

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The Line

A review of Mark Lynas's new book, "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency," is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Earth Commences Her Retalitory Roar

Reviewed by Bill McKibben  Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas London: 4th Estate, 372 pp., $27.99 The New York Review of Books So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, […]

Oliver Stone in Vietnam. A review of his new book, Chasing the Light, is at Riot Material

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

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 […]

Toyin Ojih Odutola's wonderful exhibition, A Countervailing Theory, at Barbican Centre, London, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory

at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and […]

Driving Whle Black, two books reviewed at Riot Material

Segregation on the Highways: A Review of Driving While Black and Overground Railroad

by Sarah A. Seo Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95 Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00 The New York Review of Books In 1963, after Sam Cooke was […]

A review of Sontag: Here Life and Work is at Riot Material

Losing the Writer in the Personality: A Review of Sontag: Her Life and Work

Reviewed by Michael Gorra Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser Ecco, 816 pp., $39.99 New York Review of Books Susan Sontag began to read philosophy and criticism as a teenager at North Hollywood High, when she still signed her editorials in the school newspaper as “Sue.” She read Kant and La Rochefoucauld, Oswald […]

Darkness Half Visible In Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

Reviewed by John Biscello The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina Two Dollar Radio, 353pp., $12.74 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again In the name of nursery rhyme remixology, first let us […]

Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, is reviewed at Riot Material

Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People

Reviewed by Patrick Lohier Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99 Harvard Review In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” […]

Lord Krishna speaks to Prince Arjuna about the Gita

Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita Translated by Eknath Easwaran Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00 Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked […]

A review of Kevin Young's Brown is at Riot Material

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor Brown: Poems by Kevin Young Knopf, 176pp., $19.29 Harvard Review In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” […]

Dispatch: Poems, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Reviewed by Flora Field Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich Persea, 80pp., $12.69 Columbia Journal In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the […]

The Monument to Joe Louis, aka "The Fist," as sculpted by Robert Graham

Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

by Max King Cap “My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.” — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933 He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below […]

Cornel West and his 2001 Preface to Race Matters: "Democracy Matters in Race Matters." At Riot Material.

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters Race Matters by Cornel West Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60 Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves — psychic violence […]

Another Week in the Death of America

Samantha Fields, American Dreaming at LSH CoLab, Los Angeles Reviewed by Eve Wood The first verse of the Mamas and the Papas seminal 1960’s anthem California Dreamin’ begins with “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” at once establishing an atmosphere devoid of color, hope and youthful abandon, and certainly not a […]

Through the Lens of Race, and Jim Crow South, in Eudora Welty's photographs

Reckoning Race in Eudora Welty’s Photographs

by James McWilliams Two portraits; two men. Both are from 1930s Mississippi. The men are situated together, photos 22 and 23, both from Eudora Welty’s only published book of photographs, simply titled Photographs. If you could put a frame around both images it would be the Jim Crow South.

Kara Walker's Fons Americanus (2019) at Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

A Gathering Of Ruins, And Simmering Consciousness, In Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London by Zadie Smith Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission edited by Clara Kim Tate Publishing, 144pp., $24.95 New York Review of Books Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is […]

Romare Bearden's Pittsburgh Memory, 1964. Two books on Romare Bearden, "An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden" and "The Romare Bearden Reader" are reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms

Reviewed by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell Oxford University Press, 443 pp., $34.95 . The Romare Bearden Reader edited by Robert G. O’Meally Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper) New York Review of Books Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a […]

Donald Trump and the Corporate Fascist Takeover

Corporate Fascism And The Aesthetics of Politics

by Johanna Drucker Corporate fascism. We know the term. Now we will see the full ugly face of its wrath in the vengeful fury of Trump. Trump, like all opportunistic social phenomena, is an expression of a  trending wave of collective sentiment and will. He is neither sole cause (autonomous agent) nor simple effect (isolated […]

Wim Wenders Until The End Of The World Directors Cut. An in-depth review is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Unbound Promise Of The Full Five-Hour Masterwork Until The End Of The World

by Henry Cherry Until the End of the World is a film, like the best of them, that stands outside of genre. Part sci-fi epoch, part love story, part road movie, it begins and ends with an image of the Earth’s curvature. Made by director Wim Wenders, it is the culmination of his most successful […]

Shabaka and the Ancestors, We Are Sent Here by History, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

The Exploratory Instincts Of Shabaka And The Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here By History

on Impulse! Records Reviewed by Henry Cherry Shabaka Hutchings, the London based musician behind The Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet, had just  released a second recording with his South African based project, Shabaka & the Ancestors when Covid-19 canceled the promotional tour along with everything else in the world. Hutchings spoke with NPR […]

The Coronation, by Charles Eisenstein, can be read at Riot Material Magazine.

The Coronation, The Relinquishing Of Fear And The Way As A Species Forward

The Coronation by Charles Eisenstein For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling […]

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