Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

The Earth Commences Her Retalitory Roar

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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, seeing your parents—shifts dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will you have a job? Will you die? Will you ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming. Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization. The latter is a distinct possibility, as Mark Lynas’s new book, Our Final Warning, makes painfully clear. [Read more…]

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

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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 turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which dismantled a cornerstone of the racial caste system known as “Jim Crow” by banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Change seemed to be coming in other areas of American law as well. Congress followed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and during the 1960s the Supreme Court waged a “Due Process Revolution” that established more criminal defense rights, such as the guarantee of state-funded counsel for indigent suspects and defendants. The decade seemed poised to bring about a more equal and just America. [Read more…]

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

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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 Spengler and Rudolf Steiner. She read Kenneth Burke, who would become her teacher at the University of Chicago, and of course many novels, Thomas Mann above all; an entry in her diary recalls getting caught stealing a copy of Doctor Faustus at a Los Angeles bookshop. One day at a newsstand she picked up Partisan Review and began to tremble as she read Lionel Trilling’s “Art and Fortune,” his 1948 attempt to determine if the novel remained a living form. That set her future. That was when she began to dream of New York, and even of writing for that very journal. And Trilling, a critic forever “talking about the things that mattered,” became a model for her own work.1 [Read more…]

Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People

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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?” The heart of this collection of twelve stories, the thing that Thompson-Spires communicates with great verve, humor, and empathy, is the answer to that question—a booming “Yes!”—especially as experienced by Black Americans. [Read more…]

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

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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 the man next to me if something had happened. “Kurukshetra!” he replied. “The next stop is Kurukshetra!”

I could understand the excitement. Kurukshetra, “the field of the Kurus,” is the setting for the climactic battle of the Mahabharata, the vastest epic in any world literature, on which virtually every Hindu child in India is raised. Its characters, removed in time by some three thousand years, are as familiar to us as our relatives. The temper of the story is utterly contemporary; I can imagine it unfolding in the nuclear age as easily as in the dawn of Indian history.

The Mahabharata is literature at its greatest – in fact, it has been called a literature in itself, comparable in its breadth and depth and characterization to the whole of Greek literature or Shakespeare. But what makes it unique is that embedded in this literary masterpiece is one of the finest mystical documents the world has seen: the Bhagavad Gita. [Read more…]

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

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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,” shadowed recollections of boyhood, and culminating with “Field Recordings,” somber reflections on the recurring traumas of African American social history. In its progression toward a more experienced vision, this brilliant and moving collection is structured as a coming-of-age chronicle. Young’s poetry on social issues tempers a tragic sense of outrage with a blues-based ethos which, as Young points out in a recent review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, is “embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston … [and] sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as ‘an act of resistance.’” In these poems, the expression of “hard-earned joy” in the face of unspeakable injustice is an ennobling challenge. [Read more…]

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

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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 intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities? [Read more…]

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

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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 — reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion — physical violence — for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years. The unique combination of American terrorism — Jim Crow and lynching — as well as American barbarism — slave trade and slave labor — bears witness to the distinctive American assault on black humanity. This vicious ideology and practice of white supremacy has left its indelible mark on all spheres of American life — from the prevailing crimes of Amerindian reservations to the discriminatory realities against Spanish-speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes against Asians. Yet the fundamental litmus test for American democracy — its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture — remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the prob­lem of the color line. [Read more…]

Riot Material Arts Foundation

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RIOT MATERIAL is cruising in low gear through this long stretch of Covid shutdowns and the grievous effects on each of us in all areas of incoming cash. You may or may not be aware that RIOT MATERIAL does not accept advertising, nor will we ever. Advertising is antithetical to our mission, to our singular and interpretably radical expression. We are strictly a non-commercial operation relying solely on self-funding and the tax-deductible contributions from our readers, as well as organizations sympathetic to the cause.

What is that cause? To critically, articulately and insightfully cover the diverse range of Art throughout Los Angeles, New York City and London; to identify, bring to the fore and support the local jazz scenes in all three cities, with particular emphasis on Los Angeles, our hometown; to seek-out and showcase off-the-grid or aggressively underground sounds by explorative musicians around the globe; bring greater awareness to exciting and often spectacular niche cinema via Cinema Disordinaire while also highlighting sonically/philosophically delighting, infectious, and at times exhilarating new tracks via Riot Sounds.

Take a moment to look back through our archives to see if our magazine is worthy of your support. If you love it, believe in it, see it in line with your intellectual wants, then please contribute by donating whatever you can. If you’re feeling fortunately flush, then a generous donation would be greatly appreciated — our writers will be most grateful, the artists they write about will be ever-so thankful as well as the galleries who represent their distinctive visions and essential expressions, not to mention the filmmakers, musicians, poets and penmen and avant-garde innovators who equally seek audience and affirmation for their work. RIOT MATERIAL takes a unique and elevating approach to each of these men and women, these all-important artists, these spokesmen for an historically disordered time, and we do so both critically and editorially, which gives our take on Art, Identity, and Individuality a truly incomparable slant.

As said, your contribution will be tax-deductible. RIOT MATERIAL ARTS FOUNDATION – The Mother Ship – is a 501c(3) organization which allows State and Federal exemptions for every dollar you donate. To that end, we thank you so much in advance!!!

Meantime, RM is still publishing (you’ll find the latest on our Homepage), though for the moment we will be doing so far less frequently, so please look out for occasional new essays and reviews as they go live on the site. Announcements of all new publishings will be made on our Medium and Facebook pages. 

Much love from Editorial —
Be safe! Remain engaged!!
C

Banishment

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for Sharon Doubiago

She urinates on the graves
of her precursors—
it’s her thing (one of many),
to “unite my living waters
with theirs.” The list
includes Camus,
Karl Marx, George Eliot,
over a hundred in all.
She once called me a fascist. [Read more…]

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

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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 having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of “Mammy,” hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is pulled taut: both struggle under its constriction. And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart. Which raises the question: Who tied this constricting rope? A third party? And, if the struggle continues, will the white woman eventually be extinguished? Will the black woman be free? That is, if the white woman is on the verge of extinguishment at all. Maybe she’s on the verge of something else entirely: definition. That’s why we cinch waists, isn’t it? To achieve definition? [Read more…]

Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms

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Reviewed by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
.
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 pilgrimage to honor the anniversary of the campaign to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The journey began on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Lewis, then twenty-five years old and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was severely beaten and nearly killed by state troopers as he led six hundred peaceful protesters in a march that started at a church in Selma and was forcibly intercepted by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the Confederate general and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

[Read more…]

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

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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 braids still further, to see what we might weave from them? [Read more…]

Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Yet Miraculous Retrospective, Painting After All

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at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020)
Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker

“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. [Read more…]

McCoy Tyner, The Greatest Jazz Pianist Of All Time, Is Dead at 81

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By Ben Ratliff
The New York Times

McCoy Tyner, a cornerstone of John Coltrane’s groundbreaking 1960s quartet and one of the most influential pianists in jazz history, has died. He was 81. His death was announced on his Facebook page, which gave no further details. Along with Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and only a few others, Mr. Tyner was one of the main expressways of modern jazz piano. Nearly every jazz pianist since Mr. Tyner’s years with Coltrane has had to learn his lessons, whether they ultimately discarded them or not. [Read more…]

Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright

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Reviewed by Christopher Benfey

Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 624 pp., $35.00
Harper’s Magazine

Frank Lloyd Wright isn’t just the greatest of all American architects. He has so eclipsed the competition that he can sometimes seem the only one. Who are his potential rivals? Henry Hobson Richardson, that Gilded Age starchitect in monumental stone? Louis Sullivan, lyric poet of the office building and Wright’s own Chicago mentor, best known for his dictum that form follows function? “Yes,” Wright corrected him with typical one-upmanship, “but more important now, form and function are one.” For architects with the misfortune to follow him, Wright is seen as having created the standards by which they are judged. If we know the name Frank Gehry, it’s probably because he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997. And Gehry’s deconstructed ship of titanium and glass would be unimaginable if Wright hadn’t built his own astonishing Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue some forty years earlier. [Read more…]