Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

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…]

Coming Back to Bite: The Earth Births its Curious Gifts in Blood Quantum

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Reviewed by Robert Sullivan
NYRB Online

Blood Quantum is an old-school zombie film, as opposed to the recent onslaught of AMC Walking Dead wannabes. Like George Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead—which ends when a Black man emerges unscathed after a night fighting off the undead, only to be shot by an all-white militia—the blood and guts add up to a social critique. What makes Blood Quantum a credit to its genre is the way it honors indigenous filmmaking, in particular the work of Alanis Obomsawin, the renowned eighty-eight-year-old Abenaki filmmaker who has, in more than fifty films, chronicled the modern liberal governments of the US and Canada laying siege to North American indigenous communities. [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…]

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

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Interview by Accra Shepp
NYRB Online

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…]

Food As Culture, Identity and an Enduring Form of Black Protest

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By Amethyst Ganaway
Food & Wine

We are demanding, not asking, for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.” —Amethyst Ganaway

Black people in America have used food as a means of resistance, rebellion, and revolution since being forcefully brought here in the late 1500s. Food has always been a part of the culture and identity of Black communities and has played a role as a source of both comfort and strength for a people constantly subject to abuse, discrimination, and misunderstanding. [Read more…]

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…]