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Entering the Mind Audiobook

January 15, 2023 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Riot Material Presents

Entering The Mind Audiobook

C von Hassett’s deep dive into the liberating meditative practice of Dzogchen, Entering The Mind — Hassett’s richly insightful and highly accessible book — is newly available in audiobook format. Narrated by acclaimed poet Rachel Reid Wilkie, you can now enter the mind upon a voice so present, so fluent and radiant, that perhaps it alone might lift you into an awakening. The text itself aims for this very occurrence, for its teachings are of a kind that can convey you straight into the Enlightened State – here, where so many of us seek to arrive.

DOWNLOAD THE AUDIOBOOK [Read more…]

Filed Under: Entering the Mind, Mind, Riot Material Presents

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings

January 8, 2023 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at The Drawing Center, NYC (through 15 January)
Reviewed by Robyn Creswell

Pain Relief Drawings
by Ibrahim El-Salahi
Contributors: Laura Hoptman, Hassan Musa
Exhibition Catalogue, 157pp, $35.00
NYR

The face is a mask, vaguely leonine, narrowing from its enormous eyes to a snout of flared nostrils and a small mouth, twisted into what might be a grimace or a grin. The contours of the nose branch up into a network of wrinkles around the eyes, then extend out into fiddlehead ferns sprouting from the temples. The gaze is so insistent that it is easy to ignore the virtuosity of all the little lines: the sagging pouches of the eyes, the subdued yet prickly whiskers along the jaws, the dots of stubble on the upper lip and double creases at the knuckles, the striped upholstery of the chair. Strikingly, the sitter’s left arm seems to reach out beyond the frame, which crops the arm at its wrist. Is he holding up a mirror to himself (or a phone)? It is a self-portrait of the artist in an armchair, examining himself—and us—through a screen. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Stalking the Atomic City

January 1, 2023 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Stalking the Atomic City
by Markiyan Kamysh
translated by Hanna Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes
Astra House, 160pp., $13.59
HR

The disaster at the nuclear power plant at Chornobyl in April 1986 created, in real life, a geography people had only imagined. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is the size of Luxembourg, a thousand square miles of marsh, ponds, forest, villages, towns, and large-scale industrial ruins, frozen in time. We’ve seen the photos of swing sets and classrooms overrun with vines, the abandoned high-rises in Pripyat. We’ve heard the stories of boar and lynx and deer and birds reclaiming their ancestral wilderness and harboring who knows what genetic mutations. The Red Forest is the most toxic place on Earth. In a hospital basement is a pile of firefighters’ uniforms that will remain deadly to the touch for centuries. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

It Begins with a Corpse: New Work from Cormac McCarthy

December 9, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Michael Gorra
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 383 pp., $20.22
Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 190 pp., $19.99
NYR

No regular reader of Cormac McCarthy will be surprised to find that The Passenger begins with a corpse. Or two corpses, really, one of which has gone missing. The one we see, in the italicized, single-page prologue with which the book begins, is of a frozen golden-haired girl found hanging “among the bare gray poles of the winter trees.” Her name is Alicia Western, and she’s dressed in white, with a red sash that makes her easy to spot against the snow, a “bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” It is Christmas 1972, a forest near the Wisconsin sanitarium where the twenty-year-old has checked herself in—a place she’s been before. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

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

November 22, 2022 By Riot Material 2 Comments

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 accompanying playlists, which its readers have assembled on music-streaming platforms. Professor Dylan lectures a little, then you press play. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, Books, The Line

Excerpt From The Philosophy of Modern Song: Chapter 9, My Generation

November 22, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

CHAPTER 9
MY GENERATION
THE WHO
Originally released as a single
(Decca, 1965)
Written by Pete Townshend
.
THIS IS A SONG THAT DOES NO FAVORS FOR anyone, and casts doubt on everything.
.
In this song, people are trying to slap you around, slap you in the face, vilify you. They’re rude and they slam you down, take cheap shots. They don’t like you because you pull out all the stops and go for broke. You put your heart and soul into everything and shoot the works, because you got energy and strength and purpose. Because you’re so inspired they put the whammy on, they’re allergic to you, and they have hard feelings. Just your very presence repels them. They give you frosty looks and they’ve had enough of you, and there’s a million others just like you, multiplying every day. [Read more…]

Filed Under: From The Shelf

Yehonatan Koenig’s Subversion of the Ordinary

November 11, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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 marks, each its own act of lending to the whole. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

November 5, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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 with references to West African rituals, reveals the devotion of a sibling who has become his brother’s keeper as he succumbs to cancer. Displacement, violence at home, civil unrest, and neocolonial forms of subjugation are all running themes in this accomplished, elegiac collection. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, The New Word

The Joshua Tree Talk

November 3, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

A Conversation on Dzogchen
Book Talk Video
Joshua Tree Retreat Center

PURCHASE THE BOOK
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Entering the Mind, Mind, Riot Material Presents, The Line

Entering the Mind: The Radio & Podcast Tour

October 30, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Riot Material Presents

Entering the Mind
— The Tour —

C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie on their global radio and podcast tour in support of Entering the Mind, the new book by Riot Material Founding Editor, C von Hassett. Audio and video access to shows as they go live can be found below:


Awareness Explorers
with Jonathan Robinson and Brian Tom O’Connor
“Episode 121: C von Hassett, Guest Explorer“

Awareness Explorers

Website     |     Facebook    |     YouTube    |     Podcasts
♦


GLOBALTVtalkshow
with Edwin Cohen
“Explore Your Higher Consciousness“

Edwin Cohen
Website     |     Facebook    |     YouTube    |     Linkedin
♦


Energy Stew
with Peter Roth
“Getting to That Eternal Place in Your Mind“

Peter Roth
Website     |     Facebook    |     Twitter
♦


The Empowered Spirit Show
with Terri Ann Heiman
“Expanding Creativity through Meditation with Rachel Reid Wilkie“

Terri Ann Heiman
Website     |     Facebook    |     YouTube    |     Linkedin
♦


Zen Commuter
with Thom Walters
“Episode 1826: Entering the Mind by C von Hassett [and Rachel Wilkie]”

Thom Walters
Website    |    Facebook    |    Twitter
♦


Raise the Vibe
with Liz Peterson
“C von Hassett and Rachel Wilkie, Entering the Mind, Exploration of Dzogchen“

Liz Peterson
Website    |    YouTube    |    Facebook    |    Instagram

♦


Paranormal Soup
with Jason Bland
“Episode 320: Guests C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie”

Jason Bland
Website    |    YouTube    |    Facebook

♦


Inside Personal Growth
with Greg Voisen
“Podcast 952: Entering the Mind with C von Hassett”

Greg Voisen
Website    |    Podcast Master Link    |    Linkedin    |    YouTube    |    Facebook    |    Instagram  

♦


.Zen Success
with Charissa Sims
“Entering the Mind with C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie”

Charissa Sims
Website     |     Facebook    |     Twitter    |     Linkedin

♦


.The Blissful Living Show
with Rochel Marie Lawson
“Entering the Mind with C von and Rachel”

Rochel Marie Lawson
Website     |     Facebook    |     Instagram    |     Linkedin

♦


.
Spiritual Geek Out

with Diane Hudock
“The Teachings of Dzogchen: Entering the Mind to Go Beyond the Mind”

Diane Hudock
Website     |     Linkedin

♦


Light Laughter and Lattes
with Geri Habstritt
“Accessing Pure Consciousness”

Geri Habstritt
Website     |    Facebook     |     YouTube

♦


.Master Your Mind
with Dr. Erika Montgomery
“C von Hassett and Rachel Wilkie — Entering the Mind”

Dr. Erika Montgomery
Website     |     Facebook    |     Instagram    |     Linkedin

♦


.
The Empowered Spirit Show

with Terri Ann Heiman
“Entering the Mind with C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie”

Terri Ann Heiman
Website     |     Facebook    |     YouTube    |     Linkedin

♦


.
The Art of the CEO

with Bart Jackson
“Gaining Awareness: Mental Leaps from Practical Meditation”

Bart Jackson
Website     |     Twitter    |     YouTube    |     Linkedin

♦


.
We Deserve Better

with Dorrin Rosenfeld
“A State of Pure Consciousness”

Dorrin Rosenfeld
Website    |    Linkedin
♦


.
Between the Lines

with Corine La Font
“Entering the Mind: Interview with C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie”

Corine La Font
Website     |     Facebook     |     Twitter    |     YouTube    |     Linkedin

♦


.
The Psychic Coffee Shop

with Aeson Knight
“Entering the Mind”

Aeson Knight
Website     |     Facebook     |     Twitter    |     YouTube    |      Instagram     |     Linkedin

♦


.
Aquarian Times

by Julia Bernbaum
“Entering the Mind” with C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie

Julia Bernbaum
Website     |     Facebook     |     Anchor    |     Instagram     |     Linkedin

♦


.
Sagewlf Interviews
“Rachel Reid Wilkie”
.

Sagewlf
Website     |    Facebook    |     Twitter     |     Instagram

♦.


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Sagewlf Interviews
“C von Hassett”
.
.

Sagewlf
Website     |    Facebook    |     Twitter     |     Instagram

♦


.
Radio Medium Laura Lee
5 Minute Spirit Reboot: S6, E62
On WRWO 94.5 FM

“Achieve Pure Consciousness”
.

Laura Lee
Website     |     Facebook     |     Twitter    |     YouTube    |      Instagram

♦


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Mindfulness Mode
with Bruce Langford
Episode 753
“Entering The Mind, with C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie”
.
https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/C-von-Hassett-and-R-Reid-on-Bruce-Langford.mp3

Mindfulness Mode #753: audio interview with C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie (37 minutes)
.
Bruce Langford
Website     |     Facebook     |     Twitter    |     Linkedin    |      Instagram

♦


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The Jeff Mara Podcast
Episode 449
“Meditation Practice Used On Earth & OTHER PLANETS!”
.

Jeff Mara
YouTube     |     Twitter     |     Instagram

♦


.
A Fine Time for Healing
with Randi Fine
“The Natural State of Pure Consciousness”
.
.
Randi Fine
Website     |     Facebook     |     Twitter    |     Linkedin    |      Instagram

♦


.
PURCHASE
ENTERING THE MIND
.

Entering the Mind Global Radio and Podcast Tour: Follow at Riot Material..

♦

 

 

 

Filed Under: Entering the Mind, Mind, Video

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

October 21, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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 content, “the personal,” “a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profundity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality,” writes Adorno. A list of counterparts to the personal essay might include more admirable imaginary genres such as the structural essay, the communal essay, the public essay, the critical essay, and the impersonal essay. Or, as Adorno insinuates, the good essay, which prioritizes “elucidating the matter at hand” instead of telling “stories about people,” as “bad essays” do. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Thought

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

October 2, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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 talking about, and for good reason. The metaverse does not exist. Born of science fiction and blending virtual reality into everyday activities, the idea is one that some tech executives like Zuckerberg believe will be the future of the Internet. In his case, it is a belief so resolute that he is willing to wager something like $10 billion a year and the fate of his company on it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, Thought

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

September 26, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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


.

Entering the Mind Global Radio and Podcast Tour: Follow at Riot Material

Riot Material Founding Editor, C von Hassett, takes us luminously into the life-affirming, heart-awakening, consciousness-altering terrains of mind in its natural state. Learn More Here.

.

Filed Under: Mind, The Line, Video

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

September 5, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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 pp., $19.95 (paper)
NYR

When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called “iconoclastic” for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. But alongside the bluster of “the bad boy of art criticism” was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer complicates the cartoon version of his life that continues to shadow his reputation as a writer. What remains is the difficult task of taking stock of Hickey’s literary achievement. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

An Interview with Artist Eve Wood

August 29, 2022 By Riot Material 1 Comment

Eve Wood: Hanging in There to Hang On
at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles (opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 7-10pm)

by Julie Adler

I met Eve Wood at Holly Matter, an art gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, 22 years ago now. I recall she got up and read some of her poems. Incisive, cutting, direct, I thought, “wow, what a master,” and also “ouch,” but in a good way. We became friends there, and a few years later she brought out some drawings at a meal we were having, of people, animals with wide eyes, craggy lines. Sparse, comical and awkward, eyes staring back at you or away. Up until that point I had no idea Eve was also a visual artist. I had come from a performance art background but was also starting to get more engaged in 2 dimensions. She was eager to do a trade. It seemed we shared a similar concern for the human condition. And because we humans are funny in our grotesqueness, our derangement, our folly, we didn’t think it unusual to portray that. We also felt the comradery of being outsiders, even though we both grew up here in LA and went to art school here.

So, when Eve asked me to interview her for this publication, I did not hesitate. It’s been wonderful to burrow in with her on the ways and means of her process. She’s really not an outsider (nor am I.) She is as inside as it gets. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

August 23, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Cintra Wilson

The History of Bones: A Memoir
by John Lurie
Random House, 435 pp., $28.00
NYRB

It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing by. It was a charming, homemade ad, shot on grainy video, full of beautiful women dressed in international garb like they were animatronic dolls in Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, The Line

Reflections On Our Warming Planet

July 29, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at the Lois Lambert Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica (through 3 September 2022)
Reviewed by Austin Janisch

The exhibition Reflections On Our Warming Planet, at the Lois Lambert Gallery, signals that the time for reacting to our planetary warnings has now passed. We have transitioned into a new stage, that of reflection. This progression into a period of reflection may at first be difficult to accept. However, such a problematization of our actions through the assembled artworks ultimately proves apt. Conceived by Lucinda Luvaas, the selected participants not only raise awareness of, but also pose a relevant inquiry into the climate crisis of our day. Knowledge of climate change is no longer a novel concept. Awareness of global environmental change not only occupies our consciousness, but has become palpable. As year after year continues to pass with at best proportional reaction, the assembled works act as an archive of what has already been set into motion. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

The Clear, Crisp Taste of Cronenberg

July 19, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Crimes of the Future
Reviewed by Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller
Neon
NYRB

A line from Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s latest film, has been trailing it around with the campy insistence of an old-fashioned ad campaign: “Surgery is the new sex.” On receiving this information, a skeptical Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, asks, “Does there have to be a new sex?” “Yes,” he is told by Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, with the assurance of a fashion influencer, “It’s time.”

It’s time for a new sex? For Timlin, infatuated with Saul, this might mean, “It’s time for a new sex act—sex between us.” For devotees of Cronenberg’s cinema, the phrase more pertinently means, “It’s time for a new Cronenberg film.” The director has been spawning new versions of sex since the start of his career. Murder is the new sex (Videodrome, 1983), car accidents are the new sex (Crash, 1996), commodity fetishism is the new sex (Cosmopolis, 2012), and so on. To get in the mood for new sex, you might resort to the rave drug that Cosmopolis calls “novo,” and afterward, you may need to be cured of bugs at the “Institute of Neo-venereal Disease” (the first Crimes of the Future, 1970). At all events, the precondition for making it with anyone in Cronenberg is making it new. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Milton’s Quotidian Paradise, Lost

June 23, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

By Catherine Nicholson

Katie Kadue: Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton
Timothy M. Harrison: Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England
Nicholas McDowell: Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton
Joe Moshenska: 
Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton
NYRB

Of the many liberties John Milton took in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic poem on Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, the most delightful and underrated are his efforts to imagine daily life in Paradise before the Fall. Compared to the risks he takes elsewhere in the poem—recasting the devil as its charismatic antihero, scripting conversations between God the Father and his only begotten Son, staging war in heaven, describing angelic sex, and playing fast and loose with the logic of allusion so as to make himself the founding author of the entire Western literary tradition—the domestic details of prelapsarian existence can appear merely charming, inventive flourishes on the scenic backdrop to the grand conflicts between good and evil. In the long, relatively uneventful middle of the poem, after Satan has hatched his demonic plot but before he’s worked out the crucial business with the snake, Adam and Eve occupy themselves with an array of activities: talking, eating and drinking, strolling and stargazing, sleeping, dreaming, bickering and flirting, playing with the animals, tending the roses, socializing with angels, and passing whole days in the unexpectedly interesting business of innocence. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Fiction, The Line, Thought

Foucault in Warsaw and the Shapeless, Shaping Gaze of the Surveillance State

May 7, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Marcel Radosław Garboś

Foucault in Warsaw
by Remigiusz Ryziński 
translated by Sean Gasper Bye
Open Letter Books, 220pp., $15.95
Harvard Review

Since Poland’s state socialist system collapsed in 1989, the records of its police agencies and security services have gone to a government commission entrusted with the “prosecution of crimes against the Polish nation,” today part of the Institute of National Remembrance. Remigiusz Ryziński credits the Institute and its holdings for enabling his work, yet his use of this archive also challenges prevailing Polish narratives of collective suffering under surveillance and repression. Trained in gender studies, queer theory, and feminist thought, Ryziński belongs to the milieu of pioneering Polish intellectuals who investigate the experiences of people persecuted and ostracized because of their sexuality. He has authored four books, three of them reconstructing the inner lives of LGBTQ+ communities across Poland’s traumatic twentieth century while tracing how illiberal regimes have constructed sexual deviance as a problem to be monitored, contained, and excised since World War II. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

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riot sounds

Into the Triangular Warp, Without Tether

New from Mandy, Indiana
“Injury Detail”

on Fire Talk Records

The Line

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Eve Wood, "Ostrich Pretending To Be A Francis Bacon Painting." At Riot Material.

An Interview with Artist Eve Wood

Eve Wood: Hanging in There to Hang On at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles (opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 7-10pm) by Julie Adler I met Eve Wood at Holly Matter, an art gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, 22 years ago now. I recall she got up and read some of her poems. Incisive, cutting, […]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

Reviewed by Cintra Wilson The History of Bones: A Memoir by John Lurie Random House, 435 pp., $28.00 NYRB It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing […]

Marlene Dumas, "Losing (Her Meaning)," 1988. At Riot Material magazine.

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023) Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite […]

Clarice Lispector

Baffling the Sphinx: The Enigmatic World of Clarice Lispector

Reviewed by John Biscello Água Viva by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 88pp., $14.95 Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 864pp., $29.95 The word is my fourth dimension –Clarice Lispector And on the eighth and endless day, where the bottomless hallelujah meets Ouroboros, God created Clarice Lispector. Maybe. […]

Donna Ferrato "Diamond, Minneapolis, MN 1987." At Riot Material magazine

Donna Ferrato’s Magnificent Holy

at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC (through July 29 2022) Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban The small scale of Donna Ferrato’s snapshot-like black-and-white photographs belies their personal and political power. Whether they document the medical sinks and shelves in a now-shuttered Texas abortion clinic, or hone in on the badly bruised face of a domestic violence […]

Darcilio Lima Unknown Lithograph, 1972. At Riot Material magazine.

Magia Protetora: The Art of Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos and Darcilio Lima

at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, Cleveland OH (through 30 September 2022) Curated by Stephen Romano Gallery Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz The extension of a lineage occurs not merely by the repetition of form, but by the intersection of conservation and revolution. Transformation is fundamental to preserving the essence of a given tradition’s rituals and […]

Eve Wood's A Cadence for Redemption, written in the fictive voice of Abraham Lincoln, is excerpted at Riot Material magazine.

Songs For Our Higher Selves

A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln by Eve Wood Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99 Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who […]

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