Last year, Jan Švankmajer, the great master of surrealist cinema, returned to his roots with another stop-motion film mixed with live footage in the same vein as his classics Alice (1988) and Faust (1994). Yet there is something that is immediately striking in Insects (2018), namely that it keeps breaking the fourth wall and working with meta-levels. There is, first, an introduction where Švankmajer speaks directly to the audience, offering cues to how the movie is supposed to be understood. Then, throughout the film we see how the practical and stop-motion effects were created; we witness various stage directions to the actors, who each talk about their dreams to the camera. Finally, as Insects is somewhat of an adaptation of a play by the brothers Čapek, we ourselves witness an amateur theatre group working on its adaptation. [Read more…]
Who Holds The Stag’s Head Gets to Speak
Dear God who lives inside the stag’s head
even after the stag’s shot and lies slumped and abashed
on the forest floor. Protect him.
Even after he’s been heaved onto the car’s dark roof.
Forest Green. Or Pacific Blue. Nowhere he can see.
His body stiffens like a trellis above the driver.
Help him. Hold him in your sight. [Read more…]
Norman Rockwell v. The State Of Public Art
Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, & The Four Freedoms
A traveling exhibition, with Reimagining the Four Freedoms
currently at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Washington, DC (through April 29)
Reviewed by Kevin Baker
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine
The fight over which of our public monuments should remain where they are is as complicated as the American past they commemorate. For all the fighting over who and what we should not honor from our past, there is one vital element that has been missing from the argument: that is, what we should honor and aspire to now. [Read more…]
Wyn Cooper’s Mars Poetica
Mars Poetica, by Wyn Cooper
White Pine Press, 76 pages, $16.00
Not everyone knows the sun moves around the Earth. To prove it, simply extend a line between the two largest stars in Orion. It will take you to another constellation, Pegasus. Draw another line between the winged horse’s brightest stars, and you’ll find another mythological tribute, and so forth. Find one constellation, and you can find them all. In this way, the hunter, the dog, the bear, the goat, and others can always guide us because Earth is the center.
From time to time, a random star appears which seems out of place. [Read more…]
Caramelized Onion, Mushroom, Kale & Aged Gruyere Quiche
1 Trader Joe’s pie crust
1 big or two small sweet yellow onions
4-5 leaves Tuscan kale
1 pack 3/4 oz Oyster mushrooms
1/2 pack 3/4 oz Shitake mushrooms
1 1/4 cup grated Cave aged Gruyere cheese
2 sprigs fresh thyme
Butter, as needed for sautéing
3/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup whole milk
4 eggs
Salt to taste
Ground White pepper to taste
Fresh cracked Black pepper to taste
9-10” pie dish for baking
Remove pie curst and let sit at room temperature for an hour or hour and a half. Unroll pie crust without removing the plastic film on both sides. If you see cracks take a rolling pin and smooth out the cracks and the edges rolling over the plastic films. Remove one side of the plastic film and place the crust facing down in your pie dish. Remove the other side of the film and bake the pie crust as instructed on the Trader Joe’s pie crust package. Do not forget to prick holes in the crust before baking as suggested. After baking let cool at room temperature. [Read more…]
Another Charming (And Delightfully Dark) Short From Pixar: Kitbull
Written and Directed by Rosana Sullivan. Produced by Kathryn Hendrickson.
Theatricum Botanicum Sees Plants As Dynamic Agents Of History
“I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now — in order to support the moral contradictions of and the spiritual aridity of life — expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want is power — and no one holds power forever.” –James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in my Mind
In November 2017, at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, French president Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech that cracked open a pandora’s box of sorts. “I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France,” Macron told a rather skeptical audience, further proclaiming that he expected within five years “the conditions to be met for the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa.” Whether or not this was intended as a diplomatic platitude, almost a year to the day a landmark report on the question of repatriation, commissioned by Macron, was published. And with that report, a wider crack appeared. [Read more…]
Hunting in the Dark
Joan was convinced she had cancer. Sometimes it was a dull ache in her side, sometimes a cut that didn’t heal. She knew of a woman with Crohn’s Disease and just recently an old friend of hers died of pancreatic cancer. It was just a matter of time before those alien cells took over her body. Her body was on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. When she got out her Tarot deck, she always drew the Fool. Once she saw the Hermit in a dream. He dropped his lantern and the light tumbled down into a rocky canyon, glowing on the silver cliffs as it fell. It was winter, with pockets of snow on the peaks. [Read more…]
Smoked Lavender And Berry Compote
Small pack of blueberries
Small pack of raspberries
Small pack of blackberries
Fresh lavender
1½ pinch Hepps smoked salt
¾ cup raw cane sugar
Place all the ingredients in a pot and simmer on a medium flame until it turns to mush. Let cool and refrigerate. Serve on bread, a scone, and the compote goes wonderfully with cheese, crackers and a glass of wine. Will last up to 10 days refrigerated. [Read more…]
Where to Begin?
First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,
which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker
than the dark night sky.
Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,
is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses [Read more…]
Penal Cistern Lightning Throne Lightning Rebounded
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Back into the body all the lightning goes
back into the body. Up through the crown
of the skull and round again like the Whip-It
at the fairgrounds. Pushing the boundaries
of the light body. Overloading the light
body. Silly bowl shaking above the bowl
of the skull, which is a bowl holding court over
bowl the brain. Bowl into bowl into bowl.
All the curves pressing together. Too much
light in the light body. Body of cattle after long [Read more…]
La Luz’s “Cicada”
on Hardly Art Records
Pain Scale
by Catherine Barnett
Floating above the gynecologist’s hands,
Dolor looks down at me
with her many expressions.
Someone sketched the eyes, the mouths,
someone pinned them up,
arranged the faces
so they softly say, like this? like this?
The doctor says to choose one,
but I’m no fool, I close my eyes [Read more…]
Gary Indiana’s Vile Days
Vile Days, by Gary Indiana,
edited by Bruce Hainley.
Semiotext(e). 600 pages. $29.95.
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine
How unromantic can a deathbed scene get? A test case: one day in 2015, The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, makes his way to the Village Voice’s Cooper Square offices, seeking to rescue the columns he wrote for the alt-weekly in the 1990s from their undigitized obscurity. Let in by a staff member who seems slack-jawed that anyone should be so keen to enter, Schjeldahl observes the paper’s remaining employees: “A very few people, not appearing to be up to much, sat far apart at desks in a dimly lighted panorama of desuetude.” Coda: as summer 2018 gasps its last, so does the Voice; mourned in September blog posts, like Schjeldahl’s for The New Yorker, it now exists only in archival form. This seems a fittingly uncharismatic parable for an East Village that has died more than once in the past thirty years or so—the end doesn’t even get to feel poignant anymore. [Read more…]
A City No More: The Rise Of The World’s Largest Gated Community
by Kevin Baker
From “Death of a Once Great City”
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine
New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great. [Read more…]
NYC Supertalls And The Narrowfication Of The City’s Architecture
by Aaron Timms
From “The Needles and the Damage Done”
Courtesy of The Baffler
What kinds of people did I expect to find here, in the public garden at the foot of 432 Park Avenue, New York’s tallest residential building? In the days before I arrived in Manhattan to chart a course across the city, I’d studied the plans and websites of the “supertalls,” the new crop of skeletal residential towers rising one thousand feet and more above midtown. The architects’ renderings of these new superstructures were charged with all the clichés of the genre: the plate-glass exteriors knifing skyward, the unobstructed views of the miniature city below, the lobbies at once massive and discreet. The humans were harder to grasp. Artists’ impressions showed the supertalls’ residents-to-be in a variety of unnatural poses: a couple in formal wear touching each other next to a baby grand, a woman alone on a balcony with a dining table set for eight. But it was the passers-by sketched at the periphery who interested me most. Would the people here be like they were there, smudged and passive with the bready limbs of a disaster movie’s sacrificial-crowd-in-waiting? [Read more…]
I Listen
by John Biscello From his forthcoming collection of poems, Arclight, publishing this February by Indie Blu(e) Publishing ....................................... Dawn. The sea breeze, salt-fringed, rolls in through the opened glass doors, its damp fingers sifting and touching upon the cravings, rent and folds of our shared bare skin, It’s like home, you say, and this makes me dig my nails in deeper, [Read more...]
Transforming Light Into Art: A Look At The Movement Of Light And Space
During the mid 1960’s, Light and Space became a loosely affiliated art movement related to Op Art, Minimalism and Abstraction. Influenced by American artist John McLaughlin, the movement was characterized by a focus on perceptual phenomenon and became well known throughout California. Artists integrated ideas of light, volume and scale, and the use of materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights and cast acrylic. Led by installation artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell, the pair specialized in the phenomenon of sensory deprivation and became curious about pushing the boundaries of art and perception. [Read more…]
Why Frank Zappa Is The Voice America (Still) Needs
“It’s time for a revolution, but probably not in the terms that people imagine it.” –Frank Zappa
This December marks 25 years since the death of DIY genius, comical cynic, lyrical satirist, musical innovator, social commentator, sardonic iconoclast, political debater, and composer-slash-rock-star Frank Zappa.
Throughout his eyebrow-raising career, Zappa parodied the plastic people, brain police, valley girls, dancing fools, and hungry freaks across America. His prolific body of work is a symphony of observations of human absurdity, expressed through such mediums as political meetings in the Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia, experimental advertisements for razors and cough drops, a violin bow tickling a bicycle wheel, a surrealist claymation music video, and a grotesque potato-headed puppet named Thing-Fish. He aimed to “shake people out of their complacency… and make them question things.” [Read more…]
Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind Cave”
Excerpted from Murakami's recent novel, Killing Commendatore Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Read Riot Material's review of Killing Commedatore
When I was fifteen, my younger sister died. It happened very suddenly. She was twelve then, in her first year of junior high. She had been born with a congenital heart problem, but since her last surgeries, in the upper grades of elementary school, she hadn’t shown any more symptoms, and our family had felt reassured, holding on to the faint hope that her life would go on without incident. But, in May of that year, her heartbeat became more irregular. It was especially bad when she lay down, and she suffered many sleepless nights. She underwent tests at the university hospital, but no matter how detailed the tests the doctors couldn’t pinpoint any changes in her physical condition. The basic issue had ostensibly been resolved by the operations, and they were baffled. [Read more…]