Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Ken Burns And Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War

By

Reviewed by Frances FitzGerald
An extract from “The Pity of It All,” courtesy of the New York Review of Books

Ken Burns achieved renown with lengthy film histories of the Civil War, World War II, jazz, and baseball, but he describes his documentary The Vietnam War, made in close collaboration with his codirector and coproducer Lynn Novick, as “the most ambitious project we’ve ever undertaken.” Ten years in the making, it tells the story of the war in ten parts and over eighteen hours. Burns and Novick have made a film that conveys the realities of the war with extraordinary footage of battles in Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations in the United States. [Read more…]

The Will to Deceive: On Robert B. Pippin’s The Philosophical Hitchcock

By

The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Reviewed by Martin Woessner

One of the benefits of living in New York City is that on any night of the week you can find a decent film to see on something other than the tiny screen of your laptop and in something other than a sprawling, suburban multiplex. Thanks, in part, to longstanding institutions, such as Anthology Film Archives and Film Forum, or upstarts, such as Metrograph and the newly remodeled Quad Cinema, cinematic culture survives, even thrives, here in a way that is increasingly impossible to find anywhere else. And it is a good thing, too, because the apartments are small and overpriced, the subways are irregular and overcrowded, and the pizza, dare I say it, is overrated. Something has to make up for the daily struggle. [Read more…]

Roque Dalton’s “Toward a Better Love”

By

“Sex is a political condition.” — Kate Millet

No one disputes that sex
is a condition in the world of the couple:
from there, tenderness and its wild branches.

No one disputes that sex
is a domestic condition:
from there, kids,
nights in common
and days divided
(he, looking for bread in the street,
in offices or factories;
she, in the rear guard of domestic functions,
in the strategy and tactic of the kitchen
that allows survival in a common struggle
at least to the end of the month). [Read more…]

a cop-out to a possible immortality

By

From Charles Bukowski’s just released collection of rare and never-before-seen material — poems from obscure, hard-to-find magazines, as well as from libraries and private collections all over the country — Storm for the Living and the Dead.

if we can’t make literature out of our
agony

what are we going to do with 
it?

beg in the streets?

I like my minor comforts 
just like any other
son of a
bitch

A Word With Performa 17 Artists Kemang Wa Lehulere & Nicholas Hlobo

By

I cut my skin to liberate the splinter, at Connelly Theater, East Village;
umBhovuzo: The Parable of the Sower, at Harlem Parish, Harlem
Part of Performa Biennial, NYC
by Robin Scher

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” begins Charles Dickens’ epic A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens goes on to describe the novel’s period, set against the French Revolution, as an age of “wisdom” and “foolishness.” The context may have changed since those words were written, but the sentiment remains true. Here we are in 2017, arguably more conscious than ever to the plights of the dispossessed, yet somehow still stuck in the mires of narrow mindedness. Why do we seem doomed to repeat the errors of our ways? How can we better draw on lessons from history? In November, at New York’s Performa Biennial, these were questions at the heart of at least two South African artists’ commissioned performances. [Read more…]

How do we describe buddha nature?

By

How do we describe buddha nature? Buddha nature is said to resemble space. Can we say that space exists? Can we say that it doesn’t? We cannot, because space itself does not comply with any such ideas. Concepts made about space are merely concepts. Space, in itself, is beyond any ideas we can hold about it. Buddha nature is like this. If you say that space exists, can you define it as a concrete existent entity? But to say there is no space is incorrect, because space is what accommodates everything — the world and beings. [Read more…]

Lou Reed: A Life

By

A New Biography By Anthony DeCurtis
Reviewed David Yaffe

An extract from “Lou’s Wild Side,” in the November 23 issue of The New York Review of Books

“Just a perfect day/You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/Someone good.” These lines—sung indifferently over swelling, glam rock strings—are from “Perfect Day,” an achingly gorgeous and brutally honest song by Lou Reed, who died of liver disease four years ago at the age of seventy-one. Some people thought the song was about addiction—how a junkie escaping from reality also feeds on the escape of romance. But the song could also be about how pleasurable, yet impossible, it is to escape from your true self, and about how easy it is to deceive yourself when you’ve disappointed your own expectations. [Read more…]

If The World Were Created By A God Then We’d Be Helpless

By

If the world were created by a god then we’d be helpless. It would not be within our power to do much about our own situation. However, some deity has not created the world, so we have the power to do something about our situation. That is because the situation we are in is the fruition of our own actions; our actions are a cause that has created this particular effect. Therefore it is within our power to abandon the causes of suffering and, likewise, to prevent the experience of suffering. In that same way, it is within our power to do what we want to do. If we want to achieve the higher realms of existence or the state of having crossed beyond all suffering, then we simply begin to engage in the causes that lead to those very realms. [Read more…]

Eugen Gabritschevsky: 1893–1979

By

at La Maison Rouge, Paris
Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz

An extract from “The Master of Eglfing-Haar” in the October 16 Issue of The New York Review of Books

It is possible that the people who run the American Folk Art Museum have wondered in recent years about the name of their institution. Works by American folk artists make up the majority of its exhibitions, it is true. In the last decade or more, however, the museum has become an invaluable part of New York’s cultural life because it has produced a little stream of full-fledged introductions to figures who are much the opposite of folk artists and frequently are not American. The term “folk art” implies an art for a wide, popular, and perhaps not overly discriminating audience—ingenious and lovely as folk-art creations can be. But the day has passed when this kind of work, which was at its most vibrant in the early decades of the nineteenth century, was crowded with figures waiting to be discovered. [Read more…]

Poem With Orpheus

By

by Emily Skillings

Every word in this poem is a dead body.
Each word dies as you read it
and floats behind in a wooden canoe
that covers itself with itself
to make a coffin. A white, historical plane
knits above the dead word to shroud
and replace it. The poem before (this) point
is streaming and invisible. The rivulets
on which the coffin boats float
move backward forever. That last word (word)
and then (last) (that) (forever) (backward)
(move)—you killed those words.  [Read more…]

Forthcoming Work From The Late Denis Johnson

By

The title story from Denis Johnson’s forthcoming collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which was completed just before his death in May of this year. See Riot Material’s earlier tributes to Denis Johnson here.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
By Denis Johnson

Silences

After dinner, nobody went home right away. I think we’d enjoyed the meal so much we hoped Elaine would serve us the whole thing all over again. These were people we’ve gotten to know a little from Elaine’s volunteer work—nobody from my work, nobody from the ad agency. We sat around in the living room describing the loudest sounds we’d ever heard. One said it was his wife’s voice when she told him she didn’t love him anymore and wanted a divorce. Another recalled the pounding of his heart when he suffered a coronary. Tia Jones had become a grandmother at the age of thirty-seven and hoped never again to hear anything so loud as her granddaughter crying in her sixteen-year-old daughter’s arms. Her husband, Ralph, said it hurt his ears whenever his brother opened his mouth in public, because his brother had Tourette’s syndrome and erupted with remarks like “I masturbate! Your penis smells good!” in front of perfect strangers on a bus or during a movie, or even in church. [Read more…]

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

By

I, Parrot: A Graphic Novel
Reviewed by John Biscello

“A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.”
Sylvia Plath

The power of the black-sharded lady, a cunning saboteur of a shadow-self, resides less as a jailor and more as an illusionist. She creates a phantom cage out of thin air, and conditions one to behave and function as a captive, barred from moving beyond limitations that calcify into tainted gospel. In the new graphic novel I, Parrot, written by Deb Olin Unferth and illustrated by Elizabeth Haidle, cages, both real and metaphysical, play into what is a modern-day fable on survival, fierce love, and the necessity of wing-spreading. Or, as Emily Dickinson so eloquently stated: “Hope” is the thing with feathers. [Read more…]

Susan Howe’s New Poems: Debths

By

Reviewed by Landon Hammer

An extract from “Inside & Underneath Words,” in the September 28th issue of The New York Review of Books.

The phrase “music before counting” comes from Debths, Howe’s new collection of poems. Arriving in her eightieth year, the book pushes forward with fresh experiments in poetic form, while looking back on the whole of her life and career. Concerned with first and last things, with childhood and old age, it is a summing up of what is essential and abiding; and it is also just the opposite, a book of dispersals and vanishings that gives the last word to the illegible and incomplete. [Read more…]

America’s First White President: An Audio Essay

By

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit…”

Listen to Coates’ full essay below:

[Read more…]

An Interview With Molly Larkey

By

by Christopher Michno

Molly Larkey’s recent exhibition at Ochi Projects, a shape made through its unraveling, reflects her interest in the invisible conceptual structures that shape society and structure ways of thinking. Her sculpture alludes to the ideals of utopian concepts as novel possibilities on a distant horizon, but with this exhibit Larkey also focused on identifying and adopting practices that solve seemingly intractable societal problems. [Read more…]

In The Cul-De-Sac Of Tedium: Suburbicon

By

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

After starring in several Coen Brothers comedies, actor/writer-director George Clooney strives to make one of his very own, helming Suburbicon. The crime-comedy began as a Coen Brother’s script nearly 20 years ago. Then Clooney and his writing partner, Grant Heslov, gave the draft a makeover, working in a true story of suburban racism they’d hoped to spin into a compelling biopic. But the result is a jarring combination that goes together as well as peanut butter and poison. [Read more…]

Anne Mourier’s Elevation

By

at the Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn
Reviewed by Robin Scher

The concept of toxic masculinity is not a difficult one to grasp. Just last week it was evinced throughout social media, as millions of women testified to the regular abuse they suffer at the hands of misogyny and the patriarchal structures that shape power relations in society. At the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, French-born Brooklyn-based artist Anne Mourier was staging her own subtle stand in the form of a solo exhibition she titled Elevation. [Read more…]