Stephen S. Bush, Author at Riot Material

Sorry, no content matched your criteria.

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Is As Whimsical As It Is Wearying

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Nearly nine years after the success of his charming heist flick Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson returns to stop-motion animation and tales of untamed yet lovable animals with Isle of Dogs. With this original story set in a dystopian Japan, the acclaimed filmmaker steps out of his comfort zone, creating an […]

Lauren Halsey: we still here, there

at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch Appearing simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic, the labyrinthine cave formations presented in MOCA Grand Avenue’s fantastical current installation, Lauren Halsey: we still here, there are bathed in ethereal suffusions of cerulean, emerald, magenta, and violet light. This site-specific showing presents maximalism at its most […]

On Bruno Mars

by Seren Sensei Bruno Mars is an agent of the system of white supremacy. There. I said it. More pointedly, Mars is representative of a system that smudges out Black people, specifically Black Americans, while white and non-Black persons of color benefit from anti-Black racism and white supremacy. If Mars were white, we—the Black community—would […]

The City as an Abyss of Dreams: Michael Chrisoulakis’s Los Angeles Overnight

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Los Angeles. The city is damned and neon-lit, devourer of the modern-day wanderer in search of gold and social stability, like some hip reincarnation of the Conquistadors. Pauline Kael once wrote that L.A. is the city “where people have given in to the beauty that always looks unreal.” This is ever […]

Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch Borrowing from its vast and momentous photography collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is currently exploring themes of intimacy, non-traditional relationships, and marginalized people through Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin. This gripping group exhibition centers around images from Brassaï’s provocative […]

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Is A Gentle And Needed Battle Cry

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko It seems almost impossible. For 33 years, Fred Rogers switched into sneakers and a cozy cardigan, and nestled in to host a children’s show called Mister Rogers Neighborhood. The times changed. TV became flooded with loud and violent cartoons that were basically thinly-veiled toy commercials. But Rogers was a constant, always […]

The Great Crime Decline, Yet The War On Crime Rages On

by Adam Gopnik Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence by Patrick Sharkey W. W. Norton & Company. 272 pp. $26.95 Excerpt courtesy of Adam Gopnik and The New Yorker […] In the United States over the past three decades, while people argue about tax cuts […]

The Chosen One: A Conversation With Celebrated Photographer Gusmano Cesaretti

by Pancho Lipschitz Gusmano Cesaretti pulls a book off the shelf in his South Pasadena studio and hands it to me. The book is on Chaz Bojorquez, the Godfather of East L.A. graffiti. He opens the front cover and shows me where Chaz has written in beautiful stylish script, “To El más chingón. You started […]

Self Excavating In John Biscello’s Raking The Dust

Reviewed by Ashleigh Grycner Raking the Dust (forthcoming on Unsolicited Press–April 3) By John Biscello 452 pp. Raking the Dust, John Biscello‘s masterful second novel, is first and foremost a novel about second chances. It’s about addiction, obsession, and ultimately, salvation. It’s about the fact that “all roads lead to Heaven,” and sometimes one needs to get lost […]

X Artists’ Books: Literatures Of Displacement And Permission

By Shana Nys Dambrot “What is your secret book?” Alexandra Grant asks the assembled audience. “Everyone has one.” This was in response to a question from the evening’s moderator, as to how and why she as an artist and actor Keanu Reeves came to be partners in the limited-run indie publishing company, X Artists’ Books, […]

Love in the Shadowland of Myth: Rainer Sarnet’s November

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Cinema has the capacity to become a conduit for dreams and nightmares, combining both into something the ancients could have scarcely imagined- the physical manifestation of myth. If critics such as Roland Barthes and Octavio Paz are correct, then the ritual of cinema or television has replaced the pagan rituals of […]

Judy Chicago’s PowerPlay: A Prediction

at Salon 94, NYC Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban Consistently miles ahead of the curve, the uber-feminist Judy Chicago has been so prescient that it has, at various key moments, worked against her. It sometimes seemed—and certainly must have felt—that despite presaging much of our current predicament, she was, unfortunately, pissing into the wind for entirely […]

Emmeric Konrad: Walking On Thin Ice Just To See My Reflection

at Tieken Gallery, Los Angeles (through March 31, 2018) Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot Emmeric Konrad paints angels with dirty faces, serafim porn stars, saints with reality-hangovers, and refugees from justice in rags of former couture. Chainsmokers at church, day-drinkers at Disneyland. His fraught and tectonic compositions are like stream of consciousness literature or automatic […]

The Nightmare of History: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo The spirit of an age is best captured in the artistic visions inspired by the times. This rings true in both the visual and literary arts. The Middle East has been the center of the world situation for so long that in the West we cannot think of the region without […]

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?

an exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, (through March 25, 2018) Reviewed by Lisa Appignanesi Life? or Theatre? by Charlotte Salomon Overlook Duckworth, 815 pp., $150.00 Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?: A Selection of 450 Gouaches Taschen, 599 pp., $35.00 Excerpted from Painting on the Precipice, in the 22 February issue of NYRB A woman […]

Geometry Born Of Dance: Nathan Hayden’s Strong Magic

at CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles (Through April 7, 2018) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch What mystical visions and artistic insights can dancing an hour per day provide? For Nathan Hayden, a West Virginia-born, Santa Barbara-based psychedelic multimedia artist, this transcendental practice inspires the mind-bending imagery behind his abstracted landscapes, biomorphic ceramic sculptures, and hallucinatory wall murals.