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Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

November 1, 2022 By Nicholas Goldwin

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 expressed through the film in its alternations between rare footage of early concerts and interviews, expressive animated renderings of the science-fiction imagery laden throughout Bowie’s oeuvre and various examples of Bowie’s own artwork, both visual and musical. In doing this, Morgen allows the true scope of Bowie’s career as an artist and innovator to be appreciated by the audience in a truly all-encompassing way. Yet despite the astounding variety of ways in which Bowie is portrayed in Moonage Daydream, there is nonetheless a disarming absence of any significant insight or depth given to Bowie as an individual. This makes the film’s attempt to give Bowie himself — the man, the individual — the spotlight seem lacklustre in execution, in that Morgen can’t seem to help but identify him as anything other than an icon. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, Film, The Line

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

September 6, 2022 By Nicholas Goldwin

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. Not to disparage either of those staples of cinema, but neither Tyrannosaurs nor Tatooine have anything on Tippett.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

The Clear, Crisp Taste of Cronenberg

July 19, 2022 By Riot Material

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

The Tragedy of Macbeth 

January 13, 2022 By Riot Material

A film written and directed by Joel Coen

Reviewed by James Shapiro
NYR

Those who have long followed the Coen brothers and their cinematic universe of criminals, nihilists, and overreachers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) a long-deferred reckoning with Shakespeare, who has been there before them. We don’t typically think of Shakespeare as a writer interested in crime stories, but he surely was, from the earliest play in which he likely had a hand, Arden of Faversham — a true crime story in which a wife conspires with her lover to kill her husband — through Hamlet and Macbeth. There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and the Coens feel in perfect alignment, such as the scene in which Macbeth suborns two nameless murderers to kill Banquo. The hapless pair see the pointlessness and peril of saying no to him, and in their anxious glances and resignation seem to have walked onto the set directly from an earlier Coen brothers film. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

A Quiet Place Part II Delivers Everything You’d Want For This Horror Sequel

May 22, 2021 By Kristy Puchko

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

A Quiet Place was one of the most exhilarating cinematic experiences of the last decade, unfurling a unique vision of horror that weaponized audience screams against them. Often when watching a scary movie, a good scream can release the tension that’s brewing as your spine tingles. However, while watching this 2018 monster tale in which a single peep could get you ripped into ribbons, a scream unleashed only made viewers feel more unnerved. This clever device paired with a stellar cast made John Krasinski’s horror offering a twisted crowd-pleaser and a smashing success. Three years later, he’s back with his co-writers and cast for A Quiet Place Part II, a supremely scary and satisfying sequel. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

For Our Dyings: Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams and The Colony

February 7, 2021 By Lisa Zeiger

by Lisa Zeiger

“All I can see is the frame.”
–Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past

The art of Shirin Neshat is the pure, clear pool at the heart of a Persian garden. On its surface play fountains of poetry and music, films and visions. In its depths reside all the sequestered emotion, alluring ritual, and ambivalent traditions of the artist’s native Iran. Long gone from another country, Neshat exalts its beauty in the photographs, video installations and feature films she has been making since the early 1990s. To paraphrase Henry James, she is someone on whom nothing is lost, least of all the lessons and losses of her own life, in particular the chasm of her exile from Iran. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line

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

June 1, 2020 By Riot Material

Reviewed by Robert Sullivan
NYRB

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…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line, Video

The Unbound Promise Of The Full Five-Hour Masterwork Until The End Of The World

April 17, 2020 By Henry Cherry

by Henry Cherry

Until the End of the World is a film, like the best of them, that stands outside of genre. Part sci-fi epoch, part love story, part road movie, it begins and ends with an image of the Earth’s curvature. Made by director Wim Wenders, it is the culmination of his most successful period as a filmmaker, a truth made all the more striking in that upon its initial release, Until the End of the World was a failure.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

The Painter and The Thief Offers The Best Kind Of True-Crime Bait-And-Switch

April 9, 2020 By Kristy Puchko

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Is there a word for cinema that lures you in with a dark promise, then delivers something profound, surprising, and humane instead? When I first saw the trailer for The Painter and The Thief, I thought I had its number, having seen myriad of true-crime docs. The tantalizing trailer teased a tale of two sides: the painter and the thief. I assumed theirs would be a story of victim and criminal, hero and villain, saint and sinner. However, what documentarian Benjamin Ree offers is far more compelling and so exhilarating that made me relish being wrong. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Quentin Tarantino Pure Cinema Podcast

April 8, 2020 By Cvon

Elric, Brian, Phil and Jules are joined remotely by Quentin Tarantino himself for an epic discussion about a great feature on the New Beverly website called “Tarantino’s Reviews” where QT has been writing his own articles on movies and TV episodes. He also offers five of his own picks in response to our “Ripoffs” from way back in 2017.

Filed Under: Film, The Line, Video

Cinema Disordinaire: A List Of Infectiously Strange Must-See Films For The End Times

March 22, 2020 By Cvon

Cinema Disordinaire, aka Riot Cinema, is a uniquely selective entry of films that showcase the singular in all of cinema, the seminal, and the utterly sublime come to screen this past half century. For these particularly disordinary times, where self-isolation is our newly mandated norm, we offer up a distilled list from Cinema Disordinaire’s five-decade accounting. These are must-see films — if you’re a lover of cutting-edge or entirely uncommon cinema — beginning with the latest (2019) and working backwards to high cult-bizarro, 1972. Soderbergh’s Contagion, the current streaming darling of this moment, is surely not amongst these greats, but an infectious strangeness runs throughout them all. They are, in other words, Riot Material’s favorites, offered up for those with a latently wicked heart. Below you’ll find links that take you to the original reviews of each film. Enjoy: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

In Its Feminist Spin On The Turn Of The Screw, The Turning Fatally Flubs Its Finale

January 20, 2020 By Kristy Puchko

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

The glory of psychological horror is the doubt injected within it. Is there truly a malevolent spirit creeping through creaking halls of the grand old house? Is there someone lurking in the dark, hungry to do harm? Is there a Babadook knock-knock-knocking at the closet door? Or is it all in the mind of a harried woman pushed to bring of sanity? The “what if” of it all is crucial to the stinging pleasure of this viewing experience, tickling your brain with possibilities. Perhaps the most popular tale of such stories is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. This gothic horror novella has been adapted to film and television dozens of times over the past 122 years. And Floria Sigismondi’s The Turning certainly is another one, and almost a great one! Shame its attempt to give this old tale a fresh relevance is fumbled in a bewildering final act. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Creature-Feature After Midnight Killed By A Buckshot Of Clichés

January 19, 2020 By Kristy Puchko

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Heartbreak can be a savage thing. It’s a primal ache that creeps up on you in the middle of the night, ferociously roaring and threatening to tear your heart into tiny pieces. This metaphor is made literal in the horror-drama After Midnight, which focuses on a man-versus-monster battle that begins after the dropping of a devastating Dear John letter. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

The Savage Wit And Surreal Wonder Of The Wave

January 15, 2020 By Kristy Puchko

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

You make one little decision and the repercussions hit you like a wave. Boom! You’re knocked out of your cozy footing and swept away into a new reality. There’s a swirl of excitement and terror as you desperately stretch to find your bearings or snatch a breath of air. Maybe you wish you could go back to before, make a new choice, take a new path. All of this is what the trippy sci-fi thriller The Wave is about. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Memories and Despair: The 10 Best Films of the Year

December 18, 2019 By Alci Rengifo

by Alci Rengifo

The year 2019 was reflected in its cinema like few before it. Fittingly, the decade closes with movies that obsessively gazed upon the passage of time and the social realities which are setting parts of the world aflame. It is hard for the art of an era to escape its dominant forces. Since 2016, history has moved in a strange blur, the age of Donald Trump taking on a surrealist hue. From Jordan Peele’s Us to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, visions of class war and upheaval were expressed through dreamscapes both satirical and haunted. With another decade passing, this was also a year focused on the power of nostalgia and history’s darker edges. Martin Scorsese’s grandiose Netflix saga, The Irishman, followed a de-aged Robert De Niro through the shadowy underworld of American history. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was pure nostalgia in its reverie, working ever so hard to revive an idea of 1969 Los Angeles. Now the question is if the 2020’s will bring hope or more gazing at what has passed, with fear of what is to come. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Into the Abyss With Jonathan Glazer’s Feral Short: The Fall

December 9, 2019 By Alci Rengifo

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Jonathan Glazer emerges every so often with work that above all is constructed by a powerful aesthetic. More than narratives, what Glazer crafts are images combined with soundscapes which immerse the viewer in moments of dread, hallucination and discovery. Moments which could have the feel of a common day action suddenly take on a dreamlike ambiance. In Glazer’s underrated 2004 film, Birth, Nicole Kidman plays an upper class New Yorker confronted with the possibility that a young boy is her reincarnated husband. His 2013 Under the Skin finds a silent woman played by Scarlett Johansson, an extraterrestrial in human form, drives through grey streets seeking male prospects for the purpose of consuming their physical essence for an unclear plan. In both films familiar settings, whether upscale dinner parties or gritty alleyways, are touched by extreme possibilities. But how does the artist respond to the world when it actually does become extreme? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Errol Morris On Sitting Down With Alt-Right Nationalist Steve Bannon In American Dharma

November 8, 2019 By Alci Rengifo

By Alci Rengifo

Errol Morris, one of the great documentary filmmakers, has sat down with men from the halls of power for years. In his new film, American Dharma, Morris faces Steve Bannon, one of the darker lingering figures of our very recent collective history. If some of the world’s major publications were a bit more astute they would have long ago tagged Bannon as the person of the year, if not the decade. An argument can be made that Bannon is the most dangerous man in the world. Known primarily as the odd right-wing firebrand who helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and before that as the head of the infamous website Breitbart News, Bannon’s shadow casts over every major gain by an emerging, new proto-fascism. In Brazil he consulted the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, in Europe he rubs shoulders with Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, power players united in their paranoid policies aimed at immigrants and leftists. What sets Bannon apart from the stereotypical Trump aficionado, if not Trump himself, is that he is an actual ideologue, a reactionary internationalist designed for a postmodern world. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, Interview, The Line

Atmosphere So Thick You’ll Choke: Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse

October 18, 2019 By Kristy Puchko

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast to tell a tale of isolation, envy, intimacy, wrath, and regret with The Lighthouse. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

In Jaw-Dropping Homage To The Twilight Zone, The Exhilarating The Vast of Night

October 11, 2019 By Kristy Puchko

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

There’s something in the air on a crisp night in 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico. Sure, there’s excitement as basketball season begins with a game so anticipated that nearly the entirety of this rural town has convened upon the high school’s gymnasium. But then there’s something stranger, a crackle on the phone lines, a light in the skies. In The Vast of Night, this mystery will be cracked wide open by an unlikely pair of amateur detectives. The result is an ode to The Twilight Zone series that is fittingly riveting, exhilaratingly daring, and a whiz-bang technical marvel. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

October 4, 2019 By John Payne

Reviewed by John Payne

Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, though it’s easy and quite wrenching to project ourselves onto the life of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a veteran film director afflicted by several physical maladies. His bodily decline brings him great pain, physical and mental. Of course he can’t work, can’t create, in this deteriorating state. He spends his days mostly prostrate in bed, having gobbled a vast regimen of pills and yogurts, and just recently has dabbled in heroin. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

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The Line

A poetic interpretation of Anselm Kiefer's Exodus, at Los Angeles Marciano Art Foundation, is at Riot Material.

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023) by Rachel Reid Wilkie Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in […]

Detail of Henry Taylor, "Warning shots not required," 2011. At Riot Material magazine.

Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

Henry Taylor: B Side at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023) Reviewed by Eve Wood Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B […]

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

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 […]

Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

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 […]

Grant Wallace, “Through Evolution Comes Revelation.” at Riot Material magazine.

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022) By Michael Bonesteel Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” […]

The Joshua Tree Talk

A Conversation on Dzogchen C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie at Joshua Tree Retreat Center 

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Clear, Crisp Taste of Cronenberg

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 […]

Georganne Deen, How to prepare people for your weirdness (Painting for a gifted child) 2022

Conjuring a Divine Silence in Georganne Deen’s The Lyric Escape

at Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles (through 6 August) Reviewed by Eve Wood Albert Camus once famously asked, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” One can only hope that this was a rhetorical question, yet however ironic, it is still a sentiment worth pondering, especially considering today’s current socio-political climate […]

Pesticides in our foods inevitably enter the body and will have the intended effect of killing the organism. Which is to say you are certain to become diseased and evenutally die from the longterm ingestion of industrial pesticides.

A Strictly Organic Diet is Good Enough to Save Your Life

A chapter excerpt from Entering the Mind, the new book from C von Hassett which speaks to an ageless way of resting the mind in meditation to both recognize and stabilize in its already Awakened state. Yet to do this successfully, we must first cleanse the body of its myriad mind-fogging toxins taken in through […]

Milton’s Quotidian Paradise, Lost

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 […]

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

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 […]

Noah Davis, Untitled (2015)

The Haunt of One Yet Faintly Present: Noah Davis, Still at Home

Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, Los Angeles Reviewed by Ricky Amadour Directly across from the entrance, an opening statement to Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, reads “many of the paintings you are about to see were painted in this space.” Smudges, dribbles, and droplets on the floor embody the physical notion of Davis […]

Julian Schnabel, The Chimes of Freedom Flashing (detail), 2022

The Supremely Humanistic Hand of Julian Schnabel

For Esmé – With Love and Squalor, at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (through 21 May 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood How does one represent, let alone quantify hope, hate, grief, love, joy, tragedy, or anything, for that matter, which stands in opposition to something else? Throughout his illustrious career, Julian Schnabel has always been one to […]

Rose Wylie, "I Like To Be" (2020)

In Full Surrender to the Wylie Eye

Rose Wylie: Which One, at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 June) Reviewed by David Salle Rose Wylie: Which One by Rose Wylie; with Barry Schwabsky, Judith Bernstein, and Hans Ulrich Obrist David Zwirner Books, 196pp., $75.00 NYRB Rose Wylie, who is now eighty-seven, has been painting in the same rural studio in Kent, England, since […]

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 […]

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Writers

  • Alci Rengifo
  • Allyn A. Aumand
  • Amadour
  • Ann Landi
  • Annabel Osberg
  • A. Hutter von Arx
  • Barrett Martin
  • C von Hassett
  • Christopher Lutz
  • Christopher Michno
  • Christopher P Jones
  • Colin Dickey
  • Cvon
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