Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Swimming in the River Coltrane: Both Directions at Once

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on Impulse!
Reviewed by Henry Cherry

While much of John Coltrane’s posthumously issued work filters the mysticism of his live performances, those mystic shadows do spread into Both Directions at Once, the newly released studio recording from March 6th 1963. At the time, Coltrane was working out transformative sounds while trying to retain a marketable presence. He wanted to sell more records, but he also wanted to explore the parameters of his band, his horn, and his mind. The two co-led sessions that bookend this album on Coltrane’s studio timeline certify his urge to remain in demand, while live outings like Newport ‘63 and Live in Stockholm 1963 validate his experimental needs. [Read more…]

Spotlight—Selections from Kehinde Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel

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at Skirball Cultural Center (Through 2 September 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Replete with royal, religious, and luscious floral imagery, Los Angeles-born painter Kehinde Wiley’s Old Master-inspired portraits not only subvert art historical tradition but also notions of power and cultural identity. Renowned for depicting traditionally underrepresented figures, typically African and African-American men, the artist envelopes these empowered subjects in Eurocentric symbols of status and wealth. With the unveiling of Wiley’s noble yet vibrant portrait of former President Barack Obama earlier this year, the timing of the Skirball Center’s Spotlight—Selections from Kehinde Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel could not feel more apropos. This intimate presentation delves into the artist’s photorealistic oeuvre through two monumental paintings, each depicting young Ethiopian men living in Israel. [Read more…]

Musical Mayhem in LOUDER! Can’t Hear What You’re Singin,’ Wimp!

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Review by Kristy Puchko

Imagine Marilyn Manson going on a madcap adventure with Carly Rae Jepson and the Three Stooges. That is the astonishing blend in the Japanese musical-comedy LOUDER! Can’t Hear What You’re Singin,’ Wimp!, which made its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. Vocal-chord scouring rock music collides with toe-tapping pop and gleefully silly slapstick to make a movie that’s wonderfully bonkers and totally unpredictable. [Read more…]

David Leggett and Ryan Richey: Mixed Emotions

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at Various Small Fires (Through August 25, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

What is the role of humor in art? For most of human history, both fine and folk art firmly resided in the realm of the serious. It is only in the past century that artists have begun to experiment with the idea of comedy in their work. We can trace this revolutionary notion back to Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s landmark creation, Fountain (1917). Rather than sculpt a whimsical, enchanting depiction of some goddess or river nymph, the artist simply displayed a mass-produced porcelain urinal and labeled it art. Two years later, this celebrated conceptual artist further flirted with this facetious tone in L.H.O.O.Q., a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) complete with a penciled-on mustache. [Read more…]

Lifechanger Is A Sophisticated And Richly-Disturbing Shapeshifter-Horror

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at Fantasia International Film
Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Making its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, Lifechanger is a lean, mean, and intense dose of shapeshifter horror with a chilling message perfectly suited to the complex conversations of the Me Too era. Written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Justin McConnell, Lifechanger follows a mysterious “skin-walker” who steals the form, memories, and lives of his victims, leaving behind a withered husk of a corpse. This creepy crime premise might have you expecting the movie would follow a cagey detective who is on this cruel creature’s trail. But McConnell offers something far more surprising, sophisticated, and richly disturbing.  [Read more…]

An Illuminating Word With Dark Money Director Kimberly Reed

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by Cynthia Biret

Dark Money is a political thriller documenting the influence of corrupt money on the elections in a state, Montana, that is a microcosm of America as a nation.

Directed by Kimberly Reed, who is known for Prodigal Sons, an introspective film about the impact of her gender transition on her family and friends, the film takes a meticulous approach at tracing the hidden players involved in swaying our political future.  [Read more…]

Amazon To Arctic, Part II: When Forests Tip Over

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by Barrett Martin

As a musician, I’ve always felt a connection with the natural landscape, and this is especially true being that I was born in the Pacific Northwest where we take particular pride in our environment. I was born in Olympia, Washington, the literal end of the Oregon Trail and the most western extremity of the Wild West. I learned about Crazy Horse and his Lakota warriors defeating the US Cavalry when my family took a road trip to the Dakotas. This is where Custer and his mercenaries got their karmic return, and where indigenous warriors stand up to the big oil bullies on the Dakota Access Pipeline. [Read more…]

A Short Gem Out Of Santa Monica College: Like a Rolling Stone

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by Alci Rengifo

In the rapidly changing landscape of modern cinema, where streaming, the internet and television are fast becoming the dominant mediums, the art of the short film is becoming more than a mere calling card for aspiring filmmakers. Like collections of short stories, short films are as powerful and satisfying these days as full features, if only because media is making time itself feel as if it is hurtling forward. A short music video such as This is America, by Childish Gambino, will ignite passions about race relations in America faster than any feature film. Yet this is not a particularly new phenomenon to storytelling. With few exceptions, the great literary minds of the last two centuries have flourished in the art of the short story. From Roberto Bolano to William Faulkner, smaller narratives have encapsulated powerful ideas. [Read more…]

Home Of The Porno Burrito

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by Jonathan Gold
July 19, 2006

One of the reviews that won Jonathan Gold his 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism

Today’s subject: the potato taco or, to be more specific, the wonderment of civilization that is the potato taco at El Atacor #11, a taquería chain’s grungy outpost on the fringes of Glassell Park. You have, no doubt, tasted a potato taco, perhaps the basic model of the starch bomb tricked out with chopped onion and a bit of salsa, or perhaps one of the fancy examples of the breed, cooked with the roasted-chile mixture called rajas or embellished with all manner of sautéed vegetables. [Read more…]

The Year I Ate Pico Boulevard

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by Jonathan Gold
September 23, 1998

Jonathan gold famously ate his way down Pico Boulevard and wrote about it in this 1998 story for L.A. Weekly.

For a while in my early 20s, I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach. It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school. [Read more…]

Jonathan Gold, On Art

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Perhaps Jonathan Gold’s final contribution to criticism was not on food, but art. Check out this wonderful piece in Artillery Magazine, where Gold and Artillery’s Editor-in-Chief, Tulsa Kinney, walk the streets of LA exploring galleries — and food, naturally. Gold does indeed compare food to art, and amongst other small but resonant gems, when asked by Kinney “if he sees a correlation between food and art, he pauses, ‘They both turn to shit the next day?’ Then more seriously, again, a question to an answer, “They are both ways of looking at the world?’”

Thank you, Artillery, for this last glimpse into the heart and mind of a most soulful and truly beautiful man.

Jonathan Gold | Artillery

[Read more…]

On The Beloved Jonathan Gold

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by Ruth Reichl

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

Jonathan reveled in flouting the rules. In the ’80s, when I first met him, he cheerfully drove around without a driver’s license. He wore what he wanted — in the early years his constant costume was a slightly too small black motorcycle jacket — lived where he wanted, and spent his time indulging in the pursuits that interested him. Those included music of all kinds, a voracious appetite for books, and a deep interest in art of the weirdest sort. (If you haven’t heard the chicken story, ask me some time.) [Read more…]

Los Angeles Loses Its Greatest Living Writer, Jonathan Gold

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by Andrea Chang

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times restaurant critic who richly chronicled the city’s vast culinary landscape and made its food understandable and approachable to legions of fans, has died. He was 57.

Gold died of pancreatic cancer at St. Vincent Medical Center on Saturday evening, according to his wife, Times arts and entertainment editor Laurie Ochoa. The disease was diagnosed in early July. [Read more…]

Jenny Saville Still Manages To Amaze With Ancestors

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at Gagosian, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Jenny Saville has always reveled in rendering flesh. Her earliest show at Gagosian, at the tail end of the 90s, established her ambitious scope: big, generously impasto’d gestural nudes that flew in the face of current painting trends. Lucian Freud once famously said that he wanted his “paint to work as flesh.” Saville also focuses on “paint as flesh,” but not in the  service of a heightened form of portraiture that physically embodies the sitter. Rather, Saville is interested in using paint to, as it were, flay the flesh she depicts, deconstructing her subject matter while simultaneously layering it with art historical references. [Read more…]

Under The Silver Lake Is A Twisted Love Letter To Hollywood

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

“Jesus and the Brides of Dracula. Hipster pirate. Topless bird-lover. Paddleboat stalking. Literally barking mad women. Hobo king with a cardboard crown.” The notes that I scrawled while watching Under The Silver Lake at its North American Premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival look like the scribbles of a madman. That madman is writer/director David Robert Mitchell, who won wild praise for his art-house horror hit It Follows, and now has returned with a wildly ambitious, unapologetically bizarre, and intriguingly polarizing stoner-noir. [Read more…]

D.A. Pennebaker And Chris Hegedus On Their New Doc, Unlocking The Cage

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by Cynthia Biret

Unlocking The Cage offers an intimate look at an unprecedented battle to obtain the status of legal personhood for animals. Co-directed by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the film follows attorney Steven Wise and his legal team, The Non Human Rights Project, into the courtroom and behind the scenes of this truly historic crusade.

From Don’t Look Back to The War Room and Startup.com, the acclaimed filmmakers are famous for their unobtrusive documentary style. One of the pioneers of Direct Cinema, Pennebaker was honored with a Lifetime Academy Award and Oscar nominated Hegedus received the DGA Outstanding Directional Achievement award. [Read more…]

Passing Through Time, Memory, Decay: A Journey That Wasn’t

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at the Broad Museum (through February 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Time. It can be both friend and foe. It eludes us, slips through our fingers and yet also seemingly extends ad infinitum. The fourth dimension in all of its frustratingly enigmatic glory serves as spellbinding subject matter for the Broad Museum’s current group showcase, A Journey That Wasn’t. Rather than focus on a particular artist, movement, or epoch, co-curators Ed Schad and Sarah Loyer instead chose to delve into this abstract, multifaceted concept. Comprised of 55 rarely seen works, all from the Broad’s vast collection, this sweeping exhibition acts as a philosophical treatise on the passage of time, memory, and decay. [Read more…]

Getting Lost On The High Ground Of Greater Than L.A.

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at Desert Center, Los Angeles (through 21 July 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot 

There’s something about Los Angeles that makes people constantly wrestle with what it means and never tire of describing how life is lived here. No other place, not even Paris or New York, has sponsored such a compendium of self-reflexive art and literature, almost all somehow both obsessive and ambivalent at the same time. L.A. is the kind of place where people who’ve never been here have more passion and frequently more insight about its nature than natives, which is to say, Hollywood especially, is such an aspirational, archetypal place, that there’s almost more cultural currency in projection and fantasy than in a direct yet diffuse experience of it. [Read more…]

Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade Is Exquisitely Excruciating

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Review by Kristy Puchko

I was not prepared for Eighth Grade. Since its rave-rousing Sundance premiere, stand-up comedian turned writer/director Bo Burnham’s debut feature has been gaining buzz as a great coming-of-age tale. I knew my peers thought it was “so good,” and I assumed that meant captivating and fun with occasional streaks of agonizing secondhand embarrassment. Basically, I imagined Lady Bird Jr. But Eighth Grade is not a bittersweet romp. It is not fun. It’s less a movie, and more a cringe-inducing, full-body flashback to the exquisite excruciation of being an adolescent.

[Read more…]

A Conversation With Artist And Esteemed Butch Hero Ria Brodell

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by Ellen C. Caldwell

Painter Ria Brodell has gained fame in the way they disrupt and update both the artistic cannon and history itself. In their painted series “Butch Heroes,” Brodell takes the form of traditional Catholic Holy cards depicting saints and martyrs, and instead paints “butch heroes” on a reinterpretation of the cards. Brodell highlights queer heroes from across the world and ages, showcasing and celebrating lesser-known, “butch” (female assigned, but masculine presenting) historical figures.

Brodell’s process is research-based in terms of uncovering these buried histories. Brodell visits archives and libraries, writing textual descriptions of hero and ensuring that these always accompany the images so that this history is also brought to light. [Read more…]