From David Lynch Theater Presents: “Do You Have a Question for David? Part 1” [Read more…]
An Interview with Erin Currier: Artist, Writer & Activist
by Lisette García and Barrett Martin
excerpted from Ponderosas: Conversations with Extraordinary, Ordinary Women
by Lisette García, Ph. D
available November 20th
Sunyata Books
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And then you have to do it all the time.”
–Angela Davis
Barrett: I first met Erin Currier and her late partner, Anthony Hassett, in 1996 when I was visiting mutual friends in Taos, New Mexico. A group of us went on a hike together, in the magnificent Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the high desert of northern New Mexico. We all had much in common—a great love for music, art, and an obscure martial art that we were studying with the same master in Taos. Even though we were all relatively young, we seemed to understand each other in a much deeper way than most new friends. [Read more…]
The Earth Commences Her Retalitory Roar
Reviewed by Bill McKibben
Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency
by Mark Lynas
London: 4th Estate, 372 pp., $27.99
The New York Review of Books
So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, seeing your parents—shifts dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will you have a job? Will you die? Will you ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming. Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization. The latter is a distinct possibility, as Mark Lynas’s new book, Our Final Warning, makes painfully clear. [Read more…]
Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light Chronicles the Great Director’s Journey Against a Raging Historical Backdrop
Reviewed by Alci Rengifo
Chasing the Light
by Oliver Stone
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $25.20
If there is anything the year 2020 has shaken into the very fabric of our imperial society, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan, rarely is anything absolutely assured. While a biological threat has upended not only our nationalist pride as a world hegemony, it no doubt has uprooted many personal obsessions with career paths and lifestyle. That most provocative of American film directors, Oliver Stone, has now released a passionate and absorbing memoir, Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador and the Movie Game, which in its own way, is fully apt for our time. More than any other work of autobiography to be released this summer, Stone’s account of going against the grain and demanding to be allowed to live off his vocation reads like a tonic. [Read more…]
Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory
at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and remarkable thing. She has created an entire origin-myth that not only revisits ancient African history but invents it. Through 40 new works specially commissioned for the Curve Gallery at London’s Barbican Centre, Ojih Odutola has hand-drawn a fictional prehistoric civilisation dominated by female rulers and served by males labourers. [Read more…]
Segregation on the Highways: A Review of Driving While Black and Overground Railroad
by Sarah A. Seo
Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights
by Gretchen Sorin
Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95
Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
by Candacy Taylor
Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00
The New York Review of Books
In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which dismantled a cornerstone of the racial caste system known as “Jim Crow” by banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Change seemed to be coming in other areas of American law as well. Congress followed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and during the 1960s the Supreme Court waged a “Due Process Revolution” that established more criminal defense rights, such as the guarantee of state-funded counsel for indigent suspects and defendants. The decade seemed poised to bring about a more equal and just America. [Read more…]
Losing the Writer in the Personality: A Review of Sontag: Her Life and Work
Reviewed by Michael Gorra
Sontag: Her Life and Work
by Benjamin Moser
Ecco, 816 pp., $39.99
New York Review of Books
Susan Sontag began to read philosophy and criticism as a teenager at North Hollywood High, when she still signed her editorials in the school newspaper as “Sue.” She read Kant and La Rochefoucauld, Oswald Spengler and Rudolf Steiner. She read Kenneth Burke, who would become her teacher at the University of Chicago, and of course many novels, Thomas Mann above all; an entry in her diary recalls getting caught stealing a copy of Doctor Faustus at a Los Angeles bookshop. One day at a newsstand she picked up Partisan Review and began to tremble as she read Lionel Trilling’s “Art and Fortune,” his 1948 attempt to determine if the novel remained a living form. That set her future. That was when she began to dream of New York, and even of writing for that very journal. And Trilling, a critic forever “talking about the things that mattered,” became a model for her own work.1 [Read more…]
Darkness Half Visible In Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
Reviewed by John Biscello
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
by Katya Apekina
Two Dollar Radio, 353pp., $12.74
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again
In the name of nursery rhyme remixology, first let us add the soothing menace of a Pink Floyd soundscape to the tale, and then let us peer into the fragmented disaster that the fallen Humpty has become, and realize that he was never an anthropomorphized egg-man at all, but rather a family incestuously consolidated into a single mutated unit, a dangerously complex and fragile organism that, in breaking apart, becomes its own prospective savior and redeemer. As you keep looking—and you will, because this specific accident has you in its grip, like a shock collar at Sunday mass—you will notice how the congealed blob that comprised Humpty’s interior is slowly disassembling into individual parts: mother, father, two daughters. How each of these exposed selves will react to their blunt individuation, their emergence from a cystic sublet, remains to be seen. And so you watch, and listen, and find yourself drawn into a narrative that is at once familiar and remote. Welcome to family, as modern American gothic, in the half-lit world of Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish. [Read more…]
Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People
Reviewed by Patrick Lohier
Heads of the Colored People
by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99
Harvard Review
In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” The heart of this collection of twelve stories, the thing that Thompson-Spires communicates with great verve, humor, and empathy, is the answer to that question—a booming “Yes!”—especially as experienced by Black Americans. [Read more…]
Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita
The Bhagavad Gita
Translated by Eknath Easwaran
Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00
Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked the man next to me if something had happened. “Kurukshetra!” he replied. “The next stop is Kurukshetra!”
I could understand the excitement. Kurukshetra, “the field of the Kurus,” is the setting for the climactic battle of the Mahabharata, the vastest epic in any world literature, on which virtually every Hindu child in India is raised. Its characters, removed in time by some three thousand years, are as familiar to us as our relatives. The temper of the story is utterly contemporary; I can imagine it unfolding in the nuclear age as easily as in the dawn of Indian history.
The Mahabharata is literature at its greatest – in fact, it has been called a literature in itself, comparable in its breadth and depth and characterization to the whole of Greek literature or Shakespeare. But what makes it unique is that embedded in this literary masterpiece is one of the finest mystical documents the world has seen: the Bhagavad Gita. [Read more…]
To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown
Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor
Brown: Poems
by Kevin Young
Knopf, 176pp., $19.29
Harvard Review
In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” shadowed recollections of boyhood, and culminating with “Field Recordings,” somber reflections on the recurring traumas of African American social history. In its progression toward a more experienced vision, this brilliant and moving collection is structured as a coming-of-age chronicle. Young’s poetry on social issues tempers a tragic sense of outrage with a blues-based ethos which, as Young points out in a recent review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, is “embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston … [and] sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as ‘an act of resistance.’” In these poems, the expression of “hard-earned joy” in the face of unspeakable injustice is an ennobling challenge. [Read more…]
Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Reviewed by Flora Field
Dispatch
by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Persea, 80pp., $12.69
Columbia Journal
In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities? [Read more…]
Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis
by Max King Cap
“My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.” — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933
He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below the knee. Young and fit but unidentifiable, their fingertips rasped smooth. When first put on display, tens of thousands saw this pair of dismembered bodies and admiringly walked right by them. [Read more…]
Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”
Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters
Race Matters
by Cornel West
Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60
Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves — psychic violence — reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion — physical violence — for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years. The unique combination of American terrorism — Jim Crow and lynching — as well as American barbarism — slave trade and slave labor — bears witness to the distinctive American assault on black humanity. This vicious ideology and practice of white supremacy has left its indelible mark on all spheres of American life — from the prevailing crimes of Amerindian reservations to the discriminatory realities against Spanish-speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes against Asians. Yet the fundamental litmus test for American democracy — its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture — remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the problem of the color line. [Read more…]
Coming Back to Bite: The Earth Births its Curious Gifts in Blood Quantum
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…]
Another Week in the Death of America
Samantha Fields, American Dreaming
at LSH CoLab, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Eve Wood
The first verse of the Mamas and the Papas seminal 1960’s anthem California Dreamin’ begins with “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” at once establishing an atmosphere devoid of color, hope and youthful abandon, and certainly not a description one would associate with the sunny, carefree lifestyle that has become emblematic of the quintessential California experience. Ultimately the song is a lament, a yearning to return to a brighter, more hopeful landscape, if only in the songwriter’s mind. Samantha Fields solo exhibition, American Dreaming, could be said to expand on this longing, albeit taking a darker more ominous approach. [Read more…]
Reckoning Race in Eudora Welty’s Photographs
by James McWilliams
Two portraits; two men. Both are from 1930s Mississippi. The men are situated together, photos 22 and 23, both from Eudora Welty’s only published book of photographs, simply titled Photographs. If you could put a frame around both images it would be the Jim Crow South. [Read more…]
A Gathering Of Ruins, And Simmering Consciousness, In Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus
in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London
by Zadie Smith
Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission
edited by Clara Kim
Tate Publishing, 144pp., $24.95
New York Review of Books
Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of “Mammy,” hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is pulled taut: both struggle under its constriction. And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart. Which raises the question: Who tied this constricting rope? A third party? And, if the struggle continues, will the white woman eventually be extinguished? Will the black woman be free? That is, if the white woman is on the verge of extinguishment at all. Maybe she’s on the verge of something else entirely: definition. That’s why we cinch waists, isn’t it? To achieve definition? [Read more…]
Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms
by Mary Schmidt Campbell
Oxford University Press, 443 pp., $34.95
edited by Robert G. O’Meally
Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper)
NYR
Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a pilgrimage to honor the anniversary of the campaign to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The journey began on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Lewis, then twenty-five years old and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was severely beaten and nearly killed by state troopers as he led six hundred peaceful protesters in a march that started at a church in Selma and was forcibly intercepted by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the Confederate general and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
Corporate Fascism And The Aesthetics of Politics
Corporate fascism. We know the term. Now we will see the full ugly face of its wrath in the vengeful fury of Trump. Trump, like all opportunistic social phenomena, is an expression of a trending wave of collective sentiment and will. He is neither sole cause (autonomous agent) nor simple effect (isolated outcome) of a deliberate plan of action on his own part. But the specifics of his own psychopathology optimize his virulent capacity for destructive impact. Watching and listening to the monster speak in the state of His Union address would be sufficient, even without other mountains of evidence, to feel the grotesque distortions of the personality in all of its many disorders. Now his rabid vengeance is unleashed and unrestrained. [Read more…]