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.
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The Exploratory Instincts Of Shabaka And The Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here By History
on Impulse! Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Shabaka Hutchings, the London based musician behind The Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet, had just released a second recording with his South African based project, Shabaka & the Ancestors when Covid-19 canceled the promotional tour along with everything else in the world. Hutchings spoke with NPR about the illness, its impact on touring musicians and the financial hit the quarantine has put on those musicians. “Literally, all my gigs in the next two months have been canceled. And everyone I know is in the same boat.” Questions surround the entire world as markets crash, people lose jobs across every sector, and the illness continues to mount. Hutchings isn’t a doomsayer. “We have to make the best of the situation, or the situation will just be tragic. And all situations have the potential to be tragic, or the potential to be tragic and transformative.” [Read more…]
The Coronation, The Relinquishing Of Fear And The Way As A Species Forward
The Coronation
by Charles Eisenstein
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them? [Read more…]
Charles Eisenstein On “The Coronation” And An Epidemic of Control
Interview by David Fuller
The Painter and The Thief Offers The Best Kind Of True-Crime Bait-And-Switch
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…]
Quentin Tarantino Pure Cinema Podcast
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.
John Bradford: By Land And By Sea
at Anna Zorina Gallery, NYC (through 25 April — view this exhibition online at annazorinagallery.com)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx
“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
— Herman Melville, from Moby Dick
The latest John Bradford exhibit at Zorina Gallery shows works in a style, history painting, that’s been out of favor with the art establishment for many decades. All the paintings’ subjects come from the 19th century or before, and relate to momentous events relating to the USA and the Americas: arrival of the Mayflower, of Columbus, Washington’s revolution, Lincoln’s wars. Bradford’s technique, thick impasto, has also fallen out of favor and is found more often in street market art: think Paris-view at sunset. What is a blueblood painter, if ever there was one — he is a descendant of William Bradford, the English Puritan separatist who escaped persecution from King James I on the Mayflower and became the longstanding Governor of the Plymouth Colony, known thereafter as the Pilgrim Fathers — doing producing low art? [Read more…]
Moving Room To Room, Tentacle By Tentacle: Michael McCall’s Long Strange Trip
By Peter Frank
Forward to:
Captain Squid & The Tentacle Room:
Adventures in Life, Love & Art
by Michael McCall
Fabrik Press, 260 pp., $35.00
Michael McCall came of age at a time when it was cool to live your art. That time may be coming back (no little thanks to McCall’s example, I’ll wager), but between coming of age and compiling this account, McCall’s lifestyle came to be regarded as more vagabond than renegade, more hippie than hip, more irresponsible than irreverent. Plenty of wannabe art-lifers gave the art-life a bad name. McCall – always an art maker, not just a goof, and always answering to aesthetic and ethical standards – wasn’t one of them, and he was brave enough to stick to his guns, keep on living his life as if it were an artwork, and keep on being committed to that life/art. [Read more…]
Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Yet Miraculous Retrospective, Painting After All
at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020)
Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker
“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. [Read more…]
Cinema Disordinaire: A List Of Infectiously Strange Must-See Films For The End Times
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…]
On Lessons From August Wilson’s Jitney
at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles
By Seren Sensei
Jitney ran for a limited revival at the Mark Taper Forum prior to the quarantines that recently swept through L.A. County. A protective measure against global pandemic COVID-19, the lockdown effectively shut down bars, restaurants, movie theaters, plays and gatherings; while leaders felt this was necessary to halt the spread of the highly contagious illness, a wave of uncertainty has settled across the landscape of the gig and freelancer economy, powered by everything from artists to food servers to Uber and Lyft drivers. [Read more…]
Dr. Cornel West Speaks Black Prophetic Fire
An always-welcomed dose of Cornel West, who is the focus of Arturo O’Farrill’s The Cornel West Concerto, a timely recording to be released this week. O’Farrill is onstage tonight with Jacques Lesure and His Soulful Cohorts here in Los Angeles, at Los Balcones, 9pm. Meantime, below is the Professor’s speech that inspired O’Farrill’s composition, which saw its debut at the Apollo Theater with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra.
Dr. West and his “Black Prophetic Fire” speech, at Town Hall Seattle:
Storytime With David Lynch
In Memory of Genesis P-Orridge: “Hamburger Lady”
From Throbbing Gristle’s D.o.A: The Third and Final Report
Hamburger Lady
♠
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
1950 – 2020
Godspeed!
The Beguiling Desolations Of Trisha Donnelly
at Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC
by Brian Block
In this era of pervasive promotional storytelling, Trisha Donnelly consistently chooses to go the other way and expunge. Her works carry no titles, her exhibitions no names, and her press releases only a few facts. This calculated act of liberalizing the viewing field works to intensify the abstracting power of the white cube toward the discrete objects and artist’s interventions on view. Indeed, what remains most compelling about Donnelly’s practice is her expert crafting of distinctive analogue mise en scène that finely reframes the show’s perceptual field. Far more gripping than any particular artwork of hers, it is this clandestine manipulation of the gallery space itself — as if it were a fabric in her medium — that she wields to captivating and occasionally frustrating effect. [Read more…]
Organized Anarchy in OOIOO’s Nijimusi
on Thrill Jockey
Reviewed by John Payne
What are we looking for when we listen to new music? What is most important? It’s not so much that each and every musical experience has to be formally groundbreaking and utterly unlike anything that has come before, though that rare occurrence certainly does help. Really, we’re talking about the same thing we ask of pop music or jazz or anything else, which is the element of surprise — surprise at how our assumptions about what music is and ought to be get a hefty boot in the booty; surprise at how our own pretensions toward being in whatever kind of vanguard get challenged, how we are forced to question our own orthodoxies, our own ways of breaking the rules. [Read more…]
Abandoned To The Voice In My Head: King Krule’s Man Alive!
on XL Recordings/Matador Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Archy Ivan Marshall is a 25-year-old musician who performs under the nom de guerre King Krule. As Krule, he has delivered a stunning portrait of demonic exorcism across three full length releases and as many extended plays. As Archy Marshall, he’s added a book and another album, both featuring his brother, Jack.
In a universe devoid of the weary and multitudinous musical classification system, people would immediately recognize the emotional content of the Krule/Marshall output and stamp it as such. Within the varied categorization that has been embraced by those seeking to brand themselves with the musical ideologies of others as a lifestyle choice, defining King Krule as Emo is still a contextual misstep. His is the sound of an ambling internal, but revolutionary discord. [Read more…]
In This Moment Of Collective Anxiety, New Images of Man Ponders The Human Condition, And Further Disquiets The Sense
at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the expansive exhibition New Images of Man is a both a revisiting of and expansion on a 1959 exhibition of the same name at MoMA in New York City. A tribute and comment on the human condition, the original exhibition, curated by Peter Selz, focused on new figurative work following WWII. As such, it included a wide range of artists, from de Kooning to Giacometti, working in both sculptural forms and painted images. The Blum & Poe iteration offers its own view of figurative human depiction in a vast variety of genres, from pigment prints to acrylic and oil-on-canvas, fabric, paper-mache and other mixed media, as well as sculptural figures in bronze, plaster, and even created from a mixture of fabric and human hair. [Read more…]
Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
Reviewed by Christopher Benfey
Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 624 pp., $35.00
Harper’s Magazine
Frank Lloyd Wright isn’t just the greatest of all American architects. He has so eclipsed the competition that he can sometimes seem the only one. Who are his potential rivals? Henry Hobson Richardson, that Gilded Age starchitect in monumental stone? Louis Sullivan, lyric poet of the office building and Wright’s own Chicago mentor, best known for his dictum that form follows function? “Yes,” Wright corrected him with typical one-upmanship, “but more important now, form and function are one.” For architects with the misfortune to follow him, Wright is seen as having created the standards by which they are judged. If we know the name Frank Gehry, it’s probably because he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997. And Gehry’s deconstructed ship of titanium and glass would be unimaginable if Wright hadn’t built his own astonishing Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue some forty years earlier. [Read more…]
Dust My Broom: Southern Vernacular From The Permanent Collection
at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through 15 March)
Reviewed by Seren Sensei
Folk art and folk artists tend to be an underserved discipline in the contemporary American art world. We gravitate towards fine artists with prestigious arts degrees over the more commonplace culture of folk art, and when we do discuss the importance of art born out of folk tradition, as in most artistic disciplines, we tend to highlight white artists. From the music of Bob Dylan to the exultation of Grandma Moses, when we talk about folk art as something born out of Americana or something inherently American, we very rarely talk about Black artists. Yet folk art is historically important as an archive of culture encapsulated within creative expression, and creation by Black American artists is nestled at the center of Americana. [Read more…]