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Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

December 30, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Mark Arax

The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California
by Mark Arax
Knopf, 576pp., $25.00
MITTR

The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our getaway. But the distance is no more. With all those dead pine trees in thrall to wildfire, the Sierra, transmuted into ash, is right outside our door. 

We have learned to watch the sky with an uncanny eye. We measure its peril. Some days, we breathe the worst air in the world. On those few days when we can walk outside without risking harm to our lungs and brains, we greet each other with new benedictions. May the shift in winds prevail, I tell my neighbor. May there be only the dust clouds from the almond harvest to contend with. In the meantime, I don’t dare quiet the turbo on my HEPA filters, hum of this new life.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, The Natural World, Thought

The Looming Catastrophe Few in California Are Aware Of (or in Want to Address)

December 30, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

An excerpt from Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent it, by Tom Philpott.

THE FLOOD NEXT TIME

In November 1860, a young scientist from upstate New York named William Brewer disembarked in San Francisco after a long journey that took him from New York City through Panama and then north along the Pacific coast. “The weather is perfectly heavenly,” he enthused in a letter to his brother back east. “They say this is a fair specimen of winter here, yet the weather is very like the finest of our Indian summer, only not so smoky-warm, balmy, not hot, clear, bracing.” The fast-growing metropolis was already revealing its charms: “large streets, magnificent buildings of brick, and many even of granite, built in a substantial manner, give a look of much greater age than the city has.” He described San Francisco as a kind of gorgeous urban garden, graced by “many flowers we [northeasterners] see only in house cultivations: various kinds of geraniums growing of immense size, dew plant growing like a weed, acacia, fuchsia, etc. growing in the open air.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, From The Shelf, The Line, The Natural World

Precontact California Indians: Their Life Prior to Genocide

December 30, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

An excerpt from the first chapter of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, by Benjamin Madley.

CALIFORNIA INDIANS BEFORE 1846

Within a few days, eleven little babies of this mission, one after the other, took their flight to heaven.
-Fray Junipero Serra, 1774

We were always trembling with fear of the lash.
– Lorenzo Asisara (Costanoan), 1890

In the centuries before Europeans arrived, California Indians inhabited a world different from the California we know today. Rivers ran undammed to the Pacific, man-made lakes like the Salton Sea and Lake Shasta had yet to be imagined, and vast wetlands bordered many rivers and bays. Other bodies of water were far larger than they are today. Eastern California’s now mostly dry Owens Lake covered more than 100 square miles, San Francisco Bay was almost a third larger, and the San Joaquin Valley’s now vanished Tulare Lake was the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, From The Shelf, The Line, The Natural World

The Earth Commences Her Retalitory Roar

September 11, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, The Natural World

Art Of The Calculus: Triangulating The Deadly Glowing Crown

January 30, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

A lucid and most luminous accounting of the Wuhan coronavirus and its numerous potentials.
by Dan Werb
Courtesy of The NY Times

Five cases of the mysterious Wuhan coronavirus have been confirmed in the United States, giving rise to concerns about a potential global pandemic. We’ve seen this story before, as health authorities working with threadbare data try to walk the line between epidemic readiness and needless panic. Is this new outbreak poised to become the next AIDS pandemic or a new SARS, which was stopped in its tracks after 774 deaths? To cut through the headlines, we can use a simple concept called the “epidemic triangle.” Employed by epidemiologists since the discipline’s earliest days, it is indispensable in predicting whether localized outbreaks will transform into full-blown epidemics. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, The Natural World, Thought

Amazon To Arctic, Part II: When Forests Tip Over

July 24, 2018 By Barrett Martin Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: The Line, The Natural World

Amazon To Arctic, Part I: The Rainforest Is Burning

May 31, 2018 By Barrett Martin Leave a Comment

by Barrett Martin

In just six months, between March and August, I spent time in three of the most important ecological zones in North and South America, those being: The Amazon Rainforest, the Mississippi Delta, and Alaska’s Arctic Wildlife Refuge. This is a two-part essay about the people, places, and environments I’ve seen in these parts of the world, and my observations on a warming, changing climate that is accelerating in its pace. The environment in these places is being severely impacted by oil exploration, and compounded by clear cutting in the Amazon Rainforest, confused caribou herds in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and the negative impact of heavy equipment and infrastructure on the natural flora and fauna in all three zones.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, The Natural World

The Universe Through Eyes Anew

January 2, 2018 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

The Night Sky Beyond the Visible Spectrum
Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

Filed Under: The Line, The Natural World, Video

The 1978 Paper That Predicted Our Nearing “Disaster”

July 12, 2017 By C von Hassett Leave a Comment

C von

If the greenhouse warming effect of the resultant increasing atmospheric CO2 is as great as the most advanced current models suggest, a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress. De­glaciation would probably be rapid once it had started, and when complete would have led to a rise in sea level of about 5m along most coasts.  

–Prof. John H. Mercer, 26 January 1978

12 July 2017

A trillion-ton iceberg totaling 2,240 square miles, or 12% of the Antarctic peninsula, and 40 trillion cubic feet of ice — a volume twice that of Lake Erie — today broke free from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. Following the collapse of the Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, today’s calving further weakens the entire continental glacier and sets in motion what scientist believe is the first stage of total glacial collapse. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, The Natural World, Thought

California’s New Family Of Wolves: The Lassen Pack

July 7, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) biologists have captured and fitted a tracking collar to a female gray wolf in Lassen County, and confirmed that the wolf and her mate have produced at least three pups this year.

During summer and fall 2016, remote trail cameras captured images of two wolves traveling together in Lassen County. There was no evidence they had produced pups at that time. While the female’s origins remain unknown, genetic samples obtained from scat indicated the male wolf originated from Oregon’s Rogue Pack. The famous wolf OR7 is the Rogue Pack’s breeding male. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, The Natural World, Thought

Riot Sounds

Dälek "Decimation (Dis Nation)"

“Decimation (Dis Nation)” is a Visual Stunner

Dälek
Feat MC dälek & Mike Mare

Directed by Will Brooks
.
from Precipice
out now on Ipecac Recordings
.

The Line

Hilary Brace, Drawings and Tapestries, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Darkness Made Visible in Hilary Brace’s Drawings and Tapestries

at Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station (through 19 February 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood The intricacies and inherent beauty of the natural world are rarely celebrated these days, and when artists do turn their attention to the surrounding landscape, the resulting images are usually ones of devastation and chaos — charting the movement of fires, […]

The Tragedy of Macbeth 

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 […]

John Divola, From Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert,1996-98,

Illuminating Images: Liquid Light and Golden Hour and the Affective Force of Non-Didactic Art

at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (through 5 February 2022) Reviewed by Johanna Drucker What is the difference between a wall label and a work of art? The unrelenting didacticism that prevails in current gallery and museum exhibits of contemporary art makes it seem that many curators and artists cannot answer that question. […]

The Occult Works of Ray Robinson, with an essay by Christopher Ian Lutz, is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine

The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January) by Christopher Ian Lutz Burn the Sun The persecution of the witch is a war of the hours. The Inquisition that charged women with witchcraft was not just about controlling women’s bodies – it was a crusade to extinguish […]

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim is at Riot Material Magazine.

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim

by Ricky Amadour . Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim frames her research to highlight and question the current institutional practices of conservation, acquisition, and deaccession. Acting as an investigator of cultural artifacts that correspond to institutional collections, Porras-Kim deep dives into the expansive histories, stories, and functions of those objects. The artist’s first solo exhibition in […]

Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

by Mark Arax The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax Knopf, 576pp., $25.00 MITTR The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our […]

The Great Flood of 1862

The Looming Catastrophe Few in California Are Aware Of (or in Want to Address)

An excerpt from Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent it, by Tom Philpott. THE FLOOD NEXT TIME In November 1860, a young scientist from upstate New York named William Brewer disembarked in San Francisco after a long journey that took him from New York City through Panama and then […]

Precontact California Indians: Their Life Prior to Genocide

An excerpt from the first chapter of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, by Benjamin Madley. CALIFORNIA INDIANS BEFORE 1846 Within a few days, eleven little babies of this mission, one after the other, took their flight to heaven. -Fray Junipero Serra, 1774 We were always trembling with fear of […]

Laurie Anderson's "The Weather," is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

An Atmospheric River of Wonder in Laurie Anderson’s The Weather

at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (through 31 July 2022)  Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner             “What are the days for? To put between the endless nights. What are the nights for? To slip through time into another world.”  –Laurie Anderson             “Stories are our weather”  –Laurie Anderson Laurie Anderson is a Renaissance polymath whose […]

Maria Lassnig Augenglaeser - Autoportraets (1965)

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68

at Petzel Gallery, New York City Reviewed by James Quandt Maria Lassnig: Film Works edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch, and Hans Werner Poschauko FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 189 pp., $35.00 NYRB Many female artists — most recently Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and Lorraine O’Grady — have had to wait a lifetime to be accorded the recognition […]

Marcellina Akpojotor’s Sublime Matriarchy

Daughters of Esan at Rele Gallery, Los Angeles (through 4 December 2021) Reviewed by Eve Wood Marcellina Akpojotor’s second solo exhibition, Daughters of Esan, continues her exploration into notions of personal intimacy, drawing on her own relationships with her family and the tremendously powerful and transformational possibilities of education and love. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s […]

An interview with Rachael Tarravechia, at Riot Material

Fear and Self-Loathing in Rachael Tarravechia’s Wish You Were Here

at Launch F18, NYC (through 4 December 2021) by Danielle Dewar The horror genre is rooted in a desire for catharsis by means of dispelling fears and anxieties that live deep within a subconscious mind. Since we often crave a controlled release of such emotions, the use of the macabre within an artist’s practice allows […]

Umar Rashid, aka Frohawk Two Feathers, exhibition review of En Garde/On God is at Riot Material magazine

Histories Disembowled in Umar Rashid’s En Garde/On God

at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (through 18 December 2021) Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell In En Garde/On God, Blum & Poe showcases the work of artist Umar Rashid (also known by the pen name Frohawk Two Feathers). Featuring thirteen large paintings and one sculpture in Rashid’s hallmark style, the exhibition highlights works that are bold […]

A Grid Gone Wholly Off in My Monticello

Reviewed by Bridgett M. Davis My Monticello By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Henry Holt & Company, 210 pp., $13.49 NYT In the essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison described the crafting of her fictional worlds as a quest to access the interior lives of her ancestors. “It’s a kind of literary archeology,” she explained. “On the […]

The Web of Mind Throughout Our Earth

Reviewed by Zoë Schlanger Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Random House, 352 pp., $28.00; $15.48 NYRB Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath […]

Drugs Amongst Other Adult Liberties

Reviewed by Mike Jay Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear by Dr. Carl L. Hart Penguin Press, 290 pp., $16.94 NYRB The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only […]

Rashid Johnson, Anxious Red Painting August 20th. At Riot Material

Break//Breathe: Broken Men That Glitter

by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand On the coherence of fracture an essay in fragments on fragments * I had a lover once, who self described as a volcano, but fully encased. Make space to let it out sometimes, I told him. That’s why I wanted to see you today, he said.

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

An excerpt from a new book W. W. Norton calls “a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.”  Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption by Rafia Zakaria W. W. Norton, 256pp., $23.95 There is an important distinction between what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative change” and actual transformational change. The former is […]

Burt Shonberg. A review of "Beyond the Pleasuredome" is at Riot Material magazine

Beyond the Pleasure Dome: The Lost Occult World of Burt Shonberg

at Buckland Museum, Cleveland (through 1 November 2021). Presented by Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn by Robin Scher “The truth is out there,” that quintessentially quotable tagline from the hit 90s TV series The X Files, reflects an ongoing fascination. The obsession with this statement lies in its absolute nature: the truth, not a truth. This idea speaks to an […]

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