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

October 8, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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

Pandemic Musings: A From-The-Bag Q&A With David Lynch

September 25, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

From David Lynch Theater Presents: “Do You Have a Question for David? Part 1” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, The Line, Video

Words On Fire: The Literature Of The Doors

September 7, 2020 By Alci Rengifo 4 Comments

by Alci Rengifo

The music of The Doors seems to find its place in every era since the band’s stirring debut first appeared fifty years ago. Spawned in the era of Vietnam, revolution and technological innovation, The Doors dived into a dark, literary well that is timeless and always relevant. Jim Morrison alone introduced a manic onstage persona that has influenced every rock genre to emerge since the 60s. He was Dionysus meets Rimbaud, hedonistic jester meets feverish wordsmith. Because the band was fronted by a figure who viewed himself foremost as a poet — the rare rock star who even wrote fan letters to literary scholars — their music endures much the same way the edgiest of classical literature still finds devotees. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, Thought, Video

It’s Been Going On and On and… The Devonns “Blood Red Blues (Protest Song)”

July 17, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

from their recent self-titled release, The Devonns

on Record Kicks

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

A Bullet of Exigent Thought in Sault’s “Don’t Shoot Guns Down”

June 29, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Sault's "Don't Shoot Guns Down" can be heard at Riot Material. Get on it!

From the just-released Untitled (Black Is)

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/04-Dont-Shoot-Guns-Down.m4a

on Forever Living Originals

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

On What It Means To Be A Revolutionary

June 4, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Video

Through Thinly Flesh the Corona Invades and Not But a Flash The Body Betrays

May 5, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Pharmakon’s “Body Betrays Itself”

From Bestial Burden
on Sacred Bones

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

The Exploratory Instincts Of Shabaka And The Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here By History

April 13, 2020 By Henry Cherry Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: Jazz, Records, The Line, Video

Quentin Tarantino Pure Cinema Podcast

April 8, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

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

In Memory of Wallace Roney: “Venus Rising”

March 31, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

From Blue Dawn – Blue Nights, released just months ago . . .

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/07-Venus-Rising.m4a

on HighNote Records

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

Jazz in LA: Arturo and Adam O’Farrill, Live From Culver City

March 20, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

The Live Show: Arturo and Adam O’Farrill, 28 March 2020
Please scroll to 8 minutes into the video above; technical setup prior
.
Riot Material is proud to present, and stream live this evening, legendary Jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill and his son, Trumpeter and NPR critic’s fave Adam O’Farrill, performing together in their living room, Saturday, 28 March beginning at 6pm Pacific Standard Time. This will be a very special evening where father and son, two exceptionally fine men and notable greats on their instruments, burn down the so-called house while also lighting fire to our hearts and imaginations, the sonic and creative landscapes of our minds, all in ways where we never have to leave our homes. Dine in with a special dish, either homemade or delivered-in from your favorite local restaurant, click onto the Riot Material homepage / riotmaterial.com, and voilà, sit back and enjoy!
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Jazz, Video

Dr. Cornel West Speaks Black Prophetic Fire

March 15, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

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:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Thought, Video

Abandoned To The Voice In My Head: King Krule’s Man Alive!

March 10, 2020 By Henry Cherry Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line, Video

Youth Is No Excuse! But For The Mysterines’ “Hormone”

March 10, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

from the Take Control EP

newly released on Pretty Face Recordings

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

The Throttling, Throat-Slogging Beat of “Stressy”

March 9, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Hanni El Khatib
from the forthcoming Flight (out May 15)

on Innovative Leisure

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

McCoy Tyner, Greatest Jazz Pianist Of All Time, Is Dead at 81

March 6, 2020 By Henry Cherry 1 Comment

by Henry Cherry

McCoy Tyner’s death was announced on his Facebook page earlier today. Tyner, most famously linked to John Coltrane, was a gale force of rhythmic complexity and ingenuity on the piano. Joining with Coltrane while still a teen, his double-barreled approach to the aural intricacies of modern jazz cannot be fully appreciated. The genius of Tyner’s musicality is still being deciphered. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Jazz, Video

Deadeye Through The Fist: King Krule’s “Cellular”

February 29, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

from Man Alive!

on now XL Recordings/Matador Records

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

Documents Of Love

February 15, 2020 By Cvon 1 Comment

by C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie

From Documents of Love, an exhibition of solo and collaborative works by C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie at Hosfelt Gallery, NYC.

Here, the short film “Documents of Love,” which showed alongside the couple’s languorous wall of poetry, rooms of paintings and their combined photography. The short captures a prodigious and productive moment in the East Village, NYC, bookended by a transformative journey through the Amazon and an eventual migration West: to Los Angeles; the small village of Olancha, California, which sits high in the Northern Mojave, just below the Eastern Sierras; and Rimrock/Pioneertown, the glowing third point in the now Golden Triangle of the Hassett-Wilkie clan.

Filed Under: Film, Video

Silken Volts From Synth Vamps Automatic: “Electrocution”

January 1, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

from Mind Your Own Business

on Stones Throw [Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

William S. Burroughs And A Thanksgiving Prayer

November 27, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Video

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The Line

A review of Thelonious Monk's Palo Alto

Palo Alto Sees the Thelonious Monk Quartet at its “Final Creative High”

Reviewed by Marty Sartini Garner Palo Alto on Impulse! Pitchfork Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, […]

Archie Shepp Quartet, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, September 1966. An interview with Archie Shepp, September 2020

Music for a Revolution: A Word with Jazz Great Archie Shepp

Interview by Accra Shepp NYRB My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the […]

Bobby Seale Checks Food Bags. March 31, 1972.

Food As Culture, Identity and an Enduring Form of Black Protest

By Amethyst Ganaway Food & Wine We are demanding, not asking, for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.” —Amethyst Ganaway Black people in America have used food as a means of resistance, rebellion, and revolution since being forcefully brought here in the late 1500s. Food has always been a part of the culture and […]

A Pandemic Q&A with David Lynch

Pandemic Musings: A From-The-Bag Q&A With David Lynch

 From David Lynch Theater Presents: “Do You Have a Question for David? Part 1”

Erin Currier, American Women (dismantling the border) II. Read the interview with Erin excerpted from Lisette Garcia's new book, Ponderosas, at Riot Material.

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 […]

A review of Mark Lynas's new book, "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency," is at Riot Material Magazine.

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, […]

Oliver Stone in Vietnam. A review of his new book, Chasing the Light, is at Riot Material

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 […]

Toyin Ojih Odutola's wonderful exhibition, A Countervailing Theory, at Barbican Centre, London, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

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 […]

Driving Whle Black, two books reviewed at Riot Material

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 […]

A review of Sontag: Here Life and Work is at Riot Material

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 […]

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 […]

Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, is reviewed at Riot Material

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?” […]

Lord Krishna speaks to Prince Arjuna about the Gita

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 […]

A review of Kevin Young's Brown is at Riot Material

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,” […]

Dispatch: Poems, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

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 […]

The Monument to Joe Louis, aka "The Fist," as sculpted by Robert Graham

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 […]

Cornel West and his 2001 Preface to Race Matters: "Democracy Matters in Race Matters." At Riot Material.

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 […]

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 […]

Through the Lens of Race, and Jim Crow South, in Eudora Welty's photographs

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.

Kara Walker's Fons Americanus (2019) at Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

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 […]

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art. word. thought.