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

From Trauma to Transcendence in The Naked Mind

at Track 16, Los Angeles (through December 12) Reviewed by Genie Davis Curated by Georganne Deen, the group show at Track 16 Gallery is perhaps the ultimate exhibition for pandemic times. Titled The Naked Mind, the show features the art of eleven artists including Deen, Liz Young, Eve Wood, Cathy Ward, Samantha Harrison, Christine Wertheim, Laurie Steelink, Rhonda Saboff / Parker Pine, and Lara […]

Excellence and Thrilling Abundance in LA Louver’s 45 at 45

at LA Louver, Los Angeles (through 16 January 2021) Reviewed by Eve Wood 45 at 45, currently on view at LA Louver in Venice, is an exhibition of epic proportions, not only because of the sheer number of artists included but also because it signifies and celebrates four-and-a-half decades of LA Louver’s luminous and expansive vision. […]

Stalking Memory to Spy Out One’s Self in Patrick Modiano’s Invisible Ink

Reviewed by John Biscello Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 176 pp., $24.00 If there is a suitcase, forged documentation, café-life and tons of mileage accumulated tramping the streets of Paris, it’s a pretty safe guess that you are inside a Patrick Modiano novel. The French writer, whose Nobel Prize in 2014 launched […]

Lockdown Be Damned! Raffaello 1520–1483: An Exhibition in Rome

at the Scuderie del Quirinale Reviewed by Ingrid D. Rowland Raffaello 1520–1483 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lafranconi, with Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Vincenzo Farinella Skira 543 pp., €46.00 (paper) (in Italian; an English translation will be published in October 2020) The New York Review of Books Like the artist […]

Don DeLillo’s Engrossing Yet Oddly Frictionless New Novella, The Silence

Reviewed by Dwight Garner The Silence by Don DeLillo Scribner, 128pp., has $19.22 NY Times Don DeLillo’s slim new novel, The Silence, is a pristine disaster novel with apocalyptic overtones. It’s a Stephen King novel scored by Philip Glass instead of Chuck Berry. A plane from Paris to Newark crash-lands. Two of the main characters […]

Dismantling One of the Great Encyclopedic Museums in the Country: The Regrettable LACMA Redesign

by Joseph Giovannini NYRB Online “This is a hostile takeover of the museum, and if the design succeeds in hijacking the institution, Los Angeles will be living for a long time with a wanton act of architecture, and the bitter memory of a very expensive betrayal of the public trust.” —Joseph Giovannini There are two […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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”

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 […]

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’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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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?” […]

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 […]

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