Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Stalking the Atomic City

By

Reviewed by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Stalking the Atomic City
by Markiyan Kamysh
translated by Hanna Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes
Astra House, 160pp., $13.59
HR

The disaster at the nuclear power plant at Chornobyl in April 1986 created, in real life, a geography people had only imagined. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is the size of Luxembourg, a thousand square miles of marsh, ponds, forest, villages, towns, and large-scale industrial ruins, frozen in time. We’ve seen the photos of swing sets and classrooms overrun with vines, the abandoned high-rises in Pripyat. We’ve heard the stories of boar and lynx and deer and birds reclaiming their ancestral wilderness and harboring who knows what genetic mutations. The Red Forest is the most toxic place on Earth. In a hospital basement is a pile of firefighters’ uniforms that will remain deadly to the touch for centuries. [Read more…]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

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by Jarrett Earnest

Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art
by Daniel Oppenheimer
University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95

The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded
by Dave Hickey
University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper)

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
by Dave Hickey
Art Issues Press, 215 pp., $19.95 (paper)
NYR

When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called “iconoclastic” for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. But alongside the bluster of “the bad boy of art criticism” was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer complicates the cartoon version of his life that continues to shadow his reputation as a writer. What remains is the difficult task of taking stock of Hickey’s literary achievement. [Read more…]

Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo

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Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Hunter S. Thompson’s celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. Savage Journey refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson’s influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century. —The University of California Press 

Below is an excerpt from Savage Journey.

Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo
by Peter Richardson
University of California Press, 296pp., $27.95

During the mid-1970s, Hunter S. Thompson was a central figure at Rolling Stone magazine. Although he did not write about music, he was its most popular contributor, and Abe Peck observed his primacy at close range. After editing an underground newspaper in Chicago, Peck worked for Rolling Stone in the mid-1970s and later taught journalism at Northwestern University. In his estimation, Rolling Stone was one of the most important American magazines of its era, and Thompson defined its nonmusical voice during the 1970s. In particular, Thompson linked readers to their youthful iconoclasm even as their tastes changed. “He kept the sparks flying when the readership was starting to settle down,” Peck said. As he did so, Thompson turned his growing renown to advantage. He began to lecture on college campuses, and though the work was easy and lucrative, he never enjoyed it. Rather than delivering speeches, Thompson limited himself to answering questions, which were often submitted in advance. Sensing that audiences were drawn to his alter ego, Raoul Duke, he played that role onstage. That approach, one of his friends noted, had the added benefit of masking Thompson’s shyness in public. [Read more…]

Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light Chronicles the Great Director’s Journey Against a Raging Historical Backdrop

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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…]

Testaments To Treachery And The Trampling Of Souls In C von Hassett’s Don’t Repeat Don’t Repeat

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at MASH Gallery, Los Angeles (through 1 February)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.” Which is to say, the realization of Man’s or any man’s greatest achievements comes at often dire costs and, perhaps requisitely, at the ravaging expense of the masses. C von Hassett understands this better than most, as his solo exhibition at MASH Gallery reads like a primer for the dispossessed, a lexicon of dark and sinister images that are ominous yet also humorous in a wryly sardonic kind of way. Tackling topics like mass murder, starvation, lynching and, well, Adolf Hitler, Hassett’s images function not so much as dark harbingers from the past or warnings of things to come, but as testaments to the treachery inherent in the human character, which is its own kind of warning. These paintings feel more urgent than ever, as there is an almost palpable sense of dread in the world today, and Hassett does not shy away from the gritty, unnerving truth of where we are and what we’ve come to. [Read more…]

Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism
by Timothy Denevi
PublicAffairs, 416 pp., $18.30

Timothy Denevi's Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American FascismOn a cloudy Tuesday afternoon I found myself by a train station in Santa Monica ordering an Uber ride. To ride the train through the bowels of the city can be a daily reminder that quite a sector of our civilization has gone completely insane, but the Uber ride itself put the icing on the cake and confirmed this dark suspicion. The driver, who shall remain unnamed, was a jolly type with a curious name. I have a bad habit of getting easily into conversation with any human who crosses my path and asked where the driver hailed from. Poland was the answer. Ah yes, Poland. I mentioned that Poland has been undergoing quite the political sea change, using those words as to not say the current government as right-wing and nationalist. This was my second mistake. The driver quickly announced himself as a partisan of the ruling Law and Justice Party (what a shudder to even type such a name) because, hey, they were getting rid of “the Communists still left over from the past,” who are inevitably “controlled by the Jews.” [Read more…]