Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

“The Opposite of Literature:” Mary McCarthy’s Feb. ’63 Review of Naked Lunch

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From the inaugural print edition of The New York Review of Books
In remembrance of Jason Epstein, originator and co-founder of NYRB
RIP 1928-2022

by Mary McCarthy

Naked Lunch 
by William S. Burroughs
Grove Press, 304pp., $14.49

“You can cut into The Naked Lunch at any intersection point,” says Burroughs, suiting the action to the word, in “an atrophied preface” he appends as a tail-piece. His book, he means, is like a neighborhood movie with continuous showings that you can drop into whenever you please—you don’t have to wait for the beginning of the feature picture. Or like a worm that you can chop up into sections each of which wriggles off as an independent worm. Or a nine-lived cat. Or a cancer. He is fond of the word “mosaic,” especially in its scientific sense of a plant-mottling caused by a virus, and his Muse (see etymology of “mosaic”) is interested in organic processes of multiplication and duplication. [Read more…]

Songs in the Key of Consciousness: XI’s Extrasensory Dance Poetry

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Reviewed by Henry Cherry

In the year of the pandemic, at-home bread baking was king. There’s no denying that. Why would you want to? A nice sour dough loaf can go a long way to knocking down the depression of living in lockdown. But as the endless binge of streaming media went on and on and on, people also returned to poetry, those most tenacious and misunderstood mountains of the written arts range. And so poetry, now, is ready to redeem its seat atop of the great Mount Writing, thriving as theaters and music halls and museums and ballet companies all have been shuttered by the pandemic rampaging across planet. Sometimes a cool couplet of Anne Sexton, Ted Berrigan or Percy Bysshe Shelley is just what the doctor ordered. [Read more…]

The Literal Sounds Of Plastic On Matmos’s Plastic Anniversary

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Thrill Jockey
Reviewed by John Payne

In music, in general, combining high conceptual aims with what we call accessibility (a troublesome concept on its own) is not an easy thing to pull off. My no doubt annoyingly subjective list of musicians who’ve achieved a balancing in this equation (ear-friendliness + modernity) would include, say, Robert Wyatt, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Jon Hassell, Holger Czukay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Terje Rypdal, Annette Peacock, Diamanda Galás, Coil and the Velvet Underground. This varied bunch shares the notion of basing the work on musical or thematic ideas, and in so doing not skimping on the soul; the goal is a kind of beauty. [Read more…]

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

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at the Morgan Library and Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Jed Perl

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Joel Smith
Fundación MAPFRE/Aperture, 246 pp., $50.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

This is what the great photographer Brassaï, who spent a lifetime recording the merry-go-round of twentieth-century Paris, had to say about his work: “I hunt for what is permanent.” Peter Hujar, who photographed New York and died in the city in 1987, could have said the same thing. Hujar’s achievement, the subject of a compact, engrossing retrospective now at the Morgan Library and Museum, has a nerve-wracking power. Here is an artist who yearns for the certainty of forever while refusing to deny the indeterminacy of the present. Hujar explores a considerable range of subjects. The exhibition, entitled “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life” includes portraits of friends, erotic nudes, nocturnal cityscapes, and studies of animals in the countryside. Hujar responds to different subjects in different ways. He’s there for the subject. The work never suggests a signature style. Avidity itself is his style. Henry Miller called Brassaï the eye of Paris. Peter Hujar is the eye of New York. [Read more…]

David Lynch’s Dadaist Apocalypse Via Twin Peaks

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Episode 8
by Alci Rengifo

Madness grips the airwaves like a deafening transmission, and the overlords of the earth seem to speak in terrifyingly grim visions. Thank the gods that every age produces its own soothsayers. It is fitting, then, that just as a surreal state of affairs takes hold, David Lynch returned to us with Twin Peaks: The Return, a continuation of his landmark cult 1990s series that combined melodrama with the director’s brand of surrealist imaginings. But not only did Lynch return, he also shows himself to be fully in tune with these new dark ages. Episode 8 of the revival in particular goes beyond television or even cinema — it is one mad flow about our civilization’s communion with dark forces to unleash absolute destruction. [Read more…]

Twin Peaks: Episode 8

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Episode 8
by Alci Rengifo

Madness grips the airwaves like a deafening transmission, and the overlords of the earth seem to speak in terrifyingly grim visions. Thank the gods that every age produces its own soothsayers. It is fitting, then, that just as a surreal state of affairs takes hold, David Lynch returned to us with Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), a continuation of his landmark cult 1990s series that combined melodrama with the director’s brand of surrealist imaginings. But not only did Lynch return, he also shows himself to be fully in tune with these new dark ages. Episode 8 of the revival in particular goes beyond television or even cinema — it is one mad flow about our civilization’s communion with dark forces to unleash absolute destruction. [Read more…]

Anthony Hassett’s Last Evenings on Earth

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at The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos NM
Reviewed by Erin Currier

Not unlike tin scraps gathered, then painstakingly crafted and painted into ex-voto offerings under the dim flicker of propane lamps in the outer rings of Mexico City, Antigua, or Salvador, and not unlike the mid-century Beat “cut-ups” of William S. Burroughs scattered like lotus petals on a mosaic tiled floor in the junk-sick dawn of Tangiers, and not unlike the embroidered Ayahuasca-dreamt songlines of the Amazonian Shipibo, Anthony Hassett’s pen, ink and glaze drawings in Japanese Moleskin albums are rhythms of a history at once autobiographical and universal: poetic calling cards shuffled and laid bare in a line by an adept renderer’s hand that has the strength and fury of a fighter’s fist combined with the mystical empathy of a Stigmata. [Read more…]