Meet Mary. She’s in extreme bodily pain, with neither explanation nor prognosis. She’s got one friend, who is about to leave her life forever.
Read More
At 9:42 PM on June 29, 1975, 28 year old singer Tim Buckley, blue and unresponsive, was rushed to the Santa Monica hospital in Los Angeles.
Read More
The son of a Polish-American father and Chinese immigrant mother, Thaddeus Rutkowski, along with his brother and sister, grew up in rural Central Pennsylvania.
Read More
If you've never heard of Kuso an independent film by rapper turned movie maker Flying Lotus, you're not alone. The movie is a niche film that has become a gross fascination for independent film lovers and free spirit creatives
Read More
If, judging by the trailers, the summer’s great female assassin film will not be Atomic Blonde, but Jung Byung-gil’s The Villainess, I know from having just seen it that so far the summer’s great action film isDerek Kwok’s Wu Kong with its repeated tagline, “My name will be remembered a million years, Sun Wu Kong.”
Read More
In an arena of fans and critics primed for the often-bloody sport of declamation, it takes much nerve to attempt to tell the definitive story of a major literary figure.
Read More
It’s a foolhardy attempt to try and nail down any lyrics-driven album in a single set of bars, especially one authored by a rapper of Jay-Z’s legendary, layered dexterity. But early on in the confessional “4:44,” the rapper born Shawn Carter states: “I apologize, often womanize/Took for my child to be born to see through a woman’s eyes/Took me these natural twins to believe in miracles/Took me too long for this song/I don’t deserve you.” The dual facts that a truly soul-searching statement from such a titan of rap has been long forthcoming and that he now better understands both his feminine side and the myths of masculinity are two of the multiple animating elements at work on the rapper’s shockingly good thirteenth studio album, 4:44.
Read MoreBiennials are a strange thing by their nature. Meant to represent the cream of the artistic crop, these biannual events offer an implicit promise for both artistic excellence (however one chooses to define that these days) and sharp social commentary. In this way the art displayed at a biennial serves a dual purpose: to assure highbrow connoisseurs that quality fine art is still being produced, and at the same time to reflect the zeitgeist. This zeitgeist does not belong to the rarified air of the New York art world, however, or the downtown scenesters sipping wine out of plastic cups in the antiseptic spaces of Chelsea art galleries. The zeitgeist is messy. It consists of violent video games, mass shootings, mind-boggling inequality, opiate addiction, racial tension, social media, and a consumer economy based on cheap labor, disposable products, and omnipresent advertising. In other words, it is about as far from 19th century French impressionism as one could possibly get.
Read More
On the occasion of “Too Late: the European Can(n)on is Here,” their second dual exhibition together at Shoestring Press, artists Lane Sell and Phil Rabovsky sat down with curator Madeleine Boucher in a tiny Brooklyn living room over no small amount of whiskey.
Read More
Currently on view are exhibits featuring the work of Irving Penn and Rei Kawakubo for fashion house, Comme des Garçons. I went to view both spectacles in the same day and saw Irving Penn’s photographs first. This retrospective of Penn’s work is the largest to date and celebrates the centennial of the artist’s birth.
Read More
I turn fifty this year—a distinction I share with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the famed Summer of Love… and the Six Day War that brought victory to the state of Israel and began the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights that continues down to this day.
Read More
Things to Do when You’re Goth in the Country, opts for a much wider canvas, centering (with one interesting exception) on a broader range of Midwest types, from young lesbians dropping acid in St. Louis to a set of church matrons discussing church business to a jailed, addled druggie musing on blood in the sky.
Read More
Inspired by literary journalism made famous by Capote’s In Cold Blood, this award-winning book project is entitled “Little Murderers: Character Studies of Ten Children That Kill”.
Read More
Nick Cave is more relevant and astounding than ever; he and his band, The Bad Seeds (Warren Ellis, George Vjestica, Jim Sclavunos, Martyn Casey, Thomas Wydler and Larry Mullins) are currently on tour in the U.S. and have European tour dates ready to finish off the year.
Read More
We never would have heard the beat if Jim had not forgotten his hat,
In our bedroom at Casa Brandaritz,
The old farm house, built in the 16th century,
Same family
Read More
“I don’t care what you’ve heard,”
she said, “because you may have heard
something different than I.
Read More
Jordan Peele’s 2016 film Get Out isn’t at all what you’d expect in terms of mainstream “horror”: it’s not all gratuitous blood splatter with a half-baked plot.
Read More
The Whitney Biennial was a breath of fresh air this year. There weren’t too many dark, disturbing installations of dismembered animals or humans to wander through.
Read More
RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.
Read More
Unsung heroes have become a common theme for African-American literature and movies in the modern age. The Help, Hidden Figures and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks focus on the black struggle and unsung women who helped changed the world.
Read More