Omegaville
by Tim Krause
Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Few, if any, film careers come close to the star-crossed wonder and terror that was the life and work of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who burst onto the scene in the late 1960s and who blazed, a baleful, maleficent, darkly beautiful comet across the […]
Girls’ Rooms and Boys’ Rooms
by Alec Magnet
Back When I taught comp, my last observation fell on a day for which I turned out to have assigned really boring reading. I don’t know
how many of you use the McQuades’ Seeing and Writing, but it has a little portfolio of bathroom signs from around the world that caught my eye as I was franticly scanning the pages on the subway up to campus trying to find something more interesting to talk about than what I had already assigned. After thinking about it I decided to ditch my lesson plan and instead have the class talk and write about these signs. Thankfully, it turns out that there’s a mountain of things to talk about with bathroom signs.
Populism Yea! Yea!
by Frank Episale
Since 2002, Les Frères Corbusier has been building a reputation as a company able to marry the anarchic energy and scattershot intellectualism of groups like Radiohole and the International WOW Company with a more accessible, populist aesthetic. Their mission statement describes the company’s work as “aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and […]
Comings Together/Comings Apart
by Sara Jane Stoner
Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art We’re just past the halfway point of the run of Marina Abramović’s retrospective at MOMA, “The Artist is Present,” and chances are good you’ve already seen it, or maybe seen one of the blogs that has materialized in response. Abramović, born in Yugoslavia in […]
Staged Fright
by Tim Krause
The skies in Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island are one of the most remarkable special effects I’ve ever seen at the cinema: lowering and grey, impenetrably thick, and wholly impassive to human suffering, they’re a perfect doubling, visually and symbolically, of the claustrophobic atmosphere that pervades the film from start to finish.
The Multicultural Empire of Crime
by Matt Lau
In the final sequence of Jacques Audiard’s engrossing crime drama, A Prophet, the attentive viewer will notice a deft choice of soundtrack. The tune is a familiar one, Brecht and Weill’s ubiquitous classic “Mack the Knife,” but the rendition is obscure: a droll country arrangement sung by Jimmie Dale Gilmore (who himself achieved screen immortality as “Smokey” in The Big […]
Most Happy “Fela”
by Frank Episale
When the reviews for the Broadway iteration of Fela! hit the stands (or, more accurately in my case, the RSS feeds), I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. Normally staid critics were breaking out the superlatives and the exclamation points by the bushel. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley opened his review by proclaiming that […]
A Hidden World of One’s Own
by Alison Powell
When walking into the Brooklyn Museum’s recent Kiki Smith exhibit, a large panel presents this brief statement about the exhibit: “The idea of how women found space for creative inspiration in the past is the point of departure for Sojourn, this exhibition by Kiki Smith.” It praises Smith’s “lyrical and highly personal vocabulary of images,” and declares […]
Book Review: Unpacking an Israeli Obsession
by Jacob Lederman
Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession by Haggai Ram. Stanford University Press (2009).
In the context of frequent rhetorical sparring and escalating threats of nuclear destruction, little common ground is said to exist between Israel and Iran. Enmity between the two states is often framed as the product of irreconcilable geopolitical, ideological, and strategic differences. Iran’s support of terrorist organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, the regime’s religious character, and supposedly anti-Semitic leadership all appear to ensure confrontation between the two states.
Book Review: Radical Imaginings
by Abe Walker
Imaginal Machines by Stevphen Shukaitis. Autonomedia (2009).
At every level, Imaginal Machines is a subversive text. Against the rising tide of complacency, Stephven Shukaitis sketches out new possibilities for political engagement that are at once seditious and savvy.
