Pictures Without an Exhibition Pictures Without an Exhibition
The Brooklyn Museum’s massive show of war photography is a wasted opportunity.
Jan 15, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Susie Linfield
Casual Opulence Casual Opulence
Denise Levertov’s Collected Poems.
Jan 15, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Adam Plunkett
Unreal Cities? Unreal Cities?
Do “smart” urban automation projects have more in common with Jane Jacobs or Le Corbusier?
Jan 15, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Catherine Tumber
Paris! Paris! Paris! Paris!
All reds come in the shape of lips. Even—s’il vous plaît—our shy little Mazovian cherries. So we shall write with a promiscuous tongue and instead of a period—make a lip print. At the railway station buffet in Radom we drink beer, and the world seen through a full mug is yellowed with the fright of Van Gogh, and a mug—mon Dieu!—also has no ear. Paris! Paris! Ai, dana, da dana! We climb atop our dresser stands and dream of the avant-garde’s New Trick: The Straight Line, which is a stem, and at its end hangs a lip-colored cherry. Oh, sweet drop of Marseillaise, little planet of our malignancy, flow down, drop into our thin borschts! We geometricians of form, puddle-jumpers into others’ imaginations, are waiting for you. And let the folk sing along: Paris! Paris! Ai dana, da dana! (translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer)
Jan 14, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Jerzy Ficowski
Blown Away by ‘Grounded’: Drone Warfare Up Close and Personal Blown Away by ‘Grounded’: Drone Warfare Up Close and Personal
A new play by George Brant brings home the human costs of America’s remote killing machine.
Jan 14, 2014 / Blog / Bob Dreyfuss
An Artful Imbalance An Artful Imbalance
Treme is an understated and deeply melancholic patchwork of American stubbornness.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Akiva Gottlieb
Infamy or Urn? Infamy or Urn?
How was Emily Dickinson able to be frugal and fruitful in her art?
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko
Pop & Circumstance Pop & Circumstance
The teenpop of the teens has proved discomfiting, like the dead brought back to life.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Joshua Clover
Wolves’ Hall Wolves’ Hall
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, Asghar Farhadi’s The Past
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Destination Wedding Destination Wedding
Drunk as a persimmon on the wine of Cana or myself, I couldn’t tell— the old pain and the old dream mingled and seasickness threw kisses in shapes upon the wall like shells upon the shore outside the conch- shaped hall in whose pearled hum I danced as if my feet were small and free of gravity as sea lice. When above the palms, horns, drums and silks I heard a creature high in moss- tangled eucalyptus cry for milk— a creature not my own, yet still my milk let down. I looked up and it locked me in a stare, half-child, half-marsupial, that transfixed me on the scallop of the terraced white hotel it squatted on until sure that I had seen it dove back into the lagoon like a weasel chasing an eel ever further into the nature of oblivion.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Danielle Chapman