Vince Staples by Simone White
“Life has a soundtrack. And certain music is a soundtrack to a certain type of identity or feeling. 50 Cent, the Game, and those kinds of guys—they made us feel like our lives were worth nothing, basically.”
“I think that creative improvisation music models the democratic principle. Heads of state and legislative bodies could learn a lot from this practice.”
“Every time you remember something, it’s not like you’re being teleported to the past—you’re actually physically experiencing it in the present.”
“I asked my students for the image of the essence of tenderness. One girl brought in a small, silver plate with a bunch of grapes neatly laid out on it. When I noticed she had stripped the skin off the grapes, I got goose bumps.”
“I had a guy come up to me and say, ‘I think you’re a really good writer; I just think you’re wrong about a lot of things. But I enjoy the books.’”
“I think violence is inherited, it’s taught, and some of the characters are born into bad blood. …The characters are raped and so is the land.”
“Liberty’s show manages to be about prison and not about prison at the same time: her audience writes about how the music lets them forget they’re incarcerated for a moment, and she calls that effect ‘time travel.’”
“I’m a nontraditionalist being a traditionalist creating nontraditional art, which means that I’m just making art.”
There are cities more present in the warp and weft of literature than others; that’s clear. The literary prestige of New York, Paris, or Mexico City is both undeniable and well-deserved: certain books, once read, transform forever the faces of those cities, superimposing a layer of fiction on their sidewalks and traffic signals.
Lucy and Kit sat waiting side by side on a black leather couch, before a long glass window that looked out over Tribeca, the winter sun in their laps. Kit stole sideward glances at Lucy, who hummed, twisting her hair around her fingers in a compulsive fashion.
My genitals aren’t worth listening to / Chinatown smells like brown cheese
A few years ago, I drafted two linked stories, one about Kurt Cobain and the other about Raymond Carver. Both grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Both had fathers who worked at a sawmill. Both were, in one way or another, working-class kids.
In any narrative, facts are present or not. One might assume the more facts, the better the constructed history, since facts are meant to reflect what can’t be computed by storytelling alone, which is said to be subjective and therefore inaccurate.
You wonder summer’s terabyte, / here on the terra forming, / floating and atomizing, / giving over to shadow,
David Brody by Elliott Green
David Brody has discovered a way to improvise abstraction with the help of math, producing exaggerated perspectives that make you feel the excitement of flying. The flight path might be up or down—depending on where you look—over familiar yet impossible imaginary places.
In 1943, at the age of twenty, Frederick Terna knew that if he survived the war he was going to be a painter.
After Hurricane Katrina, Brandan “Bmike” Odums realized that the graffiti he and other artists were making in the abandoned buildings around New Orleans had an inherent political value, not just because of the subject matter (though Odums himself had always had an affinity for depicting civil-rights icons) but also because creating art in those depopulated spaces foregrounded their meaning, calling attention to what they had once been, what they had been allowed to become, and why.
When I walked through the doors of the Hionas Gallery to see Rebecca Smith’s exhibition, there was one white wall piece that seemed to hover in front of a white wall. It was nothing if not quietly but palpably breathtaking. It made the room feel complete; it beckoned me closer… and thrillingly, there was nothing to say!
I saw C.D. Wright at a party once. I wasn’t her friend or her student. She was beautiful and graceful; something girlish about her face under the white hair.
It’s very tricky, if not kind of futile, to criticize the work of Merlin Carpenter; he does it for you before you’ve even had the chance, calling his art “crap political work.”
A play that updates European absurdist techniques to take aim at liberal America’s great existential troubles: race and gender.
This guide is for women who feel that they will soon be engaged in a new revolution to overthrow the soul-crushing social codes that govern their sexual, professional, and familial lives.
Venezuelan-born artist Javier Téllez’s first exhibition at Koenig & Clinton took its title from his recent film To Have Done with the Judgment of God (2016) and concerns an experience that marked Antonin Artaud’s life in 1936: the author’s encounter with the Rarámuri community living in the Sierra Tarahumara in northwest Mexico.
Accurately described as a kino-essay by its maker, Notfilm is about Samuel Beckett’s Film, starring Buster Keaton, which Lipman restored digitally from the 1964 original.
BOMB Specific: Jungle Fever by Pascale Marthine Tayou
Pacale Marthine Tayou is a Cameroonian artist based in Belgium. His work has appeared in documenta11 (2002) in Kassel, two Venice Biennales (2005 and 2009), and numerous international exhibitions. Recent solo exhibitions took place at the Serpentine Galleries, London, and Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, both in 2015.
