BOMB 150 Winter 2020

Editor’s Choice
Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s Why?
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie’s The New Woman’s Survival Catalog: A Woman-made Book
Glenn O’Brien’s Intelligence for Dummies
Lana Lin’s The Cancer Journals Revisited
Elaine Kahn’s Romance or The End
Interviews
Fiction
Deb Olin Unferth
Amelia Gray
Jenny Wu
Daniel Kehlmann
Poetry
Sawako Nakayasu
from Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From
Andrei Monastyrski
Bob Holman
Portfolio
Takashi Arai and Jacob Kirkegaard
Comic
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Essay
Christopher Page
Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s Why? by Maria Litvan
“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

On the 1973 feminist publication that gathered collective and self-help resources into one big, beautiful book.

An interrogation of the ways in which the system of representation surrounding breast cancer can isolate, infantilize, and even erase the women it professes to help.
Bruce Pearson by Charles Bernstein
The poet offers a series of keywords—performance, psychedelia, melting—to the painter, framing the complex play between text and image in Pearson’s intricate panels.

A look behind the scenes of Akhnaten, Philip Glass’s 1983 opera now playing at the Metropolitan Opera, in which the countertenor plays an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who defied gender conventions.

The artist mines the visual languages of virtual reality, contemporary dance, music videos, ancient Roman architecture, and West African shrouding rituals to create a “weird, metastasized utopia” of digital social space.

The poet’s new collection of essays, Minor Feelings, threads intense friendships, “bad” English, and standup comedy into a meditation on the Asian-American experience.

A radical “mirror game” between film and live performance, What If They Went to Moscow?, part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival, plays for two audiences, one in the theater and one in the cinema—then they switch.

On the heels of a theatrical run of Price’s evolving film Redistribution, the two artists discuss the ethics of streaming, artworks on the verge of falling apart, SoundCloud mixes, and the chaos of assigning cultural value in the twenty-first century.
The Investigators by Deb Olin Unferth
Think high-rises, gated communities, all the places that give you a twitch of existential dread. The Amazon shipping facilities, the dying superstores, the prisons and detention centers, the pig farms, all the boxes that hold products and people and animals, the LeCorbusian landscape one skirts over or through, avoids.
An excerpt from Unferths’s novel Barn 8 (Graywolf).
When she was twenty, the woman didn’t think much about skydiving at all. It was an exotic concept and felt far from her life as it was, though on her walks to class she passed plenty of women her age wrapped in rigging, practicing their barrel rolls on the soccer field.
Of all my clients, I liked Wen Changbao because he never touched me. I just listened to him. For a while I thought of myself as his dog, simply because he was my first friend.
from Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From by Sawako Nakayasu
Girl C is supposed to be hard at work today but she keeps missing her stops, slipping. As the train falls out of view once again, she returns to her world of desire, instead of the world of transport and commuting and punctuality. She allows herself to float into the passenger car, and her pockets empty themselves and her clothing flies off-screen as per instructions provided one hundred years ago.
Portfolio by Takashi Arai & Jacob Kirkegaard
A selection of daguerreotypes, micro-photographs, and film stills by two artists.
Impractical Cats by Jaakko Pallasvuo
The cats were entering middle age and felt despair. They had come to realize that life was not a project one could complete successfully. Life was not a treat.
In Praise of Drop Shadows by Christopher Page
The computer screen conjures pictorial space, but its apparent depth is paradoxical.