BOMB 152 Summer 2020

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Editor's Choice
Nina Menkes’s Queen of Diamonds
Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft.
Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher’s The Conservation Revolution
Wayne Koestenbaum’s Figure It Out
Interviews
Literature: Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Oral History: Odili Donald Odita
Fiction
The World’s Second-Oldest Woman
Poetry
Comic
Essay
The End of White Supremacy,
An American Romance
by Saidiya Hartman
Nina Menkes’s Queen of Diamonds by Catherine Damman
“Are you in pain?”
The first words spoken in Nina Menkes’s 1991 film, Queen of Diamonds, treated to a recent 4k restoration, slice through minutes of opening silence.

“You look really different than your picture.” This skewering statement is delivered at the outset of a doomed Tinder date by Anne, the impish protagonist of Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft.

Capitalism is fundamentally unsustainable. In the spring of 2020, the world began experiencing this fact more acutely than ever, as humankind struggled to control the COVID-19 pandemic.
The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance by Saidiya Hartman
One hundred years later, Hartman revisits W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 short story, “The Comet”—”a speculative fiction about the end of the world written after the pandemic of 1918, after the Red Summer of 1919, and in the context of colonial expansion and atrocity.”
Issue #152: Nicolas Party by Jonathan Lee
Party creates vivid pastels and transformational installations that lure viewers deep into the backstories of his subjects.

After researching climate change and survival psychology for her novel Weather, Offill asks if we might imagine a different way to live.

The painter looks back on five decades of experimentation and how that’s generated new levels of confidence and clarity in her art.

Boafo, who studied painting in Accra and then in Vienna, evokes Egon Schiele in his intimate portraits. Now back in Accra, he reflects on the people who inspire him.

Two sound artists on noise, fractals, Bach, Cecil Taylor, the new 7 PM ritual, and whether we still have use for the word improvisation.

The performance artist aka Dynasty Handbag recounts her journey from the San Francisco DIY scene to New York’s avant-garde theater world and ultimately to Hollywood.

From epics to lyrics, Rowan Ricardo Phillips considers poetry’s reckoning with history and how writing will reflect our current crisis for future generations.

At the appointed time, the team members left their rooms and followed Phillip’s directions. They walked down the hallway and up the stairs to a room at the end of the corridor.

I have just read a diary entry from fifteen years ago, in which I wrote that I had just read some diary entries from many more years before that, written at a time when I was staying by myself in a small town near Caen, in Normandy.

My favorites are the ones you see, but I have a lot you don’t see unless I’m naked. And I’m not going to get naked now. I’m too embarrassed with you.
Song of the Andoumboulou: 255 by Nathaniel Mackey
Lake Pred was no lake but a precondition, / predecessor assault that kept coming, / preterite arrest we couldn’t quit.