Irvine Welsh has been coined as the acid house badboy of Scotland. He also happens to write like a sonovabitch, a term he’d appreciate. Writer Jenifer Berman and Welsh discuss class allegiance, class betrayal, and “trainspotting” among the muckers.

After an eight year hiatus, the Zen Amsterdam cop returns in van de Wetering’s The Hollow-Eyed Angel. Painter and writer Stanley Moss talks to the former monk/patrolman about the unconventional crime and the unconventional solution.

Philosopher Nick Pappas and painter Katy Martin, who has currently entered the foray of film, discuss Plato’s challenge to poetry and examine conceptions of the idiosyncratic and the subjective.

With Mark Eitzel at the helm, American Music Club garnered praise and a devoted following. Songwriter Michael Kroll talks with him upon the release of his album 60 Watt Silver Lining, about eavesdropping, lyrics and the importance of cerebrity focus.

Jeffrey Vallance’s art has infiltrated the Vatican, the Debbie Reynolds Museum, the Liberace Museum and a Nautical Museum not far from the Arctic Circle. Writer David Pagel quizzes Vallance on the sacred and the profane.

Excerpts from Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s film A Litany for Survival, on the great American poet, Audre Lorde. Tributes and insights from the poet herself, friends and family on what it means to live in the heart.

From Tone Dialing and our master of the saxophone: “To know or knowing to think doesn’t mean you know. Going and getting back to where you came from is like going again. Nature has no nature.”

Cheick Oumar Sissoko makes African films for an African audience. Manon Slome and he discuss what this means: the difficulties, the differences and the ingenious determination with which a culture renews itself.

What does illusion, Kafka, Gospel music, Bunraku puppets, Sophocles, the Baroque and a dog named Rose have in common? Lee Breuer. One of our most gifted theatrical directors talks with painter Michael Goldberg.

Playwright and screenwriter Frank Pugliese and actress Martha Plimpton get real about what it means to make work, get work and keep on living in New York, L.A. and the theater world.

I want to scream for the hungry people around the world.

Naked Angels, the ad-hoc theater company of which I am a member, has been home/clubhouse to several notable young actors: Marisa Tomei, Lili Taylor, Fisher Stevens, Patrick Breen, Rob Morrow, and Gina Gershon. Not as well known, perhaps, but just as unique is the remarkably eccentric (Would he mind being so labeled? No actor should.) Toby Parker.

Not long afterwards—in May, or maybe June—she went south with the Salenko boy. I never knew exactly where.

Rolanda has a different movie running now. 

Who is that?
my friends ask

Carlos says he hates biographical details. 

The intense dignity of Diana Michener’s photographs allow us to approach—with a minimum of hysteria—the brink on which she has situated her camera. 

The portrait of Rigoletto; the funny, wooden figure (carved by someone who once worked for Frank Lloyd Wright) with the Meerschaum pipe bowl upturned and ridiculously poised as a cap on his head; and the blurred Cirque du Soleil figures swinging on poles, all seem to revolve around the clownish realities of fate and the fickle nature of looking at the world. 

He could summon up the tableau at will, many years later: Edith standing in the open door of the weather-stained day coach of the railroad train.

Interior of an empty nightclub. Mid-afternoon. 

Ovid, exiled, wrote his Tristia
to plead with Caesar in the capital;

John Laub shows us segments of urban or marine landscape that seem on the point of reverting to a previous geometrical identity. 

Naked Angels, the ad-hoc theater company of which I am a member, has been home/clubhouse to several notable young actors: Marisa Tomei, Lili Taylor, Fisher Stevens, Patrick Breen, Rob Morrow, and Gina Gershon. Not as well known, perhaps, but just as unique is the remarkably eccentric (Would he mind being so labeled? No actor should.) Toby Parker.

Here are a group of the most intriguing actors who have given the most startling performances I’ve seen in a long while; some of whom you’ve probably not yet heard—but you certainly will… .

There is real horror here, in this destitution of mind and spirit, and it’s a brave writer who will take on such an empty soul and give her the controlling consciousness of a novel.

His is scrupulous work, light on nostalgia, yet chording the heartstrings with cosmopolite insight. His mellifluous Trinidadian twang slyly softening a New Yorker’s hard-nosed sagacity, Mervyn’s poetry is an edgy pleasure.

Mark Tambella is a cocoon maker. He has painted mostly with oil on canvas for over the last 20 years on the Lower East Side. 

Written in the voices of the residents of Bermondsey, Graham Swift’s Last Orders (Knopf) captures the language of this working class neighborhood on the outskirts of London, just as Carver caught his characters’ mute eloquence, and Faulkner found his locals’ wise, wry humor.

When the curtain rises on writer/performer Linda Hill, the metaphoric veil we call normal awareness goes with it.

What do the following films have in common: The Brood, Places In the Heart, After Hours, The Fly, Big, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, The Silence of the Lambs, Single White Female, Mrs. Doubtfire, Philadelphia, Ed Wood, Seven, and Crash? 

With smug self-assurance and nervous down-cast self-referential glances, we, enlightened children of the world’s last superpower, tend to talk of the achievements of South Africa as phenomena occurring in spite of itself.

James Nares played in a band or two, but today his improvisations are usually solos, and they take place on canvas or paper.

For over the 15 years since I first encountered them, Ralph Hamilton’s paintings have served as a sort of secret paradigm, at once private touchstone and untouchable ideal, for the framing and insinuation of personality in any art.

Two works of Steven Parrino shown recently in Europe (Milano, Italy and Dijon, France) bring back home thoughts on that 20th century thing called abstraction.

Mauro Restiffe is a 27-year-old Brazilian photographer whose photographs of a few months spent in St. Petersburg last winter were included in the first Moscow International Festival of Photography in April. 

Jim Shepard’s first collection of short stories reads like a prize anthology, such is the range and success of Batting Against Castro.

Ben Kinmont constructs his work around boring domestic activities, in so doing he makes invisible social relationships visible.

Remember those wild, self-destructive kids in high school who no one could imagine as functioning adults. 

Erin Parish, daughter of artists Tom and Susan Parish, made her first oil painting when she was five (of a still-legged scarecrow with her skull instead of a pumpkin for a head, beneath a furious sun, feet planted firmly on the ground). 

In these wild and crazy times, what exactly does it mean to “come of age in America”—especially when you’re from Hawai’i? 

When summer comes around, it brings association with it: cars with windows rolled down and radios turned up, barbecues, skies staying light as hot days cool down into evening.