


On the occasion of Elevator Repair Service’s acclaimed staging of The Sound and the Furyat the Public, we revisit Coco Fusco’s interview with the ensemble from BOMB 67.

Mary Heilmann’s life’s work has stretched across two coasts and three generations, from Berkeley’s hippies to New York’s ’70s bohemia to the yuppified ’90s.

Zoë Wanamaker’s performance in Sophocles’s Electra brought New York audiences to their feet every night in 1999. Catharsis never had it so good. Film director Bette Gordon talks to the legend.

Law Professor Kendall Thomas talks to the director about Hallelujah!, her latest documentary on the controversial performance artist Ron Athey. Thomas and Gund-Saalfield hash out the questions of religion, pain, and pleasure his performances provoke.

Alan Warner’s down-dirty characters and Scottish vernacular won him a Somerset Maugham Award for his book Morvern Callar. Amy Hempel e-mailed her queries about home and memory to the “utterly stylish” former railway worker.

Years before they met, Lorrie Moore made notes on Scott Spencer’s seamless and stunning novels. She pulled them out for this interview, pinpointing the author’s uncanny understanding of Freud and the vertigo of desire.

At one time the paintings were all atmosphere. There was no ground, no topography upon which the eye could settle—time was fluid—and what lurked beneath the surface referred more to collective memory than the painter’s marks.
—I have an abrasion in my eardrum, I tell my friend C.
I see myself in the dark glass of a storefront window. The image is wavering, untrue. I slip a cigarette from my pocket with pinched fingers and stare at it for two or three minutes, perhaps longer.

In Tenner’s view, it isn’t technology itself at fault, but rather our tendency to “anchor it in laws, regulations, customs, and habits,” coupled with an inability to anticipate the unintended and unpredictable interactions between individual components acting as a system.

There is something happening: what once was referred to as performance art—a marginal form of theater that had originated with the sound poems and cabaret skits of Dadaism and Futurism—has developed into a cornucopia of themes and mixed media forms.

Shohei Imamura’s 25th film, Dr. Akagi, is a lovely mess of jazzy comedy, kink, and apocalypse that he has declared to be his last movie.

A young blood still, drummer Roy Haynes often shouts his motto, “Now is the time!” At age 72, he means it in more ways than one.

Stupid Club’s first CD Made to Feel is an eclectic collection of songs inspired by vinyl favorites crisscrossing a seemingly limitless range of genres. Stupid Club strikes a balance between looking back at music and adding an air of knowing sophistication in order to make it their own.

Where is a singer with a name like Lhasa de Sela from? The answer is Big Indian, New York, but forget it: lifestyle seems more pertinent to Lhasa than roots.
Last Train to Memphis, the 500-page first volume of Peter Guralnick’s enormous biography of Elvis Presley, ends with the singer waving goodbye to his fans as he leaves for military service.
Sometimes it is simply the inspiration behind a fiction that’s enough to cause a stir.
