Rap Poo-Bah and new media anti-tycoon Chuck D offers up his brand of economics in the land of virtual reality: free music. The politics of distribution and the poetics of rap set the music industry spinning.

Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza blends the taut gestures of modernism with the complex, ever-shifting organic designs of nature and the city in his achievement at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in Oporto in the summer of 1999.

Joseph Chaikin changed the face of theater with his Open Theater company and collaborations with Sam Shepard. The avant-garde director, who has garnered just about every theater award, speaks with Liz Diamond.

Ida Applebroog’s paintings master the secret of psycho-drama: always in the midst of an action, their denouement is left to our imagination and fears. Patricia Spears Jones speaks with the painter about the everyday violence that surrounds pop culture.

Peter Campus, seminal artist of alternative media, returns to video in his series, Video Ergo Sum. Less conceptual than his earlier work, more personal and unabashedly beautiful, the piece reflect his ongoing investigation into the perception of self.

Robert Altman cornered the American zeitgeist with wildly diverse films—Popeye, Cookie’s Fortune and Short Cuts—over a long, steady career. He discusses process, market and vision with writer Albert Mobilio.

This interview is featured, along with thirty-four others, in our anthology BOMB: The Author Interviews.

According to America’s longest running poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, “a poem’s medium is one human voice.” His Favorite Poem Project had the denizens reading out loud nationwide—a true vox populi.

The House of fiction has many windows, Henry James noted.

A winter-haunted sky. / Icicles like stalagmites on the ground.

Blanca’s aunt Vera seemed born with money. Her gestures, her voice, her social graces had been so well studied and cultivated that she could have fooled anyone who wasn’t familiar with her past. 

Thar once was a cannonball named Parpian who shot right past my bridges and straight into my life. Oh a difficult feat, for I’d spent 25 years constructing those bridges.

Every time he got sent to a new city he sensed he could get lost forever—which was not necessarily a good thing.

Swish, the ex-painter, talks to Gutt as she goes. There are days that begin so well, she tells him, the only pressure comes when she considers there is no course for her joy. 

“Boxing’s claim is that it is superior to life in that it is, ideally, superior to all accident,” writes Joyce Carol Oates in her influential essay On Boxing; “it contains nothing that is not fully willed.” 

Minimal in form, art-historically loaded, the work invited one to cut a rug while interdicting the pleasure with its massive intrusiveness.

Greg Stump, the originator of the personal ski movie, is the only filmmaker smart, gentle, and sweet enough to bring his camera into snowbound lodges, kitchens, and hospital rooms in search of an intimate word or two, something to break the monotony of what we expect from bad-ass ski movies: footage of 20-year-olds risking their lives on big, snowy mountains. 

Who among us doesn’t harbor pipe dreams? You don’t have to be a down-and-out drunk at Harry’s bar, aka “The No Chance Saloon,” to hang onto the kind of delusions that keep us going day-to-day. 

Trumpeter Lew Soloff’s With a Song in My Heart reminds one that a lyrical interpretation of clean melody can bring unsung pleasure, and that melody remains an integral element of contemporary acoustic jazz.

Textural music tends to be rhythmically, shall we say, challenged. You know, slow. Toe 2000 fronts texture and sound color over melodic development, but drummer David Pavkovic isn’t shy to kick a song along, either. 

Lola has 20 minutes to raise 100,000 marks and rescue her true love from the mob … 20 minutes and four different ways the story could turn out.

In Kimiko Hahn’s latest collection of poems, Mosquito and Ant, she entreats us to follow her through a labyrinthine self-analysis. 

My father was a documentary film editor for 35 years. 

A novelist’s job is to get “dirty with the dirty,” W.H. Auden once said. It is a dictum A.M. Homes adheres to, with formidable results.

Like the gods and mortals in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the characters in Achmat Dangor’s novel Kafka’s Curse transform—from Muslim to Jew, woman to hawk, man to tree; they seek revenge or love in horrible and wonderful ways; they betray or are betrayed. 

The narrator of Galaxy Craze’s first novel, 12-year-old May, could have been called Galaxy, or Rain, or Moonbeam. 

I would like to see the condition of a book after James Wood has finished reading it: the actual book, the spine we readers splay and cradle, the jacket where we leave our fingerprints, the pages we turn instinctively and crease at the upper corner when a paragraph catches the eye, or when the hour we have stolen for reading—and only reading—has passed.

For several years, Thelma Garcia has been creating black-and-white sequences in which she photographs herself from across the room, performing daily routines like taking a shower or making the bed.

The blobs, drips, and painterly splatterings in Nina Bovasso’s works make for a user-friendly investigation into the improvisational nature of inspiration while wrapping the whole painterly enterprise in eye-grabbing allusions to everything else in the world.

All those words like “transfixing” and “riveting”—words you see advertised on billboards that mean nothing after all, actually mean something when describing The Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes.