Arts
Success Stories
Succession and the soap-satire
Last October, then-presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg told the Hollywood Reporter that he was “struggling” to get into a buzzy HBO show …
Haunted Paintings
The Female Ghost in Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The vocabulary of film discourse contains a rather reductive palette of praise, one critics love to slather on every striking …
God, Death, and the Florida Keys
Joy Williams’s Literature of the Guidebook
Random House was doing this series—Virginia, the Hamptons, the Keys. The Keys were still kind of strange and unspoiled in the …
Unmasking Artistry
Inspecting the King of Mask Singer under the American Gaze
I have spent many afternoons with my grandfather watching K-dramas I cannot understand, appreciating the joy he derives from listening to …
Spectacle of Insignificance
I work at the Harvard Film Archive twice a week, but calling it work would be unfair. It’s about 10% administrative …
This Land, This Land, This Land
Exhibiting visual narratives of Narragansett indigeneity and settler violence in the house Colonial Providence built.
As a small crowd of us huddle on the cold stone staircase, Lynsea Montanari—a Narragansett visual artist—opens the night with a …
Video Star
Emma Chamberlain and the Relatable YouTuber
At the end of the video “REVIEWING YOUTUBE’S HQ *insane*,” YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki joins YouTube star Emma Chamberlain on screen …
In the Making
Examining the legacies of the Gorham Manufacturing Company
A silver spoon the size of a Great Dane immediately confronts anyone exiting the elevator on the third floor of the …
Scrutinizing the Self
Exploring implicit bias through Self, Made
The dark walls of "Self, Made" crept upward until they became indistinguishable from the ceiling, the disorienting scene complete with exposed …
Making Dough
Thoughts on Mika Rottenberg’s surreal videos
A kneaded piece of dough slides through a hole in the wall. Flattened bright-red fingernails are flattened. Human tears drip through …
The Fire to Release You
A conversation with Providence songwriter La Neve
On “A Pretty Red,” the opening track of her debut LP The Vital Cord, released October 14, La Neve sings over …
Self-Made Men
Wanting and getting in Mad Men
Wanting to be a man, or a certain kind of man, animates most of the heavy-hitters of ‘prestige TV.’ These shows …
Within One Frame
Human closeness in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour
content warning: suicide Last month, the film Joker won the Golden Lion—top honors—at the Venice International Film Festival. That the comic-book …
Eat, Play, Sing
The Highlander Center and the practice of cultural organizing
Woke up this morning with my mind, set on freedom Woke up this morning with my mind, set on freedom Woke …
On Desire & Being Desired
King Princess, Hayley Kiyoko, and queer representation in pop music
I easily lose myself listening to Mikaela Straus’s (a.k.a. King Princess) “Pussy is God.” Beyond its lyrics (which I know by …
The Year of Yeehaw
Cowboys making space in music
A John Wayne movie may obscure the history, but the cowboy began from a Spanish imperialist practice: Spanish colonialists forced Indigenous …
Disney To Dust
Cultural nostalgia and cynicism in live action remakes
In 2019, the Walt Disney Company became the very first studio to release five films that each grossed over one billion …
Arriving Before the Light
Notes and reflections on the life and legacy of Toni Morrison
I walk to work that morning. It’s a Tuesday. Something mellow is playing in my headphones, and my phone vibrates, and …
Queering Bollywood
LGBTQ representation goes mainstream
The last time a mainstream Hindi-language film featuring a lesbian lead was released in India was in 1996. The movie, Fire, …
Rhode Island is Famous for You
Crimetown, and the problem of Providence's mob narrative
My Italian-American father tells one of our family’s best stories. I heard it again recently after I asked him, mostly in …
The Individual Uniform
Sartorial representation from the fig leaf to the turtleneck
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable …
Tidy Futures
The work of decluttering with Marie Kondo
As we entered 2019, a push for dispossession caught the nation by storm. Brendan Hurley, manager of Goodwill Industries in the …
Unliving Color
Colorization and popular history in Peter Jackson's director's cut of the First World War
About a half an hour into They Shall Not Grow Old, the new documentary by Lord of the Rings director Peter …
Cybernetic Ghost Towns
New pathways of communication, histories of warfare, and the practice of listening
Norbert Wiener first outlined the theory of cybernetics in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics describe a …
The World as Picture, Exhibition, and Target
Angkor Wat, neo-colonialism, and opacity
Postcard for the Angkor Wat Pavilion, 1931 I want to talk about some phenomena in the violence against Southeast Asian peoples, …
Do I Know You?
Bryan Singer, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and brushing up on your history
The most erotic film I’ve ever seen was made in 1950. It’s a silent French film that lasts all of twenty-six …
"Solving" Translation
Women's labor on the page
“In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things—carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments—had …
Dirty Funding
Warren B. Kanders at the Whitney Museum and Brown University
On December 9, 2018, Hyperallergic, an online arts magazine, posted an image of four members of the Fire Department of New …
Freedom for Whom?
The reflexive photographs of Danny Lyon and the stakes of critical curation
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Sit-In, Atlanta, 1963 Who’s the real Danny Lyon? The year was 1969 and Lyon was an …
Gross National Cool
Objects I found in Tokyo
While researching my trip to Japan, I was surprised to find that “Gross National Cool” was an actual governmental concern. A …
Slowing Food
Using and watching Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
Being a foodie is most definitely entwined in my DNA. My mother famously recalls only eating noodles for about two months …
WHY AM I LONELY FOR LONESOME LOVE?
Emotion and spectacle in Mitski’s Be the Cowboy
I remember a particular moment from my first night on Brown's campus this September when my entire body was enveloped by …
To Be a Composer is Not Enough
The life and music of Julius Eastman
The last known recording of composer Julius Eastman is his performance in 1981 of an original song cycle entitled “Taking Refuge …
We Don't Live in That Kind of World
Revisiting Thelma and Louise in the second “Year of the Woman”
content warning: sexual violence Last week, we hosted a dozen women at our house for a screening of Thelma and Louise. …
Some Notes on Weather, Potentialities, and Limitations
Roni Horn and the Icelandic abyss
Preface I recently acquired my first raincoat. It happened at the foot of the Vatnajökull glacier in Southeastern Iceland. “If you …
Vocalizing Whiteness
Reversing Minstrelsy in Sorry To Bother You and BlacKkKlansman
Within a week of Spike Lee’s autobiographical drama BlacKkKlansman being released, Boots Riley, director of absurdist dark comedy Sorry to Bother …
The New School
Expressionistic recollections of a night in virtual reality
The worst part about virtual reality is how flagrantly interesting it is. You bring it up and everyone within earshot turns …
Soft Power
Petra Collins and the problem with the female gaze
Two women press their cheeks together, with dark hair falling in their faces and lips parted to reveal the radiant white …
The Shame of the Cities
Renderings, reality TV, and obsessive urbanism
There’s an image of the proposed Providence streetcar that keeps me up at night. It depicts the corner of Empire and …