Arts
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
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 …
Night of the Four Moons
Crumb, Lorca, and Harmony with Space
Every US president since the 1970s has announced some new plan to send humans back into space. Besides ‘inspiring millions,’ those …
Irona Pop
The strange popularity of Randy Newman
I think it’s going to rain today The lyric might be understood any number of ways. Though the promise of rain …
Looking Like You
A review of the 2018 RISD Faculty Exhibition
One time, during the bizarre event that is my primary studio course at RISD, we spent two hours thinking hard, in …
On Layli Long Soldier's Whereas
On November 28th, 1795—a chilly day in Bristol, just weeks after the French Revolution began grinding its wheels—English poet Samuel Coleridge …
"Hold Fort for Love Forever"
Björk’s Utopia, and ours
It’s November 2017, and I’m shuffling through wintry New England weather, the chill biting through my half-zipped parka. I am aware …
Bodies of the Water
The Bogotá River and Tequendama Falls
Pollution Two great floods are burned into my memories of those days. Memory, for a child immigrant, often feels like a …
Love Never Fails
Car Seat Headrest and my twin fantasies
The February release of Car Seat Headrest’s Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) wreaked more psychological havoc on me than any other …
Watching the Olympics on TV
Thoughts on those very wonderful games
Every couple of years, the normal schedule of televised sport is upset by a two week long global tournament of sports …
Sun-less Sunset
On the Collected and the Collective
“One day, I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of the film. He told that if they don’t …
I'm Not Going Anywhere
Architecture, Columbus, and the possibilities of caring
In 2009, Texas Monthly published a long story recounting the relationship between a mother, Ann McClamrock, and her son, John. John …
On Scrolling
Scrolling is the single gesture–besides maybe walking or blinking–that I perform most in my everyday life. Two fingers, or maybe just …
Singing a Different Tune
Grad Party and the queer storytelling of “Pretty Boy”
As a genre, the love song has a fraught history of reinforcing particular frameworks within the heterosexual matrix. The male singer-songwriter, …
Ursula, Oh Ursula
What do you do when your favorite person dies?
After the death of a great artist such as Ursula Le Guin, the inevitably lesser person writing the memoriam (in this …
From Molding to Demolding
Musings on casting, the Internet, and the things in between
The below diagram is a non-comprehensive illustration of a casting procedure. Casting commences by wrapping a blanket of material around a …
Inspiring Angels
Freakery and resistance in AIDS crisis performance
In 1970s San Francisco, to be gay was often to be spectacular. The Angels of Light, a free theatre formed in …
Book Reviews
New Releases / Reissues Cunny Poem by Bunny Rogers Cunny Poem is a collection of Bunny Rogers’s poetry written between 2012 …
A House Musuem
Mystery in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum
Underneath the premiere painting of the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, Titian’s Europa, hangs the skirt of Isabella Gardner’s own ball gown. …
Vision Machines
Apocalypse & virtual deterrence in Southland Tales
content warning: suicide The world never quite ends in Southland Tales. When a nuclear detonation interrupts an idyllic suburban afternoon in …
My Cromwell
On the fantasies of Wolf Hall
I’d seen the book around the house, collapsed on different surfaces. I had heard remnants of kingly names and dark adjectives …
The Art of Flower Power
Visual appropriation during the Vietnam War
In the late 1960s, American poet Allen Ginsberg developed the idea of Flower Power in his essay “Demonstration or Spectacle as …
Princesses in a Magic Castle
The Florida Project's recasting of representation
A quick survey of United States media discourse from the past two years makes it look like one crucial demographic holds …
A Ghoulish Passage from Lesser to Greater Perfection
An illustrated account of how I attended the TransWorld Halloween and Attractions Show and left perfected in every aspect of my being
After attending TransWorld Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis Missouri, my life’s project was completed and I attained perfection. There …
After Warhol
Expanding curating practices at the RISD Museum
In contemporary depictions of museum, galleries are often conceived of as very sterile spaces. Manicured white walls like those at New …
What a Mess!
On the stakes of the personal essay
GAITSKILL The personal essay, according to some, is in a tough spot. Last spring, Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker …
To Melt
The politics of soft steel
Steel is about leaning on an edge. Whether bending, shaping, cutting, or welding, I must always wait for the metal to …
The Vietnam Syndrome
Losing the middle ground in Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War
cw: war, police violence, racism The speaker speaks and the truth still leakswhere even Richard Nixon has got soul... Neil Young, …
Digital Inheritance
Identity and imagery in the blue light of nostalgia
ON THE VISUAL IMPACT OF THE E-CARD “Having a great time, wish you were wired!” “Traveling the Net? Miss your buddies …
Swimming Through Emotional Worlds
A Conversation with Rachel Glaser
Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the short story collection Pee on Water (2010), the novel Paulina & Fran (2015) …
An Artist's Contract
Visions toward a more just art economy
On May 17th, New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s piece Untitled was bought at auction for $110.5 million. The painting, sold at …
The Corner of the Beach
Bridging a gap in narrative tactics
Question Watch the following segment for bullshit. Experiment 1A There is a new corner of the beach at the elbow of …
Lost in the Mall
On the writer’s residency at the Mall of America
content warning: anti-Black policing “You'll need the tools for survival / And the medicine for the blues / Sweet treats and …