Four minutes into The Old Guard, released this summer on Netflix, Charlize Theron’s character Andi savors a piece of baklava and pinpoints exactly where it came from: “Hazelnut, not walnut. The Black Sea. Rosewater. Pomegranate. Eastern Turkey?” She’s right, of course – anyone who has eaten baklava for 6,000 years has learned a thing or […]
Reviews
Gina Prince-Bythewood: Feminism Frame by Frame
Please keep a safe […]: Chin Chin – Grass Jelly Drinks
by j.p.mot
j.p.mot’s object of research centers on reclaiming the orientalist gaze depicted by colonial ethnographers. Within his creative process, he is interested in serendipity and in-situ chance encounters leading to the creation of mixed-media installations. These diverse assemblages center around the study of canned humor and subversive semantics underlined by words, characters, corporate branding, and iconographies […]
Apocalypse Singing: A Review of Claire Wahmanholm’s Wilder for Pandemic Times
by Robin Gow
In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come. The collection’s striking red moon cover drew me in with its strangeness. There’s something ominous […]
Feminist Flashback: The Woman’s Film
by Jennifer Gauthier
I can’t remember precisely the first time I saw The Woman’s Film, a collaborative short documentary made by San Francisco Newsreel in 1971, but I do remember being struck by its boldly feminist mode of address and content. It has stuck with me for years and now I use it in class anytime I can. […]
Review of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov
by Aya Kusch
Helen Frankenthaler was adept in the art of getting noticed. On May 19, 1950, she donned a costume meant to transform her into a Picasso painting and made her grand entrance into the Astor Ball flanked by an actress friend, Gaby Rodgers. Fresh from college and largely unknown, Life magazine found her eye-catching enough to […]
How Justine by Forsyth Harmon Taught Me How to Feel
by Aya Kusch
A few days ago, I was talking with a friend, and I told her that teenage girls must have superpowers that temporarily bestow them with emotional endurance beyond what anyone else in any other demographic could hope for or imagine, and it’s amazing that anyone survives girlhood without needing tons of therapy afterwards. Her […]
Breaking Currents: eddy at M23
by Corey Durbin
An eddy, the titular inspiration for this show, is a flowing water phenomenon where the current is disrupted by inverse movement, causing a whirlpool. This exhibit of young emerging sculptors makes a similar gesture against a cultural current, long spiraling toward doom. M23 is a small gallery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the […]
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
Reviewed by Sophia Kaufman
At the end of Ziwe Fumudoh’s Instagram Live shows this summer—in which she quizzed her guests on civil rights leaders, asked them whether they’d ever worn blackface, what they qualitatively like about Black people, how many Black friends they have, and whether they would commit to reparations, among other rapid-fire prompts often tailored to her […]
Explorations in Friendship & Witchcraft in The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
by Aya Kusch
Long before Sephora started selling “Starter Witch Kits” and books with titles like Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive became mainstream, the Mexican-British surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington, was conjuring her own magical realms with the help of paint and the written word. Her wild life was marked by adventure, rebellion, and an irrepressible desire to create. […]
The Art of Poetry And Translation: How The Disappearing Ox Reimagines a Buddhist Parable
by Aya Kusch
The Disappearing Ox is available for $28 at Brilliantbooks.com In the 1990s, the artist Max Gimblett suggested a novel yet intriguing project to the poet Lewis Hyde; that they create a modern, American version of the twelfth-century Chinese parable known as the Oxherding series. Hyde agreed, and from there emerged an odyssey into the realm […]
