Film
Hunger and Thirst: Chantal Akerman's 'Je tu il elle'
Chantal Akerman’s death by suicide in October 2015, led me to revisit many of her films and to watch new ones, among them Je tu il elle of 1975.
Douglas Messerli
Art
Robert Mapplethorpe: Beauty, Power, and Sex from the Outside
LOS ANGELES — The remarkable two-museum show Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, gathering hundreds of photographs, collages, installations and other objects at both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Center, represents just a portion of the spectacular gift of the Mapplethorpe
Art
A Dying Society: Abel Gance’s 'End of the World'
Abel Gance’s 1931 film End of the World certainly did represent the “end” of a very important thing: the director’s career as a great cinema pioneer.
Books
Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker Tell the Real Life Stories of Fabulous Females
In the tradition of Lives of the Saints and, even more pointedly, Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Lives of Wives, visual artist Susan Bee and book artist Johanna Drucker have created a wonderful new “picture” book, Fabulas Feminae or fables of women.
Film
A Test of Faith: Jacques Rivette's Story of Marie and Julien
No one is quite likeable in Jacques Rivette’s 2003 film, The Story of Marie and Julien.
Art
On the Outside Looking In: Mardsen Hartley's Poetry
Marsden Hartley represents a rather contradictory figure in American art and literature. Both poet and painter—he wrote poetry during the mornings throughout most of his life and painted in the afternoons—he survived through the latter, but actively sought out literary attention and wrote about lite
Books
I Am A Candle: The Poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky
Although long recognized in the Soviet Union and later Russia as a great poet continuing in the tradition of Osip Mandelstam, Arseny Tarkovsky — father to renowned film director Andrei — has been little known to Western readers, and almost entirely unknown in English.
Poetry
The Drama in the Everyday: Bernadette Mayer's Early Poems
I first began reading the works of Bernadette Mayer in 1975 or 1976, contemporaneous with their publications. While I didn’t realize it at the time, Mayer wroten them in her late 20s and early 30s, quite close to my own age.
Books
Riding Backwards to See What You Missed
In his introduction to Clarence Major’s new poetry collection From Now On, Yusef Komunyakaa hints, even if he does not directly state, that there is a kind of natural quietude about Major’s work.
Poetry
Corsino Fortes: The Poetics and Politics of Seduction
The central objects and images of Cabo Verde poet Corsino Fortes are deceptively simple: sun, moon, sea, stone, bread, drums, guitars, blood, palm, fist, thumb, and mouth, along with the colors red, yellow, and green, appear time and again throughout the book.
Art
Imagining the Ordinary: Heatherwick Studio at the Hammer Museum
With its new show, Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, portrays itself as a kind of exploratory museum.
Poetry
The Poet with a Razor in His Vest: Amiri Baraka's Selected Poems
When a publication of a large selection of poems by Amiri Baraka, who died this past year, was announced, I immediately determined to review it.