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Photographing Ancient Organisms Before They Disappear
Brooklyn-based photographer Rachel Sussman spent nearly a decade tracking down the elders of our world, where life is measured in centuries instead of years.
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Duh, It’s Postmodern Poetry
Jon Rutzmoser’s thin book of poetry packed with thick descriptions of dicks, dire and dramatic Oedipal complexes, heavy-petting psychoanalytic theory references, and Disneyland descriptors made me laugh, pissed me off, had me rolling my eyes, and had me wondering what it means to write poetry today.
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The Portrait in the 21st Century
The National Portrait Gallery in London has published a compendium of what portraiture means for the 21st century. While the media may be more tech-heavy than previous centuries, the examination of self remains, perhaps with even more questions of what that means than before.
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Art of Darkness: Matt Kish Illustrates Conrad's Classic
What’s stunning about Matt Kish’s illustrations for Heart of Darkness — one for every page of Joseph Conrad’s text — is how sunny they are. His modest palette comprises yellow, green, black, and white, with the occasional hit of red, orange, or blue. The novel, on the other hand, is tonally dark: se
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Artists Offer Their Escapes from Creative Block
It seems like a lot of artists just have it together, never missing a beat in churning out work as if on an assembly line powered by boundless creativity. Of course the truth is, everyone gets in a rut sometimes that can feel like being lodged in the Mariana Trench.
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Testifying on the Walls: A Street Artist's Urban Love Letters
Meticulously painted like old advertising signs but conveying the kind of telegraphed poetry you might find scrawled on a bathroom wall, Stephen Powers's murals have been lodged into the street dialogue of cities from New York to Philadelphia to Belfast. A new book brings together the narrative of h
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Pretty in Ink: Women Cartoonists in the History of Comics
Women have been involved in cartoons and comics from their beginning, although much of their work has languished in the greater story of graphic narratives. And it's not for the reasons you might think.
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Looking at Miami as an Architectural Powerhouse
The ninth issue of CLOG, the architecture publication that emphatically “slows things down,” focuses on the increasingly growing interest in the city of Miami and the transition from a major shipping port and vacation destination to an architectural powerhouse.
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New York Noir: Capturing the City's Grit and Grime
Photographer Michael Ernest Sweet scavenges the constant contrasts of people in New York City for shots that show the grittiness and grime of its collective persona. Some of these photographs have been collected into a noir narrative called The Human Fragment, a monograph released in December by ind
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Laird Barron, 'The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All'
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (Nightshade Books, 2013) is Laird Barron’s fifth book and his third collection of short stories. Barron’s fiction is Horror with a capital H. He has a Weird Lovecraftian streak, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
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War Elephants and Pious Cats: Basil Bunting's Persian Poems
The recent death of William Weaver, the acclaimed translator of Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Primo Levi and other modern Italian authors, spurred memories of the translation class he taught at Columbia University back in the late 1970s. A small group of students listened attentively to his thoughts a
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Two Illustrators Tackle the Stories of New York City and San Francisco
Hello, New York: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Five Boroughs and Meanwhile in San Francisco: A City in its Own Words — each being published in March by Chronicle Books — are like compilations of memory from living in a city.