An engaging new memoir explores how the fusion of man and machine is about maintaining humanity, not creating monsters.
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Jazz Album Review: Playing the Music Eclectic
For fans of jazz, world music, Americana — in short, for fans of all the genres guitarist Bill Frisell has explored over the past decade — “East/West” is a must. By James Marcus Will the real Bill Frisell please stand up? It’s a question his admirers have been asking with increasing frequency over the past […]
Warning: Outsider Art
An increasingly popular movement in the visual arts prides itself on picturing everything that is the raw, untutored, and irrational.
Book Review: Orhan Pamuk’s Memories — Istanbul the Melancholic
By Vincent Czyz In his latest book, acclaimed writer Orhan Pamuk has penned an intriguing memoir that focuses on his relationship with Istanbul, the city in which he has always lived. Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. Knopf. Ottoman poets were fond of referring to Istanbul, then known to the world as Constantinople, […]
Book Review: Clones R Us
Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel explores a future that’s already happened. “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Knopf) By Liza Weisstuch In the popular imagination, science fiction novels are supposed to be set in the future, anywhere from two years ahead to centuries. Often, these stories ruminate on how the latest technology changes humanity and […]
Visual Arts Review: Cartoon Memoirist
By Milo Miles Iranian expatriate Marjane Satrapi continues to expand the art of the comic book. Back in the ’40s, the long-standing prejudice that comic books were incapable of presenting serious, adult matters was exploded by such artists as Bernie Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Eisner. But the discovery of how just how uniquely valuable […]
Book Review: The Art of B.S.
A new book gives a philosophical analysis of American culture’s obsession with nonsense.
Dance Review: Dancing with Ancestors
Urban Bush Women go back to the past in the name of a more communal and compassionate future. By Debra Cash View Gallery The names of Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Dubois, Shirley Chishom and Ossie Davis roll down like a mighty stream. On stage, Amara Tabor-Smith of the Urban Bush Women reaches across space, at turns […]
Book Review: “The Swimmer” — Wading Through the Ripples of History
By Tess Lewis A new novel captures the atmosphere of post-1956 Hungary from a child’s point of view. The Swimmer by Zsuzsa Bank. Translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo. (Harcourt Books) In tales of exile, the stories of those left behind are rarely told. This is hardly surprising because the abandoned, when they […]
Book Review: Samuel Delany’s Phallic Fun
Sci-fi master Samuel Delany’s latest novel is a mystery set in the ancient world. Phallos, by Samuel R. Delany. (Bamberger Books) By Vincent Czyz Samuel R. Delany is best known as “l’enfant terrible” who published his first novel at age 20 and then went on to win science fiction’s most prestigious awards — the Nebula […]