The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
DEC 05-JAN 06
Books
Adding Up
by Win ClevengerBooks
This series of back-pocket-sized books of drawings and photographs ranges widely, from backbiting satire of the art world to images of pursuit of the sublime. In between there are cats, castles in exploding fields, and a gentler but even sadder take on the art world.
Melissa Rossi with K.M. Ferebee
Books
Recently, the Rail caught up with Melissa Rossi, via email, on the subjects of false prophets, the lone Swiss Bush supporter, why you shouldn’t pay your taxes, and other issues raised by her most recent book, What Every American Should Know About the Rest of theWorld (Plume, December 2005).
The Songs Are My Lexicon
by Nora GriffinBooks
Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, edited by Benjamin Hedin, is a collection of literary and journalistic essays, poems, and speeches by Dylan scholars, rock critics and connoisseurs. Like the beat paperbacks and pocketbook existentialism collections that Dylan might have carried with him as a young escapee to New York, Studio A is a portable key to a secret world, not dark yet but getting there. One in which intelligent rock criticism tried to match the intensity of the music it critiqued with the power of the written word, and writers from all walks of life tried to collectively understand the progress and patterns of musical forms by dipping into their own knowledge of the hodgepodge of 20th century American culture.
Fiction: Rock & Roll Diary
by Arthur VaughanBooks
Every generation, a certain city or neighborhood becomes the capital of America’s counterculture. Whether Concord in the mid-19th Century, Greenwich Village in the early 20th century and again in the early 60s, Haight-Ashbury in the mid to late 60s, or Seattle in the early 90s, these places attract the restless and the dissatisfied, and they also give form to the furtive dreams of the rest of the country. In Paul Ford’s novel Gary Benchley, Rock Star, it’s Williamsburg circa 2004.
Art: We Are All Connected
by Rachel SymeBooks
Kept secrets are like time-bombs, silently ticking away in separate mental vaults, waiting to detonate and make trouble. For those that can’t find a tangible listener, there’s always the internet; catharsis has become as easy as clicking a button. Confessional sites like Grouphug.us or DailyConfession.com are the agnostic answer to atonement, as we can now log on, type in a sin, and send it flying into the digital atmosphere. The only problem with these sites is that they lack interactivity; the release in telling a secret comes from knowing that someone has heard it. Fortunately for all would-be cyber-confessors, Frank Warren is listening.
Investigative Reporting: Squatter Nation
by Ellen PearlmanBooks
And what about all those NGOs and government organizations? What are they doing? Neuwirth hooked up with UN Habitat, bloated with conferences and studies but not with anyone who got down and dirty with the squatters, an especially vexing fact since they were within a stone’s throw of the Kibera slums in Nairobi.
New York Stories: Acquainted With the Night
by Alexander NazaryanBooks
“All the animals come out at night,” Robert DeNiro’s famous malcontent, Travis Bickle, declares in Taxi Driver. His New York is equal parts danger and grime, a thoroughly decrepit Times Square serving as the epicenter of vice.
