Save Our City

Local

The battle lines have been drawn. From the West Side of Manhattan to downtown Brooklyn, from Harlem to Long Island City, and from Red Hook to here in Williamsburg, large developers—with help from their many, many friends in city government—are getting to build exactly what they want.

George W. Bush’s Redemption Song

Express

If the black political agenda of the post–civil rights era has been to influence the machinery of the federal government to black advantage, moving from protest to politics, the reelection of George W. Bush has shown that this agenda has failed.

The Eye of the Storm:
Works in situ by Daniel Buren

Art

Upon entering the ground floor atrium of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, its massive concrete ramps spiraling up toward the skylight, one encounters a towering mirror-covered cube supported by scaffolding elaborately rigged to one side of the museum.

Edge of Desire

ArtSeen

The first major exhibition of contemporary Indian art in the United States is currently taking place at the Asia Society and the Queens Museum. It is entitled Edge of Desire and is composed of five sections—Location/Longing, Unruly Visions, Transient Self, Contested Terrain, and Recycled Futures—each intended to address another aspect of Indian art and the changing culture that produces it.

Robert Polito with Erinne Dobson

Books

As a part of the Brooklyn Rail’s continuing series on writers and teaching, Erinne Dobson recently spoke with acclaimed poet and biographer Robert Polito, who has been the director of the writing program at the New School since 1992.

A New City of Towers

“In 10 years, I can’t imagine what Williamsburg-Greenpoint is going to look like,” City Council Land Use Committee Chair Melinda Katz said of the area’s rezoning the other day.

From Mambo to Salsa Part One: The New York Sound

Music

New York’s Latin music today sounds like a front for producer-phenoms, its acts panting to cross over, perhaps because their top voices got their start singing club music in English.

Dancing on the Rail: May

Dance

May offers a chance to see both works honed in Brooklyn neighborhoods and other works by choreographers far outside of New York—Australia to be exact.

Good Times Today, Stupor Tomorrow

Film

Threatening to throw someone off a yet to-be-completed skyscraper in a British gangster movie is to indulge in British noir neoclassicism at its finest. Like everything else in Britain, Brit noir has traditions to be observed, touchstones to be honored.

Tea in the Desert with Julia Cho

Theater

I fell in love with Julia Cho last summer in Oregon. She and I were both writers in the Just Add Water/West Festival at Portland Center Stage, where her plangent, bristling, and very funny play BFE was being workshopped.

My Body and I

Fiction

Dinner is served early and eaten quickly in the small hotels in the mountains.

The World You Wanted

LastWords

I went to Sunday School as a child. As an unhappy and sensitive youth, I should have been easy prey for an alternate reality, but it didn’t take; I spent most of my time in class reading the maps at the end of my bright green New Testament.