Stephen Antonakos in Conversation with Phong Bui

Art

A few days before leaving with his wife, the writer Naomi Spector, for his retrospective at the Benaki Museum-Pireos in Athens, artist Stephen Antonakos welcomed Rail publisher Phong Bui to his SoHo loft/studio to talk about his life and work. (The exhibit is organized by the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation, curated by Katerina Koskina and it will be on view from December 18, 2007 to March 9, 2008.)

Allan Graham in Conversation with John Yau

Art

Allan Graham welcomes Brooklyn Rail’s John Yau to his studio and home, east of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Green Hermeticism: David Levi Strauss in conversation with Peter Lamborn Wilson and Christopher Bamford

Art

"We all agreed that there is not a sufficient spiritual focus for the environmental movement," says Lamborn Wilson. "And without a spiritual focus, a movement like this doesn't generate the kind of emotional energy that it needs to battle against global capitalism."

How Far Is Brooklyn From Manhattan?

Local

I’ve lived in Brooklyn for thirteen years, meaning I have at least five more to go until I can say I “grew up” here. And, while I’m still decades away from establishing the kind of family history many have in Brooklyn, I have been here long enough to see some pretty significant changes.

Child of War, A Memoir

Express

It was the beginning of the 80s and my dad Drake had made a fortune—legally, for the most part—in the business world. Vance, his identical twin brother and an outlaw, had made a bundle in the pot biz. Everyone was loaded. We moved from Houston to Santa Fe, where I started St. Francis Junior High in the middle of the seventh grade.

The Brooklyn Rail Person of the Year 2007

It’s safe to say that 2007 wasn’t a banner year. No matter how many awards Al Gore received, the climate still got worse. Two trillion dollars later, Afghanistan and Iraq remained in shambles. The endless slog otherwise known as the U.S. presidential campaign didn’t exactly produce Lincolnesque debate. The greed of entertainment industry producers forced Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert off the air. Mailer, Antonioni, Bergman and Knievel died.

Two Places At Once

Film

Haynes is no ordinary filmmaker, and I’m Not There is no ordinary biopic. Tricky, powerful, sometimes ridiculous, it eludes definition. Haynes cast both a black eleven-year-old boy and an Australian woman as Dylan. On, paper it sounds ridiculous, but on film, strangely, it works—sometimes.

Shameless

Fiction

When she was eight years old, Megan Strehle conceived an unnatural passion for Tamas Preltz, a fifteen-year-old apprentice butcher in the town where her father took vegetables to the local farmers’ market. She would beg her father to bring her along when he loaded his Ford half-ton pickup with cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, summer squash, beans and brussels sprouts. Then she would run to Roohan’s Butcher Shop and stand at the end of the counter, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, till Tamas deigned to notice her.