Search Issues View Archive

Poetry

To Micah Ballard in San Francisco

AUG-SEPT 2003

by Geoffrey Young

I give away all that I am

frame moments that remain

rolled straight from brown eyes

I know charms turn the crowd to action

another silent chill says

alone is a way-station to form

how underrated we are

as a skull makes the oasis of a smile

cry out obsessive familiars

true love formulates hours of light

behold a blank regality

watching the day unfold

I am more myself today

when the body falls away

we are eaten by the fugue state

anything goes by saying yes

chronic dreams revisit the past

proper pleasures seed the head

if your love be not free

the depths look like shallows

there's a demand for the genius

of broken overtones

we must march to the beat

the one about self-exception

our ferocious dissidence and blazing

topicality, spectral cathedrals

using us for incense

Contributor

Geoffrey Young

Geoffrey Young's most recent book of poetry is Lights Out.

Lauren Bakst’s More Problems with Form

by Rennie McDougall

MAY 2019 | Dance

I once watched Lauren Bakst get accosted by a fan. A woman, intensely moved by Bakst’s performance at St. Marks Church in 2015, grabbed Bakst by both shoulders and launched into a monologue of praise that went something like this: “Oh my God, Lauren, you were so beautiful. SO beautiful! Not that you’re not always beautiful; you’re ALWAYS beautiful. But this time you were different; you were so in your body. Because sometimes I see you get in your head, you know? Because you’re so intelligent. SO intelligent!” And on and on.

A Life Not Fit to Form: The Restoration of Unnamable Joy

by Chris Campanioni

FEB 2019 | Books

Is a play still a play if it’s not performed? More than anything else, the question of recognition drives Christopher Castellani’s novel, Leading Men (Viking, 2019), a book that re-envisions a Portofino summer evening in 1953, and everything else that spins out from an encounter involving writers and actors and artists, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, John Horne Burns, and one man so unabashedly sincere—Frank Merlo—he could never play anyone but himself.

True to Form: International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 2018

by Leo Goldsmith

FEB 2019 | Film

Despite the rise of “creative nonfiction” across documentary production and exhibition over the last decade—at a glance, the “sensory turn” associated with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, the recent vogue for hybrid films, growing interest in (largely non-narrative) VR docs, the proliferation of documentary forms in the gallery, and the prominence of a number of adventuresome film festivals such as FIDMarseille, Cinéma du Réel, Doclisboa, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real—the narrative, character-driven documentary remains the most salable, at least in the North American market.

Eyes Without a Face: Christine Hume and Jeff Clark’s Question Like A Face