Editor's Message
A Time for Talk and...Action
The Muslim world erupts in reaction to the juvenile provocations of a reactionary Danish newspaper. The Vice President fills a hunting partner full of buckshot and then makes Harry take the fall. The Democrats take a hard line on the United Arab Emirates but have no position on the war in Iraq. It is indeed a cartoonish moment in world affairs.
But the problem is that these cartoons ain’t funny. A full-blown civil war is erupting in Iraq but, other than John Murtha, nobody has any idea how to end the bloodbath. What’s even more pathetic is that neither our political leaders nor our opinion-makers even appear to be searching for a solution. All they manage to say is that “we can’t lose Iraq,” which is a flawed position from the get-go, since it was never “our” nation to begin with.
All supporters of the war—from the eager imperialists to the humanitarian interventionists—have some serious explaining to do. And all of us who opposed the war from the outset have some serious work to keep on doing. A serious debate leading to a clear exit strategy is the very least we can do for both the rest of the world, and especially ourselves. After all, the blood of countless Iraqi civilians, and of American soldiers, is on all of our hands.
We have more masthead changes to report, this time in our Art section. Our longtime Art Editor, Daniel Baird, whose sparkling insights and tireless commitment helped put the Rail on the map in the art world, has moved on to become the Arts and Literature editor of The Walrus, an excellent Canadian magazine of ideas based in Toronto. And Megan Heuer, our extremely astute and equally dedicated Managing Art Editor, has decided to devote more time to her graduate work in art history. We’re indebted to both for their outstanding input.
The good news is that John Yau, a distinguished man of letters and frequent contributor to the Rail, is our new Art Editor. We’re also pleased that the talented Thomas Micchelli and Ben La Rocco are now managing our Art section.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Steve Lawrences Newspaper
By Noa WesleyJUNE 2023 | Art Books
At the time of its publication, Newspapers readership was formed through the community of queer-leaning artists in downtown New York. As an alternative exhibition space for photographers whose work was not being shown in galleries or museums, Newspaper summarized contemporary experience through the disjunctive visual relationships between images.

The Expanded Moment of Being
By Farzia FallahSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
The choral piece Miserere by the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582, Rome1652, Rome) is assumed to have been written in the 1630s and was regularly performed in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It is a work for nine voices, divided between two choirs. The piece consists of six sections, which are basically repetitions, in each of which a different line of Psalm 51 is sung. Today, when I listen to this piece outside any religious context, I feel as if the piece could go on and on. Listening to it, there is no difference for me, for instance, between minute three and minute eight. I am in a state of supreme concentration during these 12 minutes or so, with no sense of now or later or before. The piece creates its own time, and in these repetitions, one loses the sense of time. It has the effect of a piercing Now.
Glitching Time and Time-Based Media
By Charlotte KentOCT 2022 | Art and Technology
Time is a socio-technological system with profound organizing qualities that feels, these days, exceedingly oppressive. Theres never enough time! For anything. Calendars are the earliest containing device with the purpose of determining a social order; the history of the Roman calendar reveals the role of international and national politics that play out across each new temporal infrastructure. Our temporal orders have been designed through the global proclamation of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 by colonial empires, the apocalyptic anxiety provocations of the doomsday clock established in 1947, the insistent instant-ness of digital time since the 1970s exacerbated by strings of video chat meetings of the last couple years, and the frenetic branding of our social/professional lives demanded by transnational corporate technologys mediation of everyone and everything, all the time. Its a mess.
Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty
By Ruby RedstoneJUNE 2023 | ArtSeen
Is the Lagerfeld found within Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty a man, content amongst cans of half-drunk soda, or is he a god, elevated to higher standards of aesthetic perfection? The Costume Institute seems unable to make up its mind on this matter.