Life Comes At You Fast

By Jason E. Smith

APRIL 2020 | Field Notes

On March 3, a full two weeks before its scheduled meeting on March 17–18, the Federal Reserve announced a surprise interest rate cut of half a percent, down to 1.25 percent. It was the first emergency rate cut since October 2008, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. The markets were caught off-guard, and far from reassured.

Julia Bland: The Half That Ties, the Half that Breaks

By Claire Voon

NOV 2019 | ArtSeen

An unshakable sense of magic pervades almost all of Julia Bland’s laboriously fabricated fiber works in her first solo show at Andrew Rafacz gallery. Cut, stitched, painted, and burned canvases joined with hand-woven textiles hang like tapestries that thrum with entrancing geometric configurations. Even the exhibition’s measured title, The Half That Ties, the Half that Breaks, evokes an incantation—a sort of ritual poem seeking to resolve seemingly contrary forces.

How to Live a Best Life, With Melisa Tien

By Matthew Paul Olmos

MAR 2020 | Theater

The term “living your best life” is an identity concept which seems rampant on social media—this idea that whatever we might be doing with ourselves, living one’s “best life” is completely in our own hands; it is a readily available utopia should we choose to live it. For Tien, this play came from the process of seeing this concept of a “best life” against the backdrop of the “real racial and economic divides” which were being heavily reported in the media while she was writing.

Life as a Cabaret

Walter Corwin with Dan Kelley

OCT 2019 | Theater

Walter Corwin has been hanging out and having his plays performed at Theater for the New City going on 40 years. A protégé of Ed Bullins in the ’60s at the Public Theater and a veteran of the Actor’s Studio and The Herbert Berghof Studio, he’s never been afraid of weaving politics into his writing. The last decade of his practice has been an investigation of short form theater seemingly tailored to life in New York.