Music: A Subversive History

By George Grella

NOV 2019 | Music

Songs about fucking and killing—that would have also been an appropriate subtitle for this scintillating new book from Ted Gioia. He’s already written three valuable books about the place of music in society and human experience, Healing Songs (2006), Works Songs (2006), and Love Songs: The Hidden history (2015). Music: A Subversive History builds on those by digging down into the fundamental nature of music, how it is made and how it affects us.

Through the Uncertainty, Agnes Borinsky and the Working Group for a New Spirit Are Taking Inventory of Our Lives

By Daniel Krane

NOV 2020 | Theater

How can we find assurance and community in our upside down world? It is an especially taxing effort for theater artists, whose work and livelihoods depend on collaboration and communion. Enter the Working Group for a New Spirit, playwright Agnes Borinsky’s free initiative that offers a virtual home for transient artists, seminars in how to take stock of our lives, and more. Daniel Krane dives into this effort—”a series of gatherings for clarity and direction in our messy moment of distance and collapse”—that the Bushwick Starr is hosting now through December 7.

Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979

By Megan N. Liberty

NOV 2020 | Art Books

This addendum to the history of concrete poetry makes evident the connections between concrete poetry and artist books. Chance visual connections between the diverse works included make visible the materiality of language, the unifying component of concrete poetry.

Painting without Edge

By Suzanne Silver

OCT 2020 | Critics Page

I write about the edge in my own painting as a way of situating myself in the world and figuring out how to receive it.