Category Archives: Interview

Mark Bibbins: “We the Reader”

Mark Bibbins. Photo by Star Black.
Although The Dance of No Hard Feelings is Mark Bibbins’ second book of poetry, nothing about this recently released collection feels sophomoric. Its bulk (just under 100 pages), its effortless political and didactic flourishes, its lapidary formal qualities and charismatic cadences give an impression of rare expertise.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Portraiture of the Artists

leadblogimage
Shakespeare and Company, the legendary English-language bookstore on Paris’s Left Bank, recently got a facelift. Several faces, in fact. Fourteen illustrated portraits of the Lost and Beat Generation writers who once frequented the store—and its predecessor—now adorn the staircase wall leading up to the second floor library of the bookshop. An interview with Badaude—the illustrator Joanna Walsh—with a slideshow of her mural as a work-in-progress.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Holly Goddard Jones: More than Girl Trouble

Holly Goddard Jones. Image courtesy HarperCollins.
While the words girl trouble may conjure up images of teenaged girls talking on the phone about boys, please read further. Holly Goddard Jones’ debut collection Girl Trouble offers intimate character portrayals set in Roma, Kentucky. From unexpected pregnancy to murder, the characters find themselves in desperate situations which often render them helpless.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Is Violence Inevitable?: An Interview with Pier Marton

Triptych by Pier Marton: "War is allowed to exist every time some vital information is withdrawn. The skills required to create such a vacuum are present in most advertisement and popular media." In late October, The School of Visual Arts held its 23rd Annual National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, entitled Visions of War: The Arts Represent Conflict. The week of events included a play, a panel discussion on photography, and a series of films exploring the emotional scars of war. The conference was held at the Algonquin Hotel, and I sat in on one of the sessions called Images of the Other.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhari. Photo by Eamonn McCabe. Courtesy Knopf.
“My interest in the English language is not just to do with a relationship with empire,” says novelist Amit Chaudhuri. At least, not the British Empire. For him, Indians have to contend with an empire of a different (although not unrelated) kind: their own.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

David Ryan

HILBERT, 2009. Acrylic on MDF 18-1/2 x 21 x 2 1/4 inches.

David Ryan’s flamboyantly colored sculptural paintings are both economical and obsessive, creating an effect that interviewer Ryan Spencer describes as “Minimalism on mushrooms.” He’s currently showing work at Davidson Contemporary on Fifth Avenue.

Christina McPhee

TESSERAE HOT PINK CALI AQUEDUCT, 2009, HD video still. Total running time: 5 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. Throughout the ’80s, Christina McPhee used drawing and painting to investigate landscape and its relationship to time through work at archaeological and geological sites. By the mid-’90s, she began new media explorations of human technology and the environment by mining traumatic memory patterns and what they might uncover about geomorphologies in sites such as the San Andreas Fault. Her current exhibition Tesserae of Venus at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco imagines a world simultaneously on the verge of destruction and regeneration.

On the New Russian Realism: Questions for the Editors of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia

rasskazyFew countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has, so it’s easy to assume that with each geopolitical quake the country’s cultural continuity gets split along the resulting fault lines. But if one looks closer at contemporary Russian literature, there are more convergences than divergences with the country’s heritage. The stories in Tin House Books’ Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia offer 23 depictions of the so-called new Russia from some of its most talented young writers.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Reimagining the Expressway: Sufjan Stevens’ BQE

Sufjan Stevens. Photo by Danny Renshaw. I met Sufjan Stevens in his publicist’s office adjacent to the Highline, a wonderfully successful example of urban planning. His latest work, The BQE, tackles a less popular industrial monument. The project continues Stevens’ characteristic ambition, consisting of a film, score, comic book, photo essay, stereoscopic Viewmaster reel and a short liner note essay. Over grapes and cashews we talked of his own experiences on the expressway and the lost halcyon days of unfettered capitalism.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Pressing Issues: Recession-era Indie Publishing

STORIES BY YANYAN, published by Medium Rare. Despite the economic climate and whatever bleak circumstances could engender movies like this, Milano Chow and Megan Plunkett, recent graduates from Barnard and Pratt, respectively, have been running their own independent printing presses.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Tina Schula and Nicola Kast

Tina Schula, Brown Tea Party.

Tina Schula and Nicola Kast are both artists who deal with the lingering presence of Nazism in their work. They got together to discuss Quentin Tarantino’s recent movie Inglorious Basterds and tried to relate some of the questions that came up to their own photography.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS CONCEPTUAL WRITING?: an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith

Photo Credit: © David Velasco, 2008
Read the following interview with the the movement’s original mastermind himself.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Stephen Elliott

Stephen Elliott. Photo by Katherine Emery.
The Adderall Diaries, a nonfiction work written by Stephen Elliott and out this month, is not a book about Adderall. And though Elliott’s intent was to focus on the murder trial of Hans Reiser, It really isn’t even a book about murder. While the trial lends The Adderall Diaries a focused storyline, the more intriguing parts focus on Elliott himself, as he attempts to piece together his past and his uncertain future.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

Dread Scott

Or Does It Explode

On the occasion of Dread Scott’s public art project …Or Does it Explode? in Philadelphia, the artist exchanged emails with BOMB Managing Editor Nick Stillman. Scott’s provocative work challenges pedestrians in Philadelphia’s bustling Logan Square to consider the fate of local high schoolers will be on view through November.

Share Bomb
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • NewsVine
  • Print this article!
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis