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.
Category Archives: Conversations
Mark Bibbins: “We the Reader”
November 17, 2009 – 3:06 pm
Portraiture of the Artists
November 13, 2009 – 4:43 pm
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.
Holly Goddard Jones: More than Girl Trouble
November 9, 2009 – 6:12 pm
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.
Is Violence Inevitable?: An Interview with Pier Marton
November 4, 2009 – 4:37 pm
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.
Inching Towards Abstraction
October 29, 2009 – 5:00 pm
A record keeper in both her drawings and story telling, Lauren Redniss holds tight to details to keep them from being stolen by the pitfalls of memory. Embedding herself within a story by recording interviews and drawing on-site during the conversations, one becomes tangled within the thoughts and learn that all stories are interconnected.
Amit Chaudhuri
October 29, 2009 – 3:24 pm
“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.
David Ryan
October 28, 2009 – 4:05 pm
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.
Reveal to Relive: Akram Khan
October 26, 2009 – 5:05 pm
PODCAST In his latest collaborative dance piece In I, Akram Khan invites actress Juliette Binoche to dance out a highly charged romance against a pared down domestic theater set by Anish Kapoor. For Khan, dance provides a means to not only reveal, but to relive personal experience on stage.
Christina McPhee
October 26, 2009 – 3:11 pm
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
October 26, 2009 – 12:13 pm
Few 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.
Reimagining the Expressway: Sufjan Stevens’ BQE
October 22, 2009 – 2:47 pm
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.
NYC Faceless, Wireless: Barney Kulok’s In Visible Cities
October 19, 2009 – 11:56 am
In his latest show at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, photographer Barney Kulok leaves his camera behind to picture how we are constructing an invisible territory in the wireless domain.
Heavy Transcendence: Glenn Branca
October 16, 2009 – 2:25 pm
Often the most theoretically interesting music is more exciting on paper than as real sound, but this is not the case for Glenn Branca’s work. Accompanying his tendency for formal experiment—he adamantly rejects the idea that all music has become pastiche is the engaging intensity that made his short-lived no wave band Theoretical Girls so well thought of.
Pressing Issues: Recession-era Indie Publishing
October 16, 2009 – 12:09 pm
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.
ON OUR RADAR
SIGN UP FOR THE BOMBLast
Get email updates from BOMB-
Popular Tags
A.M. Homes Allen Frame Art Art 21 Art21 Betsy Sussler BOMB On The Inside Books Cindy Sherman creative Dance David Goodman Emily Nonko Film Film Forum Francine Prose Gary Indiana Hannah Kahng Interview Jack Palmer Jessica Stockholder Jonathan Lethem Kyle McAuley Lena Valencia Literature Lynn Geller Mary Gaitskill Mary Heilmann MoMA Music Painting Performa Peter Moysaenko Photography Poetry Reading Richard Goldstein RISD Saul Ostrow Sundance Susie DeFord Theater thought Video Word Choice -
RSS Feeds
-
Meta
