Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and sound artist. Her debut collection of poems Negro League Baseball was published by Fence Books last year. Brian W. Rogers is an artist, writer, and musician whose work most recently appeared in the London group show “A Sunken Trembling Recalled Dimly.” Together they have teamed up to form État de Siege (ÉSP) [...]
Category Archives: Film
Kenneth Lonergan
January 14, 2012 – 7:36 am
One of the great moments in Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited and under-publicized two-and-a-half-hour film, is when high school student and protagonist Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) approaches Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon), a well-meaning math teacher she had sex with, as he walks with a female colleague. Abruptly, Lisa tells the two teachers that she had an [...]
Sheena is a Punk Rocker
February 3, 2011 – 10:23 am
When I heard that Rooney Mara was to play Lisbeth Salander, the charming bad-ass from Steig Larsson’s best selling book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I was confused. Had the casting director read the books or seen the Swedish films? Lisbeth Salander is hardcore. Whereas Rooney Mara is most well-known for being from a [...]
Bored to Death Screening
October 23, 2010 – 8:21 am
Sunday night Jonathan Ames is hosting a free screening of his show, Bored to Death at Building-on-Bond at Pacific in Brooklyn. I remember before it was a restaurant it was a bodega that had a payphone outside that was guarded by thugs who used it as their office line. They would politely direct you to [...]
Sentences and Images for a Fictional Cinema
August 20, 2009 – 12:28 pm
After finishing Chris Petit’s wonderfully dark 1993 novel Robinson – as wet, grim, and seedy depiction of London as I’ve come across – in which the title character attempts to make “the Citizin Kane of porno movies, I’ve begun to try to think of other works of fiction in which the author attempts to imagine [...]
Sam Bassett’s Seven Nights at the Hotel Chelsea Rooftop
July 20, 2009 – 11:57 am
Not just anyone can shack-up in the Hotel Chelsea. Reserved for the oddest, craziest, most brilliant cream of the creative crop, its rooms have housed everyone from Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning to Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Bernhardt to Sid Vicious. So the fact that legendary manager and curator of residents, Stanley Bard, [...]
Eastern Promise: The Afghan Pop Wars
June 25, 2009 – 7:48 am
“If there was no music, then the world would be silent” is the opening sentence of Afghan Star, uttered by a child blinded by war just after he sings his melody to the camera. Originally commissioned as a standard television documentary, the colorful excesses of this project reel were taken up and transformed into a cinema [...]
