Telling an alternately funny and spooky story entirely through television commercials and fictional news programs, Buffet Infinity, written and directed by Simon Glassman, and performed by a cast of Canadian comic actors, had us marveling at its low-budget narrative and editorial mastery. A sly satire of overconsumption, machine-learning, and the horror genre, the film unfolds...
Few orchestral ensembles include three drum sets, three electric basses, three trombones, three French horns and three soprano voices. But Simon Hanes is not a typical composer. His new recording, Gargantua, a noisy, lyrical, haunting, humorous, and frequently sublime collection of clashing/complementary styles, consistently intrigues and satisfies. One can hear Rabelaisian giants stomping around the loosely...
MK unveils The Year of When, a multimedia project featuring 365 poems and 365 works of art documenting 2020.
When a movie’s plot is almost impossible to describe with a straight face — “Um, it’s an animated film about an amputated hand searching for its body, a motorcycle pizza delivery boy. . .in Paris” — you know you’re dealing with a singular creation. The French director Jeremy Clapin’s “I Lost My Body” is one...
Not long ago, the brilliant photographer and videographer Jonny Harper (@JHB1126) brought his drone and his talent to the Vista Street Farmstead. His original intent was to document the recently completed driveway mural. He ended up shooting much more. Our friend and neighbors know what’s behind the driveway gates. For those who don’t have the...
It began as a New Year’s folly, an impulsive lark. Some children and I splashed a few square panels of our concrete driveway with old house-paint from the cellar, shrouding the dull stone with color and shapes. We thought it looked pretty good, so the next day I did another panel, and then another the...
Today I’m delighted to announce my semi-retirement from writing. It’s been more than 30 years I’ve been doing this professionally, 20 years since my first book. Now it’s time to do something else. For the people who care about my work, don’t worry. Writing will continue. These essay Thoughts will continue (probably) to be published...
The new show from Los Angeles-based artist Johnny Otto contains colored pencil drawings, guerrilla art on cardboard, and a series of large paintings on canvas. Each work employs two or three primary colors mixed with white and black, applied copiously and vigorously. The results are mesmerizing. Otto reminds us of a less busy, more focused...
The results of the artist Amy Bennett‘s work speak for themselves. The process of how her paintings come to be needs a little explaining. Bennett paints exquisitely detailed townscapes, quaint villages and bucolic communities viewed, often, from a cloud’s-eye-view, with a startling combination of panoramic sweep and deep-focus detail. These mesmerizing pictures are based not...
Mostly Other People Do the Killing’s latest iteration, a quartet, is led by bassist Mopppa Elliott, whose modern bop compositions are featured on the band’s new album, “Mauch Chunk,” a rollicking, raucous dash through jazz history that’s firmly in the right now. MOPDTK’s sax man is Jon Irabagon, one the most exciting players in the world....
Domestic Terrorists“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.” – U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, ordering the release of a…
David Breskin, a renowned record producer, author and artist, wrote a poem every day for six months in 2024, prohibiting himself from revising. Instead, he “timestamped” each work at the moment of completion — and returned to composition the next day. The resulting book, Timestamp: The Daily Practice of Poetry, is a triumph, simultaneously entertaining, provocative,...
