Visions of a Tragedy, 9/11

Local

The day was clear and the air a bit warmer than usual. The sound of sirens, helicopters and fighter jets all were new for us, or rather unusual. Confusion took over quickly and even though there were many signs that something was going to happen, no one believed it could happen to us, in our own country.

Against the Giuliani Legacy

Local

The first two installments of “Against the Giuliani Legacy” challenged deep-seated definitions like “quality of life” and “decency” as defined the Giuliani cabal.

Street Work: Globalizing Resistance From Brooklyn to Inanda

Express

In the large black township of Inanda, in Durban, South Africa, most people live in sloping tin shacks without any means of waste disposal. The lucky ones live in square cement homes with a water faucet outside.

In Conversation with Terry Winters

Art

Rail (Peter Eleey): I was hoping that we could speak a bit about some of the collaborative projects you’ve been involved with recently. When did the Trisha Brown [Dance Company] piece [“El Trilogy”] go up?

Terry Winters: It had its New York premier in July, but it actually started a couple of years ago.

Artist in Residence

Art

Richard Gorcoff has been creating intricately typed art works on paper for thirty years. He has invented a distinct language of numbers, letters, punctuation, figures and complex designs created entirely out of typewriter symbols.

Out of the Ashes

Our compass has been reoriented. For residents of Brooklyn through North Jersey, the Twin Towers no longer define Lower Manhattan; and as a nation, we are being told to prepare for a prolonged conflict in Central Asia.

Buchloh’s Neo-Avantgarde

Books

Contemporary visual art is often slick and narcissistic and bears a disturbing resemblance to sophisticated advertising and music videos. Ugo Rondinone’s coolly smoldering slow-motion videos might well be promoting a new line of perfume, and Piplotti Rist’s hallucinatory work, which was featured on an immense screen hovering over Times Square, evokes fashion shoots and designer clothes for sassy, hipster girls.

Letter from Buenos Aires

Music

At the end of August, the IMF approved $5 billion in loans to Argentina, simultaneously pulling the beleaguered economy from the brink of meltdown and deepening the nation’s already enormous international debt.

How to Pick a Tomato

Local

Some days, the act of painting seems so, well, useless. One is muse-less, headachy, hung-over, or distracted. It is then that I find it useful to pretend that I am a farmer. In my fantasy they get up early, quite early in the morning since the cows have to be milked and the growing season is short.