In Staten Island, a Teenage Tour Guide of the Maritime Wastes

Local

I walked through a split in the reeds. The narrow beaten path was strewn with flattened plastic bottles, brown and green shards of glass, and withered shopping bags half-submerged in the dirt or impaled by a desiccated reed.

An American Griot: Gil Scott-Heron with Don Geesling

Express

I played for Shirley Chisholm, I played for Ken Gibson, I played for anybody who was trying to do something positive for black people—just count me in and I’ll be there,” Scott-Heron says.

New Orleans’ African Retentions: Willie Birch with Billy Sothern

Express

“In New Orleans, you still hear those drum beats coming out of Congo Square,” says Birch.

Martin Puryear with David Levi Strauss

Art

In the midst of preparing for his retrospective at MoMA, Martin Puryear took time out to talk about his life and work with the Rail’s Consulting Editor, David Levi Strauss. They are neighbors in the Hudson River Valley, and the conversation took place at Strauss’s home near High Falls, not far from Puryear’s house and studio. The exhibition is organized for MoMA by John Elderfield, and it will be on view there from November 4, 2007 to January 14, 2008, and then travel to the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas (February 24–May 18, 2008); the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (June 22–September 28, 2008); and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (November 1, 2008–January 25, 2009).

Joel Shapiro with Phong Bui

Art

“What’s new and exciting in the big piece is that it’s no longer dictated by the effect of gravity on form, but rather the effect of gravity on the organization of the form, which springs off in different directions away from any fixed axis. In other words, it really breaks away from the figure as much as from the ground.”
- Joel Shapiro

Learning from New Orleans

Some may consider New Orleans after Katrina to be a tragedy—full of sorrow, fatally flawed by its geography, and now lacking any good options in terms of what to do next. However, after going there this past month, I would simply call it a national disgrace.

It’s, Like, Canonical

Film

his was the best Film Festival in years. The schedulers showcased filmmakers that embody the Festival canon, a notion of undeniable art meeting viable commerce that the Festival helped create and codify.

North of the Middle

Fiction

They are both of them, mother and daughter, inflamed by something minuscule, sneezing in tissues, covert sleeves, a hand.