Brooklyn Food Coalition Helps Gardens Grow

Local

Imagine the concrete jungle recast as a place where farms sit next to tenements and empty lots become oases of flower plots, fruit trees, and vegetable patches. It seems far-fetched, I know.

THE ACCIDENTAL COP

Express

“It’s different than this building,” Hector said as I counted out the bills.

“What do you mean?”

He hesitated.

“Less quiet.”

Questions for Tariq Ali

Express

Tariq Ali will deliver a talk, “Obama’s War,” at the School of Visual Arts on Monday, April 19, as part of the London Review of  Books’ 30^th anniversary celebration.  Ali’s Night of the Golden Butterfly, the final novel in his critically acclaimed Islam Quintet, comes out this month from Verso.

MARK GREENWOLD WITH JOHN YAU

Art

On the occasion of his new exhibit Secret Storm: Paintings 1967-1975 (March 17–April 17, 2010), which for the first time, brings together this group of provocative and controversial early paintings as well as watercolors and drawings from the period, the painter Mark Greenwold welcomed Art Editor John Yau to the DC Moore Gallery to look at the works, and to discuss his life and work.

SHIRLEY JAFFE WITH RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN

Art

Can the same painting give us difficulty and joie de vivre? If you have ever encountered a painting by Shirley Jaffe, you know the answer to this question.

URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD WITH IRVING SANDLER & JOHN YAU

Art

Just a few days before the artist’s opening reception of her recent exhibit Errätus at Galerie Lelong (March 18 – May 1, 2010), Ursula von Rydingsvard welcomed Consulting Editor Irving Sandler and Art Editor John Yau to her Brooklyn Studio to view the works and then discuss her life and work.

SIMONE FORTI with Claudia La Rocco

Dance

While back in New York to teach a workshop and perform at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Simone Forti invited Editor-at-Large Claudia La Rocco to her former SoHo loft to talk about her life as a choreographer, dancer and writer.

WATCH THE CLOSING DOORS

Reading a book called The History of White People on the subway is a disorienting experience. Each time I look up, I encounter a spectrum of skin colors, from pasty winter white to deep African black—with numerous shades in between.

Martin Wilner WITH PHONG BUI

Art

On the occasion of his exhibit A Life in Days, on view at Sperone Westwater from January 8 to March 20, 2010, the artist Martin Wilner dropped by Art International Radio to talk to Rail Publisher Phong Bui about his life and work.

REGARDING HENRY

Music

The roots from which a jazz musician grows are important and interesting to follow, and since virtually the entire history of jazz has been captured by recording technology we can hear the players that other players listened to, followed, imitated, and then moved away from.

ABSOLUTE WILL

Books

In April 2003, I was invited to the Edward de Vere Studies Conference, held annually at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, to speak about the history of the coverage of the Shakespeare authorship question over a span of 150 years in the pages of the New York Times.

Away Alone

Fiction

Let’s go back a few years before the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union, when I was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in whatever state is most opposite that of grace, utterly ignorant, recently fired, watching my dog die in an apartment on 77th Street and Columbus Avenue...