REPORT CARD
Our Fake School Board

Local

The meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy may look like democracy in action, but nothing the public says can influence how the mayor’s appointees vote.

WINNERS AND LOSERS IN THE “NEW INDIA”: SIDDHARTHA DEB with Scott Sherman

Express

Finely written, carefully reported, and imaginatively conceived, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (Faber and Faber, Inc.) is one of the outstanding nonfiction books of 2011.

GILLIAN JAGGER with Ben La Rocco

Art

On the occasion of her installation of Reveal at John Davis Gallery (September 15 – October 9), the Brooklyn Rail’s Ben La Rocco visited sculptor Gillian Jagger at her horse farm and studio in Kerhonkson, NY to discuss her life and work.

CARRIE MOYER with Phong Bui

Art

While busily preparing for her new exhibit Canonical at CANADA gallery (September 14 – October 16, 2011) the painter Carrie Moyer took time to stop by the Rail’s headquarters and talk with publisher Phong Bui about her life and work.

SARAH LUCAS with William Corwin

Art

After a pub lunch of lamb kidney and sweetbread salad and with the cool breezes wafting in off the coastal Suffolk marshes, William Corwin sat down with Sarah Lucas on the back terrace of Snape Maltings to discuss her first ever public sculpture “Perceval” and her current project/exhibition with Gelatin at the Kunsthalle Krems.

IN CASE SOMETHING DIFFERENT HAPPENS IN THE FUTURE: Joseph Beuys and 9/11

Art

Beuys was fascinated by the Twin Towers. He must have seen them to great effect when he flew into John F. Kennedy Airport on January 19. In the terms of his theory of sculpture, the Twin Towers were classic crystalline forms: rigid, dry, and cold, like the basalt columns of 7000 Oaks.

A New Anniversary

As fall comes, and the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 goes, it’s worth considering what’s changed in the past decade.

LYNNE TILLMAN with Caroline Ball

Books

Lynne Tillman is a rare hybrid of fiction writer, essayist, art critic, and teacher. She is the author of five novels, one of which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as three collections of short stories, a collection of essays, and two other nonfiction works. Here she discusses experimentation, structure and her constant battle with language with Caroline Ball.

ACTIVISTS & ALIENS: Films of Unrest at the 2011 Festival del Film Locarno

Film

Surrounded by mountains and cozily situated in a picturesque northern cove at the Swiss end of Lake Maggiore, the small Italianate resort-town of Locarno would seem like the ideal haven from urban unrest, protests against various forms of injustice, and similar pressing social and political issues.

Connie Congdon needs to have her mouth washed out with soap

Theater

When I was a sophomore at Amherst College considering being an Economics major, I worked on a production of Lanford Wilson’s Sympathetic Magic. One of the actors in the cast, Kim Rosenstock, told me I should take a class with Connie Congdon, “because she’s awesome.” So I did, and my life changed.

Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought

Fiction

In the third book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, Moses is herding his father-in-law’s sheep on a hillside when the Lord erupts in sheet of flame from a nearby bush. The author presents the scene as a scientific impossibility: the bush burns furiously without actually burning up.