Express

AMATEUR NIGHT
A fragment from Isolate Flecks: An Anatomy

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Express

“Self-expression is not a crime,” reads a piece of graffiti in East Williamsburg. Maybe it should be.

LETTER FROM THE TRAIL: Atwater’s Ghost

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Express

On the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina, in a well-manicured and deserted Greenlawn Memorial Park, lies the body of one Harvey (Lee) Atwater. What fate has met his soul is of course unknown, but the infamous political assassin was the sort of man for whom even the most ardent atheist could wish a hell.

A Festival of Reason and the Art of Common Sense

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Express

Plans are underway for an Occupy arts festival in the suburbs: Occufest in the Occuburbs. The initial contacts with different cultural organizations have been promising. People are enthusiastic; there are promises of space and other resources. Often, however, certain questions arise: What is this—the festival and Occupy Wall Street—about? What point would a festival make? What would it do?

Kristeva’s Top-Down Critique

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Express

“I cannot take my eyes off that severed head,” writes Julia Kristeva in The Severed Head: Capital Visions. “Much as I want to, this is my symptom. Depression, obsession with death, admission of feminine and human distress, castrating drive? I accept all these human, too human hypotheses. I move on from them to imagine a capital moment in the history of the visible.”

Emma’s Lyricism

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Famed anarchist Emma Goldman led the sort of life biographers dream of. Born in imperial Russia in 1869, Goldman arrived stateside in 1885, where her anti-authoritarian sympathies incubated among the émigré radicals of New York’s Lower East Side.

American Ringstrasse

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Express

Alan Ehrenhalt does not like the word “gentrification.” That it is fraught with political meanings, that it is charged with racial overtones, and that it, itself, is enough to make urbanologists and city planners instinctively reach for their hypertension meds—these are distinctively not his concerns.

WR: The Wanderings of a Lost Soul

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On August 23, 1956, agents of the Federal Drug Administration (F.D.A.) seized six tons of scholarly literature from a Greenwich Village warehouse, transported it to the New York Sanitation Department’s Gansevoort Street incinerator, and burned it.