Posts by author

Ari Messer

  • When I Was Young

    “And he came to interview me and suddenly I felt like he was trying to corner me. ‘Oh, what’s it like being a terrorist,’ and ‘You’re just doing it for shock value so people will buy your records.’ “And then…

  • Corpus Delicti

    Sometimes, in the work of German-Danish artist Christian Lemmerz, a “child’s christening is symbolised with a baptismal font in white marble with the inside shaped as a baby coffin….[A] wet grave filled with Kölner Wasser, to dampen the stench.” In…

  • Cape Farewell

    Established by artist David Buckland in 2001, Cape Farewell coordinates cultural responses to climate change. One dope thing they do is send groups of artists, musicians, educators, writers, and scientists into the arctic–not forever, just for a trip. Past expeditions…

  • Annie Bacon’s Folk Opera

    Back in Santa Cruz, I marveled at Ukulele Dick and Oliver Brown, maestros of ukulele songsmithing and quirk. But sometimes a song is not just a song. Sometimes it’s an extended, operatic adventure, more like an urban folk ballad, played…

  • In the Art Rags

    Shirin Neshat is consistently astonishing. In Art in America, Eleanor Heartney talks with Neshat about her ongoing project of lyrical short films, and now a feature, based on Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur‘s magical 1989 novel, Women Without Men. Cabinet presents…

  • John Wesley in Venice

    You look at a John Wesley picture and you feel a thousand things at once. As a part of the Venice Biennale, Prada, or the Prada Foundation, is presenting a retrospective of the American pre-pop master’s vivid work (The Daily…

  • The Definite Article

    The Juan MacLean finally have a new album out. A much-anticipated garden of electronica songsmithing, The Future Will Come is tremendous, careful, and sleek; it will blow your little mind-feet! The Juan MacLean is touring with The Field (What’s the…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Craig Yoe

    Was Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster mad at DC Comics–or even his own creations–for betraying him? Was he taking some sort of delight in putting his characters through this alternate world? (NSFW)

  • Elle et Elle

    “Excluding men and showing only women is a revolutionary gesture of affirmative action. But the museum is avant-garde. It’s part of the Centre Pompidou culture to do things differently. And we like a lot of drama. This is going to be dramatic…

  • The Freak of Araby

    Sir Richard Bishop is a lot of things to a lot of people. He’s a gentleman! He’s a post-punk Guitar God! Now the half-Lebanese indie instrumentalist is about to release an expansive little record on Drag City called The Freak…

  • Nordic Track

    My friend Margaret has some good ideas, like DJing a monthly night of Northern indie pop. She might call it Nordic Track. That’s a perfect name, indicating how we would skate to Jens and Beyond. Maybe it will happen someday.…

  • In the Art Rags

    The future and the past converge in this month’s art coverage. Fecal Face interviews Damon Soule about having multiple dreams at the same time.  Gene Moreno and Ernesto Oroza tell e-flux about Little Haiti. In Cabinet, Aaron Schuster writes about…