Takahashi is a gardener of junk. With the utmost patience she tenderly weeds through a crazy jumble of found objects -- clocks, hammers, old paint buckets, scraps of paper, electric fans -- and arranges them in a most fastidious manner. While her installations look like the scene of an accident or a
John Ashbery has influenced more poets than almost any other author since 1950. Dean Young, Jane Miller, David Shapiro, and many younger poets take up the pen from within his tradition of shifting tone, quirky imagery, and timeless narratives. His innovations seem to have arrived simultaneously with
Charlie "Bird" Parker blew the sound of his soul through his alto and tenor sax, and for many musicians, hearing his music was like a religious conversion. He is immortalized as jazz music's "first existential hero," a blazing talent that burned out at age 35 from heroin, alcohol, and racism.
The t
Trained as a filmmaker Lafia's work is informed by a joyous engagement with the formal qualities of artistic practice. In his own words, his "work is an exploration of how discourse constructs itself." His early experimental films -- "Auto-re-tour" and "Fini La Guerre" -- investigate the tensions be