M.I.A. challenges God, fans on Governor's Island:
“Can I get more gunshots, please?” Maya Arulpragasam asked in the middle of a downpour early Sunday morning on Governor’s Island.
Bio: Patrick Robbins was raised in Brooklyn, where he still lives and works as a journalist, promoter and grantwriter.
“Can I get more gunshots, please?” Maya Arulpragasam asked in the middle of a downpour early Sunday morning on Governor’s Island. Arulpragasam, who performs as M.I.A., was the headliner of the day-long Hard NYC festival of dance music, featuring acts like Sleigh Bells, Die Antwoord, Skream + Benga, Rye Rye, and Ninjasonik. But not even the sound effects were going her way. More
Posted on July 26th, 2010 7:15am
A slightly irritating question elicited an unexpected response. Mitchell announced news that he claimed he hadn't even shared with his publisher: that Jacob de Zoet was only the first part of a trilogy that would revolve around the theme of immortality—delving, in the next two volumes, further into the realm of speculative fiction. More
Posted on July 19th, 2010 5:24pm
The film hasn’t yet been released in its full form, and this was a set of outtakes cobbled together and designed for live accompaniment by the band. There’s a lot of high-contrast, close-up shots of different parts of the boats or sculptures, which neatly mirrors the project’s aesthetic of composing a whole out of disparate elements. But the “whole” that results doesn’t really add up to a narrative or plot. More
Posted on July 8th, 2010 12:56pm
David Mitchell's early books were dazzling experiments that almost always succeeded, but he sometimes seemed to judge quality based on how many narrative voices he could cram between the covers. In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he's replaced conceptual brilliance with straightforward storytelling, and the results should silence pesky critics and restless fans. More
Posted on June 30th, 2010 1:20pm
Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio’s new anthology of short “fantastic” fiction begins with an ars poetica from Gaiman himself: “Talking to Al Sarrantonio I realized that I was not alone in finding myself increasingly frustrated with the boundaries of genre: the idea that categories which existed only to guide people around bookshops now seemed to be dictating the kind of stories that were being written.” It is the quality of the story that compels the reader, he elaborates, regardless of whether the story contains elements that break the boundary of the possible. More
Posted on June 16th, 2010 10:37pm
