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Death is Not the End: A Review of Patience by Daniel Clowes
Few artists have done more to elevate the status of comics in the public imagination than Daniel Clowes, and Patience, as befits a graphic novel billed as “a cosmic timewarp deathtrip to the primordial infinite of everlasting love,” is his longest and most ambitious work yet. It opens in 2012, as underemployed schlub Jack Barlow…
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After the Prophet: Leigh Fondakowski’s Stories from Jonestown
The paradox of utopias is that while their failure is assured, their appeal is eternal. 800 years ago, tens of thousands of ordinary people left their homes, their families, and the innumerable small ties which made up their lives to march on Jerusalem and retake it in the name of God, in the deadly mass…
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Occupy The BBC: The Work of Adam Curtis
A million acts of reportage, programming and documentation have left the BBC with the planet’s most complete video archive of the twentieth century. BBC writer and documentarian Adam Curtis’s technique is to obsessively sift through these uncountable hours of footage looking for connections. He shuffles through the BBC’s memories like its regretful conscience, imbuing each…
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The World’s Greatest Art Museum is in Hobart, Tasmania
Reviewed in this essay: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/smiley.mp3] Visit the permanent collection of any national art museum and you will likely find an Impressionist room, with a Cezanne, a Monet, a Manet, and maybe a Pissarro. There will be an Abstract Expressionist…