it ain't always me

talkin' to ya chirren

it ain't always me

mixing up gaslone utterances

scarin' motherfuckers

to death

Maria Full of Grace was not a movie I was particularly interested in seeing. A film about a seventeen year-old girl who traffics drugs? It sounds like a bad episode of a teen drama. And critics in general have a habit of applauding movies that tackle 'serious' issues, while ignoring their artistic merits. It makes them seem multicultural, I guess. However, I am happy to admit that in this case I was completely wrong.

This past year, documentaries finally became major players at the box office. Fueled by such high-profile, controversial films as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me, the ainstream ultimately learned to love documentaries. No longer doomed to limited release in art house theaters, the general public got a taste of an underappreciated form of filmmaking.

Transposing the Darwinian figurations of evolution into the dynamic simplicity of an ideogram we find a man hanging from a tree: his eyes dark as the abyss he battled and then became. Dead branches arc downward diverging from ones plunging upward while fruit gleams over Man's head in altitudes inhabitable only by the Phoenix, and a gnarled trunk split by lightning diverges into roots that strangle each other between the dance of worms.

A vast landscape stretches to eternity. A dark night finds a little boy running from his home.Cut to: New York City 2000. Haris, a stylish Afghan-American artist living in Chelsea is haunted by a traumatic past. He tries to interpret his visions in his artwork but needs more clarity. Flashback to: Kabul, Afghanistan 1979. A young Haris wakes to gun fire. His father tells him to run and sends him off with a prayer and a promise not to return home. His legacy begins.

On this hottest day of summer the cool fjords of Norway refresh in the Treaders performance of "Seraphita." In the sanctuary of the beautiful church, the 45-minute dance provides quiet respite from the brutal dog days of city summer heat. The icebergs are evoked with cool, stony, minimal movement. The original music by Yashuro Kato, also spare, begins with a quiet measured drumbeat. A crackling track with sweet vocals mesmerizes like white noise and is somehow dansant; the sound and steps merge through the dancer's musicality. Megumi Onishi, as Minna enters with a small tinkling bell. In the story, Minna, a country girl, falls in love with Seraphitus, a young but wizened neighbor who at first appears inanimate in designer Courtney Logan and Rika's combination kimono/shroud. Wilfred, danced en travesti by choreographer Naeko Shikamo, is also in love with Seraphita. Seraphitus, a.k.a. Seraphita, takes on male, and more intuitive female traits, winning the worship of both companions. Dancing at the two ends of the long (16 foot) sleeves of her costume, Shikamo and Onishi pine for the elusive and unattainable figure. They spiral toward her, only to be cast away.

The story of The Interpreter by Suki Kim begins and ends with the main character, Suzy, finding herself completely alone in a crowded, public place. Given this fact, one might assume that Suzy's state of being has not altered by the end of the novel. This is, of course, not the case.

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami is about characters trying to reconcile their sense of who they are with the world around them. They are forced to do this while trying to make sense of the tragedy of the Kobe earthquake, which struck this city in Japan in 1995. They run away from their mothers and fathers and husbands and wives, they save a world that may or may not be worth saving, and they are forced to choose whether or not they are going to bind themselves to the people they love.

Mocking the routine "how are we today?" asked hospital patients, Wiler responds, "We're fine but we are / choosing not to choose / death today / if you please." Having been diagnosed with aids four years ago, this cannot be taken as just a bit of jesting. While this isn't one of those uplifting "isn't life great" collections of poems--though it is--it isn't a poor Jack whose had a rotten bit of bad luck kind of book--which it also is.

While Turner is an African American with strong roots in the black community, his vision extends to humanity in general, those who've become "the anonymous spoils of war" of prejudice, of all the cruelty people are capable of. He hears the "Ancient voices..../ the ancestors: Listen! the say / Thou shall not forget."

hot sticky days spent squashing bugs that got in

thru half screens

some so tiny I never saw

what bit me

John Ashbery's recent collection of poetry"Your Name Here" shows him at the hieght of his powers not as a surrealist but as a surrealist/realist. Therein he indeed throws the proverbial cow up over the moon as might any symbolic bard of the unlikeley.

Welcome to a magic-tragic carpet ride where all the stories of what made the desert oasis of Las Vegas the overblown Oz it is today come together as one.The story of Las Vegas and the story of it's making according to authors Roger Morris and Sally Denton is the story of America. This is the book that credits the entire cast: the cowboys, the mob, the miners, the Shepard's, the military industrial complex, the entertainers, the teamsters, the Mormon bankers, and the journalists-In fact almost everybody except Hunter S. Thompson and Dave Hickey.

I thought it would take until the turn of the century to read The Turn of the Century, the 659 Kurt Anderson novel on what it is like to be a middle aged post-millenial infotainment yuppie. In this tale set in the twelve-month cycle just after New Years 2000, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Zimbalist and her husband George Matcier beat a path through a mercenary infested jungle of avaricious do-gooders for themselves parading under the professions of media executive, financier, and boutique industry irreplacable....

So here this writer sits as if an upwardly flowing odalisque and on his futon types on his laptop in order to compare Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is illuminated" (as further illuminated by the movie version directed by Leiv Schreiber and starring Toby Maguire { a piece in which the author refers to himself as the writer or Jonathan Safran Foer who is a character in the story itself in the third person via the voice of a narrator a young Ukrainian man named Alex who travels with a dog) (a bitch he calls her) named Sammy Davis jr. jr.} to Brett Easton Ellis's "Lunar Park" (where the writer himself is the character in the first person living his life in what might have been or a duplicate reality (a what if?) which then is seamlessly blended in with strains based on reality and a chaser of a couple of shots of that which is otherwise embellished as well).

With the four corner city block paved as to be un-bustable by the offensive line of critical rhetoric en-charged with and or desiring to promote Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated? it is almost as if one slipped the tongue as to say by Jonathan Safran Franzen (or Jonathan Franzen Foer). So therefore it beckons one practicing this most nitro glycerin of disciplines to seriously ponder approaching the volume.

The virtual and partial symbolic representation for and replacement of the physical elements of human life are monumental alterations to the nature in which those with access and or witness to technology interact with and within the universe. As the time members of our species engage in and between simulated and physical realities fluctuates the pictures that our perception forms of the tangible elements of existence change. Moreover then henceforth artists' and viewers' respective expressions and or understanding of physical reality in the fine and applied arts in physical space and cyberspace evolve. Summarily one of the phenomenological progressions in this relatively new inter-dimensional dialectic addressing how both painterly and morphically responsive digital textures emerge with the facility of one paradigm translated into the dimension of another (as well as in what could be termed visually hyphenated hybrid forms) is "Hypertexture".

One small step for gallery goers one giant step for bullshit; that's a bit extreme; but, this artonaut having landed on planet Gladstone/ whether gladly or not; but, as a gadfly sent by a glad hand extended by telephone/ I did not know what to expect after Steve cannon said "you will like it."

Dave Hickey is a noted art critic, author of "Air Guitar," and is Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

"The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is a retelling of the Orpheus myth in the post-modern guise of an inverse roman a clef of current history. Everybody is along for the ride Ahmet Ertegun, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Andy Warhol etceteras. It is the story of post-partition India invading the musical superculture, the jet stream upon which cultures actually interface.