The locus of the New Museum's recent "East Village USA" exhibition -- the period and place generally regarded as the "'80s East Village Art" phenomenon -- actually encompassed as many as 20 or 30 "East Villages," various scenes and circles rotating through Venn diagrams of intersections, casual alliance, community action and internecine rivalry. Competing styles and artists' goals were as numerous and as varied as the epistemologies presumed to underlie them.

The Downtown Collection, an amalgam of archives in NYU's Fales Library provided the initial impetus for The Downtown Show, curated by Carlo McCormick, currently on view at both the Fales and NYU's Grey Art Gallery, and its companion publication, "The Downtown Book". Less an art show in the traditional sense than a barrage of ephemera, periodicals, manuscripts and artifacts, richly supplemented -- for the most part -- by exemplary paintings and sculptural objects, and rarely seen early works by well-known artists and writers, as well as a glut of musical and performance/video documentation.

Because society is less concerned with understanding the meaning of artistic production than with promoting and profiting from name brand artists' commodities, it creates personal mythologies which insure the chosen's entry to the pantheon, all the more compelling if the artist has the good taste to die young. Keats, Kahlo, Pollock, Parker, Plath, Hendrix, Cobain, and thousands of other less recognizable names; usually some form of self-destruction is involved. ("Die young, and stay pretty", sang Blondie's Debbie Harry, who managed to avoid that fate.) In the 80s art world, the two meteors were Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Hagiography blinds hindsight, and the meaning and method of the work of both these artists are ripe for re-investigation. Though both were associated early on with the East Village, both saw the world (and the streets) as a greater canvas, to be re-coded and interpreted through a personal yet largely accessible visual hermeneutics

A blonde angel covers the Earth with some blankets. With these white immense blankets envelops the planet.

Early in Rhythm Science Paul D. Miller, better known as D.J. Spooky, brazenly claims his new book "is a theater of networks, of correspondences that turn in on themselves and drift into the ether like smoke-rings blown in an airless club.

Clark's films generally follow a male perspective, females existing mainly as foils for the males. In fact most of the major female characters in both Kids and Bully are raped. In Kids, Casper, to emulate the sexual mastery of Telly, rapes the peacefully sleeping Jenny, in a long, explicitly jarring scene. The defilement of Casper primarily intrigues Clark, however, the camera focusing on Casper's bewildered face the next morning as he asks "what happened?" Amidst all his drugs and debauchery, only the malicious violence of rape exiles Casper from innocence, from childhood. Looking back, Telly's pursuit of virgins can be seen as a subliminal compulsion to destroy innocence that is made even more profound by the fact that he is HIV positive.

El Chino you dance alone in a maelstrom of well-heeled couples

the tango, danzón, salsa, merengue, mambo, cúmbia

chachacha, guaracha on a midsummer night at Lincoln Center plaza

La perra de mi vecina, pequeña, blanca, peluda. La lleva en su cartera con su cabecita saltarina mirando a todos en el tren, que ha tomado en la estación West 4. La gente sonríe cuando ven a la peludita. En la estación de la calle 14 un policía se abre paso. Intenta entrar al tren entre medio de la muchedumbre y ¡PAFFFFFF! la macana se suelta y achueca al animal.

Poetry in Latin America, with its great capacity for transformation, moves in buds of great truths. That cosmology, besides consisting of word, rhythm, melody and verse, has been the conduit of deep historical realities. Themes like peace, war, injustice and terror expand throughout this universe, unfolding an accordion of everyday possibilities like condemnation, protest, indignation and rage.

La poesía en América Latina con su gran capacidad transformadora, se mueve en capullos de grandes verdades. Esa cosmología, que además de consistir de palabra, ritmo, melodía y verso, ha sido conductora de profundas realidades históricas. Temas como la paz, la guerra, la injusticia y el terror se expanden dentro de este universo dando cabida a un acordeón de posibilidades cotidianas tales como la denuncia, la protesta, la indignación y el coraje.

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.