Francis Powell comes from England (he always says jokingly “he's neither Scottish nor Irish, but simply plain English”)- however, for the last ten years or so he's been residing in Paris on a permanent basis. He has made a name for himself as a brilliant musician and a composer of electronic music, known as 'DJ WISE' and meanwhile he has been painting beautiful, sort of 'Art Nouveau- Klimt meets Aboriginal Art' paintings, all coupled with printed samples of his own creative writing and steady journalism. He often says that he belongs to a certain eclectic British tradition of visual artists who often turned musicians and then turned something else.

Visionary, rabble-rouser, contemporary artist, Cai Guo-Qiang is the first Chinese artist to have a major retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum. In his artist's toolbox are explosives, gunpowder, yak skin, live snakes, wooden arrows, real cars, life-like replicas of tigers and wolfs, and trenched up sunken ships. Witness the spectacle created by this modern day alchemist[...]

Richard Prince one man show at Guggenheim is a massive affair. The show consists of different cycles of artists work, his famous cowboys, biker chicks, car hoods sculptures, nurse paintings,DeKooning paintings, check paintings, black and white; color paintings, celebrity publicity assemblages etc…. Walking up the spiral of Guggeneheim in a chronological order you immerse yourself into his world, which supposed to be a pure concentration of American pop culture[...]

BOOK REVIEW (Portuguese) O romance afro-brasileiro relata a história da infância e vida adulta de Ponciá Vicêncio, menina pobre que nasceu e cresceu em uma pequena cidade chamada Vicêncio (nome do antigo dono de terra) com seus pais e o irmão Luandi Vicêncio.

The finalist Judge will be Yerra Sugarman, and the first prize will be $150. The deadline is July 1st, 2008!

Book release Party July 19th 2008 4-5:30 pm @ The Bowery Poetry Club- Readers TBA

About The Omnipresent Phillip Glass Glass: A Portrait in Twelve Parts, a film produced and directed by Scott Hicks

This excellent documentary/interview film with and about Phillip Glass going down the Astroland roller coaster in Coney Island with a smile on his face. All those years of involvement with Buddhism and other spiritual traditions would seem to have paid off. But why subject one’s life to danger gratuitously? The question is neither asked nor answered. Glass claims not to be a Buddhist. Nevertheless he has a Buddhist teacher named Gelek Rinpoche and is on the boards of numerous Buddhist organizations including Tibet House and a magazine I get four times per year about Buddhist topics called Tricycle. The film features Chuck Close, the famous artist who paints portraits mostly in black dots that look like blown up photographs. Close has known Glass for many years[...]

Do Tell HotelReview by Kevin Riordan

To read Carl Watson’s novel is to put on a pair of X-Ray glasses that do not stop at the skin, but go on to eviscerate instead of titillate, the literary equivalent of the Swedish film Travis Bickle takes his date to. From the first line, I thought I had a handle to grasp this book first published in French a decade ago: a new Jim Thompson, whose first person anti-confessionals were cherished in France and nearly neglected here, like so many other tough paperback original authors, like David Goodis, Chester Himes, or Charles Williams. This contrarian thwarted and eluded that grasp in no time. The book is as free of cliché as it is of guideposts, as he resolutely qualifies every line that might put things in the light, until, like diamonds in a seam of coal, he plants a gem of faceted brilliance[...]

Ocean on my tongue. Small boatssuccoring on the gristle of ocean. Dark brine. They're dragging the nets up from the sea [...]