AltWeeklies Wire
Photos from the Frontnew
Combat photographer and Air Force veteran Stacy Pearsall is part of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art's inside look at the War on Terror.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
01-28-2009 |
Art
Obama's Historic Victory and What Kulture Klash 3 Really Meansnew
Is it more than an arts party? Does it have anything to say to arts organizations struggling to attract younger audiences? What does it suggest about 21st-century attitudes about our experience of the arts?
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
11-12-2008 |
Performance
'Degrees of Latitude' Breaks Laurel Blossom's Pain into Piecesnew
Laurel Blossom's collection transcends self-pity by shattering the image of the author's bad childhood and even worse adulthood. Blossom mixes shards of memory with other shards: overheard conversation, punchlines, newspaper headlines, family expressions, and music.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
11-12-2008 |
Poetry
'Scratch Beginnings' is Kind, Compassionate, and Naivenew
Instead of challenging his beliefs, Shepard's descent into poverty only adds to the already vexing verisimilitudes of poverty. Instead of offering insight into what he experienced and what that means to others like him, Shepard offers a book dazed by reality and confused by how to respond to it.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
11-05-2008 |
Nonfiction
Does Being an Artist Make You a Liberal?new
It's easy to see how the cost of education and a housing crisis affect the health of the citizenry.
But reading a novel or watching a play? That's not so easy to see. Hence, we don't hear about it much.
Even so, there is a long intellectual tradition of making the case for the arts in politics.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
10-30-2008 |
Commentary
Poet Elizabeth Spires Answers Big Questions with Small Answersnew
When I found out my 401(k) lost more than a quarter of its value -- about four month's worth of salary dissipating into the ether -- I wasn't in the mood to review Elizabeth Spires' new book of poems, The Wave-Maker.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
09-24-2008 |
Poetry
Hard Contraries Meet in 'God Particles'new
Thomas Lux's God Particles is replete with iron words -- language hardened by hammer and tong, images smoldering with bitterness and irony, a worldview grown misanthropic by the disappointments of human folly.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
09-17-2008 |
Poetry
A New Quarterly Helps Us Understand Who We Think We Arenew
A new quarterly hopes to provide more background about the world and less foreground. It's called Dispatches and this inaugural issue focuses on American culture, looking at it from "the inside out, the outside in," write the editors.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
08-20-2008 |
Books
'Stop Me If You've Heard This' Is as Valuable as You'd Thinknew
I once took a class in which the professor believed the point in studying Shakespeare's comedies was not amusement so much as profitable scholarship. The Bard's comedies, in his view, were his most serious work. To see this, though, students had to assume that funny and serious weren't at odds.
I hoped similar reasoning informed Jim Holt’s new book, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.
I was wrong.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
08-13-2008 |
Nonfiction
The End of Deliberate Ugliness: How to reclaim the historic role of art in expressing spiritualitynew
Gail Sickel was searching in the 1970s, a dynamic period still roiling with the social and political upheavals of the decade before. The United States was still sunk in the quagmire of a foreign war. Coming of age amid this influence of anxiety, Sickel was part of a boom of young, idealistic Americans searching for new ways to express spirituality.
"I was looking for oneness," she says, reflecting on that time. "I was a seeker and eventually I found an experience that was heart-focused."
That experience was the Dances of Universal Peace.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
08-13-2008 |
Performance
Tags: performance
Frank Bidart's New Poems Sing Hymns to a Meaningless Universenew
His excellent new book, Watching the Spring Festival, reflects a man feeling his age, the slip of time, and the tug of oblivion. It attempts to confront the paradox of being while trying to inscribe something lasting, and also expressing unblinkingly man's cosmic dilemma -- that maybe, just maybe, there is no exit.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
08-06-2008 |
Poetry
Stories about Stories: Kevin Brockmeier’s new story collection retells (relatively) new talesnew
Each of the 13 stories in The View from the Seventh Layer is some ingenius variation of narrative genre — there are four fables, a ghost story, an alien abduction story, a fantasy, a science-fiction romance, a situation comedy of sorts, and even a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story.
Only a few of these breezy and sometimes elegant stories subscribe to that 20th-century dogma of short-story writing that Michael Chabon has called — in the tongue-and-cheek introduction to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales — the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.”
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
07-23-2008 |
Fiction
Kulture Klash 2 and the Authenticity of an Emerging Arts Brandnew
Charleston's one-night arts event tweaks the standard strategies of arts marketing and sells nothing but the idea of itself.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
04-23-2008 |
Art
The New Art of Health Carenew
How art is being used to help solve problems in modern hospital design.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
03-26-2008 |
Science
Tags: Health & Science
Can a Teen Pregnancy Flick Win the Oscar?new
It depends on how you look at comedy. Juno is the lone comedy among films that in retrospect might mark 2007 as the Year of Drear.
Charleston City Paper |
John Stoehr |
02-20-2008 |
Movies
Tags: Juno
