Get Out From Where?

March 29, 2017 Darien Gree and Matthew "Frankenstein" Logan

Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Washington) in Jordan Peele's Get Out — Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Washington) in Jordan Peele's *Get Out*

Masterful cinema usually leaves little to accident. With the film world completely oversaturated by works that are intellectually lazy and yet somehow overwrought with production costs, this is easy to forget. Many would say that the age of the auteur is behind us. It’s overly glib, but also understandable.

Throw in a film that cuts against this, where everything is well-placed and intentionally so, and a film-going public hungry for something that hits the sweet-spot between smart and emotionally satisfying will not be able to stop talking about it. Enter, like an unexpected guest who has been hiding in your basement, Get Out.

No Refuge In Western Puzzles

March 23, 2017 Shirin Rastin interviewed by Dollar Art House

Ocean View (or It Could be Summer Time), puzzles, manipulated internet photograph (Shirin Rastin, 2017) — *Ocean View (or It Could be Summer Time)*, puzzles, manipulated internet photograph (Shirin Rastin, 2017)

Shirin Rastin is an Iranian-born artist based in Orange County, California. She is exhibiting her latest series, Forced Entry, at the Dollar Art House in St. Louis, Missouri. The exhibition opens on Friday, March 24. The Dollar Art House interviewed her about her work before the exhibition opening.

Dollar Art House: In this series you combine commercial puzzles with puzzles you’ve made using images from the news media. In particular these include puzzles that show an idyllic “western” or “American” life (the former) and puzzles that depict the ongoing refugee crisis (the latter). Can you tell us something about how you arrived at this concept?

The Brown Eyed Handsome Man In Outer Space: On Chuck Berry

March 22, 2017 Jordy Cummings

Imagine, if you will, aliens, grey ones, with those big eyes, travelling through the universe and finding a capsule in the sky, representing the people from the planet Earth, a peaceful place (or so it looks from space). On the capsule, the aliens find a recording – it is “Johnny B. Goode”, the 1958 ur-narrative of rock music, Horatio Alger as channeled through the experience of Southern working class youth. “He never learned to read or write so well,” sings Chuck Berry, who died on Saturday at 90 years old, “but he could play his guitar just like-a-ringin’ a bell”. A sort of rock folk-tale, young Johnny can’t do much except play guitar.

Sunday School / Slapped

March 17, 2017 Natalie Crick

Lee Krasner's The Seasons — Lee Krasner's *The Seasons*

Madeline loves it
And sits as Mother would.
The priest like her Father
Dressed all in grey,

Palms fluttering with
Paper clowns

Vignettes and stories that get involved in life

March 13, 2017 Tamara Pearson

Life was smithereens of decisions and constant problems and challenges. And so were her stories. She stuck the smithereens of stories together with home-made glue, with the cracks between them still visible and the glue all pungent, and made a novel.

Someone else kept a diary the old fashioned way, with smithereens of thoughts jotted into a notebook he kept tucked under his pillow. And Eduardo Galeano wrote history as a series of little stories in Memories of Fire, and in Children of the Days he wrote one vignette for each day of the year.

Art + Solidarity: The Socialist Artist Running for St. Louis City Hall

March 9, 2017 Stephanie Dinges interviewed by Adam Turl

Stephanie Dinges with other socialists and activists protesting Donald Trump's Muslim Ban at St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Photo by Richard Reilly.

Stephanie Dinges is a working-class socialist, artist and activist running as a Green Party candidate for alderperson in the 13th ward of St. Louis. Dinges is running against a largely absentee pro-corporate law-and-order Democrat. On March 7th the aldermanic and mayoral primary was held in St. Louis. The general election takes place on April 4th. Red Wedge’s Adam Turl interviewed Stephanie about her campaign in late February.

A 21st Century Popular Avant-Garde

March 3, 2017 Alexander Billet

In 1871, Parisian workers famously brought down the Vendome Column in the city’s first arondissement. It was an iconic event – in more way than one – for the Paris Commune. The Column, erected sixty years previously in commemoration of Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, was torn down at the initial suggestion of the legendary artist Gustave Courbet. Courbet called the Column “a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment.”

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