 "It is a Vessel for labor without purpose. The metaphor of the stairway to nowhere precludes a tiring climb to the top where one is expected to spend a few moments with a cell-phone, because at least a valedictory selfie rewards us with the feeling that we wasted time on a giant staircase for something—perhaps something contained in the Vessel. The Vessel valorizes work, the physical work of climbing, all while cloaking it in the rhetoric of enjoyment, as if going up stairs were a particularly ludic activity. The inclusion of an elevator that only stops on certain platforms is ludicrously provocative. The presence of the elevator implies a pressure for the abled-bodied to not use it, since by doing so one bypasses “the experience” of the Vessel, an experience of menial physical labor that aims to achieve the nebulous goal of attaining slightly different views of the city. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, to which the Vessel has been unfathomably compared, the Vessel is just tall enough to make you feel bad for not hiking up it. To climb the Eiffel Tower is equally pointless, but its sheer size makes taking the elevator the de facto, socially normalized experience. The elevators of the Vessel and their lackluster architectural integration belie the architectural profession’s view of accessibility as a code-enforced concession rather than an ethos, a moral right to architecture for all. By taking the elevator up the Vessel, you are both inviting the judgment of your peers who insist on hauling ass up sixteen stories and confirming its sheer pointlessness as a structure; for, unlike the Eiffel Tower, which has a restaurant and shop, there is nothing at the top other than a view of the Hudson and the sad promise of the repeat performance of laboring your way back down."
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 "As a longtime sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Dan Healy pioneered the way live music hits you in the gut—and he amassed a rich collection of tour tees along the way. Then he forgot about it. We visited Healy at his home in Marin, for a look at his newly re-discovered archive—and to hear the untold stories of his years on the road."
Here.  "Horror doesn’t necessarily need to feel surprising (in fact, some of the best horror tortures viewers with the predictably inevitable), but “New Year, New You,” released at the end of December, presents an incredibly taut plot which twist and unfolds in unpredictable ways and showcases up and coming episode director and co-writer Sophia Takal’s talent. Daniel Kurland wrote that “New Year, New You” is “a chilling story that only gets darker and more complex as it goes on. It also doesn’t shy away from an incredibly bleak ending that makes her point with eerie poignancy. Takal doesn’t try to overextend herself and this boiled down take on friendship and jealousy gone wrong is arguably the best addition of Into the Dark to date and hopefully just the start of Takal’s filmmaking career.” Without giving too much away, let’s just say that at first you think the episode is about surviving trauma before you think it’s about bullying before you think it’s about the lengths people will go to for internet fame before you think it’s about the particular derangement of an individual human soul. “New Year, New You” is good horror because its critique of human vanity uses the internet as a medium without reducing it to a cause. As William Burroughs said in another context, the evil was already there, waiting."
Here.  "The following is a list of unidentified, or formerly unidentified, sounds. All of the sound files in this article have been sped up by at least a factor of 16 to increase intelligibility by condensing them and raising the frequency from infrasound to a more audible and reproducible range."
Here.  "But the town is real. Or as real as any ahistorical, prefabricated, American village. And the scene is a perfect synecdoche for the show’s message. In America, we’ve blurred the line between real and fake in order to facilitate a sense of liberation. From pain. From history. From our own moral failures. And the memory-erasing drug given to the soldiers is, in a sense, meant to make them more like their civilian counterparts, trapped as they are in a placeless void untethered from memory and obligation. Sure, the show could occasionally make its concerns more explicit. It does sometimes let the characters slip out of pocket and meander a bit from the symbolic roles they’re supposed to be playing. But hopefully that’s just praising with faint damnation, because the show is high quality and carries an important message: Moral obligation begins with memory. And as long as we still have boots on the ground in the Middle East and veterans back home, that’s a message that will remain relevant."
Here.  "The catalog calls the show a “collaboration between an artificial intelligence named AICAN and its creator, Dr. Ahmed Elgammal,” a move meant to spotlight, and anthropomorphize, the machine-learning algorithm that did most of the work. According to HG Contemporary, it’s the first solo gallery exhibit devoted to an AI artist."
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Scott BeauchampWriter - Critic - Poet - Editor Archives
March 2019
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