Posts

Swedish noir: The Tunnel, by Carl-Johan Vallgren

Image
Most of the Scandinavian crime wave is made up of thrillers and police procedurals, only occasionally reaching the bleak potrayal of life in the streets that is typical of noir. Carl-Johan Vallgren reaches for noir, basing his two (so far0 novels featuring ex-junkie Danny Katz in a difficult landscape of heroin, disfunctional famiies, life on the streets, sexual deviance, and exloitation. The Tunnel, the second in the series, also focuses (almost equally) on two former friends of Danny's, from his junkie days, Eva, now a prosecuting attorney, and Jorma, a career criminal. The novel actually begins with a failed armored car heist, in which Jorma is involved. Jorma spends most o the rest of the book seeking who is responsble for the betrayal that led to the robbery's failure and the murder of a friend, also involved in the robbery. Danny, a computer expert and former intelligence office, is involved in both the investigation of his own Jewish background and in the murder of
Post a Comment
Read more

Does anyone care aout book reviews?

Other than a few of the usual suspects, most book reviews (of crime fiction, anyway, which is the genre I'm following) seem to be "bests of" or thematic surveys, or best of this monht's... Does anyone care about in-depth reviews or analysis? I don't see much evidence of it. Are we reduced to thumbspup or lists of 10 best or lists of what's new?
Post a Comment
Read more

New York shows, starting with Christiane Loōhr

Image
a few good shows to report on, starting with "diffuse," by German artist Christiane Lōhr at Jason McCoy Gallery on 58th Street through May 25th. Her drawings are complex, vaguely organic abstracts in black and white, but the highlight of the show is her tiny quasi-abstract sculptures made of bits of plant material. There are tiny grande ves and somewhat larger architectural forms, the latter something like models for dwellings or communal structures but in open-weave materials. But they're not models (you don't imagine inhabitants). They are elegant objects, seemingly growing out of or bound to the "ground" or table. They defy scale, or rather insist that scale has nothing to do with size. These are deeply involving sculptures, with a phenomenological edge: Leaning toward one of the ones that's not in a vitrine, there is a palpable risk. Mildred Thompson's show at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea is a moving tribute to the deceased artists who is only n
Post a Comment
Read more

Question

Image
Would anybody subscribe (at no cost even) to an on-line publication called Irksome?
Post a Comment
Read more

Introduction to the Irksome Editor

In one of the last documents I prepared as Executive Editor (formerly Editor) of Sculpture magazine, I mistyped my job title as Erxecutive Editor and I actually liked thinking of my job that way. Erxecutive, however, sounds like the typo that it is (and would likely just be corrected by all the lurking on-line spell-checkers, so I decided to brand myself simply as the Irksome Editor (former editor, really, but once an editor...). I plan to post occasionally here in that role, when the fancy (or the irk) strikes, taking advantage of my new freedom from institutional support or constraint to say what I really think, on whatever topic is on my mind that day. Since I was editor of a contemporary art magazine, the subject of contemporary art (or art writ large) will likely come up, but this is not an art blog. One of the requrements of an editorial job is to be the fox rather than the hedghog: to know something about a lot of things, rather than being an expert who is concentrated on one th
1 comment
Read more