May 1, 2026 On Art When the Confederacy Came to LA By Harmony Holiday Installation view of MONUMENTS, October 23, 2025 to May 3, 2026, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Brick. Photograph by Fredrik Nilsen. This is not a traditional review but a look at the set of myths and the sublimated pursuit of dominance that have made it necessary to mount an exhibition featuring decommissioned Confederate monuments disrupted or forced into deeper layers of disgrace by remix and recontextualization. The result is a humiliation ritual that both targets and empowers white nationalism in the American South, instigating its reactionary temperament just enough to arouse productive tension but not enough to alleviate it or rehabilitate the temperament itself. Since its opening this past October, which came in the wake of the brutal, live-streamed assassination of Charlie Kirk and public fallout that ranged from glee to real mourning to opportunistic purposing of the optics of both grief and outrage, MONUMENTS, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick in Los Angeles, has been an institutional zone wherein real and symbolic clashes between far-right extremism and bourgeois liberal dismay are played out in pantomime. We are all of us characters in this impromptu theater of convoluted archetypes. Paradoxically, in the museum or gallery, ornate propaganda for the Confederacy gains some of the dignity of archaeology. Its monuments become pendulums swinging backward, gathering the momentum that comes from being the subject of protest and outrage, kept at bay and in check by that attention, but not for long. They haunt better there, stalking the mind like hunters in an offseason. Think of Billie Holiday’s tawny tone belting “This year’s crop of kisses are not for me, for I’m still wearin’ last year’s love” or the deceptively whimsical opening line to “Strange Fruit”: “Pastoral scene of the gallant South.” Read More
April 30, 2026 Diaries Notes on New Book By Patrick Cottrell Hermit Notes, 2023. Courtesy of Patrick Cottrell. In the late summer of 2023, I kept a log of process notes, so I could keep track of what I was writing and chart my frustrations. I had suffered from writer’s block for several years, but there were moments when I experienced true lightness and clarity. Some of them are described here. July 14, 2023 At the beginning: The memorial gathering on the five-year anniversary of my brother’s death + the new mystery At the end: The person disappears and you can’t bring them back July 16, 2023 Each day is pain/writing and yet I see myself writing new things and trying to add dimensions in order to justify this pitiful book but all i can hear are the doubts and critiques about WHY was this necessary, WHY am I doing this—“He’s repeating himself.” “He’s rewriting his first book, but trans.” “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace II: The Sequel No One Asked For.” Read More
April 29, 2026 First Person All My Dad’s Sons By Joe Bond The boys with their van. Photograph courtesy of the author. My dad used to take me to work with him. He worked at a group home for juvenile delinquents. I remember playing on the floor of a windowless office one afternoon—zooming some toy cars around—when the door kicked open and a teenager flew in. The kid smacked hard against the polished tile floor with the weight of two grown men on top of him. They were trying to calm him down, and his face was pink and wet with tears. He was screaming. I was five years old. I scooted my cars back into a corner and went on playing. Such scenes were part of my childhood. These were pretty desperate boys, twelve to eighteen years old, ten of them living together on the grounds of an old tuberculosis hospital. I remember a redbrick home with many rooms—what used to be apartments for nurses—way up on a hill, the path to it winding through the trees. Sometimes the new boys—orientation phases—would tear off down the hill on foot and try to make it into town. This was eastern Kentucky in the eighties. Near the home was a highway, a gas station, and a rundown motel where a man had murdered his wife. That was about it. Dad was pretty good at finding the boys who wanted to be found, but if you stole a car or broke into somebody’s house, he couldn’t take you back. It was a community-relations issue. Two boys stole my mom’s car once and drove it into a ditch, totaling it. Another boy ran off and no one ever heard from him again. He was fourteen years old, but it said in his file he was a prostitute, and everyone was pretty sure that was the life he’d gone back to—that he’d made it down to the highway and caught a ride. There were worse places to be than a group home—you could be locked up in a camp, a hundred serious delinquents out in the middle of nowhere, staff not at all hesitant to put their hands on you—but some of the boys didn’t know this yet. My dad was the youngest treatment director in the state. He took his boys everywhere—to movies, baseball games, five hundred miles away to the beach. Some of them had never been out of the projects except to be sent to a home. They thought Louisville was the world. Dad would load them into an old Ford Econoline van and the boys would tell their stories, what they called their “past histories,” and I would wedge in beside them and listen. Read More
April 28, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: View of Notre Dame By Hal Foster Henri Matisse, View of Notre Dame, 1914, oil on canvas, 58 x 37 ⅛ in, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here. The next three installments will appear weekly throughout May. As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right. Read More
April 27, 2026 Events Edward P. Jones’s Hadada Acceptance Speech By Edward P. Jones Edward P. Jones photographed by Jill Krementz at the Paris Review Revel on April 14, 2026. Last week, at The Paris Review’s 2026 Revel, the writer Edward P. Jones accepted the Hadada Award, a prize presented each year to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Jones, whose 2004 novel The Known World won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has been a beloved contributor to the Review since 1992, when his short story “Marie” appeared in the Spring issue. Among the editors’ initial reactions to that story, we found a handwritten note (whose chicken scratch strongly resembles that of George Plimpton) which reads: “a formidable character … well-plotted … very well controlled … Hooray!” The note accompanies a letter from Jones, dated October 1991, in which he told the former editor James Linville that “it seems that I have been creating the people in the stories all my adult life.” This speech, however, takes us back to before that adult life, to when Jones was first falling in love with, as he puts it, “this fiction stuff.” We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did. Read More
April 24, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: An Introduction By Hal Foster Grahamdubya, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. This is the introduction to a four-part series by the art critic and historian Hal Foster, resulting from a kind of ritual he devised with a friend during their regular visits to museums. Here, he explains the premise of this game and its parameters. The next four installments are short studies, each centered around a single artwork. The first will be published next week, with the other three to follow over the course of May. Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows. Read More