Last Exit Magazine
Archive
August 2008
Tompkins Square Riot
On the night of Aug. 6, 1988, a riot broke out in New York’s Tompkins Square Park as police clashed with residents protesting a newly-enforced park curfew.
[published: August 13, 2008]
Six Ways to Say Goodbye
As Shea Stadium nears the end, we celebrate and mourn the underdog from Queens.
[published: August 12, 2008]
The End of the Beginning
A flood of new money has changed the art world and changed New York and now it’s drying up. We’ve seen this all before.
[published: August 12, 2008]
The Kids are Alright
Don’t tell the punks, but they are a trapping of wealth.
[published: August 12, 2008]
Ostalgia
Nostalgia for East Germany’s simpler, if more oppressive, way of life still afflicts the inhabitants of the former DDR, particularly those riding the nicest trams.
[published: August 09, 2008]
The Mistress of Taliesin
Frank Lloyd Wright’s many renovations haven’t exorcised the ghost of his murdered mistress from Taliesin, the home the famed architect built for her in Wisconsin.
[published: August 07, 2008]
July 2008
Vladimir Keilis-Borok
On the heels of our conversation about predictions with earthquake sensitive, Cal Orey, we now speak with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, professor in residence at UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Keilis-Borok, who is also the research group leader at the International Institute for Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics, Moscow, discusses complex systems, prediction algorithms, and forecasting the 2008 presidential election.
[published: July 29, 2008]
June 2008
Narco Non-News
When a plane linked to the CIA crashed in the Yucatan jungle last year, it suggested the drug trade and its vast profits are not necessarily relegated to the underworld. (Photo by Andrew W. Sieber)
[published: June 18, 2008]
Back Underground
When New York City music subcultures find new rocks to crawl (and thrive) under. (Photo by Nate Dorr)
[published: June 18, 2008]
Off the Beaten Path
In the last strip of wilderness left in Manhattan, a handful of outsiders eke out a primeval living off the radar.
[published: June 18, 2008]
In the Dumps
While the emerging tourism trend of “poorism” has come under attack by critics, a glimpse of Phnom Pen’s garbage village unavoidably leaves Westerners with their priorities challenged.
[published: June 17, 2008]
Cal Orey
Cal Orey describes herself as earthquake sensitive, and claims to have successfully predicted quakes in California and Nevada by studying her seismically intuitive pets and her own physical reactions to underground activity. The author of The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes: Jim Berkland, Maverick Geologist talks to us about syzygy, animals behaving bizarrely, orgasmic ear tones, and the (sometimes) friendly competition between earthquake sensitives and predictors.
[published: June 17, 2008]
Against the Stream
Welcome to Appleby Horse Fair, the temporal favela which establishes itself once a year in northern England as the epicenter of the British Gypsy life.
[published: June 17, 2008]
How We Are
Photographer Joseph Rodriguez has spent his career seeking out the world that exists in the shadows of where we feel comfortable.
[published: June 17, 2008]
The Subterranean Democrat
A rabble-rousing militant and foe of corruption, Hon. Mike Walsh was the city’s most successful radical politician before the Marxists perverted American left-wing politics into a parlor game.
[published: June 17, 2008]
May 2008
Taken Flight
Falcons whose migration patterns once crossed continents now travel by airplane. And like everyone else in the security line, they must present their passports.
[published: May 14, 2008]
Feed
A 16mm portrait exploring how caring for others, specifically animals, might help one get through the difficulties of life.
[published: May 13, 2008]
Remains of the Day
Artisans of a kind of realized life-after-death, taxidermists are perpetually at work on an elegy: for the animal, for the natural world, and for a craft threatened by economic instability. Photos by Kramer O’Neill.
[published: May 13, 2008]
Dogs in Bed
In most of the world, dogs are considered filthy animals who aren’t allowed in the house. Yet sharing your bed with your canine is a common, if rarely reported, phenomenon in the United States — despite the havoc it can wreak on your sleeping patterns and sex life. With photos by Keelin Daly.
[published: May 13, 2008]
The Case of the Painted Turtles
How some red-eared sliders made it from the swamps of the deep South to the middle of the biggest park in the densest city in America.
[published: May 13, 2008]
April 2008
Amos Poe
Legendary underground filmmaker Amos Poe, a founder of the No Wave Cinema movement that exploded out of the Lower East Side during the ‘70s and ‘80s, has done what seemed impossible: A captivating time-lapse remake of Andy Warhol’s Empire, the artist’s notorious 1964 black and white silent film that consisted of a single shot stretched out over eight hours and five minutes. Poe spoke to us the day after his Empire II showed at New York’s Gershwin Hotel with an improvised live soundtrack provided by Thurston Moore, Tom Surgal and Matt Heyner.
[published: April 30, 2008]
Guilty Acts
We stopped by the Black & White Gallery in New York to check out the opening reception for artist Tamara Kostianovsky’s solo debut, Actus Reus.
[published: April 20, 2008]
Austin Wanders
A wide-eyed ramble through the snobbery vacuum that is South By Southwest. With photographs by Ana Monroe.
[published: April 02, 2008]
Sightseeing With The Enemy
An aspiring foreign correspondent attempts to cross into isolated Myanmar just in time for the revolution.
[published: April 02, 2008]
An Acquired Taste
On the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, local culture revolves around sakau, a foul-tasting muck that induces paralysis, comforts mourners and sometimes even solves legal disputes.
[published: April 02, 2008]
This Island
In the latest installment of Keach Hagey’s blog about life in Abu Dhabi, she goes to a tiki bar and finds herself feeling very much on an island – though probably not the kind that the Polynesian-costumed staff intends.
[published: April 02, 2008]
Men of Destiny
Islands are quasi-natural sovereign lordships, but there’s nothing natural—or normal—about the self-made kings who have laid claim to them over the years.
[published: April 01, 2008]
The McVineyard
Move to the island and the Chicken McNugget will look like a piece of art.
[published: April 01, 2008]
March 2008
On The Rocks
Returning to the tiny Croatian island of Lokrum more than 15 years after war forced her family abroad, a native leaves the sandy beaches for a better way to take in the Adriatic.
[published: March 31, 2008]
Robert Young Pelton
Robert Young Pelton has made a career of traveling to war zones, figuring out what’s happening on both sides of the conflict and writing about it in magazines and books – from his signature Dangerous Places travel guides to his most recent insider’s look at Blackwater, Licensed to Kill. But whatever you do, don’t call him a journalist.
[published: March 17, 2008]
I Don't Want to Blow You Up!
Brooklyn artist Ricardo Cortes just might be the most controversial children’s author working today. Consider that in 2005 he self-published an illustrated educational book about marijuana called It’s Just a Plant that drew the wrath of everyone from school librarians to legislators. Undaunted, Cortes and co-author F. Bowman Hastie III recently released a 32-page coloring book called I Don’t Want to Blow You Up!, which delivers a post-9/11 anti-xenophobic message. The authors explained the impetus behind the book in an interview conducted via e-mail.
[published: March 10, 2008]
February 2008
“Killing Hope Can Make People Go Crazy”
An American resident of Nairobi reacts to Kenya’s post-election violence
[published: February 27, 2008]
Stephen Kinzer
The veteran foreign correspondent for the New York Times and author of Overthrow — the account of how the U.S. government violently toppled 14 governments, not always to its benefit — talks to us about Benazir Bhutto’s checkered past, the importance of datelines and why Rwanda is the greatest African success story you’ve never heard.
[published: February 27, 2008]
Art History Is A Blood Sport
A bitter exchange over the Venice Biennale that unfolded in the pages of Artforum was firmly rooted in the legacy of the the 1960s, which still has a tight grip on art history and the culture at large.
[published: February 27, 2008]
From Fish To Fischer?
The rapid rise of a new kind of chess champion. With photographs by Kramer O’Neill.
[published: February 27, 2008]
Yearning For Normalcy
When violence displaced thousands after Kenya’s disputed elections, a native of Nairobi’s second largest slum got a knock on the door – and 13 new roommates in his one-bedroom apartment.
[published: February 27, 2008]
Not In Play
Before U.S. Army soldiers go to “the theater” in Iraq, they play out the war on a stage set in California’s Mojave Desert. An excerpt from the upcoming documentary of the surreal simulation, Full Battle Rattle, followed by an interview with director/producers Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss.
[published: February 27, 2008]
New Jack City
This is the story of three jackings, numerous near-death experiences and the good fun had by everyone in Southeast Asia but me.
[published: February 26, 2008]
Will Leitch
Will Leitch, editor of the unruly and always engaging Deadspin sports blog, chastises athletes and media alike in his latest book God Save the Fan. He speaks to us about his late, great web site The Black Table, why sports don’t really matter and how the Super Bowl has transformed itself into an increasingly insufferable sports-industrial complex.
[published: February 22, 2008]
John Strausbaugh
John Strausbaugh is callin’ you a sissy. In his latest book, Sissy Nation, the New York Times contributor and author of Black Like You pokes America in its doughy belly. Being the Pillsbury people we are, we giggled. We asked him who we should dress like to look tough, but he refused to tell us.
[published: February 06, 2008]
January 2008
The Huckster
Alex Rodriguez, whose prodigious talents are matched only by his glaring failures, is an attention-starved masochist who is both perfect and all wrong for New York.
[published: January 22, 2008]
Bollywood Or Bust
A reporter travels to Mumbai and is instantly recruited for a part in the world’s largest film industry.
[published: January 22, 2008]
Drag City
A dispatch from the womblike hotel gyms and awkward mall rallies of the Iowa caucuses.
[published: January 22, 2008]
The America Space
The bluster of midtown Manhattan’s empty consumerism casts long shadows. Photographer Kramer O’Neill searches for shards of its soul.
[published: January 21, 2008]
Aaron Woolf
Filmmaker Aaron Woolf was so inspired by the ideas he unearthed while making his anti-agricultural subsidies documentary, King Corn, that he just opened a locally stocked grocery in Williamsburg to put them in action. We sat down with him in the cavernous Urban Rustic to hear about how the new farm bill isn’t all bad and why grocers are sexy.
[published: January 21, 2008]
Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen
Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen are two Bay Area ex-vegetarians who recently started a quarterly journal about meat called Meatpaper. We talked with them about meat as art, metaphor, adventure and why it doesn’t matter that Standen recently returned to her tofu-eating ways. (Photo by Julio Duffoo)
[published: January 16, 2008]
December 2007
Wine-Hunting In Beer Country
A sipping trip through Door County, a hub of Wisconsin’s newly resurgent wine industry.
[published: December 13, 2007]