Editor's Message
An Open Invitation
“What the hell is The Brooklyn Rail?” asks a notable voice on the other end of the line. By now quite familiar with the question, I could hardly be indignant, and so give my standard line: it’s a Brooklyn-based paper about the arts and politics. “Right,” came the unsatisfied reply. In an era when branding means everything, perhaps we need a more convincing path.
Even in the best of all possible worlds, it’s still necessary to heed ancient wisdom: “You can give too much detail when you’re trying to make a sale,” Bob Dole firmly advised Bush II last summer, as the latter prepared for his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Unlike W, we here at The Brooklyn Rail tend tp be better with details than sales, perhaps because we respect, and even enjoy, the written word. I should also add that under no circumstances would we want “to clone Dick Cheney.” The cost would be too prohibitive.
Instead, we spend a good portion of our collective Rail time fighting with each other, our partners, our friends and out families over the important things: semi-colon usage, lapsing participles, and why possessive people whose names end in S and apostrophe plus a bonus S. New lines in the sand get drawn each day, the center never holds. So caught you are we in out vision of what The Rail delivers—a relentless pursuit of ideas, unsafe at any speed—that we sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees, especially since there aren’t any of either in North Brooklyn.
So it is up to you, that rare species of reader who is engaged enough to digest the editorial page, to give your reactions. We hereby invite you to tell us how you: a) crave each issue of The Rail, and hate waiting for it; b) want to see more coverage of any subject, excluding star gossip; or c) find The Rail’s primary utility to be thicker paper, which lasts longer in your bird café or cat box. After you peruse the following pages, please take a moment or three to tell us what the hell you think The Brooklyn Rail is, ok?
Send your letters to:
What the hell is The Brooklyn Rail?
43 Withers St. #3
Brooklyn, NY 11211
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Crossing the Line: Germaine Acogny's Somewhere at the Beginning
By Rennie McDougallNOV 2019 | Dance
In Germaine Acogny’s performance Somewhere at the Beginning—directed by Mikaël Serre and presented at La MaMa theater as part of the Crossing the Line Festival—Acogny does strike her forehead and mark the ground and curl her wrists over her head, but it is her presence within these actions that bring her performance to life, something not easily translated into neat sentences.
Loie Hollowell: Plumb Line
By Elizabeth BuheOCT 2019 | ArtSeen
Body is vessel in the nine new paintings by Loie Hollowell that make up Plumb Line, the artist’s debut show with Pace. With a strong, centrally-placed vertical line as her organizing principle, Hollowell delivers human forms distilled into a succinct vocabulary of curved shapes: bisected disks, almonds, and ovals, plus stacked rows of half-circles crowned by a glowing orb.
Crossing the Line: Stefanie Batten Bland's Look Who's Coming to Dinner
By Gillian JakabNOV 2019 | Dance
As an admitted Francophile, I’m always drawn to the FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line festival. But as this year’s programming continues to prove this is not la francophilie de votre grand-mere. (If you want Bordeaux and brie in berets by the Seine… who can blame you, but this is not that kind of party).
Welcome to the Feminist Institute’s Guest Critic Edition of the Brooklyn Rail
By Kathleen LandyMAR 2019 | Editor's Message
Women have shared their wisdom with one another for millennia, in oral histories that teach and inform subsequent generations of women about family, home, sex, power, politics, and survival. But patriarchal histories didn’t include these contributions. Huh!
