Paula Crossfield

“I dreamt that I opened my mouth and took out a substance incessantly. As this was happening I felt as if I was losing my own internal substance, which made me very anguished mainly because I could not stop losing it. In the work I made afterwards, which I called Cannibalistic Slobber, people had co…

On September 25th, Microsoft’s Halo 3 video game earned $170 million dollars, the highest single-day take of any form of entertainment, ever. But if you really want to know what’s going on with the phenomenon of modern games, you have to look at the way players tackle the hardest of hardcore games, …

Having written a text on Kenneth Snelson’s digital stone sculpture based on his theories of the atom, which he showed this past summer in Beijing, I was curious to view some of the recent steel and cable work for which he is best known.

‘I believe in individual taste, but taste-making is a kind of fiction. It’s just a way to organize things that as time passes are going to fall apart again,’ says Smith.

‘It’s too easy to blame Kevin Carter for being the vulture, where in fact we are the vultures, the vulture is us,’ says Jaar.

Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection is a subtle chapter in the story of the Brooklyn Museum’s commitment to collecting and displaying feminist art. Burning Down the House shares a lot of artists, ideas, and assumptions with Global Feminisms: New Directions in Feminist Art, on…

While preparing for his forthcoming one-person exhibition at Larissa Goldston Gallery, on view from April 2nd to May 9th, the painter Matvey Levenstein stopped by the Rail’s Headquarters to talk to Publisher Phong Bui about his life and work.

I once received a book of poetry from a fan in Prague after a concert. The book was written by the Czech poet Vˇera Chase…A few years later, I was searching for inspiration for my new music, and I found her poem “Elida.” I was inspired by the provocative and somewhat erotic nature of the poem. Also,…

In his 101 Stories of the Great Ballets, co-written with Francis Mason, George Balanchine remarked, “Just as Giselle is ballet’s great tragedy, so Coppelia is its great comedy.”

A nearly vertical path cleaves to the side of a mountain in India, connecting the town of Dharamsala with the village of McLeod Ganj.

The singular force behind Mount Eerie and the Microphones never skimps in his efforts or attention to aesthetic detail—Phil Elverum is prolific. Elverum’s newest release, Black Wooden Ceiling Opening, is a foray into dark, heavy music pounded out with the help of Jason Anderson and Kjetil Jenssen of…

There are two types of people who went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on opening weekend. There are those who love the trilogy, and those who love action movies. If you possess unconditional love for Indy that surpasses that a mother feels for her child, you will like King…

Franco Piavoli’s films, praised by greats such as Bertolucci, Brakage and Tarkovsky are unique, falling somewhere between Italian Neo-Realism and extreme formalism. Virtually free of dialogue, and sans subtitles, Piavoli draws the viewer into his world with images of nature-turned-abstract through h…

How can I say it? How soften the blow I must inflict? My senses are confused, reason leaves me, I exist here and now only through pain and sorrow...

The Zen scholar and teacher, Daisetz Suzuki (1870 – 1966), once explained that the origin of the term koan was a kind of certifying document that, in ancient times, was used to test one’s understanding of Zen.

When someone tells you she’s been an activist her whole life, it’s usually hyperbole. But not 56 year-old Debra Sweet.

Jordan Harrison is in previews for Doris to Darlene at Playwrights Horizons when we meet in the subterranean tearoom at Takashimaya, the Japanese department store in midtown. Here we are served a wide tray with an assortment of goodies—spiced nuts, vinegared rice with cucumber, dried pears dipped in…

To get some idea of the size and scope of David Hinton’s Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology, imagine you are Donald Allen, editor of the seminal New American Poetry 1945-1960. Next, imagine the era of “New American Poetry” begins somewhere around 1500 BCE and finishes around 1200 CE, and is goin…

After eight years in which ideology reigned supreme, President Obama, it is often said, will bring a welcome pragmatism to Washington. It is worth asking just what this means, or is likely to mean.

Though formally quite different, they show Buñuel’s affinity for the grey areas between innocence and sin, and his distaste for the easily psychoanalyzable.