The Lieutenant of Inishmore - Martin McDonagh's Comically Violent Thriller
by Priya Jain
At the beginning of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, two men are standing in a small, bleak living room; the beaten-up chairs and stained walls, and the sparse black-rock landscape beyond those walls, let you know immediately that this particular Irish tale isn’t going to be the typical green-hilled, nostalgic kind. The fact that this isn’t going to be a typical play at all becomes clear as soon as you realize what the men are looking at: a dead cat, splayed on the table before them, its brains falling out of its head.

Novel Appearances: French Book Art at the New York Public Library
by Anne K. Yoder
The New York Public Library's exhibition, "French Book Art | Livres d'Artistes: Artists and Poets in Dialogue," features over a century's worth of collaborations between artists and writers. Whether French by birth or by virtue of residence, when gathered under one roof, the talent is staggering—from Manet, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Picasso to Dubuffet, Bataille, and Beckett—the works are as varied as the artists. (View May 5 through August 19, 2006)

All Tied Up: Four Centuries of Graphic Sex in Japan & Eiichi Yamamoto’s The Belladonna of Sadness
By Robin Epstein
When The Belladonna of Sadness came out in 1973 it was widely considered a step forward in anime, as the filmmaker successfully carved a distinct niche apart from the pervasive style of full animation being done by Disney. Nonetheless, the film still remains firmly within the Japanese tradition of manga, literally “whimsical pictures,” a style of comic art that came to prominence after World War II, and the film also contains elements of shunga, an even older form of artwork in Japan that’s the subject of the Museum of Sex’s new exhibit, “Peeping, Probing and Porn: Four Centuries of Graphic Sex in Japan.” Not coincidentally, the words “graphic sex” in the exhibit’s title are especially meaningful since the pictures on display are literally hardcore sex cartoons.

Inside The Black Factory: William Pope.L on Art and Race
by Jonathan Lachance, photos by Erika Imberti
The giant inflatable igloo on Union Square Park’s south steps may have looked like a prop for another guerilla marketing campaign, until a man in a hockey mask painted with blackface approached and asked in a friendly tone, “What kind of nigger are you?”