“I’m driving down Piasa Street in Alton, on my way to a café to grade my students’ papers, when I see hundreds of people in white shirts standing..." —Sky O'Brien
“They’ll take the park,” she said... as she looked up at the houses on Telegraph Hill. “I’ve seen it happen. In Pasadena.” —Sky O'Brien
"Good poetry is always song... Song precedes writing."—Willis Barnstone
"There’s something reverent, even religious, about all these layers. The screen’s protector—its image—is elevated to the status of artwork."—Sky O'Brien
Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer," as discussed by the editors and friends of Dispatches magazine—rants, raves, reviews and more.
"I’m never questioning the artist making what they want to make, but we have to look at why certain things are elevated and other things are repressed."—Sarah Schulman, by Sky O'Brien
"As a painter, I’m always trying to ask, How can I say the most with the least amount... How do you edit things out? " —Susan Chen
"And that’s what we do as artists. We insert ideas into existing ideological circuits." —Alfredo Jaar, by Sky O'Brien
“Steinberg’s line is full of gaps, and, therefore, invites the finest bliss."—Sky O'Brien on Joe Milutis on Roland Barthes on Saul Steinberg
"The restaurant was full. I looked down at the evening sun poking through my Monet mashed potato." —Sky O'Brien
"There’s no such thing as postwar. War is the mother of the modern state... haunting the present like an after-hours ghost." —Sky O'Brien
"If Monet hadn’t been so ambitious—Clear Morning with Willows is 42 feet long—I might have found God." —by Sky O'Brien
"From characters wrestling with legacies of Khmer Buddhism to the Communist regime to West Coast technologism, nothing was safe from his sardonic wit..."
A dispatch from the South West forests outside of Perth, in Western Australia.
“A nonconformist to the end, the New York Times reported that Ferlinghetti died of lung disease, not the virus. He was 101 years old. The lawyers had taken their time." —Sky O'Brien
“Maybe the absence of these and other “characters” is passable, even unremarkable. No text can say everything about a moment” —Sky O'Brien
“Fires are not guerillas divorced from the landscape. In Australia, fires are the landscape, and have been for thousands of years.” —Sky O'Brien