Literary

Peach Picks: Words and Pictures

by / Dec. 14, 2017 10am EST

ON PEACH:

Peach Mag published four paintings by Brad Phillips last week. According to his artist bio, he was “born in 1974, or 1973” and is “based in Kingston, Jamaica.” Not to be a drip, but Brad Phillips actually lives and works in Toronto. He identifies most as a writer and has contributed to Editorial MagazineAdult MagazineArtslant, and Vice. As a visual artist, Phillips makes photorealistic and text-based paintings, with phrases like “25 years on the job and I’ve never once had to draw my service revolver. I am a florist.” With humor and an appreciation for the absurd, his work deals with love, eroticism, addiction, and suicide. It’s also worth noting that @brad_phillips has a cult following. Members of this cult include myself, and senior art critic and columnist for New York Magazine Jerry Saltz, who cites “the amazing Brad Phillips” as evidence of great art on Instagram. Another place to look at his great art is peachmgzn.com. Featured paintings include Mess Made by Request (2016), based on a photograph of his partner, artist Cristine Brache, who is wearing a tank top embroidered with the words Niagara Falls and peeing her pants.

IN PRINT:
Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire by Emily Witt

Columbia Global Reports / nonfiction

Emily Witt, author of Future Sex, has been hailed as one of America’s foremost prose stylists under the age of 40. Her latest book, out with Columbia Global Reports, asks, “How did Nigeria create the second largest movie industry in the world?” Witt spent five weeks in Nigeria, visiting the marketplaces of Lagos, the multiplex for a red-carpet premiere, a movie set in the northern city of Jos, and the headquarters of a startup trying to digitize what has been largely an economy based on piracy. Despite infrastructural shortcomings like electricity cuts and fuel scarcity, Nollywood has grown into a globally recognized cultural industry producing more movies every year than Hollywood. As the producer Femi Odugbemi explains, “Nollywood has not sought authentication. It has not sought permission to intrude into the cinema space. Its death has been predicted over and over again. The only reason it has not died is it became owned by the people whose history it was telling.” Nollywood is a great starting point for anyone interested in the subject, and Witt’s descriptions of popular movies such as Taxi Driver (2015), inspired by Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic, are especially fun to read.      

 


“Peach Picks” is a column of literary news and recommendations written by the editors of Peach Mag , an online literary magazine based in Buffalo. For inquiries, contact the editors at peachmgzn@gmail.com.

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