Carlos Valladares

New York

Writer at Freelance

south central LA // yale phd film // in the Demy-monde

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Articles

How America Ripped Off R. Crumb

2 weeks ago | artnews.com | Carlos Valladares

“I like your comics, kid. They’re very good. Just stay away from cocktail parties.” Charles Bukowski delivered this evergreen piece of advice in the 1960s to the King of Underground Comics, Robert Crumb. Crumb indeed did his best to steer clear of the US bourgeois jet-setting class that he and Bukowski had then pinpointed as the veritable enemy.
My Responsibility: Charles Burnett on “The Annihilation of Fish”

2 months ago | mubi.com | Carlos Valladares

The cinematic event of the year so far is the rerelease of Charles Burnett’s long-unavailable romantic masterpiece, The Annihilation of Fish (1999). It has weathered Todd McCarthy’s snide, vicious Variety review that sealed its obscurity until now.
How Andy Warhol Made Blow Jobs Boring

2 months ago | artnews.com | Carlos Valladares

Every party should have Warhol films projected. That’s my conclusion after revisiting some of them for hours at the tiny but warm New York Museum of Sex show “Looking at Andy Looking.” Everyone should fall asleep to Sleep (1964). Every film frame can, if hung over a bed, lull you.
The Storied Kafka Novella That May Have Never Existed

Jan 2, 2025 | msn.com | Carlos Valladares

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Luna Luna, the Drake-Backed Art Amusement Park, Will Either Make You Laugh or Cry

Dec 9, 2024 | msn.com | Carlos Valladares

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Luna Luna, the Drake-Backed Art Amusement Park, Will Either Make You Laugh or Cry

Dec 9, 2024 | artnews.com | Carlos Valladares

As I enter the Shed, ready to be “immersed” in the “fun” that is Luna Luna, the ’80s art-amusement-park recently restored by Drake for $100 million, I hear a music blaring. I turn. I see a man on a motorcycle. And from his stereo, the infamous line: Tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A minorrr. I take it that the Man on a Motorcycle blasting song-of-the-summer “Not Like Us”, Kendrick Lamar’s now iconic Drake diss, will not pay $44 to go see Luna Luna tonight. We’re not like him.
Ming Smith's Four Ohio Shows See a Restless Artist Come Home

Nov 28, 2024 | artnews.com | Carlos Valladares

The photographer Ming Smith (b. 1947) has four shows in Ohio this season—a homecoming of sorts, as part of this year’s FotoFocus Biennial. Three of the shows mark the first major exhibitions of her photographs to take place in Columbus, her hometown. The fourth, “Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue,” at the Gund in Gambier, showcases her camera’s encounters with and within Europe. This work is layered, sonic even its empty spaces and silences.
Barbara Probst's Photographs Make You Feel the Limits of Knowing

Nov 8, 2024 | artnews.com | Carlos Valladares

Sculpture was Barbara Probst’s first medium, but, by her own admission, “somehow, I got sidetracked in photography and got stuck there.” In Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, she studied the peculiarities of late 20th-century space that later, at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, got mixed up with a notion of time as so many discordant shards.
French Weaver Marie Hazard Loses Herself in Cross Hatches and Spirals

Oct 28, 2024 | artnews.com | Carlos Valladares

To communicate beyond the word, beyond “the disastrously explicit medium of language,” per James Baldwin: This is Marie Hazard’s obsession. Hazard is a weaver, and we converse well. Yet words are hard for her. She is dyslexic. She wishes she could write. Writing, she says, is “difficult to next to impossible” for her.
‎‘Anora’ review by Carlos Valladares • Letterboxd

Oct 15, 2024 | letterboxd.com | Carlos Valladares

★★ My estimation of Baker’s cinema has lessened with each new film since the galvanizing call of Tangerine, and this reaches a kind of defeatist and profoundly depressing nadir. The frantic, shrill, Safdian pileup of noise, cruelty, and bad vibes reminded me less of the classic screwballs (the spirit of Cukor touches Mikey Madison’s performance, not to mention the tight ensemble dynamics of the girls at the HQ club — which, alas, dissipate after the first act) and more of Bogdanovich’s...