July 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Nico: Beyond the Icon By Michael LaPointe Still from Nico, 1988. Nico believed in fate, and she was fated to be an icon. In her youth, she was the femme fatale of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the spectral singer of the Velvet Underground. Later in life, she became an allegory of rock ’n’ roll’s excess, the moon goddess felled by heroin. In the thirty years since her death, she has variously served as a feminist symbol—the Judith Shakespeare to her canonical male peers—and a stand-in for European trauma, an exile wandering the world in the aftermath of war. But for Nico, being an icon was a problem. When she sang “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in 1966, she wasn’t asking to become a permanent surface for our collective reflections. Even through her many permutations, Nico’s artistic achievement remains out of focus. As in the case of her favorite poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, critics tend to misunderstand her work as unfinished, as if severed before its full flowering. While contemporaries such as Joni Mitchell occupy the very center of pop history, Nico remains apart. Today she is best known for the songs she came to loathe. Of course, they’re also her catchiest, but I wonder if her artistic mission—a mission of destruction—is simply incompatible with any of the images we’ve made of her. We construct icons, but Nico was an iconoclast. Read More
July 27, 2018 Arts & Culture The Saddest Songs Are the Ones About Flowers By Drew Bratcher My buddy Nick swears that “Chiseled in Stone” by Vern Gosdin is the saddest country song ever written. “You ran crying to the bedroom,” it begins: I ran off to the bar Another piece of Heaven gone to Hell The words we spoke in anger just tore my world apart And I sat there feeling sorry for myself It’s a hell of start. Seldom has romantic strife been evoked so concisely. What words did they speak in anger? None, we suspect, that lovers haven’t always said. The point, I think, is that these lovers never dreamed they’d be the ones saying them. Nobody sets out to be miserable in love. After a modest run as a singer and guitar player in California folk-country bands, Gosdin retired in the early seventies only to rally as a solo act later in the decade. Beginning in his mid-forties, he sent one song after another—“I’m Still Crazy,” “Is It Raining at Your House?,” “This Ain’t My First Rodeo”—into the top 10. “Chiseled in Stone,” which won the’89 CMA award for best song, helped him mount one of the greatest comebacks in country music. He was Music City’s patron saint of late bloomers. Gosdin looked like a Burt. He had Bacharach eyes, Reynolds sideburns and mustache, Lancaster air. His pliant, world-worn voice took cues from George Jones, whose vocal performances of sentimental lyrics dredged out of wretchedness a pitiful joy. Read More
July 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Reopening the Case Files of Leopold and Loeb By Jeremy Lybarger Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. It wasn’t America’s worst murder, even at the time. The June 1912 massacre of six members of the Moore family and their two houseguests, all of them bludgeoned to death as they slept in Villisca, Iowa, was arguably worse. That case was never solved, though a recent book, The Man from the Train (2017), names a plausible suspect. And worse than that was in 1893, when the physician and amateur hotelier H. H. Holmes built a jerry-rigged murder castle in Chicago in which he killed and cremated potentially dozens of women—a case that inspired that staple of used-book sales, The Devil in the White City (2003). Or maybe the worst was in 1892, when Lizzie Borden, from Falls River, Massachusetts, was tried and acquitted of killing her father and stepmother with an axe. In 1924, the murder of the fourteen-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks should have seemed mild by comparison. What was most shocking about Franks’s murder, of course, was who killed him: two young University of Chicago students named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Both came from wealthy families. Leopold’s father was a prominent businessman; Loeb’s was an attorney and vice president of Sears, Roebuck. The families’ combined fortunes would now total more than a hundred fifty million dollars, adjusted for inflation. From today’s vantage, the boys seem like prototypes for a figure that has since become cliché: the intellectual, nihilistic, remorseless killer who has a hailstone where his heart should be—sociopaths, in other words, real-world precursors of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho or Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs. When asked to identify the “original nucleus” of the idea to kill Bobby Franks, Leopold mentioned the “pure love of excitement, or the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different.” Read More
July 25, 2018 Arts & Culture Where the Voice of Alejandra Pizarnik Was Queen By Patricio Ferrari Hay, madre, un sitio en el mundo, que se llama París. Un sitio muy grande y lejano y otra vez grande. (There is, mother, a place in the world called Paris. A very big place and far and very big again.) – César Vallejo In a diary entry of May 1959, while still living with her parents in Buenos Aires, shortly after the publication of her third poetry collection, the twenty-three-year-old Alejandra Pizarnik wrote: Je voudrais vivre pour écrire. Non penser à autre chose qu’à écrire. Je ne prétend [sic] pas l’amour ni l’argent. Je ne veux pas penser, ni construire décemment ma vie. Je veux de la paix: lire, étudier, gagner un peu d’argent pour m’independiser [sic] de ma famille, et écrire. (I would like to live in order to write. Not to think of anything else other than to write. I am not after love nor money. I don’t want to think nor decently build my life. I want peace: to read, to study, to earn some money so that I become independent from my family, and to write.) Bold and assertive in tone, these words are less of a confession than a daring conviction, a resolution, a literary plan. Circumstantial? Purposely stylized? Perhaps the more essential question here is: Why did the Argentinian-born poet turn to a foreign language that, until then, she’d almost exclusively employed just to read French literature? Read More
July 24, 2018 Arts & Culture Ode to the Library Museum By Erica X Eisen The Morgan Library. There is no friend in the world better than a book; in the abode of grief that is this world there is no [better] consoler. —Mir Ali Heravi In the Chester Beatty Library, there are books made entirely of jade. There are picture scrolls featuring calligraphy by the brother of the Japanese emperor. There are papyrus codices that constitute some of the few surviving texts of Manichaeism, a religion of darkness and light that rivaled Christianity in scale until its last believers died out in fourteenth-century China. There are Armenian hymnals, Renaissance catalogues of war machines, and monographs on native Australian fauna. There is all of this and more—thousands and thousands of other works diverse in period and place of origin, waiting for human eyes. And yet as I walk through the galleries, as I survey the cases of books safe behind their glass, it occurs to me that if a book is a thing meant to be read, then in a certain sense, these objects have lost their function to all but the scholarly epigraphists, backs bent in the private study room. And yet far from becoming something less because of this, the books on display have become something more. Can we recover a physical literature? Can we recover a literature that is not merely read but felt? The library museum gestures at just such a possibility. By immobilizing pages, by securing spines, by presenting material that is illegible or unintelligible to the average modern reader, the library museum ruptures our habitual schema for what to do when confronted with a text. We cannot comprehend the sentences, the words, the script itself even. And furthermore. we are not meant to, are meant instead to attune ourselves to their textures, their heft, their thingness. When we cease to read, we begin to see. At the point of losing sense, we regain sensation. Read More
July 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Michael Stipe, R.E.M., and the Anxiety of Influence By Christian Kiefer Michael Stipe’s “Infinity Mirror.” (Photo: Toby Tenenbaum/Brooklynvegan.com) There was a time when art was cool—books, movies, music, paintings, sculptures—and you could love what you loved, proudly and without reservation. For me, as a child and then a teen from a small town, I wanted to pull all of it into me, to make it part of who I was or who I was becoming or who I wanted to be. And this feeling stayed with me right up until I made it to graduate school. Critical theory killed me, or nearly did, because it made it wrong to think anything was cool. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence was a wrecking ball. “What we used to call ‘imaginative literature’ is indistinguishable from literary influence,” he writes in the preface. Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” was another. “To give an Author to a text,” Barthes writes, “is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.” There were other such texts, of course, texts that were read (or misread) to deny the very act of imagination itself, as if art were simply a structure built by social and political forces, ultimately designed to be used for some other intellectual purpose—to make a point or to tear down another. I found it difficult to understand why anyone would ever want to discount the author of a work, for it felt—and still feels—like a denial of the best of what art really is: the singular and individual act of a heart, a mind, a soul reaching out to grasp hold of another heart, another mind, another soul. Which is to say that I still think art’s cool. Books. Movies. Bands. Literary magazines. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and cynicism is death. Read More