November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture Wants to Forget By László Krasznahorkai René Magritte, The Empire of Light, II, 1950. We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not too illustrious children of a not too illustrious epoch that will consider itself truly fulfilled only when every individual writhing within it, after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history, will have finally attained the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion. This age wants to forget it has gambled away everything on its own, without outside help, and that it cannot blame alien powers, or fate, or some remote baleful influence; we did this ourselves: we have made away with gods and with ideals. We want to forget, for we cannot even muster the dignity to accept our bitter defeat, for infernal smoke and infernal alcohol have gnawed away whatever character we had, in fact smoke and cheap spirits were all that remained of the erstwhile metaphysical traveler’s yearning for angelic realms—the noxious smoke left by longing, and the nauseating spirits left over from the maddening potion of fanatical obsession. Read More
November 20, 2017 Arts & Culture The Life and Afterlife of Vivian Maier By Pamela Bannos Vivian Maier, 1958. (Image from the Ron Slattery negative collection.) The following is an excerpt from Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, which was published last month. There are many ways to get the wrong picture about Vivian Maier. Call her a nanny, as if that was her identity, instead of a photographer. Call her just a Chicagoan or just a Frenchwoman, instead of a born Manhattanite and self- styled European. Call her Vivian, as if you know her well. Call her a mystery or an enigma, as if no one ever knew her, or ever could. To get the right picture, look at her squarely, as she would look at you: on her own terms, from her own evidence of who she was and what she did. Only then can we begin to see Vivian Maier, woman and photographer, and begin to enter her world. Read More
November 20, 2017 Arts & Culture What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? By Claire Dederer Still from Woody Allen’s Manhattan Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it’s back to the men I guess: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector. They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them. We’ve all been thinking about monsters in the Trump era. For me, it began a few years ago. I was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and found myself awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities. I had exhaustively read about his rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey; I feel sure no detail on record remained unfamiliar to me. Despite this knowledge, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. The more I researched Polanski, the more I became drawn to his films, and I watched them again and again—especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does. I wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man. He’s the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. In the public’s mind, man and work seem to be the same thing. But are they? Ought we try to separate the art from the artist, the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we want to listen to, say, Wagner’s Ring cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner’s work has rarely been performed in Israel.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass? And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered inconsumable by their maker’s transgressions—how can one watch The Cosby Show after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it’s technically doable, but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence? And is it simply a matter of pragmatics? Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend’s house? Read More
November 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Playing for Ralph Ellison’s Little Man at Chehaw Station By Mychal Denzel Smith Ralph Ellison For the agnostics and atheists among us, there is no divine force dictating our paths. We are only that which we decide, individually and collectively, and can achieve with our own intellect. The human body has natural limitations. And coincidence is merely coincidence. But every so often, I’m confronted with seemingly unconnected factoids that give some credence to cosmic intervention. For instance, the fact that Ralph Ellison died on April 16, 1994, only three days before the release of Nas’s classic debut album, Illmatic, on April 19, 1994. Ellison, of course, is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, a work now heralded as one of the greatest American novels. Drawing from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground both thematically and narratively, Ellison artfully constructs the psychic terror of a black man living in a society of political and social hierarchies that render him, this unnamed narrator/protagonist, invisible, at least insofar as anyone can be bothered to understand his basic humanity. Ellison’s time had come: he succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the no-longer-young age of eighty-one. But there is some poetry to be found in the passing of one of the most influential black writers in American letters only days before the release of the most influential hip-hop album of all time. Illmatic, like Invisible Man, is a document of black male life, this time from the vantage point of a post–Civil Rights, post-Reaganomics urban landscape. Nas captures the paranoid sensibility of a black man highly aware of his own mortality, attempting to survive in a world that offers him little more than drugs, police, guns, and prison. Read More
November 15, 2017 Arts & Culture The Electrifying Dreamworld of The Green Hand By Nicole Claveloux From “Purple Slideshows,” by Nicole Claveloux. I’ve been deeply in love with the work of Nicole Claveloux for close to forty years, which is strange because until the New York Review of Comics reissue of The Green Hand, I’d never actually read one of her stories. I don’t read French, but more to the point, it somehow seemed perilous to focus in any way on the text, as I feared it could only diminish the mysterious power of her images. I first saw her name in Heavy Metal magazine when I was in high school and, soon after, through some miracle, managed to blunder across a French album of her work called La main verte. I remember standing in the mildewed chaos of Larry’s Comics in Chicago (RIP), transfixed by the beautiful, electrified colors—unlike any I’d seen before (or since). I took it home and obsessed over every panel, drawn into an intimate, immersive private dream world of deep and complicated emotions, an obsession that has only deepened over the years with the acquisition of further volumes of her work, thanks to French eBay and my NYRC editors. Nitpickers and amateur sleuths may wonder how I could claim never to have read one of her stories while noting their appearance in an English-language magazine in the very next line, but both the bad reproduction quality and the slick relettering repelled my sensitive young eyeballs. To replace her fragile text with italicized pre–Comic Sans–ish shouting was like watching an Ozu film dubbed by a troupe of drivetime DJs. So I skimmed and squinted, holding out (for thirty years, as it turns out) for the optimal experience. I can offer no more biographical info about Ms. Claveloux than a page-one Google search, and I’m surely no expert on French comics history (though I do have some special favorites from that astonishing post-Underground era, like Yves Chaland, Serge Clerc, and Chantal Montellier, all published by Les Humanoïdes Associés). But, freed from the bonds of responsible scholarship, I can testify to how the work strikes me on a purely visceral level. Like the early films of David Lynch, there’s a recognizable, fully imagined world made to vibrate with genuine emotion and mystery by a fearless inward-focused artistic self-assurance and an intensely felt clarity of vision. This boldness is present throughout her work, from the fluid ease of the drawings to her dazzling stylistic shifts—from Crumb-level high detail to Heinz Edelman–esque playfulness in the span of a few panels. She is, to me, a crucial figure in the all-important transition from the early Undergrounds of the 1960s to the present day. I see her distinct influence in my own comics and those of many others of my generation and younger (Julie Doucet seems perhaps the closest to a direct heiress) who may well have never heard of her. Read More
November 13, 2017 Arts & Culture The Screen of Enamoration: Love in the Age of Google By Alfie Bown Today, Roland Barthes is among the less trendy of the famed French theorists of the sixties and seventies, or at least one of those considered less germane to our current moment. While revivals of Deleuze, Lacan, Foucault, and even Derrida abound as potential solutions to the social, cultural, and economic problems plaguing the planet, Barthes rarely pops his head outside of the undergraduate classroom. As a serious political conversation piece, love, too, has gone out of fashion. While the hippie movement of Barthes’s own generation united love with countercultural politics, today such attempts seem disengaged and out of touch. A data-pull from Google Scholar articles shows that academic work on love has halved in the past five years. The more pressing our political struggles become, the more love recedes into the background. Read More