November 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Eternal Friendship: An Unlikely Cold War Connection By Anouk Durand Excerpt from Anouck Durand: Eternal Friendship (Siglio Press, 2017). All rights reserved. French artist-writer Anouk Durand’s photo-novel, Eternal Friendship, is collaged from photographic archives, personal letters and propaganda magazines interspersed with text. It tells the true story of a friendship between two photographers forged in the crucible of war. It begins in Albania during World War II, stops in China during the Cold War, and ends in Israel as Communism is crumbling. Below, we have reprinted Eliot Weinberger’s introduction, followed by a short excerpt from the book. The Albanian language has a tense for surprise. That is, the verb-ending changes if one says “You speak Albanian” or “You speak Albanian!” The physical landscape of the country is punctuated with periods: 200,000 tiny dome-shaped concrete bunkers, scattered everywhere, meant to hold one or two snipers each, and built by Enver Hoxha in the delusion that it would repel an imagined Soviet invasion. But, even more, the psychic landscape is a forest of exclamation marks entangled with question marks: surprise and bewilderment. Albanian did not have its own written language until the 20th century, and 95% of the women couldn’t read it. Fishermen on the coast, farmers in the hills, shepherds in the mountains, the blood feuds of continually warring clans: Albania was always an agricultural colony or the backwater of an empire or occupied territory on the way to somewhere else for the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Italo-Normans, the Serbs, the Venetians, the Bulgarians, the Ottomans, the Italian Fascists, the Nazis. In its first years after World War II, the new People’s Republic of Albania under Hoxha—who was prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister, and the commander-in-chief of the army—became a client state of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Breaking with Yugoslavia, it became a client state of Stalin’s Soviet Union, copying the Stalinist economic system of state enterprise and collectivized farming and the Stalinist political system of mass imprisonments and executions. The penalization of “enemies of the people” extended to their grandchildren. Read More
November 9, 2017 Arts & Culture The Case for Seasonal Sentimentality By Mary Laura Philpott All original illustrations © Mary Laura Philpott. There’s a line in Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn: “Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.” I reread it recently and thought, wait a second—I cry sometimes when the leaves fall. Although I’ve always wished I’d had a chance to meet the late Ephron, maybe it’s better that I never had to admit to her my sentimentality, which apparently was as uncool then as it is now. I’ve also been known to get a little teary when I find a craggy pebble that looks like a frowning face. I sniffle when I see a skunk in my yard who looks lonely, like it’s dawning on him that all his skunk friends went on an adventure without him. I laugh, too, when I see a twig that looks like it’s giving me the finger. I chuckle when I see an ant trying to carry a half a Froot Loop. As a cartoonist, I draw talking birds, smiling flowers, and chickens wearing socks, and very often these creatures feel as real to me—and as filled with inner narratives—as people. Read More
November 9, 2017 Arts & Culture How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art By Cody Delistraty Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso’s granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist’s narcissism. “No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius,” she wrote in her memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather. “He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father’s blood, my brother’s, my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and mine. He needed the blood of those who loved him.” After Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, barred much of the family from the artist’s funeral, the family fell fully to pieces: Pablito, Picasso’s grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso’s son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself. Read More
November 9, 2017 Arts & Culture Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School By Chris Kraus From the anniversary edition cover of Blood and Guts in High School Kathy Acker was the most intentional of writers, but paradoxically, while Blood and Guts propelled her mid-1980s commercial breakthrough, it was her least intended work. She composed Blood and Guts in fragments, in her notebooks and as drawings, over five years that began when she was twenty-six years old and living with the composer Peter Gordon in Solana Beach in 1973. Solana Beach was a sleepy California beach town fourteen miles north of UC San Diego in La Jolla. She’d fled New York for California after meeting Gordon on a cross-country ride-share road trip in the summer of 1972. It was there, while happily ensconced in Gordon’s two-bedroom upstairs bungalow apartment near the beach, that she composed the dream maps placed among the fairy tales in the chapter titled “How spring came to the land of snow and icicles.” The fairy tales themselves were written three years later, while she and Gordon were living on East Fifth Street in New York. Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness, Acker writes in Blood and Guts. And also: Dear dreams, you are the only thing that matter. She’d known, since beginning her long, self-willed apprenticeship as a writer when she was twenty-three years old, that dreams, and their disorder, would be central to her writing process. Working on her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in Solana Beach in 1973, she attempted to regain a childhood consciousness, pushing herself toward a point of self-dissolution through sex and hallucinogenic drugs. The dream maps, which weren’t published in that book, record her dreamtime forays across regions with names like the Plains, the Village, and the Childhood Land, where she discovers lions, wolves, trees, huts, and streets. “My mom,” Gordon recalls, “was a psychologist, and found them fascinating. Kathy gave her a large drawing that my mom had framed. Later, Kathy took the maps back, to include in Blood and Guts.” Blood and Guts opens with a hilarious, hyperbolized transcription of the tormented break-up conversations between the protagonist Janey Smith and a father who she regards as her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement and father.” These pages—the last to be composed—were written in the wake of her and Gordon’s separation in September 1978: “Mr. Smith was trying to get rid of Janey so he could spend all his time with Sally, a twenty-one year old starlet who was still refusing to fuck him.” By then, Gordon and Acker had long been living separate lives. “Kathy had her own life and I had my own life, with Kathy in it,” Gordon recalls. “The relationship was not going to change, and I was now marked as a married man. I realized I had to get out.” Read More
November 7, 2017 Arts & Culture When Someone You Know Is Gay By James Frankie Thomas The author’s copy of When Someone You Know Is Gay. At the tail end of the Clinton administration, my school library had a miniature gay section hidden in a corner. It took up half a shelf and consisted of maybe four books—half a dozen, tops. As far as I know, no one else was aware of this; I never saw another soul in that section of the library. Perhaps it appeared, like Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement, only to those who needed it. I needed it desperately. I was thirteen, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I liked girls in the way that I was expected to like boys. After a disastrous game of Truth or Dare, during which I committed the socially suicidal error of asking “Truth: Which girl in our class would you most like to kiss?”—“Ew, Frankie, that’s a gay question!”—I understood that these feelings were classifiable under (a) “ew” and (b) “gay.” It was the memory of that seventh-grade slumber party that primed me to notice, in the corner of the library, a bright turquoise hardcover titled When Someone You Know Is Gay. Read More
November 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Ai Weiwei’s Selfie-Ready Public Art By Sarah Cowan Ai Weiwei, Gilded Cage, 2017. Last week, at the base of Central Park, a yellow leaf fell through the narrow openings in Ai Weiwei’s new public sculpture, momentarily matching its color, before landing at the feet of two African pedicab drivers. The men were switching between swapping jokes in French and asking tourists in English, “Where are you from?” as they held up laminated signs advertising their services. Those being approached scurried into Ai’s structure, using it as a convenient excuse not to engage, hiding behind its bars. The piece is one of over three hundred works included in Ai’s citywide Public Arts Fund project, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.” This one’s title, Gilded Cage, constrains the structure to a cliché, even though its bars are painted more of a burned orange matte than gold, and its gaping opening defies captivity. Two concentric rings, which extend vertically from the pavement in towering, unscalable metal bars, form a beaker-shaped prison big enough for a handful of people. The outer ring is an inaccessible passageway at odds with the architecture of movement it contains: a sequence of turnstiles not unlike the ones just underground, whirling with commuters. If you pass your arm between the bars, you can shove the turnstiles into a spinning motion, though no bodies can pass their thresholds. Read More