June 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Three Movements By Amelia Gray Reading Isadora Duncan’s autobiography. Isadora Duncan, 1905. There’s a story of Isadora Duncan and the press that has stuck with me since I read it years ago: “I’m going to Egypt to lay flowers at the feet of the Sphinx,” she told reporters in Boston. “At its paws, I should say. I’m going out on the desert … Remember that I said this mysteriously.” The story of your life arrives in three parts: your self, your image, and the product of the two. When I started writing about Isadora, I knew only the product: her body of work, classical figures draped in silks. I knew that she was considered a spontaneous dancer, despite the methodical repetition, the hours of work behind that effortless flow. Only by reading her autobiography, My Life, did I begin to understand the distance between her life and her image. Read More
May 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Rules for Consciousness in Mammals By J. D. Daniels Clarice Lispector. Anyone who talks about Clarice Lispector and psychoanalysis is likely to say something foolish, not least because psychoanalysis is a discipline of listening, not talking. And, in fact, this is a tempting place to stop. # “Coherence,” says Lispector, “I don’t want it any more. Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder. I can only guess at it through a vehement incoherence.” Let’s talk about this single aspect of Lispector. I’m going to tell you not just why her work is so important, why I think she is so important, but how I think it, the way in which I think that thought. Read More
May 25, 2017 Fashion & Style Lolita Fashion By An Nguyen and Jane Mai Drawing by Jane Mai, from the cover of So Pretty/Very Rotten. Have you ever seen the Japanese movie Kamikaze Girls (aka Shimotsuma Monogatari)? It came out back in 2004 (released in the United States in 2006) and was based on the 2002 novel by Japanese author Novala Takemoto. The story is about an unlikely friendship between two high school girls—Ichigo, who is a member of a Yanki girl biker gang, and Momoko, who wears a niche fashion style called Lolita fashion. In Shimotsuma, a rural town in Ibaraki prefecture, Momoko stands out in her Rococo-inspired Sweet Lolita outfits with lots of lace, frills, ribbons, and colors like pink, red, and sax blue from her favorite brand Baby, the Stars Shine Bright (BTSSB). On the weekends and holidays, she makes a two-and-a-half-hour train trip to Tokyo so she can go clothes shopping in the Harajuku and Daikanyama neighborhoods. Being a high school student, she does not have a job, so she swindles money from her dad by telling fake sob stories about friends in distress or trying to sell bootleg “Versach” merchandise, through which she meets Ichigo. It’s been a long time since I last watched the movie in its entirety, but one of the scenes has stuck with me through the years. At the end of Momoko’s monologue about her life up to that point, she floats slowly into the sky as she says, “So what if I was deceitful? My happiness was at stake. It’s not wrong to feel good. That’s what Rococo taught me. But actually my soul is rotten.” Momoko talks about how Lolita fashion is connected to the romantic, decadent, and aristocratic parts of the Rococo era and tries to find happiness through material things. She has decided to devote her life to clothing, but her connection to other people is lacking. Even though she wears pretty clothes, she feels that deep down there is a part of her that is rotten. Read More
May 22, 2017 Arts & Culture Before a Million Universes By James McWilliams The pros and cons of the digitized Whitman and his “lost” novels. Walt Whitman with a butterfly, 1873. When I was a history graduate student in the waning days of the analog nineties, there were three kinds of researchers. Most impressive were the archive rats. These chain-smoking, type-A cranks entered an archival collection, knew precisely the evidence they needed, and did everything but ransack the place to find it. They chewed their nails to the nub and suffered insomnia, but their work showed a rare, if manic, evidentiary depth. Then there were the curious browsers: laid-back dreamers with a loosely generalized notion about what they sought. They limited themselves to documents that seemed interesting, floating among their sources with poetic insouciance. Their work, like cloud formations, drifted until it cohered into elegance. (They were also the only grad students I knew who smoked weed.) Finally, there were the surgical strikers. Soulless but engineered for accuracy, these students knew precisely which few documents to examine, did so with disinterested velocity, patched the holes in their dissertations, and then went to lunch. Prolific was how the rats and browsers praised the surgical strikers—faintly, of course. Read More
May 19, 2017 Arts & Culture Drumset = You By John Colpitts In seemingly bland method books, drummers become writers—and their eccentricities shine through in remarkable ways. Greg Gandy, Brett’s Drums, 2015, oil on canvas. I’m a mostly untrained drummer. I’ve taken lessons for brief periods, but until recently I’d missed out on that most essential component of drum pedagogy: the method book. In my efforts to improve, I’ve been drawn to the introductions of these books, which feature efficient, often dull language—and in which, occasionally, the eccentricities of the authors shine through in remarkable ways. In the last few months, I’ve become obsessed with gleaning hints about drummers’ personalities from these books, far too many of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been written by men. Lost in the hinterland between art and technique, their introductions tend to exhibit grouchiness, pretension, narcissism, penury, New Age quirkiness, and sometimes even wisdom. What follows is a survey of some of the more striking entries. Method books, intended to help you master a specific aspect of your musical craft, are usually flimsy pamphlets filled with exercises in musical notation. They’re aspirational texts, meant to be worried at and wrestled with, written in and dog-eared. Many are so frustratingly abstruse that they seem as though they weren’t made to be used at all. And like infomercials, some of them make outrageous claims; their titles alone can be a source of amusement. On my shelf I have Advanced Funk Studies, Drummer on Parade with Street Beats, The Hardest Drum Book Ever Written (by the inimitable Joel Rothman, the author of more than a hundred drum method books), The New Breed II, and Inner Drumming. Often the titles contain the word modern, which traditionally distinguishes between military-style parade drumming and contemporary rock and jazz playing. This distinction has been in place for almost a century, so it makes for an odd juxtaposition. At the same time, the term cozies up to a vision of the drummer’s future: some crowning moment after thousands of hours of dogged practice, in which, at last, the exercises are mastered and the drummer becomes truly “modern.” Read More
May 18, 2017 Arts & Culture The Library of Books and Bombs By Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Andrew Moore, County Archive, 2012. © Andrew Moore, Courtesy of the Artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery Last summer, I moved into a flat on the edge of London’s Bethnal Green and Whitechapel. I chose it only because it was where my significant human made his home. It was my first time moving in with someone. As I clattered up from the Tube, I found myself in a swell of schoolchildren on Jack the Ripper tours, Bangladeshi immigrant families, and men with tortoiseshell glasses and Scandinavian backpacks. The local cafe offers beetroot lattes and vegan croissants. The local supermarket has an aisle devoted to halal food. This was a beautiful place to live, but I was a mess. My first novel was about to come out, and I jittered and jangled around the flat, failing to read or write. Finally, I did what I’ve always done when nervous. I looked for a library. My father told me once that he always has to know the location of the door of any room he’s in. I need to know the nearest bookshop and library. The theory is the same: we need an escape. Read More