March 7, 2017 Arts & Culture Your Own Private Party By Larissa Pham How reading Eve Babitz got me through the depths of winter. Eve Babitz. The winter after I finished art school and moved to New York, I started telling people I was thinking of having “a California period.” These conversations happened at parties, mostly, in high-ceilinged apartments in Crown Heights stuffy with heat, shoes melting in a salty pile outside the front door; we’d crowd around someone’s open window, smoking and ashing into the succulents, cold air rushing in as quickly as we could exhale. I envisioned a place far away from all this, far from the snowbanks that turned to dirty gray slush and the gloom that pervaded the city at dusk. I wanted Hollywood; I wanted David Hockney. I wanted pools and pool paintings, sparkles and spangled reflections under that hazy golden California light; I wanted to make abstract canvases covered in pink glitter while next to me some turquoise sky stretched off into an Umberto Eco–esque hyperreal. Read More
March 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Remembering Paula Fox By Caitlin Love Paula Fox at The Paris Review’s 2013 Spring Revel. In memory of Paula Fox, who died last week at age ninety-three, we’re looking back at a series of essays published on the Daily in 2013, when Fox received The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize for lifetime achievement. First, Tom Bissell has the story of how, as a twenty-four-year-old editorial assistant, he brought Fox’s masterpiece, Desperate Characters, back into print: W. W. Norton, the house that employed me, had encouraged me to come up with “ideas” for the paperback committee, which at the time felt like a huge honor. Correction: it was a huge honor. I had a few ideas, most of which, I was gently informed, stank. But one didn’t. Read More
February 27, 2017 Arts & Culture In a Word By Albert Mobilio An exhibition of drawings by Jackson Mac Low surveys his restless reinvention of the line. Jackson Mac Low, Hi, n.d., ink on paper, 9 1/4″ x 12″. At the poetry readings I attended around New York City in the eighties and nineties, a familiar figure often occupied the front row: an elfin gentleman with dramatic eyebrows and a great wave of hair to match. At my very first events, he drew notice because he sat with pen in hand, writing throughout the reading, as if he were taking dictation. I recall wondering if he was a journalist or another poet cribbing lines from his fellows. I soon learned that he was the legendary composer, performer, and poet Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) and that in all likelihood he was culling words and phrases to deploy in the many recombination schemes he used to create his texts. With roots in the Fluxus movement and an early association with John Cage in the fifties, Mac Low emerged as one the most rigorously adventurous American poets in the decades that followed. Not the least part of his unconventional profile was his energetic work across genres and art forms: writing poems and prose in diverse modes, composing and performing music, collaborating with theater and dance companies, and creating a body of visual art that might be said to incorporate something of each of these multifarious pursuits. A sampling of that work—mostly done with pen or crayon on paper—is currently on view at the Drawing Center in a show titled “Lines–Letters–Words.” The title is literally accurate in that it describes the pieces on display, which, indeed, depict lines, letters, and words. But the sequence of the terms makes the title especially apt, as it gets at the heart of Mac Low’s enterprise as a poet and artist: understanding the construction of communication; that is, how mere lines are bent to configure something called letters and these letters are assembled to create that improbable result, a word. The sequence is equally relevant when read backward; for Mac Low, disaggregating meaning from sound, sound from words and letters, and ultimately from the random marks on a page achieved the same end: revealing the relation between meaning and its constitute parts. Read More
February 17, 2017 Arts & Culture The Internment Artist By Rory Tolan Isamu Noguchi, Sculpture Elements. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the son of a Japanese poet and an American writer, had the gnawing wanderlust of those who feel they never belong. His world had always been spinning: a blur of steel towers in Manhattan, of arch cafés in Montparnasse, of bowed pagodas in Kyoto. He’d walked the patchwork flats of Indiana, the palm tree avenues of Honolulu, the slated plazas of Mexico City. In 1942, he waded into a sea of dust, banishing himself to Arizona’s Sonoran desert, where his life gave way to bleaker scenery: plains of silt and ironwood, megaliths of saguaro cacti, a rift of barbed wire more cutting than the cacti, if the gunners didn’t mow you down first. That year, Noguchi entered a concentration camp entirely of his own will. He had lived in New York, a state exempt from the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The roundups that followed Executive Order 9066, signed seventy-five years ago next week, had affected mostly those in the American West. Yet Noguchi, whose first name means courage, had exiled himself anyway. He checked in to the Poston War Relocation Center, the largest of the United States’ concentration camps for those of Japanese ancestry. After talks with the U.S. government, he came to beautify the place, to make it more habitable. He also came in solidarity, to share the pain of a group he claimed as his own when he branded himself a Nisei, a first-generation Japanese American, in spite of feeling only like a gaijin, an outsider. Those efforts foundered. Rejected on both counts—by the administration, who regarded him with suspicion, and the internees, who feared he was a spy—he pleaded for months with the War Relocation Authority before he was set free. It was one of the blackest times of his career. Read More
February 14, 2017 Arts & Culture Crazy-Beautiful Heart By Thomas Lux Bill Knott’s primal poetry. Bill Knott, from the cover of I Am Flying Into Myself. I met Bill Knott in late 1968, or in early 1969, at William Corbett’s house, a gathering place for poets in Boston’s South End. I’d read Knott’s highly acclaimed first book, The Naomi Poems, from Big Table, in the spring of 1968. It was published under the pen name Saint Geraud (1940–1966). I was immediately struck, poleaxed, by the emotional power of the poems. Mostly short, intense lyrics, they were unlike anything I’d ever read and moved me to the bone. I felt, before I’d read Emily Dickinson’s famous comment, as if the top of my head was taken off. Many were love poems. Most were written in his early and mid twenties. There was urgency, a longing, a wild and plaintive high-note sound that was maybe particularly attractive to a twenty-two-year-old man. Forty-seven years later, as I stand on the terrible threshold of senescence, Knott’s poems still lift the hairs on the back of my neck. His anguished poems about the war in Vietnam were among the first I’d read on that subject, and I still believe them to be among the strongest. It is the war that my generation either can’t forget or refuses to remember (sometimes both). Read More
February 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Dance of Steel By Simon Morrison In Soviet Russia, getting a ballet off the ground was no mean feat, as Sergei Prokofiev learned the hard way. Léonide Massine wields a large hammer over the head of Alexandra Danilova during a production of Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier in London. In Russia, during the Soviet era, government control made the challenge of getting a ballet onto the stage no less onerous than being admitted into the ballet schools of Moscow or Leningrad. The daunting auditions of Soviet legend—teachers scrutinizing preadolescents for the slightest physical imperfection—found an ideological parallel in the required inspections by censorship boards at the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky–Kirov theaters. First, the subject of a prospective ballet was adjudicated in terms of its fulfillment of the demands for people-mindedness; the music and the dance would be likewise assessed. There would follow a provisional closed-door run-through to decide if the completed ballet could be presented to the public, after which it would either be scrapped or sent back to the creative workshop for repairs. Dress rehearsals were subsequently assessed by administrators, cognoscenti, politicians, representatives from agricultural and industrial unions, and relatives of the performers. Even then, after all of the technical kinks had been worked out, an ideological defect could lead to the sudden collapse of the entire project. Bodies as well as plots were changed by politics. The traditional emploi that defined danseurs noble and demi-caractère endured, but emphasis was placed on bigger builds and altogether less softness in the curves. In sculpture, “Soviet man” became like a Greek or Roman demigod, the muscles stronger than steel. So, too, he became in ballet. Read More