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Category Archives: Arts & Culture

When a woman artist looks for her forebears, she sees a void.

There are, needless to say, great female artists. There’s Tamara de Lempicka, queen of art deco. There’s Artemisia Gentileschi, forever in paintings, cutting off her rapist’s head. There’s love-ravished Camille Claudel, making the hands of her lover Rodin’s sculptures before being institutionalized for forty years. There are Mary Cassatt’s paintings of children. But it can’t be denied: the canon of Western woman’s art is nothing compared to the canon of Western woman’s writing.

Noted Audre Lorde, “Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper.” While a writer may require only a room of one’s own, an artist needs years of training, muses, a studio, canvas, paints, patrons, and, fundamentally, a world that lets her be grubby and feral and alone.

Growing up, the women in art history who inspired me were primarily models: Victorine Muerent. La Goulue. Far from pampered, indolent odalisques, these are sexy, tough, working-class women, often with backgrounds in the sex trade. Notable contrasts to the genteel girls who studied flower painting along with piano and embroidery, my archetypes were flamboyant, glamorous self-creations, unabashedly employing themselves as their own raw materials in a world that would give them nothing else. I too worked as an artist’s model. For an artist, the job is a paradox: you’re clay for someone else’s creation while longing to make your own. Read More

  • Arts & Culture

    Think of Me Fondly

    By

     foundphantom

    I was waiting for a friend on the steps of the Palais Garnier, pacing impatiently between the marble columns, when I noticed a paperback book sitting nearby: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. Certainly not a random encounter, I thought, as the book is set in (and beneath) the home of the Opéra national de Paris. I opened it up, and found a note.

    “I am not lost!” it said. “This book was left here to find a new reader.”

    As it turns out, the Web site www.bookcrossing.com tracks books in their travels around the world. After you run across one of the traveling books, log the discovery on the Web site, post a review, and leave it somewhere else for a new reader to find. I sent mine on its next adventure not far from the Pont Neuf.

     

  • Arts & Culture

    Ululating to Air Supply

    By

    Greatest+Hits+Air_Supply_Greatest_HitsShe of the Karaoke Tribe, from the Archipelago of the Interminable Love Song, where Karen Carpenter never goes out of style, has not asked me to prove my love, but when she says she wants to go with her Filipina émigré friends to Diamond Jo Casino in Dubuque, Iowa, to see Air Supply Live! in concert, I seize this as an opportunity, after twelve years of marriage, akin to a renewal of vows, and as close to sacrificing my life for her as I’m going to get. It’s a card I will hold in reserve. “Yes, I cheated on you with your best friend, but don’t forget, I went to see Air Supply Live! with you at Diamond Jo Casino in Dubuque.” 

    Hard work, marriage. 

    You remember Air Supply and what they sang. Of course you do. That song. And the one that sounded just like it, and that other one, too. Yeah. Those. 

    If I seem as enthusiastic about the concert as a zombie at a baby shower, then that’s twice as enthusiastic as I mean to seem. I embarrass easily. I’m overly self-conscious, and when someone does something really stupid around me, such as wearing a fake deer head to get attention, as I saw recently on a commuter flight, I feel that it’s me wearing that deer head. The same holds true at an Air Supply concert. I feel as though it’s me belting out stale lyrics along with the audience.  Read More