August 16, 2022 Arts & Culture Past, Present, Perfect: An Overdue Pilgrimage to Stonington, Connecticut By Henri Cole James Merrill with wisteria in Charlottesville, 1976. Photograph by Rachel Jacoff. In French the word merle means blackbird, a dark bird of the thrush family. A blackbird’s song marks its territory. The male has black feathers and a yellow beak. It is in the same genus as the meadowlark. Forty years after first meeting James Merrill at my teacher David Kalstone’s Chelsea apartment, I am sitting at his desk in Stonington, Connecticut, with his large Petit Larousse open before me. Searching for the meanings of our names in French, I am distracted by a blackbird perched on the windowsill, drinking a little dew and then swaying on a nearby branch. It speaks in polished, rudimentary tones with a slow tempo. Merrill’s big desk is in a small room—in an apartment of small rooms—behind a hinged bookcase that creates a very private space. Still, I can hear a train whistle, a foghorn, halyard lines clinking against the masts of sloops anchored in the harbor, church chimes, and bits of conversation from villagers below on Water Street. These must be the sounds Merrill heard, too, while working. He was an early riser and liked to give the first hours of the day to his poems, which reflect, mirrorlike, so many of my own feelings. Mirrors are also a motif in his poems—mirrors that remember us across the years, reflecting our beauty and dissolution alike. It has taken me some days to sit at his desk. Read More
July 28, 2022 Arts & Culture The Face That Replicates By Katy Kelleher Collage of Norman Rockwell, “Girl at Mirror,” 1954. Licensed under CC0 4.0. Sylvia refused to wear her glasses, which is why she saw me everywhere on campus. It seemed like it was every day that she’d come to our dorm’s living room and tell me about the not-Katy. “I yelled at her again,” she sighed, flopping onto the worn couch. “It wasn’t you.” It never was. There wasn’t only one not-me. There were several other girls on our small liberal arts campus who had dirty-blond hair and shaggy bangs, girls who wore knee-high boots and short skirts, low-rise jeans and V-neck sweaters and too many tangled necklaces. In 2005, I didn’t stand out. I still don’t. My face, I suspect, is rather forgettable. I’m neither pretty enough to be remarkable nor strange enough to be interesting. This is true for the majority of people, though I have wondered if I have “one of those faces” that is particularly prone to inducing déjà vu. Some people seem like permanent doppelgängers. I became hypervigilant, on the lookout for not-mes that were also, sort of, me. Read More
July 27, 2022 Studio Visit Infinite Dictionaries: A Conversation with Marc Hundley By Na Kim Marc Hundley. Photograph by Na Kim. Marc Hundley, whose portfolio of posters appears in the Review’s Summer issue, first moved to New York City in 1993 to model for Vogue with his twin brother, Ian. They were twenty-two and modeling was a means to an end—funding what Hundley calls their “club kid” lifestyle. As their final job in the industry, Marc and Ian walked Comme des Garçons runway shows in Paris and Tokyo alongside the supermodel Linda Evangelista, for a payout of two thousand dollars each. The two brothers then moved from Manhattan to the apartment in Williamsburg where Marc still lives. In the late nineties, he worked as a carpenter and still-life photographer before beginning to make T-shirts and posters for his friends in the downtown club scene, which led him to an interest in text-based art. His prints and drawings often take the form of flyers that play with the associative potential of text and imagery. He still works across various disciplines including graphic design, carpentry, photography, and fine art. Hundley’s portfolio for the Review’s Summer issue constitutes something like a diary of several weeks he spent exploring the magazine’s archives this spring. The posters he created connect imagery and text in unexpected ways: each includes a particular phrase that caught his eye and pays homage to a work of art found in the same issue. (Four of these posters are now available to purchase in the Review’s online store.) In June, we sat down in his large studio in Bed-Stuy on chairs he had built. We shared a bottle of natural wine and talked about his work, the intimacy of being a twin, and how to write a love letter to a stranger. Read More
July 20, 2022 Arts & Culture E. E. Cummings and Krazy Kat By Amber Medland Krazy Kat by George Herriman. In 1910, a mouse named Ignatz first beaned Krazy Kat with a brick. The plot of this comic strip, centered on a “heppy go lucky kat,” is simple. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. Officer Pup loves Krazy Kat. Ignatz Mouse hits Krazy over the head with a brick; Officer Pup pursues and usually arrests Ignatz Mouse; Krazy, to whom the brick seems to be a sign of love, is ecstatic. A small heart pops up above his head. The cartoonist, George Herriman, twisted and tangled the three-lover triad and cat-mouse-dog triad and spent thirty-one years retying the same surreal knot. You know what will happen in any strip of Krazy Kat—the same sequence reoccurs eternally—but somehow there is still room for unexpected delight. Read More
July 6, 2022 Arts & Culture Why Write? By Elisa Gabbert Photograph of light on water by Aayugoyal. Licensed under CC0 4.0. I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”—many times before I read the essay it comes from, and was reminded once again to never assume you know what anything means out of context. I had always thought the line was about her essays, about writing nonfiction to discover her own beliefs—because of course the act of making an argument clear on the page brings clarity to the writer too. She may have believed that; she may have thought it a truth too obvious to state. In any case, it’s not what she meant. She was talking about why she writes fiction: I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means … Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind? Read More
May 19, 2022 Arts & Culture Postcards from Ellsworth By Rebecca Bengal Ellsworth Kelly, Having The Time Of My Life, 1998. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. 1 Several years ago, moving into an old but new-to-me apartment with bare white walls, I tacked a poster-size sheet of heavy paper above my desk. Over time, I began to randomly pin found photographs and scraps of stories and poems to this sheet—including a couple of reproductions of Ellsworth Kelly postcards, which I’d torn out of magazines. Every so often, my eyes would stray upward, and these flashes of color would slide into view. I had not thought of them again until very recently, when I heard of an exhibition curated from the four hundred postcards Kelly made and mailed at various points during his seven decades of making art. Read More