January 3, 2017 In Memoriam John Berger, 1926–2017 By Sarah Cowan “Every artist’s work changes when he dies,” John Berger wrote in his essay on Alberto Giacometti. “Finally no one remembers what his work was like when he was alive … [His work] will have become evidence from the past, instead of being … a possible preparation for something to come.” Berger died yesterday at age ninety. A painter who traded his brush for a pen, he became an art critic for the people, telling stories with a revolutionary spirit. The “evidence” of his tireless work will be his published writing, including more than fifty books: criticism, novels, poetry, and screenplays. In his final years, fans and disciples could seek him out in the small French Alpine town of Quincy, where he’d lived since 1974, having left a robust public life to lend his labor to “peasants”—his favored word for the villagers—so he could “write about them in this way—to understand their experience of their world.” From those who made the pilgrimage, we have gotten intimate interviews with the aging writer, full of retrospection. Berger had ample time to prepare his legacy. He donated his archives to the British Library in 2009; Verso Books has recently published two collections of his writing, Landscapes and Portraits; a documentary about his life in France, The Seasons in Quincy, was released last year; and a new book by writers indebted to Berger has now become a posthumous honor. Read More
December 23, 2016 In Memoriam The Last Picture Show By Richard B. Woodward Nineteen volunteer fire departments on the East End of Long Island responded to an alarm that sounded shortly after six A.M. on December 15. A stretch of stores along Main Street in Sag Harbor was burning, the flames accelerated by whipping winds that the local fire chief, Thomas Gardella, later described as acting “like a blowtorch.” Working at first in the winter dark and then in smoke-choked early morning light, the dozens of firefighters needed more than four hours to put the fire out. Temperatures were so cold that water from the hoses froze on their uniforms and trucks. No one was killed, thanks in part to a Sag Harbor police officer, Randy Seyert, who went through the smoke to rouse two sleeping residents in the apartments above the stores. They have nonetheless lost everything, as have the owners of five local businesses. Ad hoc recovery funds have been gathered to help alleviate the shock of total loss. The destruction of one building, the Sag Harbor Cinema, has left a particular sting. Its white stucco facade and red neon Art Deco lettering were the face of the village. The black rectangular hole that now stands along Main Street is a public injury, as if someone has ripped out an eye or a tooth. Certain places retain their grip on memory out of all proportion to their social value or their function in your life, and the Sag Harbor Cinema did that for me. In an architectural landscape like New York, where nothing is safe from the forces of real-estate development, the theater had somehow escaped improvements. Its appearance and mode of operation changed barely at all in the more than three decades I was a patron. A proud ignorance of upheavals happening elsewhere in the industry was one source of the comfort the cinema provided. Read More
December 19, 2016 In Memoriam Shirley Hazzard, 1931–2016 By Matthew Specktor Photo: New York Society Library The call came at eleven at night. I was breathless, having raced inside to pick up. I’d been on my way out to dinner, and only a shot of curiosity at who might have been calling at such an hour, on a Friday, had urged me to run back and catch it. “Is this Matthew Specktor?” The voice on the other end was remote. It sounded, for a moment, as if she might have been calling from somewhere far away—an analog, transatlantic connection—but that wasn’t it. The accent wasn’t American, wasn’t Australian, wasn’t English, certainly, although it muddled a few of these things. “This is Shirley Hazzard …” Once I got to know her—it would take a few years—I’d understand that this “remoteness” was not geographical but temporal. Everything that seemed to constitute Shirley, everything that mattered, was also a piece of the historical past. But just then what I felt was surprise—something akin to what an astronomer might’ve experienced (to borrow a figure from one of her own books) upon receiving a signal from another star. Proof of life. Read More
December 8, 2016 In Memoriam My Step Is South By Drew Bratcher Discovering William Christenberry. William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1994. One of my first days in Washington, having just arrived from Tennessee, I wandered into the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I found myself surrounded by Kodak Brownie photographs of barns, country stores, Baptist churches, metal signs, family graveyards—striking reminders of the Southern landscape I’d left behind. Starting in the 1970s, the artist William Christenberry had photographed the same places in rural Alabama year after year. In one picture, a shack with false brick siding commanded the landscape; two decades later, kudzu had swallowed it whole. Their continuity gave these images a neurotic but documentary quality. There was loss in them. There was deep and complicated love. Read More
November 11, 2016 In Memoriam Leonard Cohen, 1934–2016 By Adam Shatz Leonard Cohen died on November 7, a day before the election, at eighty-two. Readers of David Remnick’s extraordinarily moving profile in The New Yorker know that he had been preparing for death. Still, it felt like an act of cruel and unusual punishment after Trump’s victory, and like many Cohen fans I couldn’t help connecting his death to the election. Was it a sign of some sort? Had Cohen been so dejected that he decided to call it quits? Did Trump kill him? You may laugh, but it’s no less plausible a theory than pretty much anything from the president-elect’s mouth. When I heard the news of Cohen’s death, my first thought was: Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye. Then I remembered that Neruda, one of Cohen’s favorite poets, died as Pinochet established his grip on power. Neruda was spared the sight of Chile’s grim descent into torture and extrajudicial killing, and the imposition of a regime of murderous silence. But he did not vanish: his poems of revolutionary love were like fireflies in Chile’s dark night, providing sparks of hope that the day of liberation would come. Read More
October 14, 2016 In Memoriam Dario Fo, 1926–2016 By Dan Piepenbring Dario Fo, sweater game on fleek. If you’ve exhausted the Internet’s rich store of Bob Dylan think pieces, you might turn your attention to another Nobel laureate: Dario Fo, the Italian playwright, who died this week at ninety. The Vatican once declared his play Mistero Buffo, a kind of one-man political-satire revue, to be “the most blasphemous show in the history of television.” (If you’re confused, this was in 1977, well before the undeniably satanic Pretty Little Liars hit the airwaves.) As the New York Times has it, Fo and his late wife–collaborator, Franca Rame, did more to upend the art of political theater than anyone in their generation: “Basing their art on the tradition of the medieval jester and the improvisation techniques of commedia dell’arte, Mr. Fo and Ms. Rame thrilled, dismayed and angered audiences around the world. Together they staged thousands of performances, in conventional theaters, factories occupied by striking workers, university sit-ins, city parks, prisons and even deconsecrated churches.” Read More