December 20, 2016 Our Correspondents Beautiful Animal of the King By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. This week: Zarafa. Design by Kristen Radtke. All these observations bring to mind the possibility of bringing her to Paris by small daily journeys. No other manner of transport seems preferable to me. —Count Villeneuve-Bargemon At each arrival in populous towns … I had to fight the crowds who rushed tumultuously at the animal. —Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire The giraffe occupies all the public’s attention; one talks of nothing else in the circles of the capital. —La pandore Name: Zarafa Species: Giraffa camelopardalis camelopardalis Years Active: 1825–1845 Distinguishing Features: Sixteen-inch prehensile tongue, tufted ossicones, bedroom eyes Skills: Long walks, befriending dignitaries Habitat: A parquet-floored wing of the Jardin des Plantes rotunda: “truly the boudoir of a little lady” Additional Notes: When Zarafa arrived at the port of Marseilles in the autumn of 1826, she did so unnamed. Though she was occasionally called “the child of Egypt,” “Dame Girafe,” or “the Beautiful Animal of the King” by dignitaries, newspapers, and her thousands-strong French fan club, Zarafa lived her eighteen years never officially known as anything but la girafe. There were no other beasts of her kind, you see, with which to confuse her. Read More
December 16, 2016 Our Correspondents The Long and Pretty Good-bye By Megan Mayhew Bergman Megan Mayhew Bergman’s column is about naturalism. This week, she discusses the role of modern elegiac writing in an era of extinction. Michelle Blade, Entrance, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 60″ x 46″. It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth, to no longer practice customs barely acquired, not to give a meaning of human futurity to roses, and other expressly promising things —Rilke, “The First Elegy” Last week, my daughters and I were talking about the extinction of the northern white rhino, looking at a photograph I took last November through a fence at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy. “He’s the last of his kind,” I said, pointing to the hulking animal in sagging, dusty-white skin. “And one day soon, no northern white rhinos will exist.” “Why?” they wanted to know. Detailing the horrors of poaching and civil war in the Congo and Sudan seems harsh, and I’m still learning how to talk to my girls about the human hand in death and change. When a neighbor died, the answer was still safely that “death is the natural course of things,” but the answers become more complex when we talk about war, extinction, or place. How do we acknowledge human complicity, the way resource consumption impacts the habitat and survival of other species? Read More
December 14, 2016 Our Correspondents A Good Whipping By Anthony Madrid On the “Mrs Thrale” bit in Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hester and Queeney Thrale, 1777–1778. Frank O’Hara composed the piece that he later called “Meditations in an Emergency” on or around June 25, 1954—anyhow, that is the date on the manuscript. At that time, the title was “Meditations on Re-emergent Occasions,” which makes O’Hara’s debt to John Donne’s 1624 text Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions much more obvious. O’Hara’s piece, retitled at the suggestion of Kenneth Koch, was published in Poetry about four months later, which is an excellent turn-around time. This was during the five years when Karl Shapiro was editor. You can have a look at the original page layout of “Meditations in an Emergency” here. Clickers who know the text will find no surprises. Read More
December 9, 2016 Our Correspondents Safe as Houses By Amy Gentry On Max Ophüls’s 1949 noir, The Reckless Moment. Joan Bennett in The Reckless Moment. What makes a thriller “domestic,” anyway? Broadly speaking, it takes place in a house. Domestic thrillers are horror stories about the emotional labor that maintains the private sphere going terribly awry; think of the way towel straightening and pantry rearranging become acts of violence in Sleeping with the Enemy, transforming Julia Roberts’s new home, at the climax, into an uncanny country where she’s always a stranger. Sleeping with the Enemy was released the same year as Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, and while Faludi herself criticized nineties domestic thrillers for preying on women’s fears about their changing roles in a postfeminist world, it seems more accurate to say the films expressed those fears—many of them were, after all, based on novels and screenplays by women—much as post–Word War II film noir expressed anxieties about reintegrating men into the social order after what they had seen and done overseas. In fact, nineties domestic thrillers have their precursors in the 1940s subgenres of melodramatic noir and women’s suspense that rose alongside more traditionally masculine postwar noir. Alfred Hitchcock’s films about murderous husbands and male family members in the early forties—Rebecca, Suspicion, and Shadow of a Doubt—kicked off a decade of domestic thrillers that invited noirish paranoia into the house, including George Cukor’s Gaslight, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, and Joseph Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number. Read More
December 8, 2016 Our Correspondents Reporting from the Front By Jeff Seroy Alejandro Aravena’s entry hall. A woman in housedress and slippers, scarf wound round her head, stands on a ladder staring at the desert. This arresting image, a photograph taken by Bruce Chatwin, was chosen by the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena to represent the themes of this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice, which closed November 27. The woman, whom Chatwin encountered in southern Peru, was a German archeologist. She was there to study the Nazca lines, which look like random gravel from the ground but from a small elevation take shape as geoglyphs, or man-made images of animals and plants. The point? A slight shift in perspective achieved by modest means can alter our experience of the world. More than sixty countries were represented in the Biennale’s two locations, the Gardens and the Arsenale. At both sites, Aravena, who recently received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, constructed compelling entry halls from over ninety tons of scrap material left over from previous Biennales. Out of plasterboard and the metal posts it attaches to, he formed cavernous spaces with textured walls and sculptural ceilings. The boards were cut with ragged edges and stacked like tiles, leaving small ledges here and there, or tiny gaps for windows, while lengths of torqued aluminum stalactites hung just above our heads. The spaces felt like primitive shelter: cave, hut, igloo, ger. Read More
December 7, 2016 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 2: Raul By Mike Powell Mike Powell’s column is about living in Arizona. The wall along the Arizona-Mexico border. Photo: Cecilia Balli/PRI. My friend Raul is thirty-six and until recently played in a band called the Electric Blankets. Raul works at a bar that I drink at all the time. I generally don’t talk to bartenders because I don’t want to get in their way, a trait I’ve always considered to be European but have been informed is just unfriendly. One night, Raul saw me at a party and he patted me on the back and that was that. Raul lives here in Tucson on an expired green card. He was born in Tijuana and moved to Southern California when he was eleven. His family started a Mexican restaurant outside San Diego; it turned into two. As a teenager, Raul started going up to Los Angeles with a crew of kids to dance to hard house, a genre of music I was unfamiliar with until Raul told me about it. “DJ Irene,” he says. “DJ Trajic.” I listened to them later. It sounds like a pinball machine crossed with construction noise. Raul married a friend when he was twenty-three and moved to Tucson shortly thereafter. The plan was to stay for eight months; that was eleven years ago. Raul watched the 2016 presidential election at his bar in a state of mounting anxiety. Tucson is a blue pocket in a mostly red state. The plan was to celebrate. “We had TVs, we had bands, we had guest speakers,” he says. By the end of the night, he was crying on his barstool, “not out of sadness or anger, but out of fear. It felt like the fucking twilight zone.” Read More