January 7, 2014 On Music Swamp Thing By Dan Piepenbring Cover of Bobby Charles’s 1972 album Bobby Charles. When it gets cold, profanely cold, anesthetically cold, I like to put on humid music. It doesn’t cut the wind chill, but it helps. In a pinch, one could depend on Dick Dale or calypso; in dire straits, even a Key West bromide like Jimmy Buffett’s “Boat Drinks” gives off enough balm to suffice. But while such songs have heat, they lack humidity. At the risk of sounding like a sleazy bandleader: if you really want to thaw out, you’ve got to sweat. Bobby Charles’s eponymous album, soon to be reissued on vinyl for possibly the first time since its 1972 release, is perfect for the job: it has the languor and stickiness of an August day in New Orleans. Battered but amiable, Charles, a Louisiana native who died in 2010, sings with the slightest of rasps through ten tracks of rhythm and blues, alternately bustling and lumbering. He strikes me as a man who knew how to take his time. His is the sort of music people like to describe as “homegrown” or “country-fried,” though both adjectives feel too tinged with condescension to apply here. In deepest winter, the mere sight of Bobby Charles’s cover is a salve. It has a brown-and-green palette both earthy and eye-popping. What felonies wouldn’t you commit to be that man, or that dog, reclining in such tauntingly verdant swampland? Read More
January 7, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Makeovers By Sadie Stein “There is a new hotspot for heavy petting on the Upper West Side,” declared the West Side Rag, awesomely, some months ago. Widely considered the dirtiest, crummiest, saddest, and generally worst movie theater in Manhattan, the Loews Eighty-Fourth Street transformed itself in 2013 into an amorous teenager’s paradise, instituting luxurious, fully reclining seats and removable armrests. Reported the New York Post, The new loveseats are a huge hit with teens. Upper West Sider Richard Velazquez, forty, was seated in the same row as an enthusiastic teen couple at a World War Z showing last month. “Even before the previews started, they were going at it,” says Velazquez. “She was not entirely on top of him, but a quarter of the way there. When the movie ended, they were still at it. I was thinking, ‘Get a room already,’ but the theater was their room!” I don’t know if this gamble—or whatever it is—has paid off. Did anyone want an unsanitary multiplex with business-class seats? Who knows? All I know is that the Love Theater is my local, a mere five-minute walk from door to door. They don’t often show films I want to see—I guess the lineup is more geared toward the tastes of the heavy-petting demographic—but yesterday I crossed Broadway to see The Wolf of Wall Street, my thinking being that a comfy seat might come in handy in watching a three-hour film. Read More
January 7, 2014 Studio Visit Anthony Cudahy By Justin Alvarez Cudahy in front of his painting Untitled (Vanessa). I was first introduced to artist Anthony Cudahy in 2011, when I interviewed him for Guernica. I was moved by his fleeting scenes of silence—a woman pinning a boutonniere on an unseen man’s tuxedo jacket, two girls hugging in a bedroom while one stares at herself in the mirror—and amazed by the wide range of work from an artist so young (he was only twenty-two). When Adrian West pitched his translations of Josef Winkler’s novel Graveyard of Bitter Oranges for the Daily, I immediately knew Cudahy’s work would best accompany Winkler’s tales of death and phantoms in an unfamiliar country. Both invoke the Flemish hells of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder—lively, complex, symbolic, the best kind of fever dream. I met with Anthony at his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he is an artist-in-residence for the Artha Project. Amid the stacks of wood planks from the neighboring furniture studio and the incessant clanking of pipes, we discussed the benefits of the Internet for the art world, growing up in Florida, and his hatred of the color yellow. Read More
January 7, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Try New Things By Dan Piepenbring Variety, it’s said, is the spice of life, and too often our lives are sparingly seasoned—not with fennel seed or ancho chile powder, but with a few grains of table salt, iodized if we’re lucky. On a water cracker. But a new year is upon us, and we intend to try new things: like duck larb, or sweetbreads in mole, or Alsatian choucroute garnie. Sure, The Paris Review is reliable: with the best in fiction, interviews, poetry, and art, plus three National Magazine Awards in the last five years, we prefer to think of ourselves as sturdy, not stodgy. But in terms of variety, it’s hard to beat McSweeney’s, whose every issue is a veritable jack-in-the-box of unpredictability. Where we hew to the tried and true—same trim size, same typeface—at McSweeney’s these things are subject to change without notice. 2005’s “Made to Look Like It Came in Your Mailbox” issue was just that; winter 2010 came in a large box illustrated with a very rubicund head; and their most recent offering, “Multiples,” features up to six different versions of twelve stories. Clearly, then, the most variety of all would come from reading both our magazines. That’s why, through January, we’re offering a subscription deal: you can get McSweeney’s and The Paris Review for just $75, a 20 percent savings. That’s more than a lot of new things—it’s a flavor explosion. (Caveat emptor: though we can’t speak for McSweeney’s, we feel comfortable saying our publication will never be literally edible.)
January 7, 2014 On the Shelf Siri Hates Her, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring HAL 9000—still the standard-bearer for baneful artificial intelligences. Eschewing received wisdom and millions of high school syllabi, one writer dares to contend that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette trumps Jane Eyre. Spike Jonze wrote the screenplay for Her, which features a honey-tongued operating system named Samantha, well before Siri came into this world—but surely you can see the connection. Siri can’t. Ask her about Her and you’ll get some guff: “I think she gives artificial intelligence a bad name.” As the New York Times prepares to debut its new home page, this helpful gif shows how the site has evolved since 2001. (“The New York Times on the Web,” it said then—as if to congratulate itself for having arrived.) Fan art for The Catcher in the Rye. Highest honors go to that left-handed fielder’s mitt. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince becomes an art exhibit.
January 6, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Love in a Cold Climate By Sadie Stein Photo: Sebastian Dooris I moved to Greenpoint, in North Brooklyn, on the heels of a breakup, and although I lived there for years, in my memories it is always somehow winter. While I was hardly a pioneer in the neighborhood—a recognizable mumblecore actor lived one fire escape away—ten years ago it was still a far cry from today’s full-on Girls-level gentrification; friends still griped about taking the unreliable G train to come visit, and more than one said that the rent had better be pretty cheap to justify the schlep. It was. To those who know the area, this was just off of Monsignor McGolrick Park, a twelve-minute walk from the Nassau Avenue station. At first glance the apartment was unprepossessing, but after I had pulled up the stained carpet, painted the walls a vivid blue, found a copper leaf sculpture at a thrift store, and sewn a gaily-patterned bark-cloth curtain to separate the bedroom, I fancied it was cheerful, in a vaguely retro-modern way. There was also a fire escape large enough for a table and chairs, not to mention a few pots of nasturtiums and some basil in the summer, even though, again, my primary memories involve snow. I had chosen the neighborhood because it was one of the few where I could both afford to live alone on my shopgirl salary and also feel safe walking alone at night. But I had not been living there long when I met M., and he kind of just moved in by osmosis. It was never a formal arrangement, but I didn’t like going to his roommate-filled bachelor pad three trains away, and we were young enough that this sort of thing seemed normal. Read More