May 3, 2021 Look The Talents of the Saar Family By The Paris Review In recent years, the work of the ninety-four-year-old artist Betye Saar has experienced something of a critical reappraisal, with major retrospectives appearing concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019. When asked why this sudden resurgence in attention might be occurring, she replied: “Because it’s about time! I’ve had to wait till I’m practically 100.” It’s baffling that she had to wait at all: Saar’s work, especially her Joseph Cornell–inspired assemblages, is without peer. Thankfully, a new show at the Crocker Art Museum, in Sacramento, California, suggests that talent travels matrilineally in the Saar family. “Legends from Los Angeles,” which will be on view through August 15, features twenty-three works by Betye and her daughters Alison and Lezley. A selection of images from the exhibition appears below. Betye Saar, Woman with Two Parrots, 2010, mixed-media collage on paperboard, 12 x 24 5/8″. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Emily Leff and James Davis III. © Betye Saar / Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California. Alison Saar, Jitterbug, from the Copacetic portfolio, 2019, linocut on handmade Japanese Hamada kozo paper, 19 1/2 x 18″. Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds provided by the Marcy and Mort Friedman Acquisition Fund; and Janet Mohle-Boetani, M.D., and Mark Manasse. © Alison Saar. Photo courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery and Mullowney Printing. Read More
April 30, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sweaters, Sisters, and Sounds By The Paris Review Maryanne Amacher, one of the subjects of Sisters with Transistors. Photo: Peggy Weil. Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures. Such care is taken with the visual and aural elements of Lisa Rovner’s Sisters with Transistors, a new documentary profiling women composers from the early days of electronic music, that watching it feels more like observing a cinematic poem than a cut-and-dried work of nonfiction. Featuring a voice-over by Laurie Anderson alongside decades’ worth of rare archival footage, the movie examines the careers of ten women—Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Wendy Carlos—and the gender disparity that has led to so many of them being overlooked, forgotten, or outright erased from the history of electronic music. The relationship between art, humans, and machines is one I find constantly fascinating, and Sisters with Transistors is filled with moments that explore just that, from an account of how Derbyshire’s early memories of air raid signals in the Blitz influenced her ghostly compositions to video of a bemused Thurston Moore watching Amacher fling her body between stacks of keyboards as she plays in her equipment-stuffed home. Sisters with Transistors is available to stream on Metrograph Digital through May 6. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
April 30, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Donika Kelly Reads Taylor Johnson By Donika Kelly National Poetry Month is almost over, but the second series of Poets on Couches continues. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across distances. “States of Decline” By Taylor Johnson (Issue no. 228, Spring 2019) The room is dying honey and lemon rind. Soured light. My grandmother sits in her chair sweetening into the blue velvet. Domestic declension is the window that never opens— the paint peeling, dusting the sill, and inhaled. It is an american love she lives in, my grandmother, rigored to televangelists and infomercials. Losing the use of her legs. Needing to be turned like a mattress. No one is coming for her. The dog is asleep in the yard, her husband, obedient to the grease and garlic in the cast iron, salting her death in the wind house. Donika Kelly is the author of two collections of poems, Bestiary and The Renunciations. She teaches at the University of Iowa. Her poem “Dear—” appeared in the Winter 2018 issue.
April 29, 2021 At Work Everything Writes Itself: An Interview with Black Thought By David Ma Black Thought. Photo: Erica Génécé. In 2016, wearing a white shirt with tiny embroidered roses, Black Thought centered himself in front of a whispering audience at the Harvard Innovation Labs. He had just finished a conversation with host Michael Keohane about the hand-painted clothing he’d made as a young artist, his rise within rap music, and his eventual aspirations as an actor. To the delight of the campus crowd, he asked, “I can kick a rhyme?” Nudging up his glasses, he then unleashed five minutes of complex stanzas, double entendres, and expository verses. Somewhere within the burst of sentences, he veered into the biographical. “I got to see how gangstas played at such an early age. What my father was into sent him to his early grave. Then mom started chasing that base like Willie Mays … Trouble was my ball and chain.” And then, after a pregnant pause—“Black Thought is what that all became.” Despite almost three decades of recorded material and myriad rhymes, Black Thought has remained low-key about his life offstage. Black Thought, a.k.a. Tariq Luqmaan Trotter, grew up alongside hip-hop itself. His first purchase at a record store was Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock. His early love of rap music gave way to an enduring interest in the written word. “I remember thinking how much I just loved writing,” he says. “I’d write all kinds of things down all day long. I was around nine years old when I tried to write my first rhymes.” He spent his formative years at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts. During this time, a chance encounter with a young drummer, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, would change the trajectory of both their lives. The two, along with the rapper Malik B., formed the Square Roots, a name shortened to just the Roots by the time their first release, Organix, arrived in 1993. Running counter to hip-hop’s celebrated history with sampling, the Roots became known for their use of live instruments and a rotating lineup of band members. They experimented with sampling more in their later work, but live instruments were foundational to their ascent, and word spread about their exuberant stage show. Their 1995 album, Do You Want More?!!!??!, and its 1996 follow-up, Illadelph Halflife, were springboards that took them around the globe for the next fourteen years—world tours, Woodstock, television, film, their very own music festival, even the White House—all of it halting somewhat when they became the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2009 (and eventually The Tonight Show). Collectively, the Roots have amassed more than twenty studio projects, live works, compilations, collaborations, and more. They’ve been nominated for fourteen Grammy Awards and won three, including one in 1999 for their juggernaut single “You Got Me.” Throughout the Roots’ expansive catalogue, we’ve witnessed Black Thought’s maturation as an artist, his gravelly, aging voice and renewed boldness on recent material, all of it quite fitting of his sage persona and increasingly sermonic verbiage. There’d long been attempts made at solo projects over the years, but a perfect storm of industry semantics and gridlock deadened many would-be albums. The Roots’ Phrenology in 2002 was in fact a project whose entire framework was built around sketches intended for Black Thought’s solo debut. Phrenology signaled that Black Thought was undeniably emerging into his own, and his peers were taking notice. In 2018, he released Streams of Thought, Vol. 1, the start of what has become a series of solo projects, each recorded with different producers. As expected, the Streams of Thought series represents a deviation from the material Black Thought has recorded with the Roots. Here, he’s more inward, more confessional, touching on topics like his family and his anxieties as an artist. To date, there have been three volumes, but a fourth is afoot—it seems to be ongoing, a living document that he’s committed to for the longterm. “Am I a journal or journalist? Olympic tournament–level genius author? Affirmative,” he rapped in a 2020 NPR Tiny Desk performance, sitting stoically in house slippers and dark glasses. He’s also been working on a Broadway adaptation of George Schuyler’s 1931 Afrofuturist satire Black No More, which he’s producing, writing music and lyrics for, and costarring in. From our respective corners of the country, Black Thought and I spoke a couple of times over the past year, discussing watershed moments of his artistic growth, important Roots history, and the nucleus of his whole enterprise: his use of language and the written word. INTERVIEWER What are your earliest memories of rap music? BLACK THOUGHT I’m about the same age as hip-hop itself. Kool Herc and those guys started going back and forth on disco breaks in July or August of 1973, and I was born in October of that year. I was invented just a couple months after the breakbeat was invented. Some of my earliest memories are of breaks being spun at disco parties in the neighborhood. Music-wise, record-wise, though, it would be “Rapper’s Delight,” whenever that hit. INTERVIEWER When did your interest in writing begin? What sparked it? BLACK THOUGHT I was nine years old when I started writing. A rapper named RC LaRock got popular and really made an impression on me. He made me want to write actual rhymes. In 1980 he had a song called “Micstro” that was a huge influence in regards to my style. Then “Superrappin’,” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, came out, and they did a particular style that was comparable to what the girl group JJ Fad popularized on the song “Supersonic.” Then Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three came out and influenced me a lot, too. But I remember “Superrappin’ ” in particular because it’s a serious record that starts out at a moderate pace. By the end of it, the verses are lightning fast. I wanted to write my first song in that same cadence. Read More
April 28, 2021 Bulletin Watch a Conversation between Eloghosa Osunde and Akwaeke Emezi By The Paris Review Every year, the Paris Review Board of Directors gives awards to recognize remarkable contributions to literature. One of these, the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, is a $10,000 award that celebrates an outstanding story published by an emerging writer in the magazine in the previous calendar year. The winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize for Fiction is Eloghosa Osunde, for her story “Good Boy,” which appeared in the Fall 2020 issue. In commemoration of this year’s Plimpton Prize, we’re presenting a taped conversation between Osunde and the artist and writer Akwaeke Emezi, introduced by managing editor Hasan Altaf. The video, which appears below, will be available to stream on our YouTube channel from April 28 to May 11. And don’t forget: readers are also invited to stream a special free screening of PBS’s American Masters documentary N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear, which will be available until Friday, April 30. Momaday is the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award, presented each year to a “distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.”
April 27, 2021 Arts & Culture Comics That Chart the Swamp of Adolescence By Emily Flake Copyright © 2021 by Shary Flenniken. I don’t know how old I was when I first read Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie, but I definitely wasn’t old enough. I was a precocious reader and pretty sex-obsessed for a child, and my parents would buy National Lampoon every now and again and leave it where it could fall into my unsupervised little hands (parenting was a different animal entirely in 1984, kids). I couldn’t have been more than seven, but the experience is as clear and vital as if it happened yesterday: here was something that looked friendly and kidlike, but it was dangerous. It was confusing, it was weird, and it was very, very hot. Copyright © 2021 by Shary Flenniken. By the time I came of age, I had put National Lampoon on my mental back burner. I wouldn’t say I forgot about Trots and Bonnie, but I’d stored it away deep in my subconscious, where it formed a bedrock of my sensibility I wouldn’t recognize until years later. When I reacquainted myself with the strip in my twenties, it was like seeing a long-lost and deeply beloved friend. I also realized I’d been ripping Shary off for years. Those blank Little Orphan Annie eyes, the cheerful willingness to be absolutely disgusting, the heady mix of raunch and innocence—all things that had percolated through my own mind and heart and spilled out into my own work, a dim echo of the masterful original. Read More