July 21, 2022 Diaries September Notebook, 2018 By Daniel Poppick At my old job, I wrote descriptions of objects; at my new job, I write descriptions of talks, concerts, classes, Jewish holiday services, and other events. Once I was in the business of selling matter. Now I am in the business of selling time. But how to use it? * Parable of Uncle Martin September 2, 2018 1:13 P.M. Dear Uncle Martin, Just wanted to drop you a quick note to wish you a very happy birthday—100 is a big one! Apologies for the belated note, though I’m sure you were inundated that day. I hope this finds you well and that we can see each other again soon. Lots of love, Dan 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 18, 2022 On Film On Paris Blues By Darryl Pinckney Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman in Paris Blues (1961). Courtesy of Metrograph. “For me as a kid,” writes Darryl Pinckney in a memoir in the Review’s Summer issue, “the film had everything I couldn’t have: cigarettes and train stations, late nights and drinking. Sex.” The film in question is Paris Blues (1961), directed by Martin Ritt and starring Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman. In honor of Pinckney’s essay, the Review and Metrograph cohosted a screening of the film on the evening of Sunday, July 10—the first in an ongoing series of cohosted evenings. Before a sold-out theater, Pinckney greeted the enthusiastic audience with a talk that spanned the glory of Sidney Poitier, the changing role of race in postwar cinema, and dreams of integration and artistic integrity. Today, we are publishing his remarks in full. The black character entered mainstream postwar cinema as a social problem. This is the milieu of Sidney Poitier’s debut, in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out in 1950. He is a doctor, and the black community beats off the white mob come for revenge on Poitier’s character after a bigot’s brother dies in his care. Two decades went by before a network television station was willing to air the film in prime time. In Richard Brooks’s Blackboard Jungle (1955), Poitier is thirty-one years old but completely convincing as a bright, ambivalent black student at a high school troubled by violent ethnic rivalries and nihilistic juvenile crime. In The Devil Finds Work (1976), James Baldwin recalls that Harlem audiences bayed at the Sidney Poitier character at the end of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958). A black convict is suddenly free of the white convict he’s been chained to for more than an hour on-screen, but he falls off the train he hopped on to escape, because he extended his hand too far to the white convict, who had been giving him such an awful, racist time. Poitier found a film world opposed to the Hays Code, segregation, and McCarthyism by temperament as well as from principle. He fit right in. He worked with the best people right off. These films were made with studio commitment, if not entirely wanted by them. The black director Lloyd Richards made a Broadway hit of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, but he was passed over when it came to the making of the film, which featured the original cast, including Sidney Poitier. The film came out in 1961, a few months ahead of Paris Blues. Read More
July 15, 2022 The Review’s Review Balenciaga, Light Verse, and Dancing on Command By The Paris Review Look 7 in Demna Gvesalia’s 2022 Balenciaga haute couture show. For someone who spends most of life reading and writing, dance is a miracle. Literature twists language to get at truth, but dance circumvents it altogether. Of course, this is only true at the moment of performance; the work of dance is full of language–often commands, usually unheard by the audience. Milka Djordjevich’s CORPS, which I saw at NY Live Arts a couple of weeks ago, invites us to consider the interplay of communication and labor in dance. It opens with a two-word command, “Snaps, go,” spoken by one of six dancers in drab gym uniforms as they march into view, fingers obediently snapping. When another says “no-head, go,” they begin to shake their heads, still snapping. This continues, with about forty moves in different combinations—from sources including military drill, ballet, and cheerleading—for the first half of the piece. (My personal favorite was “pointers,” a raffish shaking of double finger-guns that I plan to try at my cousin’s wedding). It’s a strangely anarchic, nonhierarchical performance of command-giving: any dancer can call the next move, and the official vocabulary is interspersed with chatty asides. Controlling their own collective fate, they still end up doing things that none of them seem to want—like jumping up and down for what feels like ten minutes, breathless, awaiting instruction. Anyone who has had a job, or a family, will recognize the inertia of the group project. In the second half, the drill team, now in gold-spangled, softly jingling, not-quite-matching costumes, begins a magnificent disintegration, each dancer interpreting the moves from the first sequence in their own ways, then getting weirder, ultimately collapsing into a pile on the floor. There they chat, all speaking at once, repeating everyday phrases until they morph into new ones (“in or out/in and out/In-N-Out/have you been to In-N-Out?/best burgers…”). This psychedelic segment is a bit more exciting than the flawed austerity that precedes it, but you can’t choose a favorite—each half relies on the other for meaning. —Jane Breakell, development director Read More
July 13, 2022 Eat Your Words Cooking with Dante Alighieri By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica MacLean. For the past fourteen months I have been on a path of conversion to Catholicism. In addition to going to mass, trying to memorize prayers, and worrying about my singing voice, I attend a staid biweekly discussion group moderated by a priest. We are slowly reading a book of contemporary Italian theology. My conversion was spurred by a specific—and specifically Catholic—experience of grace. I am confident about it, but less so about reconciling myself with the many dogmas of Catholic Church. I have struggled especially, as a previously secular person, with believing in sin. As a category, it has always seemed socially malignant, an excuse to burn witches. And in my personal life both gluttony and lust might be problems, especially because they don’t really seem like problems: sex and food are good things. Read More
July 12, 2022 First Person Bona Nit, Estimat (An Ordinary Night) By Robert Glück Illustration by Na Kim. I can’t fall asleep till my skin—sweaty, sticky, sizzling with bacteria, random fungal itches, swellings, vague histamine eruptions—has been unified by a bath or shower. I wear a white cotton T-shirt softened by age to tame this commotion and to guard my insanely sensitive nipples against the onslaught of, say, the blanket’s edge. Mr. X. and I read for a while. I’m reading Derek McCormack’s wondrous Castle Faggot, but after a few paragraphs the words stop making sense. I whisper, “Bona nit, estimat.” Xavi whispers, “Bona nit, malparits,” and we kiss. Why do we whisper? Sometimes we whisper “I love you.” I roll onto my right side, and incredibly Xavi slides closer and drapes an arm over me. Ceding bed territory sets off a small alarm. “Sweet dreams, honey,” he might add, amused to be using the English endearment. Thirty seconds later he snores softly in my ear and a toenail digs into my calf. I am on the edge, he gathers the quilt in such a way that I am half-exposed and if I want more space or more covers there will be a struggle. I find this adorable. Everything explains why we should be together in this bed. I often think about the dead before sleep—saying goodnight to them? Not think about—more like have the feeling of them. Are they my default setting? Is default consciousness what happens before sleep? My mother and I disliked talking on the phone so we spent most of our weekly calls saying goodbye, but now I mentally pick up the phone to say hello, a gesture. I think of Kathy Acker with a pang of love, a welter of unfinished business. When Xavi holds me, he contains these feelings. Tonight it’s simple—I wish Kathy were alive to be held like this. Read More