January 5, 2012 Arts & Culture The Wedding Party By Sophie Pinkham As Kim Kardashian recently reminded us, marriage is no longer the inevitable result of a wedding; the ritual is easily divorced from the institution. This is a source of some comfort to the single person approaching thirty, bombarded by engagement announcements and Facebooked wedding photo albums. Just a few more years of this, you tell yourself, and people will start getting divorced. So this fall I was tickled to receive an invitation to a fake wedding in New Orleans. With all the phoniness announced up front, there was no need for jealousy (I’ll die alone!), anxiety (She’s making a terrible mistake!), or expensive gifts (But I can’t even afford health insurance!). Read More
January 4, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. RIP Josef Skvorecky. The Adequate Gatsby. Jay Caulfield? Actors Anonymous. The strange mystery of Michiko Kakutani’s Twitter. The strange experience of eating with Marianne Moore. “By two o’clock on New Year’s Day in this Dickens bicentennial year, I already found myself wishing that either he or I had never been born.” Reading North Korea. Martin Luther online. “The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.” The world’s most expensive book? A good year for the Good Book.
January 4, 2012 On Music Sodad By Janine de Novais On December 17, Cesária Évora died of respiratory complications following a stroke and heart surgery. Thousands of mourners not only sang but also applauded loudly during the funeral procession. She had said, when announcing her retirement in September, “I’m sorry, but now I have to rest.” Before Cesária Évora, being Cape Verdean meant being from an invisible country. When I was growing up in Europe in the early eighties, the islands I called home did not appear on the maps we studied in school. Little obnoxious Belgian classmates would accuse me of inventing the place. My other friends had it easy. If someone asked where they were from, they could answer, “I am Belgian,” “I am Dutch,” “I am Moroccan.” They could respond, whereas I always found myself giving long-winded answers that included the phrases five hundred kilometers, west coast, and Senegal; and required cutting the air in the shape of Africa and picking a spot somewhere in the middle of an imagined ocean. There—that’s where I’m from. I might as well have said, Nowhere. I distinctly remember how this changed when Cesária Évora became a worldwide sensation. It was sudden and startling; I could now tell anybody I was Cape Verdean and expect them to reply with her name, as if it were a greeting: You’re Cape Verdean? Oh, Cesária Évora! She encompassed all I wanted to say about home: her voice was the easy pace, the maritime air, the raspy beauty, and the full sound of the port city of Mindelo, her hometown and mine. In the summer of 2005, when I was home in Mindelo for the summer, my grandmother took me along to visit Cesária. Read More
January 3, 2012 Nostalgia At the Gettin’ Place By Aaron Gilbreath If someone had asked my granddad where he got the chaps in this photo, he might have replied, “At the gettin’ place.” His speech was rich with colorful phrases. To him, a convincing salesman was someone who “could sell eggs to a chicken,” the relationship between a person’s actions and character best summarized with “Whatever’s in the well comes up in the bucket.” And when dismissing someone unsavory, he preferred the placid “Let ’em peck shit with the crows” to a crass “Fuck them.” So many of his sayings reflected elements of the hardscrabble, rural world that shaped him. The gettin’ place in this picture is a roadside stand in Apache Junction, Arizona. Largely known nowadays for its scenery and suburbs, back in 1947, Apache Junction was a fringe outpost east of Phoenix with a few cafés and tourist traps along the highway. Signs announced: Postcards! Indian jewelry! Pan for gold! Read More
January 3, 2012 Arts & Culture The Tokyo Diary By Dean Wareham Long time no e-mail and say hello Dean! How are you? Thank you very much for invite me at your concert on October in Tokyo. I am so happy to see you again at your concert. You looks very fine and almost satisfactory on your life. How long will you stay in Japan/Tokyo? Are you busy in Japan? About me: I am not fine after the earthquake very much. It was so terribly happen. I have felt so sad and scared for a long time. I become nervous. I have not good sleep, any time crying. And became unable to make music and sing song directly from after the earthquake. I am a little worry about that I wonder I never make music again, some time. Now I am better than before, but not perfect. Music is saved me any time. I wish/believe it is so, also this time. A. I never made it to Japan with Galaxie 500 in the summer of 1991 because I had quit the band in April, just a few months before we were scheduled to tour there. Unbeknownst to me, the promoter had already put tickets on sale for a Tokyo show. Unbeknownst to him, I had decided I didn’t want to be in my own band anymore. Twenty years later I am playing these songs again but with a different trio, comprising my wife, Britta, on bass guitar and a drummer, Anthony, from Youngstown. The very same promoter booked two shows for us in Japan. After a four-month postponement on account of the earthquake (the first time I’ve ever seen the act-of-God clause in my contract applied), I finally found myself on an American Airlines flight from JFK to Tokyo. Anthony is growing a beard, starting today. “That way people will think it was a really life-changing trip when I get home,” he says. Read More
January 2, 2012 Look Relatos By Pierre Gonnord Pierre Gonnord, Ali, 2006, color photograph, 58 1/3 in. x 49 1/5 in. Read More