April 28, 2011 On Music One New Wagnerite at a Time By Catherine Steindler The Ride of the Valkyries in Robert Lepage’s new production of Die Walküre. Photograph by Ken Howard, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera. When Mark Twain spent a week attending performances of Richard Wagner’s operas in Bavaria, he complained that “seven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.” But by the end of his ordeal, he conceded it to be “one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.” That was in 1891. This year, the Metropolitan Opera is rolling out a new production of Wagner’s famed four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, and I’m here to tell you that whether or not you like opera, this is an experience that is not to be missed. On Friday, I saw Die Walküre, the second of the four operas, and was reminded that the Ring is not only one of the most magnificent achievements of human creativity but also, contrary to reputation, one of the most accessible. I don’t fully understand why the Ring came to be considered impenetrable. It is long, I’ll grant that. In 1853, having completed the libretto for the Ring, Wagner wrote to his friend, Franz Liszt, “Mark my poem well, it holds the world’s beginning and its destruction.” This isn’t just Wagner’s notorious megalomania speaking. The cycle does tell the story of the origin of human conflict, the destruction of the human world, and everything else in between. Perhaps it’s these enormous themes that are responsible for the Ring’s reputation. But still, they’re nothing you don’t find in your standard myth. Perhaps it’s the dead seriousness with which Wagner approaches his ambitious enterprise that makes him a little perplexing, even suspicious, in these times—he hasn’t a trace of cool irony to protect him against mockery. Thank God. Whatever the reason, the Ring appears on the horizon like a monumental citadel, but venture just a little closer and you’ll see that the points of entry are as plentiful as the structure is immense. Indeed, because the Ring contains multitudes, you can use it to think through whatever’s on your mind: the environmental consequences of greed, your ugly competitive streak, why Gadhafi won’t just throw in the towel, your latest breakup—it’s all there. Herewith the half-dozen reasons I’ve been using on my friends to lure them to the Ring … Read More
April 27, 2011 At Work Yoram Kaniuk on ‘Life on Sandpaper’ By Joshua Cohen Wounded in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Yoram Kaniuk moved to Greenwich Village to become a painter. Nineteen and broke, he came to center a rarefied circle of fellow painters, musicians, writers, and actors—Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Willem de Kooning, Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, among others. Writes Kaniuk, “I was in the lives of these people by mistake.” Though he may have played a minor role, Kaniuk’s memoir, Life on Sandpaper, is an unforgettable telling of his New York decade, the 1950s. His newest nonfiction book, 1948, not yet translated to English, recently won the 2010 Sapir Prize for Literature. Not long ago, I spoke to Kaniuk about Life on Sandpaper, which was published by Dalkey Archive Press this February. When did you begin working on this memoir? In the seventies I used to write for a paper here in Israel, and every weekend I used to publish a story. I wrote many of these stories, not exactly in this form, and when I didn’t have any more true stories, I had to invent them. And then at the start of 2000, I started to work them into Between Life and Death [the memoir’s Hebrew-language title]. I didn’t know what it would mean to people here in Israel, but it was amazing how much the young people loved this book. It opened a door for me—for my novel The Last Jew, and for other books. Today it seems that there are more Israelis outside of Israel than in Israel itself. Soldiers taking a gap year in Europe, in India, in Tibet; scuffling jazz musicians and installation artists in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn; Israelis “making the business” (in Israeli English) in Panama and Buenos Aires. There once was a stigma attached to this expatriation. When one goes to Israel, one literally “goes up,” or “ascends”—makes aliyah. When one leaves one is said to have “gone down,” or “descended”—yerida. Was there the same stigma associated with leaving Israel back in the 1950s, when you came to that other Jewish homeland, Greenwich Village? The Israelis coming to America when I came, which was in 1951, were people who had fought in the 1948 war, which was a very tough war, the worst war Israel ever had; almost an entire generation was killed. We came to New York because we were never able to find a way, in Israel, of letting out the grief, the demons. Also, you have to remember that I had been wounded, physically. My first years in America, I didn’t think about Israel at all, I didn’t think about the war, I didn’t remember anything, I was completely in a daze. And later I understood that I had to have my autonomy. But I should say that many Israelis who were there with me in New York, or even in Los Angeles, eventually came back. Still there was a feeling that Israelis at that time didn’t know what their homeland was. Read More
April 27, 2011 Look Ida Kar By Nicole Rudick Ida Kar, self-portrait with a painting by John Christoforou and an assemblage by Heinrich Heidersberger, 1962. After moving from Tambov, Russia, to Egypt with her Armenian parents in 1921, Ida Kar spent five years in Paris. She had been educated at the prestigious Lycée Français in Alexandra, but her stint on the Left Bank, at age twenty, formed the foundation of her education as an artist. André Breton had written the first Surrealist manifesto there four years earlier, and the city was a hotbed of artistic experimentation. In the studio of a young German photographer named Heinrich Heidersberger, Kar made her first foray into photography. She returned to Egypt in 1933, just as that nation’s artists began developing their own iteration of surrealism (André Breton famously wrote to poet Georges Henelin, in 1936, “The imp of the perverse, as he deigns to appear to me, seems to have one wing here, the other in Egypt”), and dedicated herself to the medium. When the newly married Kar moved to London in 1945, she wasted little time in initiating her photographic career and cultivating the kind of artistic community she had known in Cairo. She began making high-contrast, tightly cropped commercial portraits of theater actors in 1947; by the end of fifties, her roster of sitters had come to include many of the era’s most significant painters, sculptors, authors, poets, playwrights, and composers, among them T. S. Eliot, Noël Coward, L. S. Lowry, and Somerset Maugham in London; Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Marie Laurencin, and Alberto Giacometti in Paris; and Dmitry Shostakovich, Leonid Leonov, Ernst Neizvestny, and Ilya Ehrenberg in the Soviet Union. In 1960, Kar mounted a groundbreaking solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; hers was the first retrospective show of a photographer at a London gallery. Of it, she boasted, “We are going to make this show the most exciting photographic event since ‘The Family of Man.’” The comparison with Edward Steichen’s thorough 1955 survey of documentary photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art was apt. The Whitechapel show solidified Kar’s reputation as documentarian of cultural life, while rousing critics to debate photography’s aspirations to the level of high art. “I don’t think it is an art,” insisted David Sylvester, a fan of Kar’s work, “because the essence of art is that the artist creates his forms and does not select them: photography reproduces the form.” Kar proved unmoved by the debate. Until her death in 1974, she continued her work, making sensitive portraits of the St. Ives artistic community, of Fidel Castro and Cuban writers, and of any number of intrepid, purposeful women artists. Click on the images below to open a gallery of Kar’s photography. Bertrand Russell, 1953. Bridget Riley, 1963. Dame Barbara Hepworth, 1961. Doris Lessing, 1958. Iris Murdoch, 1957. Terry Frost, 1961. Hussein Shariffe, 1960. Marc Chagall, 1954. Laura del Rivo, 1961. “Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer, 1908–1974” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through June 19. All images © National Portrait Gallery, London
April 26, 2011 Arts & Culture Put Up This Wall! By David Zax A screenshot of Salty slapping Dan Safer. Last Saturday evening, before a small audience gathered in the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, a man named Salty repeatedly slapped a man named Dan. “Less on the chin, more on the cheek!” cried Dan Safer, a choreographer, standing inside the masking-taped square that had been marked off as the stage and steeling himself for yet another blow. With a red bandanna tied around his neck, Safer sported muttonchops, a handlebar mustache, and tattoos that ran the length of his arms. The fellow named Salty obliged, smacking Safer again and again until Safer’s face turned bright red and he grew dizzy, widening his stance to stable himself. “I love you!” blurted Salty, a slight blond figure in maroon corduroys and a yellow-and-blue-striped tie, after landing a particularly fierce slap. “How we doing on time there, Rob?” Safer now asked of Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House and the emcee of the night’s event, programmed by the French cultural institute Villa Gillet for an ongoing series called Walls and Bridges. Spillman had been conscripted as timekeeper for the current “piece.” He stood off to the side, a reluctant accomplice in this sustained act of public sadomasochism. Read More
April 25, 2011 At Work Meghan O’Rourke on ‘The Long Goodbye’ By Thessaly La Force Photograph by Sarah Shatz. In 2008, on Christmas Day, Meghan O’Rourke’s mother, Barbara, died after a two-and-a-half-year battle with advanced colorectal cancer. O’Rourke was lost in her grief, which she found overwhelming and unlike anything she had ever experienced. Her book, The Long Goodbye, is her attempt to understand her grief, documenting the years before and after her mother’s passing. In reading The Long Goodbye, I braced myself for the tears (which, yes, did come) but, by its end, discovered that O’Rourke had written a beautiful memoir about a daughter’s love for her mother. We spoke recently about her book; an edited version of our conversation appears below. How did this book come about? I started writing things down, for myself, before my mother died. It was a private recording of what was happening. Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world. My mother was going through this really intense experience: she had been sick, she had been diagnosed with advanced cancer two years before she died, and she went into a remission that was unusual. Then the cancer came back—it went to her brain, which again was not common for the cancer that she had. It was bizarre to see someone change so radically and so quickly; I had to write it down in order to not go crazy with the strangeness of it all. After my mother died, I was supposed to be writing my column at Slate, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had thought of grief as being sad, but instead it was like being suddenly aware of all the luminous, fragile elements of existence. It was also lonely in its way. My editor at Slate said, “Why don’t you write about what you are going through.” I didn’t think what happened to me was extraordinary. But it was what I was obsessed with, and so I started to shape what I was experiencing into a piece. I was very unprepared for grief. It was isolating. There was no language for it, and no language around it—but I felt that I was in contact with all of these deeper realities; even the sky seemed strangely bluer. But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone. I came across a quote of Iris Murdoch’s: “The bereaved have no language with which to speak with the unbereaved.” I thought, What if you could find a language that would describe the experience, with all its mysteries? Read More
April 22, 2011 Look The Speed of Motion By Harold Edgerton Moving Skip Rope, 1952, black-and-white photograph, 6 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches. Credit: Harold Edgerton: The Anatomy of Movement, by Gus Kayafas and José Gómez Isla.