February 22, 2011 Studio Visit Joe Bradley By Stephanie LaCava The artist Joe Bradley has his studio in an old pencil factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There is no buzzer. You must call his cell phone to be let in, and then ride a manual elevator to the white concrete space where he works on the fifth floor. Bradley was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and was recently featured in two solo shows. I visited the thirty-five-year-old artist to talk about his evolving process as a painter. Photograph by Michael Nevin. This building is called the Pencil Factory. When you go outside, there are these giant pencils on the wall. It’s got a lot of light, and it’s quiet and big enough. You can have six or seven paintings up at the same time and don’t have to shift them around. I don’t go into painting with any kind of plan. The ones I am happiest with I have no idea how I arrived at. The best ones are always a real surprise. For most of the paintings I use unprimed canvas and oil paint. I like drawing when the canvas is on the floor, and then I’ll pin it up and see what it looks like on the wall. Sometimes, I turn it over and work on the other side. The nature of the oil paint is that it kind of bleeds through the canvas so you have some sort of residual marks seeping through from the other side and influencing the composition. Photograph by Michael Nevin. Read More
February 18, 2011 Arts & Culture Auguri, Frederick Seidel! By The Paris Review James Brown, Planet (Pink and Grey) VI, 2006, oil and pencil on linen. Frederick Seidel has received some unusual tributes in recent years. Writing in n+1, Philip Connors credited Seidel’s poetry with giving him the courage to quit his job. Wyatt Mason made a passionate case for Seidel’s Poems 1959–2009 in The New York Times Magazine—not a publication known for its attention to verse. There’s been a poem dedicated to Seidel in The New Yorker. The London Review of Books has likened him to a YouTube person in a bunny suit, while fellow Paris Review staffer Dan Chiasson compared Seidel’s effusions to a garden hose. In a nice way. Now the artist James Brown has published a collection of works on paper, canvas, cardboard, and linen inspired by Seidel’s poem “Into the Emptiness.” The volume has come to our attention just in time to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday, tomorrow, of our most youthful editor. § James Brown, Into the emptiness I, 2009, mixed media on cardboard. Read More
February 18, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Grown-up Writers; Reading Parameters By Lorin Stein Is there an age requirement in submitting to magazines? I am seventeen years old, and I’ve wanted to be a professional writer since I was thirteen. I feel like I am ready to submit my work to publications like The Paris Review. But it seems like the normal age to be published these days is your forties, and no offense to those writers, but I think when teens hear about a young-adult novel or material of that nature, it would be nice to also know that it was written by an actual teen. (And I don’t think we should have to go to a teen magazine just for that.) So why is the norm so close to the forties and fifties? Is it really for the maturity of the work? If that’s the case I think I would fit in without a problem. —T Oh, T! I remember feeling exactly the same frustration. Unfortunately—and it is unfortunate, when you’re sitting there waiting for high school to end—grown-ups enjoy two big advantages over teenagers, when it comes to writing: They know what it’s like to be a kid—and also what it’s like to be older. (It is constantly surprising, how different it is to be older.) And they just have more practice writing and reading. They know which rules it’s okay to break and when to break them. Nothing teaches you that but time and practice. If I were you, I wouldn’t turn up my nose at the teen zines. But to answer your original question, I don’t think there’s any age requirement for submitting to grown-up publications. And if there is, to hell with it—that’s a rule you should go ahead and disregard! Read More
February 18, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Literary Video Games, Return of ‘Spy’ Magazine By The Paris Review The other evening at East Village Books I picked up a used copy of Dawn Powell’s 1936 novel, Turn, Magic Wheel, stopped at Second Avenue and Seventh, and settled in to the opening scene … only to realize that I’d been walking in the footsteps of the writer-hero, Dennis Orphen—and that he, too, had just come to a halt at Second and Seventh. I half expected him to walk in the door. Powell has a way of collapsing the decades between one literary New York and another. Orphen’s sin, to have used a friend as material, is as old as his profession and feels as fresh as Thursday night. —Lorin Stein I’ve been playing a lost Nintendo video game that was supposedly found at a yard sale and purchased for fifty cents. (In fact, it was recently created by San Francisco-based developer Charlie Hoey.) Why the mention? It’s modeled after The Great Gatsby. Says the Web site: “You’re not in the middle west anymore, son. Welcome to the Wild West Egg.” The Atlantic writes, “At least now we know why Gatsby couldn’t make it to the blinking green light: Sand Crabs.” —Sam Dolph It seemed like a good idea at the time: the full publication archive of Spy magazine is now available via Google Books. —David Wallace-Wells I’ve been thumbing through the pages of Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive, an illustrated biography about Marie and Pierre Curie. There’s a show of the book currently at the New York Public Library (where Redniss did much of her research as a Cullman fellow). Not long ago, Dwight Garner praised the book in the Times, saying, “Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris that’s become a dream city.” Spooky and beautiful—Redniss’s work is worth taking a look. —Thessaly La Force Read More
February 17, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Nico Muhly, Composer, Part 2 By Nico Muhly This is the second installment of Muhly’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. Photograph by Samantha West. DAY FOUR 10:15 A.M. While I slept, iTunes seems to have downloaded the complete collected works of MNDR. I must have gone on a pre-ordering binge, because it also is trying to download the film of Never Let Me Go. I’m listening to “I go away,” from the MNDR track. I like electronic-based slowish tracks; I loved that Capslock track off the MIA album whose title I dare not reproduce here. I wish there were a more poetic way to describe the rhythmic passage of time than “tick tock.” I’m looking at this queue: yet more SVU and the new Top Chef are coming! I fly tonight back to New York so maybe I can sneak one of these in on the plane. 3:00 P.M. Good God! The BBC has a story about the “history” of chai in India. The segment begins with a twelve-second history of tea that elides over the idea of Empire so quickly it feels like a blow to the solar plexus. I reach a Kiplingesque encounter with a terra-cotta cup maker in Kolkata just as we reach the rental car return, so I don’t have a moment to jot down who was responsible for this. They should write opera libretti! I do wonder who is responsible for radio’s “generic ethnic background noise.” I’m convinced that if you slow down the audio and remove the host’s voice, you’ll hear the same group of five people chattering—be it a story about Inuit fishing quotas or the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. 9:00 P.M. A calm post-flight evening of take-out and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. I am preparing for Saturday night, which is when I will be seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adams’s Nixon in China with a bunch of friends. I have the score perched next to my computer. I watch the first twelve minutes of an episode of Top Chef with Isaac Mizrahi saying outrageous things to the cheftestants and pass out. Read More
February 16, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Nico Muhly, Composer By Nico Muhly Photograph by Samantha West. DAY ONE 10:45 A.M. Reykjavík, Iceland. I wake up later than I want, and desperately read, again, the last twenty pages of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star. By this point, the plot has turned into a fun cross-Benelux car chase. I myself have just come from a slightly awkward but ultimately fun week in Benelux, where I was resident at a chamber music festival, and every time I go to the Netherlands I reread this book. I make special digital note, this time, of some good descriptions: “minatory Flemish motets.” 3:30 P.M. Oh my God, there is an Ali Farka Touré album I don’t own: Red & Green. I’m buying it right now. I am going to also take this opportunity to rebuy the Toumani Diabaté album Djelika. I am, as always, fascinated by the weird intervalic overlap between Morricone scores and Malian music. I’m making a note to go know more about this. It is also noted that Mio, the brother of Valgeir, both of whom I am making a ton of records with this week in Iceland, has pants very similar in cut to those featured on the cover of Red & Green. DAY TWO 5:45 A.M. I wake up in a panic—an anxiety dream about an e-mail argument, which is prescient given the early-morning realities of my inbox. To calm myself, I buy music online manically. The new Iron and Wine cover is neurosis-provoking neon, but I buy it anyway. While listening on headphones, I fall back asleep and iTunes continues and mysteriously plays Paula Deen’s “Thanksgiving Special,” in which she makes oyster dressing. I actually like her accent, although the way she pronounces the word for (as in, “I’ll let this fry up here for a minute”) strikes me as uncharacteristically Vietnamese. Read More