November 18, 2010 Arts & Culture Pills and Thrills: Fred Tomaselli’s Transports By Christian Viveros-Fauné Car Bomb, 2008. Photocollage, acrylic, resin on wood panel. 60″ x 60″. © Fred Tomaselli. Image courtesy of the James Cohan Gallery, New York. When Motherless Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem announced in April that he would be relocating from Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to the white-collar, academic enclave of Claremont, California (where he’d take over David Foster-Wallace’s teaching slot at Pomona College), the borough felt a twinge of old-time, Brooklyn Dodgers–style rejection. Fortunately for dwellers of Kings County—and others who hold resident New York bards dear—Fred Tomaselli was simultaneously putting the finishing touches on the installation of his latest crackerjack show: his unabashedly gorgeous, conceptually expansive midcareer retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Tomaselli is a Brooklynite in the same way most New Yorkers come by their adoptive heritage—as immigrants from ambition. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Orange County, within spitting distance of Disneyland’s Matterhorn, he moved to Los Angeles in 1981, only to leave for New York, and rusty, desperate Brooklyn, in 1985—“one last crazy stupid thing before I got old and lost my nerve,” he later recalled. Read More
November 18, 2010 Events Literary Trivia! By Thessaly La Force Do you happen to know in which London borough Zadie Smith was born? Or on which continent Nathan Englander set his first novel? If you know the answer to both of these questions, then write to me at this e-mail address. The first person to get both questions right will win two tickets to hear Zadie Smith and Nathan Englander speak at a benefit event for Matawi, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping young Somali and Kenyan refugee women attend college. The event will be on December 2 at 8:00 P.M. at the SVA Theater in Chelsea, with a reception to follow. Seats normally sell for $100; VIP tickets are $250 (and are still available online). So come on, you literary buffs—show me what you’ve got!
November 17, 2010 On Film Christopher Sorrentino on ‘Death Wish’ By J. D. Mitchell Charles Bronson plays Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974). Christopher Sorrentino’s Death Wish is a monograph on the controversial and eponymous 1974 action movie. It stars Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, an architect turned vigilante after his wife is murdered and his daughter is brutally assaulted in their New York City apartment. The book is the second installment in Soft Skull’s Deep Focus series, which invites contemporary writers to examine important popular films. I recently interviewed Sorrentino about his new book via e-mail. In the 1970s, Hollywood produced a number of superficially political, urban action films. I’m thinking of Dirty Harry, which you discuss at some length in the book, and, of course, blaxploitation cinema. What made you decide to revisit Death Wish in particular? Sean Howe approached me with the idea of writing about a movie that hadn’t been done to death, and we batted around a list of titles and genres ranging from eighties romantic comedies to zombie movies. The most prominent one we talked about was The French Connection. I really don’t like that movie, but it did get us talking about New York on film in the seventies. Among other reasons, Death Wish appealed to me because I’ve always been fascinated by Charles Bronson—since I was a kid. I didn’t have especially high expectations for the film itself, although Death Wish ended up surprising me a lot. When did you first see the film? Oh, probably when I was a teenager. Read More
November 16, 2010 A Letter from the Editor Rev Lav By Lorin Stein Decorator and diarist Rita Konig was recently commissioned to design a model penthouse for Manhattan House, the white brick landmark on 66th Street. We attended the unveiling of Rita’s apartment and were delighted to discover The Paris Review occupying the best real estate in the joint. Rita calls it her “Paris Review Loo,” or “Rev Lav” for short. We are equally delighted to report that the last issue got stolen two days later, along with a stash of Jo Malone bath salts. Some broker out there has no scruples—and a taste for the finer things.
November 16, 2010 Arts & Culture William Eggleston: For Now By Michael Almereyda William Eggleston, 1970. Photographer unknown. William Eggleston’s color photographs are among the most widely viewed, and widely admired, in the medium. But I wanted to survey Eggleston’s unseen, unpublished work—his B-sides, bootlegs, unreleased tracks—and to that end I made five trips to Memphis in the course of a year, rummaging through roughly 35,000 digital scans archived by the Eggleston Artistic Trust. The intention was to come up with a book of images rescued from near oblivion. The resulting selection—necessarily partial, narrow, subjective—favors pictures of people, many of them the photographer’s blood relatives and close friends, a few of which appear below. When I reviewed an early layout with Bill, he was pleased to be confronted with images he’d clean forgotten about, and he provided considered commentary. Read More
November 15, 2010 On Music The Tao of Prince By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Scott Penner If you’ve felt a frisson in the air lately, it’s probably because Prince has announced a new tour. The sky’s all purple, there are people running everywhere—this is exciting news. Prince should’ve faded long ago from the public consciousness, but his mystique is oddly resilient. Even his failures adhere to some kind of Princely internal logic. What makes him such a strange, potent pop-cultural force? The answer has something to do, I think, with his elusive persona. The most convincing explanation of Prince is a tautology, something you’d hear from a stoned teenager: Prince is, like, Prince. At the risk of sounding more like a stoned twenty-something, I’ll call him a man of dialectics, a brazen mess of binaries. He’s the living refutation of Lincoln’s “House Divided” address. A house divided against itself can stand, Prince says, and it’s a great place to throw a party. As early as 1981’s “Controversy,” he asked us if he was black or white, straight or gay, God fearing or navel gazing. By 1984, when Purple Rain came out, Prince was all slashes: black/white, straight/gay, male/female, rock/R&B, voluptuary/ascetic, cocaine/peyote, garish/understated, Hendrix/Little Richard, gothic/ecstatic, authoritarian/anarchist, apocalyptic/Panglossian, hip/square, selfish/selfless. Any thesis about him came bundled with its antithesis. He was so at odds with himself that the odds synthesized into one whole, perplexing person. Read More