February 17, 2022 The Review’s Review Ye’s Two Words By The Paris Review A red planet in the foreground with a green planet in the distance, set in a starfield. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock. In the wee hours of this morning, Ye shared a flurry of Instagram posts. There were videos advertising his proprietary Stem Player, which he claims will be the only place fans can listen to DONDA 2, the album he plans to release next week. “Go to stemplayer.com to be a part of the revolution,” he wrote. The Stem Player, which allows users to remix music by manipulating stems, or the individual, elemental parts of a song, is a disc covered with what looks like semitranslucent tan silicone, featuring blinking multicolored lights that correspond to the tempo and other aspects of a currently playing track. Its design is of a piece with Ye’s Yeezy aesthetic: earth tones complemented by bright hues, like a Star Wars scene set in Tatooine. His posts recall George Lucas’s series in their narrative messaging as well: Ye highlights the battle between an evil empire—in this case, the music and tech industries—and an intrepid revolutionary, himself. “After 10 albums after being under 10 contracts,” Ye explains, he is ready to control the means of distribution. “I turned down a hundred million dollar Apple deal. No one can pay me to be disrespected. We set our own price for our art. Tech companies made music practically free so if you don’t do merch sneakers and tours you don’t eat … I run this company 100% I don’t have to ask for permission … I feel like how I felt in the first episode of the documentary.” Read More
February 17, 2022 Studio Visit Don’t Delete: A Visit with Billy Sullivan By Lauren Kane Billy Sullivan’s studio. Photograph by Lauren Kane. Billy Sullivan’s studio, a fifth-floor walk-up on the Bowery, has a comfortable, elegant dishevelment. Hanging all around the space are some of the brightly colored figurative drawings and paintings he has been making since the seventies: portraits of his friends, lovers, and other long-term muses, rendered in loose, dynamic brushstrokes and from close, pointedly subjective angles. A still life of a bouquet and two coffee cups is an outlier among the faces. Near a work in progress on the wall is a table with a color-coded array of pastels, each wrapped in its paper label (mostly the artisan Diane Townsend, with a few older sticks from the French brand Sennelier); a metal cart bears tubes of oil paint, and carousels of slides are tucked away on low shelves. Tacked up on a set of folding screens is a display of Sullivan’s photographs and sketches, and next to that is a burgundy chaise longue adorned with a faux animal pelt. When I visited on an overcast afternoon in December, Sullivan had set out a bowl with grapes and a fig on the kitchen island, where he pulled an espresso for himself and poured a glass of water for me. Read More
February 17, 2022 The Moon in Full Hunger Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column, The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. The Large Figure Paintings, No. 5, Group 3, Hilma af Klint, 1907. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I In a driveway in San Jose, California, faded winter sun shone off the waxy tongues of the biggest jade plant I’d ever seen. The person I was with, whose mother’s heart had stopped four days before, unloaded things from a rental car. His stepfather, who I’d been warned was “a strange man,” pulled in behind us, back from collecting his wife’s ashes. He walked over with a cardboard box, anonymous and regular as any box you’d see on a doorstep, and stood by his stepson, holding this box. The man hefted the box in his hands and said, in a tone I cannot describe as anything other than merry, “You wouldn’t believe how much your mom weighs stripped of water and bodily liquid.” Something exited the person I was with, as though his bones had changed density, and he leaned back into the trunk of the car. The stepfather started to speak again—“Or fluid is the word, isn’t it, bodily fluid, blood and …”—and I moved toward him, opened the door to the kitchen, and held it for him. “Here,” I said, and he walked through it and the door swung closed and through the plexiglass I watched him place the box on the kitchen table, next to a bowl of persimmons and a bouquet of white carnations neighbors had sent in sympathy. Read More
February 15, 2022 Redux Redux: Couples at Work By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Working at his place in the afternoon, and other notes from the archive on writing and romance. If you enjoy these free interviews, and the portfolio, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Jane and Michael Stern, The Art of Nonfiction No. 8 Issue no. 215 (Winter 2015) INTERVIEWER When you started writing about road food, did you think it was of a piece with the folkways movement that was going on then? MICHAEL STERN If we didn’t at the start, we very quickly did. The year after Roadfood was published, we published Amazing America. And in Amazing America there are lots of folk-art environments and stuff like that. I think when we absolutely started, when Roadfood was called Truck Stoppin’, we weren’t thinking that it had anything to do with pop culture or folk art, but as soon as we got on the road and started finding guys like Howard Finster and that guy in Wisconsin— JANE STERN —the guy who collected— JANE AND MICHAEL STERN —the oil rags— MICHAEL STERN —not only did we very quickly realize that that was our passion, but I think it really helped us, in some way, to get a perspective on the food we were writing about. It wasn’t just truck-stop food. It was food that was a cultural phenomenon as well. Read More
February 14, 2022 Fiction Sephora on the Champs-Élysées By GauZ Illustration by Matthew Fox (@matteo_zorro). New Recruits The vast office in which the group of Black men find themselves is open-plan. No walls interrupt the space separating them from the glass cage emblazoned with the three letters—CEO—that mark the territory of the alpha male. A huge picture window generously affords a view over the rooftops of Paris. Forms are handed out, left, right, and center. Here, they are recruiting: recruiting security guards. Project-75 has just been granted several major security contracts for a variety of commercial properties in the Paris area. They have an urgent need for massive manpower. Word spread quickly through the African “community”: Congolese, Ivorian, Malians, Guineans, Beninese, Senegalese. Everyone takes out the various papers required for the interview: the identity card, the traditional résumé, and the CQP, a kind of official permit to work in security. Here, it is portentously dubbed a diploma. Then there is the cover letter: “To Whom it May Concern,” “part of a dynamic team,” “a profession with excellent career prospects,” “in keeping with my skills and training,” “please be assured,” et cetera. In a place like this, the medieval circumlocutions and ass-kissing phrases of motivational letters become risible. After all, everyone in the room has a powerful motivation, though what it is may be very different depending upon which side of the glass one finds oneself on. For the alpha male in his glass cage, it is maximum turnover. Hiring as many people as possible is part of the means. For the Black procession outside, it is an escape from unemployment or a zero-hour contract by any means necessary. Security guard is one of those means. The training is absolutely minimal, employers are all too willing to overlook immigration status, the morphological profile is supposedly appropriate: Black men are heavyset, Black men are tall, Black men are strong, Black men are deferential, Black men are scary. It is impossible not to think of this jumble of noble-savage clichés that is atavistically lurking in the mind of every white man responsible for recruitment, and in the mind of every Black man who has come to use these clichés to his advantage. But that is not at issue this morning. No one cares. And, besides, there are Black men on the recruiting team. Everyone fills out his form with a modicum of diligence. Last name, first name, sex, date and place of birth, marital status, Social Security number: this will be the most demanding intellectual challenge of the morning. Even so, a few of the men glance at their neighbors’ forms. Someone coming out of a long period of unemployment lacks self-assurance. Read More
February 11, 2022 The Review’s Review Mathematics of Brutality By The Paris Review Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,” goes Mao’s famous dictum. “A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.” The aftereffects of this kind of violence on a nation’s citizens is the subject of the South African writer C. A. Davids’s new novel How to Be a Revolutionary, out from Verso this month. In chapters that crisscross between present-day Shanghai, apartheid-era Cape Town, Beijing during the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests, and a series of McCarthy-era letters from Langston Hughes to a South African friend, Davids follows the friendship of Beth, a South African diplomat, and Zhao, a Chinese writer, as they come to terms with the moments of betrayal, naivete, and political cowardice in both of their pasts. Read More