May 16, 2019

On John Kane’s photography of Pilobolus and Momix.

John Kane, Where landscape becomes dreamscape, 2008. (All images copyright John Kane. Used by permission.)

In the hills of northwestern Connecticut there is a portion of the state, a rural and rural-suburban region, that I refer to as “Pilobo-land”: it includes Washington, New Milford, and other nearby towns, and has long been home to two of the world’s most celebrated dance-theater companies, Pilobolus and its sibling, Momix, as well as to a number of their most noteworthy friends, neighbors, and collaborators. It’s a community that tends to be on a first-name basis, even between individuals who have yet to meet directly. Pilobo-land, however, is more than a place; it’s also the overlapping worlds, on stages and in minds, that it creates. Just as Vladimir Nabokov dubbed his cherished intangible possessions “unreal estate” one might, in regard to Pilobolus and Momix, speak of “surreal estate.” It’s a place where landscape becomes dreamscape, where the rural and the theatrical are both strikingly pictorial, and no photographer has captured them more artfully or faithfully, through multiple decades, than resident John Kane. A selection of his work, a small number of images, dramatically enlarged, is now on display in the heart of the territory it documents, at the Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens, in the village of Washington Depot.

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May 16, 2019

Pinakothek

More Obscene than De Sade

By Luc Sante

In his biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past.

“Maybe it would be better if we stopped seeing one another. Maybe there is no remedy to our solitude because … we don’t love each other enough.”

Fotonovela, fumetti, roman-photo—the terms betray the fact that the form never got much traction in the Anglo-Saxon realm. There is no word for it in English, exactly. You could say “photo-comics,” but you’d risk being misunderstood. These narratives, often but not always romantic, are conveyed by means of photographs arrayed in panels on a page, with running text often in talk balloons. Their impact has been almost entirely restricted to countries that speak Spanish, Italian, or French; their readership is overwhelmingly female, at least in Europe. Their history formally begins in 1947 in Italy, in the magazine Grand Hotel, soon followed by its French sibling, Nous Deux; both magazines still exist. Fotonovelas flourished in the fifties and early sixties (into the eighties in Latin America), then began a slow decline that still refuses to yield to extinction.

Everything was all mixed up. She closed her eyes and thought she heard Daniel. “Your hair is so fine and aromatic!”

The culprit of their near-demise, of course, was television, in combination with social anxiety. Fotonovelas were associated with the poor and unlettered (my mother aspirationally ignored their weekly appearance in Femme d’Aujourd’hui, to which she subscribed for almost fifty years), the naive and sheltered and perhaps delusional. Roland Barthes, having written that “love is obscene precisely in that it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual,” went on to call Nous Deux “more obscene than de Sade.” Some years earlier, in a less militant phase, he noted of the fotonovelas that “their stupidity touches me” and ranked them with other “pictographic” forms, such as stained-glass windows and Carpaccio’s Legend of St. Ursula. There are even more specific antecedents, although no record of actual influence: Nadar’s famous conversation with the centenarian chemist Michel Chevreul was published as sequential captioned photographs in Le Journal Illustré in 1886, and La Folle d’Itteville, the collaborative photo-novel by Germaine Krull and Georges Simenon, was published in 1931. Read More

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May 16, 2019

On Music

A Mosh Pit of One’s Own

By Vivien Goldman

Fea. Photo courtesy of Blackheart.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Virginia Woolf writes in 1929. The same applies to being a musician, in that Woolf really means autonomy, making your own space in which to create, however you succeed in contriving it. The familiar riot grrrl cry “Girls to the front!” was designed to stop a leaping, frenzied, all-male mosh pit from preventing women from enjoying the show without getting smashed by a random pumping fist: a common complaint from girl punk fans.

Over and over, She-Punks shout for their own space, which translates as agency. No wonder, then, that groups like the Delta 5 in seventies Leeds and the Bush Tetras in early-eighties downtown New York both sang about getting people out of their face.

“Everyone called us a woman’s band, which is kind of a misinterpretation, because we always had two guys in the group,” sighs Bethan Peters, the Australia-born, New Zealand–raised bass player of the Delta 5 who really grew up as a law student/punk musician in Leeds. Delta 5’s “Mind Your Own Business” was released in 1979, a pivotal moment in England. The knock-on effect of repeated strikes led to what was called the Winter of Discontent, with its collapse of basic social services and approximation of anarchy, leading to the election of the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher. It was the abandonment of an idea of egalitarian socialism that had failed to align itself with the future of industry and business, particularly new technology. Its replacement was a hysterically optimistic conservatism. In a domino effect, Thatcherite promises of a more dynamic capitalism with home ownership for all led to the economic devastation of the old working-class industrial North of England. As its music reflects, Leeds was in the forefront of antiestablishment thinking, with a vigorous breed of no-nonsense student Lefties. Women’s rights were a default belief for them, in contrast to the chauvinism usually ascribed to old-school Northern blokes. Alongside singer Julz Sale, the band included drummer Kelvin Knight and guitarist Alan Riggs. The women of the Delta 5 blossomed alongside their supportive male bandmates, unlike so many women artists in the punk scene. Their spiky, metallic, grating guitar sound expresses that group of artists: rigorous, uncompromising, their arrogant conceptualism tempered with welcome sarcasm. Read More

May 15, 2019

On Poetry

Et in Arcadia Ego

By Anthony Madrid

Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Sannazaro, ca. 1514–18.

One winter morning, seventeen years ago, Nadya woke me up with the words “Anthony, get dressed.” She explained there was a house on 57th Street (Hyde Park, Chicago), with all the windows and doors open, students everywhere, people walking out with grocery bags of books. “Everything’s free. He just wants the house emptied ASAP.”

I got down there quick as I could, but most of what had been in the house had already taken a walk. I gathered that the previous owner of the place had been a high school French teacher, age 1,000. The current owner of the house, age I-wanna-say-sixty, was visibly drunk, grinning and gabby, on the porch. Somebody said he worked in Hollywood.

I went upstairs. There was a hill of books in the middle of the floor of a ransacked bedroom. I picked up a book and bagged it. Here are photos of the book I bagged, 9 February 2002:

Don’t get too excited. It’s a 1772 Venice print of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. As you can see, it’s bound in vellum. In the condition shown in the photograph, the book is probably worth a hundred bucks.

Any Italian literary person would know the name “Sannazaro” in the same way people in my village would know the name “Sir Philip Sidney.” I’m not saying their merits are equivalent, just talking about name recognition. Both writers are classics, but the fame of each is hobbled by his investment in Renaissance pastoral, a much-maligned department of literature.

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May 15, 2019

Notes on Pop

On Nighttime

By Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory.

Source: Thinkstock

I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured. Under the wrong circumstances, a hospital room can become a symphony of noises, each of them courting the worst of a person’s anxieties. There might be an incessant but inconsistent beeping, or the sounds of several machines doing the work of keeping a person alive. It is a privilege to be told that someone you love is going to survive. The message comes from some exhausted doctor, eager to give the good news after the tests, or the surgery, or whatever else. I have also been on the other side: knowing that I would be watching a person I love slowly fade until they vanished altogether, and understanding there’s nothing that can be done.

There’s something uniquely challenging about the moments in between, when the good news of a person’s continued living is delivered, but they still have to stay in a hospital room for a few more days before they can go home. From far enough away, underneath a wave of monochromatic hospital blankets, it can be hard to tell if someone is still breathing. Particularly if you’ve already imagined a world without them in it. If you’ve spent enough time imagining someone as dead, it can be difficult to visualize them as simply sleeping. I don’t love hearing the beeping and the sonic hiccups of hospital machinery, but it is worse not to hear anything.

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May 15, 2019

Arts & Culture

The Hidden Harper Lee

By Casey N. Cep

At the end of the profile that Harper Lee wrote of Truman Capote when he published In Cold Blood, she speculated that “Kansans will spend the rest of their days at the tantalizing game of discovering Truman.” It was an odd claim; Capote loved publicity so much that even before he died, there was little left to discover about his time in Kansas, or anywhere else. Lee, by contrast, was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries: not only what she wrote, but how; not only when she stopped, but why.

For seventeen years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, readers wondered what Lee would write next. In the years during and after she knocked on doors around Lake Martin, some knew exactly what but wondered when. Many people knew the title. One woman claimed to have seen a book jacket. Big Tom had heard from Lee more than once that the book was on its way to the publisher or that the galleys were already back from the printer. A friend of his remembered Lee saying, one night at dinner, that she had written most of it but was having trouble figuring out an ending. A friend of Lee’s in New York had a letter from her in which she said she’d written two-thirds of it before giving up. Someone claimed Louise had read the whole thing at her kitchen table in Eufaula and declared it better than In Cold Blood. An English professor at the University of Alabama heard from Lee’s old friend Jim McMillan that she had written the whole book but her publisher had rejected it because it was “too sensitive a subject.” McMillan’s daughter had heard it was all written, too, but locked away in a trunk, and would not be published until after Lee died.

Lee had arrived in Alexander City with such enthusiasm and chased her story with such determination that publication of The Reverend seemed imminent, but her second book, like the Second Coming, appeared to be delayed. She spent years working on The Reverend, some of them under the watchful eye of her sisterly Cerberus in Eufaula. Three years after that stint in Barbour County, her new literary agent, Julie Fallowfield, said, “It’s my understanding Miss Lee is always working.” Nine years later, Fallowfield told another reporter the same thing: “She’s always working on something.” Read More

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More Obscene than De Sade

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A Mosh Pit of One’s Own

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Et in Arcadia Ego

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On Nighttime

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