May 26, 2023 The Review’s Review “The British Male!”: On Martin Amis By The Paris Review Amis in Léon, Spain, 2007. Photograph by Javier Arce. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. To be British is a very complicated fate. To be a British novelist can seem a catastrophe. You enter into a miasma of history and class and garbage and publication—the way a sad cow might feel entering the abattoir. Or certainly that was how I felt, twenty years ago, when I entered the abattoir myself. One allegory for this system was the glamour of Martin Amis. Everyone had an opinion on Amis, and the strangeness was that this opinion was never just on the prose, on the novels and the stories and the essays. It was also an opinion on his opinions: the party gossip and the newspaper theories, the Oxford education and the afternoon tennis. The British male! Or at least the British bourgeois male, with his many father figures, both real and acquired. From certain angles, in certain photos, Amis looked like Jagger, and so he became the Jagger of literature. He was small, true—I feel a permanent pang of camaraderie at his line in The Pregnant Widow about a character who occupies that “much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—but he was also hypermasculine. It wasn’t just his subjects: the snooker and the booze and the obsession with judging all women “sack artists.” It wasn’t even just the style: an inability to leave a sentence alone without chafing at every verb, the prose equivalent of truffle fries. It was also the interview persona, all haughtiness and clubhouse universality, however much that could be contradicted in private by thoughtfulness and generosity of conversation. Read More
May 26, 2023 Overheard Fucked for Life: Bladee’s Paintings By Elena Saavedra Buckley Benjamin Reichwald and Jonas Rönnberg, OCB Dinitrol, 2023. Photograph by Olivia Kan-Sperling. This summer, we’re launching a series called Overheard—which is more or less about what it sounds like. We’re asking writers to take their notebooks to interesting events or places; they’ll record what they see, but mostly what they hear. In the first of the series, Elena Saavedra Buckley goes to a TriBeCa gallery opening for an exhibit of collaborative paintings by two Swedish hip-hop artists, and surveys the scene. The art show I was going to was risky to google, because it was called Fucked for Life and took place in the basement of a gallery called the Hole. It had been raining, and the humidity followed us downstairs, where the low-ceilinged room felt like the hull of a ship. The paintings reminded me of more focused, imaginative versions of the kind of thing your friend’s stoner older brother might make in his room—they had barely shaped demonic faces at their centers, orbited by tagged abstractions and blooms of neon, all lacquered and dripping. Some sat in ironic-seeming ornate gold frames; others hung against long stretches of loose fabric layered with graffiti, which had been made the day before and seemed to be releasing damp chemical wafts. This was the private opening of new collaborative paintings by Bladee and Varg2™, whose real names are Benjamin Reichwald and Jonas Rönnberg—two Swedish artists affiliated with a Nordic brand of underground hip-hop that’s been gaining steam since the mid-aughts. The two collectives at its center are the Sad Boys—helmed by the fairly famous Yung Lean—and Drain Gang, which was started by Bladee. I didn’t know much about Varg2™ before this weekend; he’s a techno producer who used to go by just Varg until a German metal band of the same name sent him a cease and desist. (He then released an album called Fuck Varg.) But I love the warbling, auto-tuned, alabaster Bladee—the second e is silent—who raps as often about Gnosticism and demons as he does about weed and being depressed. He has obsessive Zoomer fans like the rest of Drain Gang, though his are made especially rabid by how difficult he is to grasp. You can barely see him from behind his hair, hoodies, sunglasses, and blasted-out photo edits; one comment on a recent music video reads, “i don’t think i’ll ever get used to seeing high quality footage of bladee,” and a four-second clip of him saying “Drain Gang”—just the audio!—has 132,000 views. He says he was once struck by lightning in Thailand. Read More
May 23, 2023 On Sports The Playoffs: A Dispatch By Rachel B. Glaser Rachel B. Glaser, Ref Huddle, 2023. These years, the only basketball I watch is the playoffs, but I take them very seriously, because they’re so fleeting, dramatic, and sublime. I love the ever-changing narratives. The pregame handshakes. The postgame interviews. The controversial tweets. The stupid commercials one can’t help but memorize. I love when a player “gets hot” and their teammates keep funneling them the ball. The rarely seen, silent green siren that flashes when a coach uses their challenge to dispute a call. The sudden announcement of a technical foul and the way the mood shifts during the single, solitary free throw. I love catching glimpses of the players’ tattoos of babies, ancestors, dates, signatures, playing cards, angels, lions, phantoms, and crosses emitting sunbeams. I like when the refs touch each other in any way, but especially when all three of them put their arms around one another, huddling to discuss a difficult call. I like watching endless replays of fouls, trying to decide whether something was a block or a charge, or who touched the ball last. I like when the commentators disagree with the refs and when the broadcast cuts to the former ref Steve Javie in some NBA warehouse in New Jersey, standing in front of TV screens, calmly hypothesizing what the refs are discussing. I love the emotions, which in other sports are often hidden under the players’ helmets and hats. Jamal Murray’s arms outstretched in joy as he backpedals after nailing yet another three. Jimmy Butler’s and Grant Williams’s noses touching while they scream at each other like two feuding angelfish. Robert Williams’s head in his hands on the bench. Read More
May 19, 2023 The Review’s Review Shadow Canons: Danzy Senna and Andrew Martin Recommend By The Paris Review Snow on snow in Geneva, Switzerland, courtesy of jenny downing, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Over the last few years, I’ve been reading unappreciated and erased novels by Black artists from the twentieth century. They’ve helped me think about the idea of illegibility—about what the literary world has historically deemed too wild, complex, radical, experimental, or challenging to be included in the precarious and burgeoning Black canon. I’m also interested in why some promising writers give up after only one or two books. What conditions are required to be a writer over a lifetime? Some of these forgotten novels have since been rediscovered, like Nella Larsen’s twenties classics and Fran Ross’s 1974 Black feminist picaresque, Oreo. Others are still fairly unknown, like William Melvin Kelly’s dem and Willard Savoy’s Alien Land, his only novel, published in 1949, about mixed-race identity and passing. My most recent addition to this “shadow” canon is Alison Mills Newman’s Francisco. Originally published by Ishmael Reed’s press in 1974, it’s a California road-trip story about a Black woman artist, musician, and actress whose husband, the eponymous Francisco, is a Black indie filmmaker. Reading it, I can see how it rubs against that era’s prescribed notions of uplift, chastity, and even Black feminism in its celebration of Black love, sensuality, and joy. It doesn’t deal in the familiar tropes of trauma or alienation, and the female narrator is enthralled by her male lover at a time when narratives about Black men as absent or as abusers were more palatable to the mainstream. Thanks to New Directions, who reissued the book a couple weeks ago, it’s found its way back into the world in time for the author herself to experience its discovery. —Danzy Senna Read Danzy Senna on Robert Plunket here. Read More
May 18, 2023 Home Improvements Rear Window, Los Feliz By Claudia Ross Photograph by Claudia Ross. A sign on the dried grass in front of my apartment building named it the Isles of Charm, a label that suggested—correctly—the irony of the complex’s eventual decay. I moved in on a COVID-era deal, meaning I could afford a studio unit in Los Feliz, though only the kind with communal laundry machines that smelled like Tide pods and urine. The walls were thin, and that was how I met my neighbors. I shared a hallway and one tiled wall with Brian and Luciana. Brian and Luciana kept their door open all the time, to let the wind in. The distance between their lives and mine was a door screen and the stuttering hum of my air conditioner. I heard everything. They were older than I was, in their mid-thirties or forties. It wasn’t sex, though their arguments occasionally seemed to have an erotic fervor. Read More
May 17, 2023 Dispatch At Chloë’s Closet Sale By Sophie Kemp The line outside the Sale of the Century. Photograph by Sara Bosworth. In the high noon heat of the big hot sun, the intersection of Broadway and Lafayette was an ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail, a snake that was not a snake at all but actually a line of mostly women—who were nearly all young and definitely all well dressed—waiting to go inside a NoHo loft to go shopping. But okay—this was not some sort of run-of-the-mill sample sale. No one waiting in that line was there just because they were looking for a little something to do on a Sunday morning in May. These girls were in line because inside that loft was a woman named Chloë Sevigny. She was there because she was selling her clothes. These girls were waiting in line because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was Chloë’s stuff, at an event quite literally advertised, in the promotional materials, as the Sale of the Century. It is not that insane to wait in that ouroboros of a line for three hours, when you think about it. She’s Chloë: Harmony Korine’s muse, wearing bleached eyebrows in the movie Gummo. Dancing to the O’Jays’ “Love Train” in a subway car in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. Appearing naked and pregnant on the cover of Playgirl. She’s the kind of celebrity who can get her one million Instagram followers to wake up early on a Sunday to buy her toothpaste. The second the sale began, it was already a viral event—like Black Friday for fashion-school freaks. TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram were flooded with vibey haul videos, memes implying sartorially motivated violence, posts about new female friendships forged in line, allusions to the Bush presidency, and suggestions that maybe you could find a girl to date among the racks? And most importantly: a reminder that “if you’re in line for Chloë Sevigny’s storage-unit sale, please stay in line.” It is true that a specific subset of New Yorkers seemed to be saying (or posting), “chloë sale! chloë sale! chloë sale!” Read More