July 16, 2018 On Dance How Like the Mind It Is By Ellen O’Connell Whittet When Martha Graham was a child, she often visited her father’s office after work hours. One such day, she climbed on a pile of books so she could see the top of her father’s desk, where he was looking at a drop of water on a glass slide. When he asked her what she saw, she described it as “pure water.” He slipped the slide under the lens of a microscope, and she peered once more through the lens. “But there are wriggles in it,” she said in horror. “Yes, it is impure,” he replied. “Just remember this all your life, Martha. You must look for the truth—good, bad, or unsettling.” “Movement,” he taught her, “never lies.” It was a lesson she would recall years later, as she dictated her memoir, Blood Memory, at age ninety-six. “In a curious way, this was my first dance lesson,” Graham writes, “a gesture toward the truth. Each of us tells our own story even without speaking.” Read More
July 16, 2018 Arts & Culture How Finland Rebranded Itself as a Literary Country By Kalle Oskari Mattila The Finnish writers Johanna Sinisalo, Sofi Oksanen, and Laura Lindstedt. Here’s the thing about us Finns: we haven’t traditionally been very good at branding. In fact, seeing the brand-led global success stories originating from Sweden (IKEA, H&M, Spotify, Skype, Absolut Vodka, ABBA, Stieg Larsson, etc.), we’ve been overcome with jealousy. In Finland, we’ve been known only for Nokia phones. Engaging in excessive promotion doesn’t suit the quiet, self-effacing Finnish spirit; in Finland, you’re expected to do your job well and then let the work do the talking. In some cases, that’s worked for us: you bought a Nokia phone not because it made you cool but because you could drop it in the toilet or throw it across your apartment and somehow, miraculously, it still worked. But then Nokia went down the drain. Nokia’s undoing dovetails with the rise of the iPhone in 2007. The dwindling of Nokia, our biggest export, left an enormous dent in the Finnish economy. At the turn of the millennium, a staggering 4 percent of the Finnish GDP came from the company, and Nokia represented 21 percent of Finland’s total exports and 14 percent of corporate tax revenues. “It was and still is unprecedented,” Gordon Kelly writes in Wired. Nokia’s downfall left an even bigger dent on Finnish self-confidence. We were getting run over by Americans who were louder than we were. Around the time of the global recession, the Finns set out as a nation to find the “next Nokia.” It was all we talked about. In a small socially democratic nation like ours, where so much is shared, we felt a common responsibility over our exports. Anything and everything could be the next Nokia, we said, so long as we figure out how to brand it. Tech start-ups were the obvious choice, but cultural products emerged as a strong contender. Could we sell even more great design? Leverage our architecture? Finnish heavy metal started to do well in Germany and the Anglo American world. Then something decisive happened in Finnish literature. Read More
July 16, 2018 Arts & Culture Robin Williams’s Best Role By Chantel Tattoli Original art by Ellis Rosen. Last summer, the documentarian Marina Zenovich joined some friends for a beachside lunch in Saint-Tropez. She was on holiday from editing her film Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, which airs on HBO on July 16. The crudités basket arrived, and I—brave from the sun and the rosé—blurted, “Marina! Williams’s best animated container was Batty, not Genie.” Zenovich dragged endive through vinaigrette. “Who’s Batty?” she asked. And then, with the flawless patience of a master interviewer, she said, “Okay. Tell me.” This story takes place over a span of eight months in 1992. Robin Williams appeared in theaters for two animated feature films. First, he lent his voice to a lab-tortured bat in the indie environmental flick FernGully, about a tribe of fairies living in endangered nature; then, he voiced a high-octane jinni on retainer for three wishes in the Disney blockbuster Aladdin. The characters share traits, namely a deep-seated distrust of people. In the one case, people had experimented on him until his sonar failed, and in the other, they’d enslaved him on a wish-fulfillment circuit. Where Batty Koda’s head sprouted wires, Genie had passed ten thousand years in a common oil lamp because humans, it seemed, were real jerks. “They’re numb from the brain down,” Batty claims. Read More
July 13, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sexy Pulp, Blockheaded Heroines, and Terrifying Trees By The Paris Review Virginie Despentes’s ‘90s feminist punk pulp fiction makes for the best summer reading—all of her sparkling rage goes incandescent in the sunshine with a glass of something effervescent. Luckily, Feminist Press will be publishing Pretty Things (translated by Emma Ramadan) on August 14th. First published in France in 1998, it’s the story two identical twins: Claudine, the hyper-sexualized man-eating “pretty one,” and Pauline, the bitter reclusive “smart one,” who dresses in baggy sweaters and has never before shaved her legs. Beyond a body, the only thing the sisters seem to share is an explosive anger at men and a complete disdain for each other. When Pauline decides to impersonate Claudine, she pulls on the trappings of femininity like a heavy high camp drag routine, taking shaky steps through Paris’s 18th arrondissement in Claudine’s high heels. She never thought it was possible to go out like that without someone shouting, “Where’s the costume party?” Her appearance, legs on display, silhouette transformed. And no one realizes that she’s not at all like that. For the first time she understands: No girl is like that. It’s pulp in every sense: propulsively readable, violent, sexy, with all the satisfaction of an inevitable ending. And yet it’s also a feminist parable, blunt and unrelenting in its wrath, and it feels as fresh now as it would have ten years ago. Despentes—who is also a cultural critic and filmmaker—was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International for Vernon Subutex, which will be coming out from FSG this fall. If you haven’t read her yet, it’s time to start at the beginning. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
July 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Are You, Jack Whitten? By Jack Whitten Born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, Jack Whitten is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. Although Whitten initially aligned with the New York circle of Abstract Expressionists active in the sixties, his work gradually distanced from the movement’s aesthetic philosophy and formal concerns and focused more intensely on the experimental aspects of process and technique that came to define his practice. For six decades, he kept a log as a private exercise, recording and processing the experiences and experiments of his art making as well as reflecting on the way his studio life intertwined with his daily life. In the extract below, he recollects living and working in sixties New York. Jack Whitten in the early seventies on the corner of Broadway and Broome Street, New York, New York. Courtesy the estate of Jack Whitten. My first studio in New York was a storefront at 369 East 10th Street between Avenue B and Avenue C. Stanley’s Bar was on the corner of Avenue B at 12th Street. The Lower East Side in 1960 was a thriving young art community and Stanley’s Bar was our favorite meeting place. Every night of the week I could speak with Ishmael Reed, Calvin C. Hernton, David Henderson, and other members of the Umbra Group of Poets and Writers. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg often frequented the bar on off hours. Stanley, the Polish owner, knew Charlie Parker who was also a visitor in the early fifties. I loved to hear Stanley’s stories about Charlie Parker spending hours playing the jukebox and playing Polish polkas! Stanley, like Mike Fanelli who I would meet later in the sixties when I moved to the Lower West Side, was a friend of the artist. You could always get a hot meal on credit, cash a check without having a routine identification card; this was important because who had a bank account? The first time I ever showed a painting in public was at Stanley’s…a small group of collage paintings from 1963. The first painting I ever sold was to the superintendent of the building where my studio was: a Spanish fellow who often came in to admire what I was doing and paid $35 for a small 1961 painting as a Christmas present for his wife. Read More
July 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Harvard Color Detectives By Katy Kelleher Photo: Katy Kelleher. Inside the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, below a vast glass roof and above a neoclassical series of gray stone columns, hangs a fake painting. It’s a Mark Rothko—or, rather, a replica of a Rothko. The canvas is covered in moody indigo and vibrant crimson. It shows a square of color, patchy and imperfect. As the eye moves from left to right, there comes a moment when something changes; the colors diverge. On the right side of the piece, the colors are faded, washed pale from exposure to “a very bright light,” explains Narayan Khandekar, director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard. On the left side, the colors are vibrant and angry. “This half,” he says, waving one hand around the square of color, “is an exact copy of the Rothko painting as it would have appeared to the original owners.” This replica is an investigative tool, used by the art explorers at Harvard’s research center to help return the Rothko to its former glory. The original work was composed of a series of large violet and vermilion squares painted on five separate canvases and often referred to as the Rothko Harvard murals. Harvard commissioned the work in the early sixties because some within the institution felt that the university “lacked real modern art.” Rothko was honored and excited by the opportunity, and he accepted the commission with one caveat: he didn’t want to be paid for the paintings. “This is the first time I have been able to deliver commissioned work that I am satisfied with,” he said. It was also the first time his work had been displayed at Harvard, and for the former garment-district laborer, this felt like quite the coup. Read More