February 26, 2019 On Sports They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Our favorite poet/sports correspondent is back, this time with a meditation on Lionel Messi. Lionel Messi/ Photo: David Ramos On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville. On an overcast morning in New York. Sometime past midnight in Tokyo. A Saturday in Abidjan. This is how you live now. This is how you have lived for nearly half of your life. You’re in one place, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places; at times encircled, at times cursored, at times turned into a digital shroud of statistics that mark how fast you’ve run at your fastest. The shorn-smooth grass you walk on—you mostly walk, like a painter let loose on a meadow, while everyone else runs as though late for a meeting—is black ice for the rest of us. We see you there, infected with data. We watch you in the simulacrum. We love you because the simulacrum tells us to love you. We hate you because the simulacrum tells us to hate you. The pontificators and the screamers have their say. Some of us have no interest in you, but the simulacrum makes sure we know who you are. We parse from all of this what we consider pleasure: love, hate, indifference. You’re standing in one place, one patch of grass on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. A ball floats in the air toward you. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places. Your name is stamped between your shoulder blades. You turn your back away from the ball. We all know who you are. You balance yourself and focus. What you’re about to do has no name. Read More
February 26, 2019 On Music A Tribe Called Quest Is Gone, but Hip-Hop Isn’t By Hanif Abdurraqib Lil Uzi Vert. Photo: Spike Jordan. Photo courtesy of Atlantic Records. I spent a lot of 2017 in schools, and I imagine that I will spend a lot of future years in schools. Because of this, I spend a lot of time talking to people younger than I am, and I spend a lot of time talking to them about music. This creates an interesting discussion point for me—I spent 2017 remembering that when I was young and wanted to talk to someone older about music, I mostly wanted validation that the thing I liked was not, in fact, awful. This had mixed results in my teenage years. My love of the so-called “shiny suit era” had its detractors, many of them older than me, many of them longing for the days of what they imagined to be “real hip-hop.” The question I spent most of my time answering in 2017 was how I felt about what is now called “mumble rap” in the popular discourse—rappers who eschew lyrical prowess in the name of drum-heavy trap beats and melodic choruses. If there’s one thing that’s for sure, changing trends in music will forever have their scapegoats, and because the trends in rap music shift so rapidly, scapegoats appear and then are replaced by new scapegoats nearly every two or three years. Shiny-suit rap was a scapegoat once, back after Biggie was murdered, and Tupac murdered before that, and conservative media outlets were delighting in what surely was soon to be the death of the genre they hated most. But then songs about money and partying and living like no death would ever arrive for you ended up on the radio. Auto-Tune was a scapegoat for a while, until Kanye West made 808s & Heartbreak in 2008 and people decided Auto-Tune was a worthwhile artistic endeavor—until Jay-Z released the song “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” in the summer of 2009, and then it was done for good. “Mumble rap” is the most active and vigorous scapegoat rap has had in years, in part because the internet—particularly social media—has created a landscape for it to thrive and be a hotly debated topic, engaging with ideas of language and whether or not rappers should have to adhere to them, and whether or not this so-called mumble rap is actually pushing the genre forward, past some of its bowing to establishments. The real truth is that the rappers don’t actually mumble. Rappers like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, and Young Thug aren’t really aesthetically or sonically similar, and all of them rap fairly clearly. What people are really angling at is the drug-drenched persona of young rappers who seem to, as they put it, have no substance. What people are really pointing at is what they believe to be a lack of lyricism. I don’t necessarily rebuke this in its entirety, but I rebuke the idea that my pals and I weren’t young once and didn’t listen to shit that moved us to dance or get reckless no matter what the rapper was saying. I rebuke the idea that every lyric written when I was a young hip-hop lover was sent down from the heavens and written with a golden pen. I rebuke the idea that the “turn up” is new or something that anyone in need of it should be ashamed of. Or the idea that the turn up isn’t flexible. That it doesn’t happen in the middle of a gospel song on Sunday, or in a trap house on any day when people in the hood get paid, or in a nightclub in New York when the horn player catches a good solo and the band lets him air it out until he’s gotten all he can out of his instrument. Read More
February 25, 2019 Comics A Mail Carrier Bikes the Wasteland By Gébé The unnamed protagonist of Gébé’s Letter to Survivors is a mail carrier who traverses a barren, desertlike landscape on a bicycle. Because this story takes place in the aftermath of some probably nuclear apocalypse, he wears a hazmat suit, his mask protruding comically like a duck’s bill. He travels from bunker to bunker, shouting the contents of strange letters down to former suburbanites huddled in dim squalor. Never before available in English, Letter to Survivors has just been published by New York Review Comics in a translation by Edward Gauvin. Below, the postman arrives with a message describing a painter who gets paid by a mysterious fat cat to black out, square by square, an original Modigliani. Read More
February 25, 2019 Arts & Culture The Beauty of Invisibility By Jennifer Wilson Modified from John Singer Sargent’s Lady Agnew Of Lochnaw, 1892 Akiko Busch is a writer and a swimmer. She teaches environmental writing at Bennington College and seems to live as off the grid as one can in 2019. Much of her writing feels drawn from understated encounters with nature and the pastoral sublime, such as observing water eels in a brook or chopping vegetables in a Hudson Valley home. Her 2009 book The Uncommon Life of Common Objects has an entire chapter devoted to vegetable-peelers. So when her new essay collection, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, touches on things like Barbie dolls that can connect to WiFi and smart refrigerators, the reader begins to worry that no one, not even Aniko Busch, can order a new vegetable-peeler online without worrying who’s tracking her and why. In How to Disappear, Busch contemplates how government surveillance, smart technology, and our own desire to be seen have all contributed to a perhaps irrevocable loss of personal privacy. She does this circuitously, eschewing the alarmist and Luddite tropes that encumber many studies of our technology-dependent culture. Instead, Busch meanders across a broad cultural landscape to locate the source of our beliefs, fears, and desires about invisibility. She looks at the role of invisibility in children’s stories (from imaginary friends to Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak) and the Huldufólk, the invisible people who are thought to live inside Iceland’s lava rocks. She visits a physics lab at the University of Rochester where scientists study “transformation optics,” the practice of bending light waves around things to render them invisible. Another essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway to think through aging, and the invisibility of older women. Busch explores camouflage, anonymity and unsigned works of art, and police surveillance of minorities. By drawing from natural science, children’s literature, folklore, art history, and more, Busch takes the timely issue of privacy and makes it timeless. Read More
February 25, 2019 Arts & Culture The Poetic Consequences of K-Pop By Emily Jungmin Yoon Official poster for BTS album “Love Yourself Answer” Once, as a preface to reading my poem “Bell Theory,” I jokingly told the audience that I had been teased for my English when I was younger, when it wasn’t trendy to be Korean, or rather, before the boy band BTS made Korean cool. A few people chuckled and smiled out of either discomfort or kindness, and I found myself wanting to cry as I read the poem about my clumsy English, colonized Koreans’ Japanese, and the cruel consequences of failures of tongue. I had never gotten emotional during my own reading before. I tried to control the quiver in my voice and fingers. If anyone noticed, they didn’t say anything, out of either discomfort or kindness. I moved to Victoria, BC, Canada from Busan, Korea when I was just a few months shy of eleven years old. I knew only how to say, “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” when someone asked how I was doing. My older sister and my mother, who had quit her job to come with us, knew only that same phrase. There’s a joke that if a Korean gets hit by a car, or otherwise hurt, and an English speaker exclaims, “Oh my God, are you okay?” the Korean will automatically say, “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” So for a while, that is what we were, to everyone, always: fine. My father stayed behind in Busan to continue producing income for our family. In a way, it felt like we had all sacrificed something, even me, who did not quite understand why we had to leave. Yet, undeniably, we were extremely privileged. The three of us had left for Canada because my parents wanted my sister and I to be educated in a system free of the intense cramming and competition that Korean students are infamously subject to. They wanted us to have more ease and less pressure to pursue our dreams, whatever those dreams ended up being. Our language, however, marked us immediately as strange, even stupid or uninteresting. We were strange because people could tell we were from elsewhere. We were stupid because we could not express everything—this vexed my mother, who didn’t care that people treated her as foreign, but was frustrated by being unable to perform mundane tasks with full clarity and command. We were uninteresting because, almost without fail, we were asked if we were Chinese or Japanese. “Korean,” we would say, and (white) people would say “Oh” or nod in disappointment and stop talking. Even if we had been Chinese or Japanese, I don’t believe that any ensuing conversation would have been particularly more enlightened. But I wanted to be seen. I would have beamed enthusiastically if someone had mentioned that they had eaten kimchi. I would have said “Yeah” with as much eagerness as I could muster, because I didn’t know how to say much else. Unfortunately, I did want my identity to be a digestible unit of information, used to categorize me so that white people didn’t have to actually learn who I was beyond a stereotype. Because without even that, I didn’t exist. Read More
February 22, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Features, Films, and Flicks By The Paris Review Still from Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here. Photo courtesy of StudioCanal. You Were Never Really Here is a disturbing and poetic piece of cinema. I don’t know whether it’s my favorite movie of 2018—the experience of watching it was too uncomfortable for that—but even so, it strikes me that Lynne Ramsay’s omission from the nominees for best director at this year’s Oscars is difficult to justify. In You Were Never Really Here, Joe, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is a tortured, messy veteran and contract killer tasked with tracking down the kidnapped daughter of a senator. Often in movies of this sort, the pressure that builds by the threat of violence is somehow released when that violence occurs. There is no such relief here. In the pauses between violence, Joe returns home to his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) to fret over her health or help her polish cutlery; all the while the violence remains, like a ringing in the ears following an explosion. —Robin Jones Read More