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
July 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Visual Frequency of Black Life By Peter L’Official On Arthur Jafa’s video collage Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. Arthur Jafa, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. Installation view, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Rome, 2018. One of the most striking moments in Arthur Jafa’s transcendent 2016 video collage, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, is also one of its most recognizable. Barack Obama stands behind the podium at the TD Arena in Charleston, South Carolina, having just delivered a eulogy for the Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney, the slain pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a week after nine of its African American worshippers were killed in an attack by the white supremacist Dylann Roof. The scene is a tableau of purple paraments and vestments and other decorous trappings of church and state. In the midst of perhaps the most solemn and pregnant silence of his presidency, Obama casts his head downward and, with an almost imperceptible shake of his head, launches softly into the opening refrain of “Amazing Grace.” If you have seen this footage elsewhere, then you know that the crowd, beginning with the AME preachers seated onstage behind the president, stands and joins him in singing the hymn. What you might not have noticed—and what Jafa’s masterfully sequenced seven-minute video symphony illuminates—is the reaction of one of the AME preachers, in sunglasses and seated in the second row behind Obama in the left of the frame. On hearing the first two gently delivered notes, the preacher realizes, in a flash of recognition, that the nation’s first African American president has begun to sing for the congregation and all the watching world. Four fluid gestures occur in an instant: the seated preacher looks to his left, meets the eyes of a fellow clergy member, strips off his sunglasses with awe and pride and exultation, and leaps to his feet. Captured in this seconds-long space is the president’s call to song and the affirmatory response of the oldest AME church in the Southern United States. Very little of this one man’s subtle, then soaring emotional response is perceptible in the available footage of Obama’s eulogy. Seen in real time, it simply happens too fast. Read More
July 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Destined for the Dirty-Book Bin By B.J. Novak I’ve been fixated on Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern’s Candy since I first came across it in college. I’ve read it out loud many times to try to capture and understand its rhythm; I’ve given many copies to friends. And yet, what is it? And—even more intriguingly, and more on this in a second—why is it? Candy begins with exhilarating precision; the opening chapters are my favorite pages of any book ever written, with its exquisitely tuned language guiding us through an ecstatic parody of outrageous ego-driven meaninglessness, pulled off with the combination of subtle precision and insane audacity that you might find in a pilot successfully flying a plane under the Brooklyn Bridge. As it continues, the book’s writing gradually collapses, with an entropy that might well be described as obscene, into a tone of sloppy, lascivious wildness that syncs well with its plot. Along the way, it goes on extremely unnecessary tangents to satirize nearly everything imaginable to an audience of its time: psychotherapy, New York City, Hollywood screenwriting, Jewish mothers, quack doctors, New Age healing, progressive causes, pretension, naïveté, innocence, idealism, corruption, generosity, selfishness, spiritual searching, gurus, the male gaze, awareness of the male gaze, “daddy issues,” sexual repression, sexual liberation—as one review suggested, sex itself—and perhaps most of all, the reader who would buy such a book—a person they surely pictured on the banks of the Seine, scratching his head as to what the hell he was reading and whether it was turning him on or not. Read More