November 27, 2018 Arts & Culture Toward a More Radical Selfie By India Ennenga Mitchell Grafton, Updating Vermeer. 2012 We are at the end of an era characterized by the self-portrait. This claim is not provocative—we’ve lived as characters for some time and have all felt it coming. So let me rephrase, we live at the end of an era characterized by relentless anxiety around the self as a product: what it means, who owns it, what it costs, what it’s worth. The word celebrity suggests that this value can be quantified and, generally, stands as a catch-all term for the collective disorders (disembodied desire, objectified anxiety, schadenfreude as catharsis) underpinning a cult of self. As two of the leading lights in male egomania, Elon Musk and Kanye West, enter ecliptic phases of digital self-harm, we see that a long-standing crisis is coming to the fore of the treatment of ourselves as characters. The similarity of their breakdowns is uncanny and no doubt representative of a broader crisis in charismatic authority nationwide. Like failed children of the Lacanian mirror stage, the reflection of their own, simplified self-image precipitates a meltdown instead of a progression. Yet this era was heralded years earlier, in 2007, when Britney Spears shaved her head and the onlooking public could only digest it as hysterical—the most misogynistic of characterizations. It now feels avant-garde: she assassinated her own character. Indeed, she reclaimed her self as something more than just a brand or commodity. By attacking her appearance (her hair, the root of so much aesthetic femininity) she drew attention to the ways in which our society attaches identity to women. In 2018, the ambivalence toward how to treat one’s digital self, how to create one’s “character,” is a particularly unwieldy knot for women. The collapse of the critical space between one’s personality and one’s online persona erases the distinction between self-expression and self-promotion. Every post now seems to fall into a dangerous trap. We are currently confronted with questions that, until recently, seemed behind us. Is asserting self-love affirming and feminist, or is it playing into age-old misogynist reductions of women as fetish objects? Where do hashtag trends like “I woke up like this” and “celebrities without makeup” quite fit in? Do they acknowledge the pressures that women face in a gendered society, or do they simply obscure the means of beauty’s production? To break past this surface we must ask: where is the work? I mean, really, who seems to work anymore? All we see is women on vacation—cooly “off duty” in the day, beguilingly gowned at night. Studios and offices serve as backdrops for fashion shoots, not meaningful loci of productivity. All these women “woke up like this”: capturing and captioning themselves from the moment the dawn light began streaming in. Consuming these images is stultifying. To be digitally femme means to bathe anxiously in the images of others and act impotently in response, liking a photo or congratulating others on their beauty. More stultifying is that this is done in spite of knowing the effort that went into each composition. The selfie is a cover-up, hiding both the means of its own production and the true self. Read More
November 27, 2018 Redux Redux: The Shopping Mall of Loss By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Carolyn Kizer. This week, we bring you Carolyn Kizer’s Art of Poetry interview, Doug Trevor’s short story “St. Francis in Flint,” and Debora Greger’s poem “To the Fifties.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Carolyn Kizer, The Art of Poetry No. 81 Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000) Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing. Also, male artists always have had the qualities that modern women find lacking in most men; these guys know how to cook, change a diaper, take responsibility for entertaining and educating their children. Of course part of this is due to economics: most good painters are poor. But mainly it’s because they are tactile, earthy; like Antaeus, they have their feet firmly in the dirt. Read More
November 26, 2018 Arts & Culture An Evening at New York’s New Playboy Club By Laura Bannister The Mansion Lounge at the Playboy Club [Photo:Steven Gomillion] On a Wednesday evening a couple of weeks ago, I stood on the corner of Forty-Second Street and Ninth Avenue waiting for a friend. Two middle-age men halted before me, and looked me up and down appraisingly. “Working the corner?” one queried, and his friend let out a snigger. “Sure am,” I said, less assertively than I’d have liked, and then watched as they departed. Soon after, my companion arrived, and we rushed toward Tenth, late for our dinner booking. We had reserved a spot at the Playboy Club, where, according to the OpenTable app, it was not essential for nonmembers to make reservations: walk-ins were permitted to sit at the bar, as long as they met venue dress codes. But the multistory, fourteen-thousand-square-foot space had opened a mere three weeks before, with its iconic namesake—the media and entertainment giant Playboy Enterprises—touting a triumphant return to the city. Its first club launched in Chicago fifty-eight years ago, spawned thirty now-shuttered American chapters, and the last Manhattan joint closed its doors in 1986. Despite mostly dubious media coverage—the Guardian lamented its comeback as “defying the #MeToo era” and several journalists noted its proximity to the route of January’s Women’s March—we suspected the retro joint might be bustling, though we weren’t sure exactly with whom. Read More
November 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Fran Lebowitz Doesn’t Dance Anymore By Vince Aletti Smoking dance floor at New York, NY. © Toby Old. When I told Fran Lebowitz—the cosmopolitan wit and author of Metropolitan Life and Social Studies—that my editor had suggested we discuss nightlife while out in a club, she said, “Tell him, You know how difficult Fran is, and let’s just do it someplace we can actually talk.” That turned out to be Fran’s book-packed apartment on West Fifty-Seventh Street. We spoke after dark but before dinner, on a hunter green leather couch, while Fran sipped Evian and smoked one Carlton after the other. The ensuing conversation was originally published in the March 20, 1990, issue of the Village Voice. ALETTI When I mentioned the idea of an interview on the subject of nightlife, you said something like, But I never go out anymore. Yet we always see photos of you—in Vanity Fair, Vogue, W, and other magazines—out at night. Is that not nightlife? LEBOWITZ No. That’s not nightlife. That’s social life. There’s a difference. Nightlife is fun. Social life is business. I thought you meant clubs and things. I thought you meant fun. ALETTI Don’t you go out after these social events? LEBOWITZ To clubs? Very, very rarely. There are tons of clubs that I have never been to—because I have been to their recent predecessors. I don’t think they’re fun anymore. And I think there are a couple reasons why. I don’t, by the way, consider this an opinion. I consider this a fact. I don’t think they’re fun anymore—at least for people of my age—because of sex. Or lack of sex. Read More
November 21, 2018 Arts & Culture No One Has a Monopoly on Death By Inger Christensen Peder Severin Krøyer, Copenhagen: Roofs under the Snow, 1870–1900, oil on canvas, 7 x 9 in. January 1981 It’s snowing. I’m thinking back to January 1979, when I received a letter whose writer told of his sudden fear of snow; for an instant the snow floating down to earth had been a poison that smothered all life. It’s snowing. I’m remembering the farmer on TV who told of walking out into his fields in early November, and the snow, the first very sparse and fine snow, burned like fire. But now, so much later, nobody would believe it. Even though practically every child knows that snow and fire are no longer opposites. Not in a radioactive world. So. It’s snowing. The snow is no longer snow, but it’s still snowing. We’re now so fearful that we’re not even fearful anymore, but the fear is spreading anyway, and the closest word for it is sorrow. We see what’s happening, and we’re happy about what’s not happening. We compare what’s terrifying with what’s even more terrifying. We compare limited nuclear war with total nuclear war, and the comparison deprives us of the last remnant of our natural horror. We see thousands of dead birds, thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, thousands of death wishes and their violent expressions, but as long as we see all this annihilation in all its well-known forms, at least we’re seeing something, and as long as we see something, total annihilation hasn’t happened yet. Read More
November 21, 2018 Arts & Culture The Moral of the Story By Anthony Madrid This is the second part of a two-part thing on Aesop’s fables. Part 1 can be found here, but you don’t have to read part 1 to understand part 2. Illustration from The Fables of Aesop (Jacobs) Were you told, as a child, that fables are stupid? I think I was explicitly told that. Look at these two quotes: (a) “Fables are literature before literature was even a baby. Fables are four-celled literature.” (b) “Fables are like the children for whom they are composed: primitive, annoying, and brutal.” Items (a) and (b) are not things that were said to me when I was a child. Those quotations are me, when I was first teaching literature, twenty-five years ago. I was distilling what I’d been told. I felt I must warn the young as I had been warned: “Lessons are bad. Talking animals are bad. Anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is bad.” Today I think the opposite, straight down the line. Lessons are good; talking animals, hell yes. And anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is probably my only reason for getting up in the morning. Read More