March 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Mean Streets: The Life and Afterlife of Berlin Alexanderplatz By Dustin Illingworth George Grosz, Panorama (detail), 1919. The German artist George Grosz emerged from the decadence of Weimar culture as an unlikely moralist. His grotesque paintings of Berlin street life—seething, ugly, claustrophobic, often thick with malice—skewered the city’s lurid postwar demimonde. Though today Grosz is best remembered as a gifted caricaturist, his contemporary Hannah Arendt considered him a documentarian: “[his] cartoons seemed to us not satire so much as realistic reportage,” she wrote. Within the crucible of the metropolis, Arendt suggests, one must be prepared to enlarge one’s conception of the real. One of Grosz’s works, Panorama (Down with Leibneicht), adorns the cover of a new edition of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 Expressionist masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, published by New York Review Books and translated from the original German by Michael Hofmann. Dense, death-haunted, bleakly erotic, Panorama pairs perfectly with Döblin’s immense and splendidly gritty novel, on whose shoulders rests, as Hofmann has it in his afterword, “the literary name and fame of the city of Berlin, if not the idea of modern city literature altogether.” The book follows the petty criminal Franz Biberkopf—“transport worker, housebreaker, pimp, manslaughterer”—as he attempts to go straight after a stint in Tegel, a Berlin prison, for beating his girlfriend to death. His fate, as relayed through dozens of slangily titled episodes (“Reunion on the Alex, Bitching Cold”), unspools with the sensational power of tabloid melodrama. While Biberkopf regains his bearings in the city, he vows to lead the life of a respectable man, selling newspapers and tie holders in the proletarian Alexanderplatz district. But after a friend’s betrayal upsets this delicate stasis, he returns to a life of crime, falling in with a band of con men, and eventually losing an arm after a failed heist. Following a period of convalescence, he meets and falls in love with Mitzi, a prostitute, who is then murdered by the devious, predatory Reinhold, a criminal associate. Biberkopf, distraught, opens fire in a crowded bar, and wounds a policeman. While in custody, he starves himself and enters a self-induced catatonic state. After a climactic confrontation with the figure of death, he returns to his senses and finds a stable but much diminished life as a menial laborer. Ground beneath the boot of rude, rapacious Berlin, Biberkopf, in lieu of love or purpose, is left “sniffing the air, sniffing the streets, to see if … they will still accept him.” The final chapter concludes with bitterly humbled wisdom: “We know what we know, we had to pay dearly enough for it.” Read More
March 5, 2018 On Music The Soundtrack of ‘Phantom Thread’ Will Outlive the Oscars By Paul Grimstad Still from Phantom Thread. Not often does a film score stand out as a work of art independent of the movie it embellishes, but there are the rare exceptions. Everyone remembers the zither tune in The Third Man, Howard Shore’s ominous counterpoint clocks in After Hours, or Stanley Kubrick’s counterintuitive needle drops in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other scores meet the film on a plane in which the photography and music cannot be disentangled: Ryuichi Sakamoto’s title cue for The Last Emperor; Jerry Goldsmith’s recurring, melancholy muted-trumpet line in Chinatown; Philip Glass’s winding synth fractals heard over a time-lapsed New York City in Koyaanisqatsi. Jonny Greenwood’s score to Phantom Thread—Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie about a maniacally fussy dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock—is of the latter type. The music has a sinewy, ductile curvature that folds itself into the piles of fabric, weaving its way into the lining as the cloth becomes a dress. The main theme is a tense piece played by a string section in its upper register, where things cease to sound sweet and become eerie and diaphanous. Other cues are full of wide, warm major-ninth chords that flutter around like pastel ribbons. There are voicings that remind one of Bill Evans at his most fragile; instrumental color that brings to mind the Ballet Russes; airy chromaticism à la Miles Davis circa Nefertiti. Solo piano lines pick out patterns in the music like animate glowing lace. All of it is impeccably recorded. It is perverse that it didn’t win the Oscar for best score this year. Read More
March 5, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Doorway By Amit Chaudhuri Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1806. My mother often told me how much I’d looked forward to my first day of school. Although I find the thought extraordinary—I loathed school—it’s plausible. I was an exuberant boy. The deceptively effervescent nursery, which no longer exists, was located in an old house on Nepean Sea Road in Bombay. My mother dropped me there but lingered, to look out for me (she was very protective) but also to spectate. From afar, she watched me push a boy—a gesture of friendliness, she’d later insist. At this, the teacher apparently smacked me. I took great umbrage and began to cry. My mother swooped down and plucked me from the crowd of children. She believed the teacher had punished me because the boy I’d pushed was European. I went home but did not stop crying. In the evening, I got a fever. I didn’t want to go to school the next day. The honeymoon period was over. After that first experience, my parents struggled to put me into a series of kindergartens. I finally found myself attending a school called Sunny Side, a seven-minute walk from the flat we then lived in on Malabar Hill. Once, when my father dropped me off on the way to the office, I refused to get out of the car. I remember him opening the door on the left, then the right, as I moved sideways each time to the opposite direction. Occasionally, I resigned myself to mornings in Sunny Side School. My favored spot was the doorway, where I said goodbye to my mother, watched her walk home, studied her as she turned to wave, and instructed her, with a gesture of my hand, to come back soon. Read More
March 5, 2018 At Work An Interview with Julián Herbert and Christina MacSweeney By Lily Meyer Julián Herbert began the book that made him famous while he was sitting in his mother’s hospital room. She was dying of leukemia, and as he cared for her, he wrote what became one of the most heralded literary experiments in the Spanish language in decades, Canción de tumba (2014). An English translation of the book, Tomb Song—an exceptional work of metafiction and autofiction—is out this week from Graywolf Press. There is, certainly, no way for a reader to know how to divide fact from fiction. A tender conversation between the narrator and his pregnant wife could be invented; a wild hallucination in Havana could be the truth. There’s no way to know. Fiction or not, Tomb Song is clearly a work of self-examination. As the narrator describes his itinerant childhood, his mother’s work as a prostitute, and the fracturing of his atypical family, he seems to be looking in the mirror. And yet Tomb Song is more like “a hall of mirrors,” as Herbert said to me. Once you start seeking facts, you’ll be looking forever. I came to Tomb Song through its translator, Christina MacSweeney, whose work I began seeking out after I read her translations of another great Mexican experimentalist, Valeria Luiselli. Like Herbert, MacSweeney is devoted to voice. When I spoke with them, both told me how vital it is for them to read their work aloud. I conducted these interviews over email. Julián Herbert’s answers to me were in Spanish, which I’ve translated into English below. Read More
March 2, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bobby, Janelle, and Romeo By The Paris Review Like most people who live in New York, I’m always threatening to move to Los Angeles, and like most people who live in New York, I likely never will. This winter, however, I almost made a visit. The impetus was an exhibit of Ellen Gallagher’s at Hauser & Wirth. The deterrent was the thought of taking the A train from Harlem to JFK. Luckily for me, and for people everywhere thwarted by inertia and a lack of cheap flights, Hauser & Wirth published Accidental Records, a catalogue of paintings, photographs, collages, and texts meant to accompany the show. In it, Gallagher patches together a series of strange seascapes populated by ruled lines, whale fins, and teeny, tiny spores. The images appear unpeopled but evoke a population that’s been willfully forgotten. In the liner notes to their 1997 album, The Quest, the Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya writes, “During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?” The Drexciya myth is one that’s been taken up by a number of black artists, Gallagher included. In Accidental Records, she creates the imagery for a world in which these mothers and sea babies, dead or unborn, were able to survive. —Maya Binyam Read More