June 18, 2024 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes As we were putting together this Summer issue of the Review, an editor in London sent me Saskia Vogel’s new translation of a 1989 book by Peter Cornell, a Swedish historian and art critic. The Ways of Paradise is presented as notes to a scholarly manuscript; the author, Cornell tells us in an introduction, was “a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden,” where for more than three decades he was “occupied with an uncommonly comprehensive project, a work that—as he once disclosed in confidence—would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.” After his death, the manuscript was never found. “Which is to say,” Cornell writes, “all that remains of his great work is its critical apparatus.” The footnotes that comprise The Ways of Paradise orbit certain preoccupations: the center of the world, labyrinths, flânerie, rock formations, Freudian repression, passwords, folds of fabric, aimlessness. As I followed the trails left behind by the mysterious man Cornell calls the author, I felt an emerging sense of relation between only tangentially related things. (I also felt a relief that the categories of “Fiction” and “Nonfiction” had already been banished from the Review’s table of contents in favor of the more-encompassing “Prose.”) Read More
June 17, 2024 First Person Rented Horrors By Kathleen Alcott Illustration by Na Kim. I was a fairly unsupervised child, living like a rat on the crumbs of adult culture, its cinema in particular. 1976’s Taxi Driver I saw for the first time at eight—rented and shown to me by a housemate of my mother’s—and what I remember most is the gamine Jodie Foster at a diner’s laminate tabletop: her cheer, and her will, her fistfuls of prostitution money. The relieving and misguided lesson I absorbed, likely because I felt particularly attuned and exposed to adult violence, was that childhood could be short-circuited. Soon after, thanks to a few errant adults in my life, I was renting the most obscene things I could find, studying the horror aisle of the Silver Screen Video in Petaluma as though it were the Library of Alexandria: containing and promising and threatening all. Unusual to my experience of these films was that their one-dimensional and sex-warped predators did not seem so different from the world reflected in my actual life. A few years before, the month I turned five, my neighborhood had been infested by the FBI, who were searching for traces of the just-kidnapped twelve-year-old Polly Klaas. She was abducted in October of 1993 from a sleepover at her house, which was around my literal corner. What Polly became, in the child’s simplistic understanding, was the greatest celebrity: her face on every magazine and national news segment, the vigil always lit for her in town looking like an ancient shrine to the cruelest gods. It took almost two months to find her body. When the guilty man was finally tried, he famously declared in court that Polly had pleaded: Just don’t do me like my dad. Her ruined father lunged for him. Read More
June 14, 2024 The Review’s Review The Measure of Intensities: On Luc Tuymans By Joshua Cohen Luc Tuymans, Polarisation—Based on a data visualization by Mauro Martino (2021). Graphing is the practice of visualizing the abstract—the use of the coordinate plane not to map a territory or to demarcate a two-dimensional surface but to track a measurable quantity across space and time, quantities such as position, velocity, temperature, and brightness. Its invention can be traced to Nicole Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, courtier to Charles V, and scholastic philosopher-polymath who held forth at the College of Navarre of the newly founded University of Paris. His Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum (Treatise on the Configurations of Qualities and Motions) from 1353 lays out early versions of what we now call functions and the x and y axes, which he referred to as “longitude” (the axis of the independent variable) and “latitude” (the perpendicular axis for plotting the values of the dependent variable). What made these pictures not merely illustrational but statistical “graphs” was Oresme’s radical insistence on presenting the variables in accurate ratio, with some accord of scale between the unit of measurement and the object or subject or process being measured. His key principle, at least when it comes to the visual, is: “The measure of intensities can be fittingly imagined as the measure of lines.” Not content to have merely created graphing, Oresme also speculated about creating graphs of graphs, so-called complementary graphing that goes beyond the charting of an individual phenomenon into the charting of the relationships between sets or groups of multiple phenomena, an innovation that took the statistical combination of algebra and geometry just up to the border of what would become modern calculus. It’s striking to note what phenomena—and what relationships—Oresme thought worthy of graphing. His examples include motion and heat and cold, but also varying definitions and degrees of the qualitative, including grief or sorrow, in effect prophesying the future of infographics, which don’t purport to measure just production, consumption, price fluctuations, or the orbits of stars, but also the ebb and flow of human opinion. This is a profoundly contemporary desire, to metricize and parameterize our own thoughts and emotions, and to create dynamic models from those standards to show—to make seeable—our social and political life. Read More
June 13, 2024 Dinner Parties The People Who Fight at Dinner Parties By Sarah Miller Oskar Schlemmer, Dinner Party, 1935. Public domain. I think most people like to walk away from a dinner party saying, “What a lovely evening.” I do. But I don’t feel compelled to do that. I know it’s not always possible. Also, I prefer people who don’t necessarily regard the warm glow of candlelight or the sound of a thirty-seven-dollar bottle of listán negro being poured into a glass as an automatic call for politeness, regardless of what is being said, or happening in the world. It’s commendable to walk into a dinner party assuming you’ll have a nice time but wise to prepare yourself for the wrong-thinking of your fellow guests. Read More
June 12, 2024 Dispatch Those That Are Fools: At Clownchella By Rob Goyanes Photograph by Sarah Shtern. “Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.” —Feste the Clown, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare Walking up to the Elysian Theater, a small club off the 5 at the foot of Elysian Heights in Los Angeles, I thought I was hallucinating when I saw a dozen goats under the bright white light of the marquee, and for every goat a clown. Everyone was fawning over the short-haired creatures. Some had two little bald spots on their heads instead of horns, which, I later learned, is where the hot irons get applied for disbudding. The Elysian was hosting Clownchella, an event happening the week before Coachella. Maybe it goes without saying: these events bear virtually no relation to each other. Coachella is a sprawling music and art festival of spoon-fed nostalgia, snakeskin pants, and sensorially shattering spectacle held on the grounds of a polo club, brought to you by sponsors like American Express, Coca-Cola, BMW, et cetera, and which costs (at least) $510 plus accommodations. Clownchella was a one-night clown festival with five acts that cost sixteen bucks. At Clownchella, I expected circus-variety clowns, red noses and big shoes. I had figured that the history of clowning had reached its terminus; from ancient Greek mimes to commedia dell’arte, Charlie Chaplin to Bozo to Krusty (my personal favorite). The clowns most relevant to our times seem to be the old-fashioned scary ones, the Jokers and the Pennywises. But I’d heard that Los Angeles has a diverse and burgeoning clown scene that’s innovating the form. Independent teachers are developing their own clown pedagogy, nurturing a new generation of performers and borrowing from European clowns, who, apparently, are way ahead of the curve. This summer, Hannah Levin, the host of Clownchella, and some other LA clowns are traveling to Étampes, France, to study with the French clown and pedagogue Philippe Gaulier, who for the past fifty years has taught clowning using methods like mask play, Greek tragedy, and the study of Chekhov, all with the goal of finding the clown within. The clowns here take silliness very seriously. Standing outside the Elysian, I watched as the goats jumped around and let out cute little bleats. Read More
June 11, 2024 Dispatch Pokémon Is All About Reading By Joseph Earl Thomas Image by Sara Goetter. The game is played with great feeling. Pikachu, perhaps the most successful soft power symbol of the twenty-first century’s new media enterprise, looms gigantic over Nintendo as a concept and cuteness as aesthetic dominance, despite staying mostly benchside on the battlefield. Though, for some of us, these pocket monsters are just ciphers for the competitive video game circuit: 4D chess pieces; some amalgamation of straights, flushes, or full houses; the kings, queens, and rooks of RNG; what Dungeons & Dragons would be with rounded edges and big-lipped fish splish-splashing their way toward evolution. Next to my black-and-white Nintendo Switch sits the corduroy Bulbasaur my son got me for Father’s Day. I’m playing around with weather, one of four core environmental hazards in the extended Pokémon video universe: Rain, Sun, Snow, and Sand. Enjoying the filth I am, of a team whose prospects are slim but whose aesthetics please me, listenin to Beans and Freeway on my headphones. And even though what we do is wrong I play Tyranitar to start, a darkly rock type dinosaur with SAND STREAM, brewing up a storm when she enters the battlefield. Despite a soft-chinned weakness to FIGHTING types, Tyranitar is a respectable individual; she earned a slot on my team of six through grit and survivability, clapping back after absorbing heavy damage historically, just without the heroism of hindsight. Read More