July 31, 2018 Arts & Culture Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings By Katy Kelleher Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Czardas dancers, 1908. Inside an old brick building in Somerville’s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in the basement of the 1914 Art Deco building is a collection of hideous paintings and disturbing drawings otherwise known as the Museum of Bad Art. “You won’t ever see this stuff in the Museum of Fine Arts,” the curator Michael Frank says. Frank is the kind of guy who can’t pass a yard sale or a flea market without stopping to browse. He loves ugly things, but for him, ugly is a problematic word. “When I read your email, I thought, Uh-oh,” he admits. “Calling something ugly is like calling something beautiful. The minute you say it, you’re in a difficult spot, trying to define what that really means.” Frank prefers to think of these paintings as “badart,” one word, no hyphen. Badart is not the inverse of “good art”; it’s the inverse of “important art.” Some might call these pieces outsider art, and in the past, many of them could have been termed primitive or art brut. I prefer to think of them as ugly. Charming—like the dancing dog wearing a tutu or the nineties eyebrows on one particularly serene Virgin Mary—but ugly nonetheless. However, I understand where Frank is coming from. For Frank, ugly is a word that suffocates, depriving his favorite paintings of their rightful playful air. Ugly is also a word that carries hard moral implications; for centuries, ugliness has been associated not only with sickness and deformity but also dishonesty, violence, aggression, and bigotry. Consider the term ugly American or the repeated critique of Trump’s “ugly” acts. The word itself comes from the equally discordant-sounding ugga and uggligr, two Old Norse adjectives that mean “dreadful, fearful, aggressive.” (Other words that bloomed from the “dreadful” root include loath and loathsome.) The meaning changed only in the fourteenth century, when uglike stopped meaning “terrifying” and began to mean “unpleasant to look at.” Even though the word ugly is now primarily used to describe the unaesthetic aspect of things rather than their deep moral fiber, it retains elements of its original meaning. Using it can shift a well-meaning aesthetic critique into the realm of moral judgment. This is unfortunate for those of us who genuinely enjoy, and celebrate, ugly things. If you, too, want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the inverse of beauty. We tend to talk about aesthetics as though the categories are locked in a battle: good versus evil, light versus dark. But opposites are a crutch. Beauty and ugliness do not negate each other. Read More
July 31, 2018 First Person Like You Know Your Own Bones By Crystal Hana Kim On memory, inherited trauma, and my grandmother. Crystal Hana Kim and her grandmother. When I was almost two years old, my grandmother flew from Hongcheon, South Korea, to Flushing, Queens, to take care of me. For a few years, while my parents worked, I spent my hours with Halmuni. I do not remember how we colored our days, but I press my thumb onto the photographs of that time. I smudge their borders and try to return to a forgotten past. In one glossy, blurry photograph, I am paper-crowned with a waxy yellow Burger King wrapper laid out before me, a rounded bun raised to my open mouth. Halmuni does not eat; instead, the camera catches her watching me. A tender, unsmiling gaze. When I examine this picture, I am convinced I remember. That crown, I think. Yes. I remember the thick gold paper with the Burger King logo, the jewels on the rounded arches. But the crown in the photograph is blue, and that unexpected color unbalances me. My confidence slips. Perhaps I am remembering a different day. Perhaps I am remembering the last time I looked at this photograph. Memory warps and stretches and shifts to fit the strictures of your life. As my mother and I share a bottle of wine, she recalls my first years. She tells me that I had no understanding of mother-daughter love when I was young, that my world revolved around Halmuni. I wanted to sleep in her room. I wanted my mother to return “our” chopsticks when she used them in the kitchen. The edges of my mind seem to prickle with recognition. A white linoleum floor, my hand on Halmuni’s knee as I demand my mother leave us alone. Read More
July 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Nico: Beyond the Icon By Michael LaPointe Still from Nico, 1988. Nico believed in fate, and she was fated to be an icon. In her youth, she was the femme fatale of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the spectral singer of the Velvet Underground. Later in life, she became an allegory of rock ’n’ roll’s excess, the moon goddess felled by heroin. In the thirty years since her death, she has variously served as a feminist symbol—the Judith Shakespeare to her canonical male peers—and a stand-in for European trauma, an exile wandering the world in the aftermath of war. But for Nico, being an icon was a problem. When she sang “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in 1966, she wasn’t asking to become a permanent surface for our collective reflections. Even through her many permutations, Nico’s artistic achievement remains out of focus. As in the case of her favorite poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, critics tend to misunderstand her work as unfinished, as if severed before its full flowering. While contemporaries such as Joni Mitchell occupy the very center of pop history, Nico remains apart. Today she is best known for the songs she came to loathe. Of course, they’re also her catchiest, but I wonder if her artistic mission—a mission of destruction—is simply incompatible with any of the images we’ve made of her. We construct icons, but Nico was an iconoclast. Read More
July 30, 2018 Literary Cities Literary Citizen of the Andes: Gabriela Alemán and Quito By Dick Cluster Cotopaxi, in Quito. Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is an Andean city ninety-three hundred feet above sea level, squeezed into a narrow valley fifteen miles south of the equator. On the west side, you can take the teleférico up to the shoulder of the Pichincha volcano and step out of your gondola onto an alpine landscape at an elevation of more than thirteen thousand feet. Looking down at the urban area from above the tree line reminds me of cities closer to the poles than to the equator—Bergen, Cape Town, or even Anchorage. But unlike those other locations, Quito is not a port, and its cityscape is not set against a background of bright blue. Rather, the city spreads like an elongated flow of white and beige concrete poured between green ridges that hem it in. It’s a low-slung city—the tallest spire is still the steeple of the cathedral built at the turn of the twentieth century. It all looks diminutive from above. Across the valley rises Parque Metropolitano, the city’s green forested lung. If the clouds permit, you can also see a series of snowcapped, conical volcanoes in the distance. Those cones remind you that you are standing on an active volcano. In 1660, the last major eruption of Pichincha spewed a massive column of ash into the air, plunging Quito—which was founded in the previous century by Spanish conquistadors on an earlier Inca site—into darkness and blanketing it with more than a foot of debris. After centuries of dormancy, Pichincha stirred again in 1981 and again in 1999, both times raining ash on the capital. So, too, to a lesser degree, did a 2015 eruption of Cotopaxi, a volcano fifty miles distant, one of the peaks visible from the top of the teleférico. “One hundred miles from the snows of Cotopaxi” is where H. G. Wells set his 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind,” the tale of a pristine, fertile valley sealed off from the rest of Ecuador by a huge fictional eruption, “the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days.” Read More
July 27, 2018 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Summer By The Paris Review Christine and the Queens. When I watch Christine and the Queens, I feel joy in its purest form. Her best songs are perfect pop constructions laced with a delicious, defiant queerness, and unlike most pop songs, they don’t wear out after repeated listenings. They’re songs to dance to, to feel at home inside, to feel sexy in, songs you don’t mind getting stuck in your head. The pleasure of the music is deepened by her music videos—that is to say her body’s movements, loose, earthy, MJ-inflected, charged with the casual charisma of a true star. I’ve spent the year pregnant, my body becoming bigger, stranger, slower, and unwieldy—after giving birth two weeks ago, my body remains a slow moving creature, still unfamiliar to myself. Watching Christine move with such boundlessness, as she does on her latest single, has a new kind of power over me. I feel it, the freedom she has in her body, in my limited one. It holds a place for my body to return to. She’s on tour this fall to promote her new album, and you should not miss the chance to see her live. —Shruti Swamy TMI, maybe, but I’ve had a rough summer so far. Well, so has the world (it’s not summer everywhere, but you know what I mean). I’m reading all sorts of Marxian stuff for a book I’m working on—I don’t recommend this as therapy—and a line from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus keeps coming back to me: “What cogito lacks its evil genius, the traitor it will never be rid of?” But “at least there’s pretty lights,” as the band Men at Work put it. At least there’s the National Park Service’s Bear Cam, a live feed from Brooks Falls in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Right now there’s a lone brown bear in the frame, scratching himself and romping in the river. Sometimes there are five or six, scanning for the salmon that surge upstream. Yesterday, I watched a huge fellow catch a fish, tear it open, then jump, startled, when a seagull alighted briefly on his back, causing him to drop his prize after one bite. The gulls just wade around, or float like ducks, waiting to gulp down what the bears let fall. I’m a bit obsessed with bears. I’ve met a few black bears in the wild, including one last summer in the Catskills who refuses to stay put in a poem. These Alaskan brown bears are bigger, lanky and lumbering but fleet af when they need to be. Now there are no bears in the frame, just the river. I like the river too. —Michael Robbins Read More
July 27, 2018 Arts & Culture The Saddest Songs Are the Ones About Flowers By Drew Bratcher My buddy Nick swears that “Chiseled in Stone” by Vern Gosdin is the saddest country song ever written. “You ran crying to the bedroom,” it begins: I ran off to the bar Another piece of Heaven gone to Hell The words we spoke in anger just tore my world apart And I sat there feeling sorry for myself It’s a hell of start. Seldom has romantic strife been evoked so concisely. What words did they speak in anger? None, we suspect, that lovers haven’t always said. The point, I think, is that these lovers never dreamed they’d be the ones saying them. Nobody sets out to be miserable in love. After a modest run as a singer and guitar player in California folk-country bands, Gosdin retired in the early seventies only to rally as a solo act later in the decade. Beginning in his mid-forties, he sent one song after another—“I’m Still Crazy,” “Is It Raining at Your House?,” “This Ain’t My First Rodeo”—into the top 10. “Chiseled in Stone,” which won the’89 CMA award for best song, helped him mount one of the greatest comebacks in country music. He was Music City’s patron saint of late bloomers. Gosdin looked like a Burt. He had Bacharach eyes, Reynolds sideburns and mustache, Lancaster air. His pliant, world-worn voice took cues from George Jones, whose vocal performances of sentimental lyrics dredged out of wretchedness a pitiful joy. Read More