October 20, 2017 Our Correspondents Norma Does Not Lie: On Believing Women By Alison Kinney Sondra Radvanovsky and Joseph Calleja. Photo: Ken Howard for the Metropolitan Opera. Ten years ago, the first time I saw Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 opera, Norma, at the Met, I noticed one quirky bit of stage business. In the opera, the Roman proconsul Pollione has come to 50 B.C.E. Gaul to pacify the locals. He’s also pursuing a young, lovely priestess, Adalgisa. But his buddy Flavio calls him out: Pollione has already seduced the high priestess, Norma. Norma broke her vows and betrayed the revolution for Pollione’s sake—and gave birth to their two sons. So what about Norma and the kids? Pollione spreads his hands in an offhand, bro-ish shrug, as though it’s too much effort to sing, “So what?” or, “Whaddya want me to do about it?” (We never see Flavio again; presumably he’s been demoted.) After that, I looked for what I dubbed the “Met shrug”—the “man shrug,” really. Isolde calls out Tristan for murdering her fiancé and capturing her for a forced marriage: shrug. Pinkerton impregnates and abandons fifteen-year-old Butterfly and gets called out: shrug. The Met’s movement coach had nailed it: so hilarious, so casually entitled, so irresponsible, so right: “Whaddya want me to do about toxic masculinity? La donna è mobile!” Read More
October 20, 2017 On Film Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience By Lauren Elkin Jules Breton, The Recall of the Gleaners, 1859. “Existence isn’t a solitary matter,” says the shepherd to the wanderer in Agnès Varda’s 1985 film, Vagabond. This vision of collectivity, the belief that we are all in it together, recurs throughout Varda’s films, from her early, proto–New Wave La Pointe Courte (1954) to her acclaimed Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) to her most recent film, Faces Places (2017), made in collaboration with the young French street artist JR. (Filmmaking isn’t a solitary matter, either.) “This movie is about togetherness,” she told New York Magazine. Watching Faces Places, I couldn’t help thinking about Varda’s 2000 film, The Gleaners & I. Both are road-trip movies in which Varda interviews the kinds of people we don’t often see in movies—farmers, miners, dockworkers, and their wives. Both films proceed by chance, gleaning whatever they happen upon. But though The Gleaners is now seventeen years old, old enough to drive a car and almost old enough to vote, it’s feeling as fresh and relevant as if it had been made in parallel to Faces Places. It rewards rewatching. The Gleaners & I is a documentary about the time-honored act of gathering what other people have abandoned or thrown away. Gleaning is most often associated with what’s been left behind after a harvest; think of that famous Millet painting, The Gleaners (1857), which you can find in the Musée d’Orsay. The women—gleaners used to be mainly women—bend over to collect the bits of wheat the harvesters have left on the ground; they gather what they find in their aprons. It looks like back-breaking work. “It’s always the same humble gesture,” Varda comments in voice-over: to stoop, to glean. Read More
October 19, 2017 On Music Bing & Ruth and Amy & David By Sam Stephenson David Moore of Bing & Ruth. New York has felt like a second home since my parents first took me there as a teen in the early eighties. I grew up in rural coastal North Carolina, but the Mets became my team in 1979 when we got cable TV, and WOR carried 162 Mets games. On that first trip, I made my way alone to Paragon Sporting Goods in Union Square to buy Mizuno baseball cleats. Over the past twenty years, I’ve made more than 150 trips to the city while researching the photographer W. Eugene Smith. I now know a lot about arcane matters, like the history of Manhattan’s wholesale flower market, Long John Nebel’s overnight radio talk show, and underground angles on the midcentury jazz and drug scenes in places like Staten Island. The city feels further away from me today, and it’s literally true. I moved earlier this year with my family to Bloomington, Indiana. Our house in Durham was 480 miles from Grand Central; from Bloomington, it’s 760. For nearly three decades I’ve listened to late-night sports radio on fifty-thousand-watt WFAN through a transistor beside my bed. Now I have to use a stream, which doesn’t feel the same; the conversation on WFAN isn’t quite the vernacular it used to be either. Moreover, the pall of Trump is wide and heavy, even in cities he lost by forty points. In August, I drove four hours, from Bloomington to Chicago, to hear the improvisations of the Eric Revis Quartet, and each time I looked down the Chicago River and saw the six-story letters spelling TRUMP on the side of his building, it felt like Biff’s rule in Back to the Future II. Read More
October 19, 2017 On Poetry The Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow By Ed Simon C. Hansen, La Fête D’Aegir, 1861 “What could be dafter / Than John Skelton’s laughter?” —Robert Graves Sometime early in the sixteenth century, a frequently hungover, perennially in trouble, and womanizing priest named John Skelton took to the lectern at his church. He faced his angry congregation and tried to explain the bastard child born to his mistress. Despite his Cambridge education, his humanist credentials, the fact that he’d once been tutor to Prince Henry, and the immaculate poetry he’d penned, the good Christians of Diss, Norfolk, had complained to their bishop about the priest’s behavior. Skelton may have claimed that (when it came to poetry at least) he’d imparted “drink of the sugared well / Of Helicon’s waters crystalline,” but his congregation was less than impressed. The priest penned inspired lyrics like “Speke, Parrot,” “Phillip Sparrow,” and the immaculate doggerel “The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng,” of which the five-hundredth anniversary is this year. Across these works, he developed an innovative rhythm known appropriately enough as “Skeltonics.” But that sort of thing was of no sway with the bishop. Laity and clergy alike didn’t care for the literary pretensions of this self-styled “British Catullus.” Perhaps it was clear that ordination was not Skelton’s calling, for what could the parishioners expect from sacraments administered by a man who once wrote that “To live under law it is captivity: / Where dread leadeth the dance there is no joy nor pride.” Read More
October 19, 2017 At Work Carrie Mae Weems on Her Favorite Books By Jo Steffens The following is excerpted from Unpacking My Library: Artists and Their Books, a collection of interviews with contemporary artists about their personal libraries, to be published by Yale University Press in November. Carrie Mae Weems in her library. Photo: David Paul Broda INTERVIEWER Your photographic work incorporates family stories, autobiography, documentary, and other narrative forms. What do you consider to be your role as a storyteller? CARRIE MAE WEEMS In the past I’ve employed elements of text in and around my work, but I’m certainly not a storyteller. Storytelling requires skills that I don’t possess. Rather, in my work, text functions as a conceptual frame for creating play, counterpoint, tension and/or positioning meaning. The word is a form and the shape of things. INTERVIEWER Is there one book that stands out as having had a big impact on you when you first read it? WEEMS Books are my playmates, my best friends, my running buddies, my partners in crime, my solace, and my occasional lover. Read More
October 18, 2017 Arts & Culture When Oscar Wilde Colluded with the Russians By Jennifer Wilson Oscar Wilde In 1880, Oscar Wilde made the uneventful decision to write a play about Russian terrorism. I say it was uneventful because the play (his first), Vera; or the Nihilists, appeared amid a deluge of other crime thrillers, adventure tales, and even romance novels about Russian nihilists and their terror plots. The Vera of Wilde’s play was inspired by the real-life figure of Vera Zasulich, whose attempted assassination in 1878 of the governor of Saint Petersburg made her an international lightening rod, especially in England where the public feared Russian nihilists might stoke domestic tensions and inspire Irish separatists. In many ways, fears of Russian interference unfolded in Victorian Britain in a manner not unlike what we see today. As was the case in Wilde’s era, the specter of an external threat had a way of unmasking internal strife. English publishers were eager for anything that satisfied the public’s demand for terrorist intrigue, especially when seen through the lens of the Russian outside agitator. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1894 short story, “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez,” Sherlock Holmes solves a murder involving fugitive Russian nihilists. Henry James’s 1885 novel, The Princess Casamassima, follows a London bookbinder named Hyacinth who becomes involved in a terrorist plot; the novel was James’s homage to Ivan Turgenev’s novel about Russian nihilism, Virgin Soil (1877). These “dynamite romances” (as they were called) frequently starred Russian femmes fatales who enticed innocent, unsuspecting British men into the dark underworld of nihilist conspiracy and terrorism. For instance, in George Alfred Henty’s adventure novel Condemned as a Nihilist (1892), the protagonist, a young man named Godfrey Bullen, is seduced by an agent named Katia into taking part in a plot to secure the escape of a revolutionary leader. After unintentionally becoming implicated in the conspiracy, Godfrey is exiled to Siberia … of course. Read More