April 5, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Applause By Amit Chaudhuri Still from Pyaasa, 1957. Appreciation of artwork is always situated in, and partly an expression of, a cultural context. And there are different cultural contexts, and, within these, different languages of appreciation. Certain milieus make room for visceral, spontaneous responses and others for a certain refinement—knowing, say, when to laugh or when to applaud. I get the impression that the latter is especially important in performances of Western classical music. People are silent as they listen. They don’t generally shake their heads or gasp with pleasure during the recital, but they must at least know when the piece has ended, and when—and how much—to applaud. Concerts of popular music, on the other hand, are often, as we know, propelled by the audience’s response—a response that’s at once visible and (at times deafeningly) audible. The joke that Joni Mitchell made to the audience in 1974—“No one said to Van Gogh, Paint a starry night again, man!”—was a rueful admission about the way audience intervention could shape the pop-rock-folk concert. In the North Indian baithak, or soiree, the visceral, the unpremeditated, and the refined converged. The listener, too, was a participant. The Hindi word baithak relates literally to baithna, or “sitting,” and implied a far smaller space than an auditorium. It sometimes encompassed the middle-class drawing room, in which culture was often showcased in India. There were overlaps between the North Indian baithak and the Urdu mehfil, which was associated with performance and recitation. I use the past tense here because the smaller spaces, and the cultural lineage they sprang from, have been vanishing for decades. In the baithak or mehfil, the informed listener’s response followed the development of the performance like the live and changing thing it was. Appreciation expressed at the right moments—when a sense of beauty was created, say, by a note being deliberately elided in a raga—demonstrated generosity and knowledge, and both were important to a classical performer. The performer articulated a creative transformation of the melodic mode, the raga, and took liberties with the time signature. The informed listener needed to also have mastery over these time signatures and modes in order to be struck by the recital’s creative departures. One of the stock expressions of appreciation, still often used today, is the exclamation wah!, which is a nonsense word that has to be earned: it is the cognoscenti’s astonishing! or well done! It’s the paradoxical sound of informed wonder (paradoxical because the seemingly spontaneous utterance is the result of years of training and exposure, like great music itself). Read More
April 5, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Suicide, Wizards, and Cherry Farmers By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. Dear Poets, A very, very dear friend of mine committed suicide on April 1 last year. I was the last friend to have seen him. A full year has passed, and I still feel utter despondency that I wasn’t able to help—even though, being a suicide and mental-health advocate myself, I know there are some things you can’t help. I don’t know what I feel. I feel pain, like a piece of my body was torn apart. I have been walking on eggshells with everyone, thinking, What if I say the wrong thing and push them into something like suicide? Do you have a poem for this? I badly need one. Still Struggling Read More
April 5, 2018 Arts & Culture Franny and Zooey in Iran By Sasha von Oldershausen I had a bad experience in Hollywood once. —J. D. Salinger To understand J. D. Salinger’s opinion of Hollywood, one needn’t look much further than his stories. Holden Caulfield launches into an invective against the industry on the second page of The Catcher in the Rye. Of his brother D. B., Holden says, “Now he’s out in Hollywood, D. B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.” Salinger’s own profound aversion to the industry began when he sold the film rights to his short story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” to the producer Samuel Goldwyn. The story, first published by The New Yorker in 1948, offers a scathing portrait of upper-middle-class American society. In Salinger’s opinion, Goldwyn missed the point entirely in the campy and hyperromanticized 1949 Hollywood feature My Foolish Heart. From that moment on, Salinger vowed to never have his work adapted to the screen again. He refused to sell any more film rights, and he successfully fought a series of copyright-infringement lawsuits over the unauthorized adaptation of his works in film and in any other medium. The current trustees of the Salinger estate include his widow, Colleen M. Salinger, and his son, Matthew R. Salinger, who have been just as unyielding as the author himself. The infamously litigious estate has fought off the many Western filmmakers who have wanted to adapt Salinger’s work and likely will continue to do so for some time: U.S. copyright law ensures that intellectual property is protected for the lifetime of the author plus an additional seventy years. Yet in the nineties, a gap in international copyright laws enabled one unlikely director to slip through the cracks. Read More
April 4, 2018 Our Daily Correspondent Bazaar Land, Las Vegas By Joshua Baldwin A fellow bus rider wearing three pairs of eyeglasses reached across the aisle and asked me to touch his phone. “It’s so hot,” he said. “Please. Why is the phone so hot?” I apologized and returned to my reverie of capitalism’s detritus floating against the pale Mojave sky. Over the past two years, I’ve taken around twelve of these rides from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, so this must have been around the thirteenth. I was heading to town for the biannual Affordable Shopping Destination expo of March 2018, a four-day wholesale-merchandise trade show held across all two million square feet of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s exhibit space. I’d heard there would be a lot of stuff at this expo. You know, products. Of the type sold at our nation’s truck stops, car-wash gift shops, airport kiosks, and dollar stores. An estimated forty-five thousand attendees from pretty much every retail and distribution channel would come to interact and strike deals with the twenty-six-hundred-plus importers, vendors, and suppliers—and I, a stranger with a slow-growing penchant for conventions, would join them. Read More
April 4, 2018 On Art The Chimerical Creatures of Unica Zürn By Natalie Haddad Left: Unica Zürn, Untitled, 1965. Right: Unica Zürn. © Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin. In 1970, after over a decade of intermittent hospitalization for mental illness, Unica Zürn committed suicide by jumping out the window of the apartment of her longtime companion, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. Zürn is best known as the author of anagrammatic poetry and the semi-biographical novellas Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine, but she was also a visual artist. She had a preternatural skill for creating phantasmagorical worlds. Her pen-and-ink drawings were exhibited at galleries throughout Paris and Berlin, and she participated in the 1959 International Surrealist Exhibition. Her artistic practice, often eclipsed by that of her husband, confounds her literary legacy. Read More
April 4, 2018 Hue's Hue Jonquil, the Light Yellow of Early Flowers, Mad Painters, and Dust Bowl–Era Pottery By Katy Kelleher John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903. Here are two yellow fables: In the first story, a man sits next to a pool of water. It gleams silver in the moonlight, and the surface is untroubled by leaves or raindrops. He can see his own reflection, and he admires the tender sweep of his brow. He looks for so long that he no longer wants food. Even though he sits near water, he feels no thirst. Eventually, his body, his beloved physicality, withers, and he dies. Where he once sat, a slender-stalked flower appears. The nymph, who had watched the man’s demise from the cover of the trees, names it for him. Every year, in that same spot, a narcissus opens its butter-yellow petals to reveal a diminutive golden trumpet, a floral echo of his lost beauty. Read More