January 9, 2018 Stolen An Inspired Theft By Ann Beattie Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our series Stolen, writers share stories of theft. Long, long ago, in the faraway kingdom of Virginia, a tall, somewhat-handsome man came to town. He had a rather well-known art gallery for a time in New York City, though in those days the word gallerist had not yet been invented, so he was just thought of by name. This man had come with his daughter, an equestrian, to visit several artists who showed at his gallery. This was a time so distant that Banksy, while certainly more than a gleam in his father’s eye, was not yet a star. Read More
January 8, 2018 At Work Tom Sachs and David Searcy: Japanese Tea, Rockets, and Switchblades By David Searcy “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (which closed yesterday) was a vast and complex exhibition of ideas within ideas about ideas, wherein the protocols of the Japanese tea ceremony and those of NASA’s space program are revealed to express opposed yet deeply similar understandings and even longings. There is a “me upon my pony on my boat” sort of yearning throughout this profound yet willfully childlike theater of imitation. Lucia Simek, an artist and the communications manager for the museum, and a friend of both Sachs and the writer David Searcy, arranged for the two to get together in the spirit of their weirdly similar interests—rockets, Mars, Japanese tea bowls, and switchblade knives. Read More
January 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Staging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi By Deborah Lindsay Williams The Louvre Abu Dhabi The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, opened in November after years of delay and a cost rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The same weekend as LAD’s grand opening, the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center hosted the world premiere of Parable of the Sower, an opera composed by the singer/songwriter Toshi Reagon, a queer Brooklyn-based activist, and based on the prophetic novel by Octavia Butler. At first glance, it seems unlikely that a “starchitect” museum in Abu Dhabi, where gas is cheap and water is expensive, would stage an opera about a fiery, drought-ridden apocalypse. And yet, taken together, the museum and the opera initiate a set of conversations—about art and culture and change—that upend stereotypes about the Gulf. The book Parable of the Sower (1993) was intended as the first of a trilogy. It’s set in a world where California is burning, rivers have dried up, and the president sells entire towns to the highest corporate bidder. Violence is everywhere, and not even houses of worship are safe. In the second book, Parable of the Talents (1998), a president is elected who promises to “make America great again.” The third book was never published. Given Butler’s prescience about America’s worst impulses, perhaps it’s best that the third book never came out: Do any of us really want to know how bad things might become? Read More
January 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Revising “The Waste Land”: Black Antipastoral and the End of the World By Joshua Bennett Kea Tawana, The Ark In what I am calling the weather, anti-blackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies. —Christina Sharpe, The Weather and as I watch your arm/your brown arm just before it moves I know all things are dear that disappear all things are dear that disappear —June Jordan, “On a New Year’s Eve” {1} As of yet, there is no general consensus regarding the finer details of Kea Tawana’s biography. According to an obituary published in the Times Herald-Record immediately following her death on August 4, 2016, she was “born on a … reservation [and] ran away from home at the age of 12.” But by Tawana’s own account of things, the artist was born in Japan in 1935, moved to the United States with her father and two brothers when she was twelve years old (her mother and sister, Tawana claimed, were killed by an air raid during World War II), and eventually settled in Newark, New Jersey. It was there, almost five decades later, that Kea Tawana would assemble her Ark. By all accounts, the Ark project was a wonder to behold in person. The vessel stood over three stories high, spanned eighty-six feet in length, and was constructed from the ground up with wood and scrap metal Tawana gathered, without assistance, from various abandoned locales throughout the city. In his 1987 profile of Tawana’s Ark, Chip Brown of the Chicago Tribune writes: The ark is an elegy to the lost communities of the Central Ward. Everything but tar paper and nails has been scavenged from the ruins of her environment. She has reused the lumber of demolished homes and bars, columns of churches, pieces of orphanages and synagogues … She figured an at-sea food storage capacity of 120 days and freshwater storage of 1,400 gallons. Her sketches called for a chapel, a library, a museum, a conservatory, a greenhouse, a bakery, a laundry, a sick bay, a stained-glass studio and metal shop. She anticipated a crew of a captain, a first officer, six seamen, a cook and two cats. She also envisioned that the ark would be able to mount a credible defense with an arsenal of six quartz pulsar lasers and four 2.5-inch rocket tubes. Read More
January 5, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dorothy, Oz, and Arkansas By The Paris Review Anna Kavan If a “beach read” is light and easy reading for the warm summer months, then Anna Kavan’s Ice is its cold-season equivalent, a book to complement the contemplative stillness of winter weather. Ice was recommended to me by a colleague, and I picked up Penguin Classics’ fiftieth anniversary edition (it was originally published in 1967). Like the fine intricacy of frost on a window, Kavan’s novel is hypnotically and delicately complex. The plot itself is deceptively simple: a nameless narrator seeks to rescue the object of his affection, the also nameless “glass girl,” from her abusive captor, referred to as “the warden.” The quest traverses a frozen apocalyptic landscape, and the structure of the hero’s journey is subverted by strange, hallucinatory scenes and shifts in narrative perspective. The hero’s antagonists are the totalitarian regimes and unrelenting frigid cold of his environment, but also the obsessive visions occurring in his mind. The introduction and afterword of this edition offer insight into the character of Kavan herself, and how the political and social allegories of the novel are layered with allegories for Kavan’s personal struggle with trauma and addiction. Even half a century later, the concerns of the Ice find serious foothold in the preoccupations of today, and, much like the substance for which it is named, brilliant and blinding moments are refracted through clear, sharp prose. —Lauren Kane Read More
January 5, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Sylvia Plath By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. In her diaries, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) liked to boast about her “damn good” lemon-meringue pie, which she was able to produce even under difficult conditions. She once wrote that she “cooled lemon custard and crust on cold bathroom windowsill,” presumably due to lack of refrigeration at a rental apartment at Smith College. Pie-making enthusiasts will know that keeping the dough cold, cold, cold is the trick, and also that the fridge is pretty essential for setting a lemon curd. They will marvel, as I do, at Plath’s excellent domestic skills. Read More