November 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Playing for Ralph Ellison’s Little Man at Chehaw Station By Mychal Denzel Smith Ralph Ellison For the agnostics and atheists among us, there is no divine force dictating our paths. We are only that which we decide, individually and collectively, and can achieve with our own intellect. The human body has natural limitations. And coincidence is merely coincidence. But every so often, I’m confronted with seemingly unconnected factoids that give some credence to cosmic intervention. For instance, the fact that Ralph Ellison died on April 16, 1994, only three days before the release of Nas’s classic debut album, Illmatic, on April 19, 1994. Ellison, of course, is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, a work now heralded as one of the greatest American novels. Drawing from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground both thematically and narratively, Ellison artfully constructs the psychic terror of a black man living in a society of political and social hierarchies that render him, this unnamed narrator/protagonist, invisible, at least insofar as anyone can be bothered to understand his basic humanity. Ellison’s time had come: he succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the no-longer-young age of eighty-one. But there is some poetry to be found in the passing of one of the most influential black writers in American letters only days before the release of the most influential hip-hop album of all time. Illmatic, like Invisible Man, is a document of black male life, this time from the vantage point of a post–Civil Rights, post-Reaganomics urban landscape. Nas captures the paranoid sensibility of a black man highly aware of his own mortality, attempting to survive in a world that offers him little more than drugs, police, guns, and prison. Read More
November 17, 2017 On Television The Wholesome Yet Filthy Comedy of Trixie and Katya By Kastalia Medrano Katya Zamolodchikova and Trixie Mattel. Because we haven’t figured out how to actually solve the various things happening in our country, for now we’re relying pretty heavily on humor. Contemporary political humor has many forms, but it’s the takedowns that get far and way the most attention. This has created an odd climate in which people assume that for comedy to have any political or cultural value it has to be mean. A lot of comedians fall back on the assumption that the shortest path to funny is through picking the lowest-hanging target. But Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova, a pair of much-beloved drag queens whose show premiered on November 15 on Viceland, have found a way of landing jokes without aiming at anything at all. They’re able to show, consistently, that being wholesome is not mutually exclusive with being absolutely fucking filthy, and that a firm grasp of one’s own brand doesn’t mean acting like an asshole. Earlier this month, I sat down to talk with them. KATYA: Yeah, I don’t, I’m not like a very good actor. TRIXIE: Me neither, bitch! I’m not good at anything! I can do, like, two voices. We do the white-girl voice… KATYA [white-girl voice]: I’m like, so excited to be here, so grateful… Read More
November 17, 2017 This Week’s Reading Contributor Picks: Doomed Bohemians and Death Masks By The Paris Review In place of our staff picks this week, we’ve asked six contributors from our Fall issue to write about what they’re reading, watching, listening to, and enjoying. Still from Personal Shopper. In his films, Olivier Assayas often makes use of reflective surfaces: glass walls, windows, mirrors, screens, Hollywood stars. His distinctive recipe seems to be mixing them with dark, strange themes that enter his scripts obliquely. So if you start watching Personal Shopper expecting a satire on personal shoppers, you will be confused and disappointed. Better to expect a peculiar ghost story. Even better, prepare yourself by watching some of his back catalogue: Irma Vep, Late August Early September, The Clouds of Sils Maria. I couldn’t decide if the final scene was a botched job or a masterpiece, but the choice of Anna Hausswolff’s haunting “Losing Track of Time” on the soundtrack was certainly inspired. Also: one of the best portrayals of ghosts in cinema I have seen in a while. —Isabella Hammad Read More
November 17, 2017 At Work Narcissism and Pleasure: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer By Robert Storr Yvonne Rainer, still from Privilege, 1990, 16mm, 103 minutes. © Yvonne Rainer. Courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of Chicago. The following is excerpted from Interviews on Art, a collection of more than sixty interviews by Robert Storr with contemporary artists. Yvonne Rainer is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker who has been recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of the past fifty years. She emerged in the 1960s as a pioneer of the Judson Dance Theater movement, an avant-garde performance style that blended elements of dance and visual art, and later turned to experimental film. This previously unpublished conversation was conducted on April 9, 2009, at the College of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, at Boston University. INTERVIEWER Let me begin by saying that it is a special pleasure to enter into this conversation. Yvonne and I have known each other over quite a long time. We first met in the early 1980s—in effect, part of the protracted aftermath of the 1970s—which was a very different time from now. What we’ve gone through lately, and are about to go through with the onset of recession resembles the 1970s more so than the boom times of the 1980s and nineties: an art world where the terms of making art takes place against a very unsettled and uncertain background. Considering that we are about to speak in front of a predominantly student audience, I would like to begin by saying that I’ve been struck by the way that for the past twenty years or so, people have talked a great deal about careers as if there was some kind of scripted narrative or a scripted scenario for how one begins in one place and ends up in another ideal place. But it seems to me that art has always been much more about working, than about careers and about the specific work that one chooses. Since then you have done many things. Perhaps our conversation might start with the fact of just this variety of paths forward: how you have chosen to work in this way and chosen to work in that way and how have patterns developed rather than how those were patterns foretold or planned. Read More
November 17, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part Five By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this fifth installment, Nabokov wakes from an erotic dream to bloody sheets. Dec. 13, 1964 8.30 am 50. Skipped four nights (Did not take down the banal dreams I had lately). Intensely erotic dream. Blood on sheet. End of dream: my sister O.,[1] strangely young and languorous. Then V. tells me I must not forget to go to the oculist. I find his street but cannot remember the house number. Am agonizingly searching in the telephone book but do not recall his name and, moreover, do not know how to dial the vague number I have in mind—something ending in 492. Then stand near a window, sighing, half-seeing view, brooding over the possible consequence of incest. Read More
November 16, 2017 Events Barney’s Wall: An Evening with Barney Rosset and The Paris Review By The Paris Review On Saturday, November 18, New York University’s Forum on Law, Culture, and Society will host a screening of Barney’s Wall, a seventy-three-minute documentary about Barney Rosset, the provocative and iconoclastic publisher at Grove Press who, in the 1960s, published numerous now-canonical books and helped overturn contemporary censorship laws. Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, will participate in a conversation after the screening with the film’s director, Sandy Gotham Meehan, writer and editor Alan Kaufman, and New Republic editor Win McCormack. Tickets are available here. In celebration of this event and of Rosset’s legacy, we have unlocked our interview with him for a limited time. Read More