November 7, 2017 On Music Liner Notes: A Way into the Invisible By Renee Gladman Eric Dolphy in Copenhagen, 1961. Photo courtesy JP Jazz Archive/Redferns. In the midnineties, I was a jazz head. I was a poet and I was a jazz head. I loved to read and I loved listening to music. I collected vinyl but also CDs. I shopped at Amoeba Records on Haight Street in San Francisco and brought home records by the bandleaders Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, my favorite at the time, and others. And I read the covers of these albums as if they were books, lured in by the various frames commentators employed to situate a given recording, like Leonard Feather opening his notes for Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else with “WHAT manner of album is this?” At the same time, as a graduate student in poetics, I was deeply immersed in the works of Henry James, Nathaniel Mackey, and Leslie Scalapino, and, although I didn’t know this then, or knew it only slightly, converging in the field between these producers and their various disciplines was a way of thinking about “the invisible” that would shape my life in music and language and art for the next two decades. As I think of it now, the invisible refers to all these inner energies, maps, and syntaxes I’m trying to make present in my drawings and in the unfolding of my sentences, but, in 1995, the idea of it had only just landed in me, and I had little language around it. I felt it most present when I witnessed forms crossing into other forms: sound into thought (in the case of jazz) and poetry into prose (in the case of the books I was reading). I was drawn to jazz because it felt like mind music to me. It was a way to experience thought without thinking (that is, to experience bodily the map of someone else’s thinking without needing to write my own story on top of it to comprehend it). I found atmospheres compelling. Similarly, to read a Henry James novel was to be in an atmosphere of manners, where action and emotional response were embedded in an elaborate orchestration of adjacency: to read was to wander next to. And to listen to jazz was to enter a space inside the space in which I was living, one that lifted the top off the day or stretched the day beyond itself. I wanted to know what was happening—how this was happening—so I often turned to the liner notes of my LPs for answers. I saw them as a sort of foyer to the music: preparatory time for listening, a way of sublimating. You had to drop down into something to hear jazz, to be there for it—not having it as your background music but rather as a force carving lines into your brain. Jazz asked something of me that was like writing. To listen was to write, I had at some point concluded, and for a few years I tried to figure out the nature of that relationship. I wanted to know how listening was like making something, and what that something might look like. Read More
November 6, 2017 Stolen The Mexican American Bandit By Myriam Gurba Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft. Still from the animated short Zimbo by the Guadalajaran directors Rita Basulto and Juan José Medina. My ex-wife stared as she watched my maternal grandmother slide a chicken into her purse. When she noticed she was being watched, my grandmother locked eyes with my ex-wife. In her thick Guadalajara accent, my grandmother bellowed, “For the dogs.” Her dogs were waiting outside of the buffet, in her truck. It was Mother’s Day and they were her most beloved. On our way home, my ex-wife asked, “Have you seen your grandmother steal meat before?” I looked at her with a deadpan expression meant to approximate the one my grandmother had given her. “She’s Mexican,” I answered. My grandmother’s habit of filling her purse with meat reinforces an American stereotype: that Mexicans are thieves. Consider the now-retired chip mascot Frito Bandito. And Speedy Gonzales, the cheese snatcher. But Mexicans invert this trope. “You live in California,” my paternal grandfather would remind me when we’d visit Mexico at Christmas. “You live there because of a robbery! The United States stole that land! Americans are thieves.” My grandfather’s indictment was supposed to make me, a gringa, ashamed. Instead, it made me secretly relish America. My family lived on stolen land and stolen fruit always tastes better. Its ill-gotten nature emboldens its umami, glazes it with immoral MSG. When I went on my first stealing spree, I became a Mexican bandit, and a practitioner of Manifest Destiny. Read More
November 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Ai Weiwei’s Selfie-Ready Public Art By Sarah Cowan Ai Weiwei, Gilded Cage, 2017. Last week, at the base of Central Park, a yellow leaf fell through the narrow openings in Ai Weiwei’s new public sculpture, momentarily matching its color, before landing at the feet of two African pedicab drivers. The men were switching between swapping jokes in French and asking tourists in English, “Where are you from?” as they held up laminated signs advertising their services. Those being approached scurried into Ai’s structure, using it as a convenient excuse not to engage, hiding behind its bars. The piece is one of over three hundred works included in Ai’s citywide Public Arts Fund project, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.” This one’s title, Gilded Cage, constrains the structure to a cliché, even though its bars are painted more of a burned orange matte than gold, and its gaping opening defies captivity. Two concentric rings, which extend vertically from the pavement in towering, unscalable metal bars, form a beaker-shaped prison big enough for a handful of people. The outer ring is an inaccessible passageway at odds with the architecture of movement it contains: a sequence of turnstiles not unlike the ones just underground, whirling with commuters. If you pass your arm between the bars, you can shove the turnstiles into a spinning motion, though no bodies can pass their thresholds. Read More
November 6, 2017 Revisited Watership Down By Emily Ruskovich Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Emily Ruskovich revisits Richard Adams’s Watership Down. My parents had known each other for only three weeks when my dad asked my mom to marry him. She was stunned by his proposal, and so she said, Let me think about it. And she sat there for a few minutes in silence, thinking, while my dad, in agony, sat there and watched her think. After considering the question logically, my mom said yes, for five reasons. She laughs when she tells this story, though she assures me that it’s true. In those few minutes, she decided that even though she hardly knew my dad, she ought to marry him because: He, like her, ate the entire apple, swallowed the core and all the seeds, so she knew he was not wasteful or pretentious. He, like her, had always wanted to name a son the unusual name Rory, and that seemed an important, even wistful, thing to have in common. My dad knew all the words to the Kenny Loggins song “House at Pooh Corner,” so she knew he was probably kind to children. He, like her, was an Idaho Democrat. Most importantly, while they were dating those three weeks, they read Watership Down. That was the tipping point for my mom: if this strange and loud man could become so invested in the fates of rabbits as to have tears fill his eyes while he read, then he was, without question, a good man. They’ve been married now for thirty-three years. Read More
November 3, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Snoopy, Sappho, and Shikaze By The Paris Review Still from 120 BPM. In need of a pick me up this week, I went to see a French movie about AIDS. 120 BPM is paced like an electrocardiogram, a steady bum-bum of a heart beat, without any sappy manufactured climax or resolution. Instead, you are plunged into the relentless every day lives of the members of ACT UP, an AIDS-advocacy group in Paris in the 1990s, as they throw blood around the offices of pharmaceutical companies, interrupt high school classes to distribute condoms, and stage die-ins. Rather than romanticize their youth, beauty, and “coolness,” as a film about ACT UP easily could, it lingers on the group’s disorderly planning meetings, their internal feuds and diverging ideologies, their moments of misplaced rage at each other, and the indignities of their slow deaths. It is not a documentary, but it feels so real, more real than a documentary ever could—heartbreakingly realistic without ever straining for an overly gritty “realism.” The director, Robin Campillo, and his co-screenwriter, Philippe Mangeot, drew on their own experiences as members of ACT UP, and the film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival this year. I can’t say that it made me feel better, exactly, but it did leave me replenished in that way that an encounter with truly good art can. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
November 3, 2017 History From Throwing Sticks at Roosters to Dwarf Tossing By James McWilliams On the human desire to hurl (and hurl things at) animals, and other humans. In the fourth volume of Brett’s Miscellany, published in Dublin in 1757, readers could find an entry on a custom called “throwing at cocks.” This was an activity where a rooster was tied to a post while the participants, as if playing darts, threw small weighted and sharpened sticks (called coksteles) at the poor bird until it expired. The article explored the sport’s origin: “When the Danes were masters of England, and used the inhabitants very cruelly,” it began, “the people of a certain great city formed a conspiracy to murder their masters in one night.” The English artfully devised “a stratagem,” but “when they were putting it in execution, the unusual crowing and fluttering of the cocks about the place discovered their design.” The Danes, tipped off by the commotion, “doubled their cruelty” and made the Englishmen suffer as never before. “Upon this,” the entry concluded, “the English made custom of knocking the cocks on the head, on Shrove-Tuesday, the day on which it happened.” Very soon “this barbarous act became at last a natural and common diversion, and has continued every since.” Thus the innate human urge to throw things at things entered the early modern era. William Hogarth depicted cock throwing in The Four Stages of Cruelty, Children Torturing Animals (1751). Throwing at cocks continued well into the late eighteenth century. Although the custom, according to Remarks on the character and customs of the English and French (1726), exemplified a “diversion of the meanest of the populace,” throwing at cocks was soon normalized. It ranked up there with “playing at foot ball,” “bowls,” and “prize fighting.” A Complete History of the English Stage (1800) referred to it as an “annual sport.” In 1747, a volume called The History and Present State of the British Isles lumped throwing at cocks with “wrestling,” “footraces,” and “nine pins” as “the sports of the common people.” A regular activity, in other words. In time, the moralists cracked down on such hoi-polloi barbarity. Anyone who knows anything about throwing at cocks probably does because of Hogarth’s etching, First Stage of Cruelty, which demonstrates—while censuring—the incivility of this particular blood sport. John Brand, in his 1777 Observations on Popular Antiquities, notes that, “to the credit of our northern manners, the barbarous sport of throwing at cocks on Shrove Tuesdays is worn out in this country.” A London minister who published a lengthy sermon on the topic urged “the suppression of the throwing at cocks in the town or city” because it was an activity that all too easily exemplified how “the lower orders of people among us are eminently reproachable.” By 1793, the Country Spectator advised that throwing at cocks should be met with the “pain of your heavy displeasure.” Read More