September 11, 2017 In Memoriam Michael Friedman (1975–2017) By Sadie and Lorin Stein Michael Friedman. It was surprising, when we searched the archive, to discover that Michael Friedman published only one piece on The Paris Review Daily: a response to the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of The Death of Klinghoffer. It surprised us because over the years we’d talked about his doing so many different things, on so many different subjects, from a column on new music at Le Poisson Rouge to an online version of an informal seminar he held known as Michael Friedman’s Drunk Music Appreciation Class. As his obituaries amply demonstrate, Michael had other—and arguably more important—things to do with his time. When he died on Saturday, at the age of forty-one, the theater world lost one of its most vibrant and versatile talents. When someone dies, we’ve been known to describe him as “a friend to the Review.” Usually what that means is a regular contributor to our pages, or perhaps a material supporter of the magazine. Michael was neither. But in every sense, he was a true friend to the Review. He certainly gave his effervescent presence and restless, quicksilver intelligence to our events; as a theater veteran—not to mention a mensch—he knew the importance of showing up. And he was a friend, period. He was the best. No one wanted to have to write any of these tributes for him. He deserves them all.
September 8, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cruelty, Obsession, Cheekiness By The Paris Review Larry Rivers, Vocabulary Lesson (Polish), oil on canvas, 22 1/4″ x 33″. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery © Larry Rivers Foundation / Licensed by VAGA. What I know about the poets of my generation, I started to learn, in the late nineties, by reading the young critic Stephen Burt. Many of the poets he wrote about seemed forbidding, but he tried to make them inviting. His own poems were often disarmingly direct. One line, from his poem “Kudzu”—“like the body I hated then, and hate”—still rings out to me twenty years later from a blur of more elliptical work. Now Stephen also goes by Steph and Stephanie, and their new collection, Advice from the Lights, has been my subway reading for the past two weeks, especially “Sadder,” an elegy to the poet C. D. Wright, and Burt’s imitations of Callimachus, and the many evocations of childhood in a “wrong” body: O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look, up there on the uneven climbing bars, too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring, the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors and thin swings that make no decision, like weather vanes. O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes. —Lorin Stein Larry Rivers’s painting of Maxine Groffsky appears on the cover of our new issue, and I’m pleased as punch. I’ve long been an admirer of Rivers’s art and feel a kind of greedy affection for it: I never tire of seeing it. This week, “(Re)Appropriations,” a small survey of works—more than twenty paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures and relief paintings—opened at Tibor de Nagy in New York. The exhibition displays the changes in his work over five decades, but it’s hard not to get hung up looking at his life-size painting of a boldly nude (except for boots) Frank O’Hara, from 1954, and the collages from the early sixties, which are gorgeously tactile. I admire the way his representations of friends, cultural objects, and historical figures are only partially rendered on the canvas, as though they are already drifting out of River’s view just as he has turned to look at them. —Nicole Rudick Read More
September 8, 2017 The Lives of Others Roaring Girl: London’s Sharp-Elbowed, Loudmouthed Mary Frith By Edward White How Mary Frith’s reputation changed from bawdy rogue to defender of the patriarchy. Moll CutPurse smoking. When James VI of Scotland took the English crown in 1603, it was heralded as a blessed return to normality. For the previous forty-one years, the natural order had been put on its head by the reign of Elizabeth I, a woman performing the ultimate male duty. Elizabeth’s reign had necessarily been an act of political transvestism. She presented herself as the Virgin Queen, the chaste goddess, but also as the guardian of divinely ordained power; she wore dresses from the neck down, but the crown upon her head remained inherently male. “I have the body of a woman,” she famously reminded her people, “but the heart and stomach of a king.” Read More
September 8, 2017 In Memoriam “Plainness in Diversity” By John Ashbery John Ashbery. Photo: Lynn Davis This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive. Read More
September 8, 2017 First Person Death’s Plus-One By Brian Cullman Early that fall, Amy’s cousin JJ was leaving Bertie’s Hair Salon in Fox Point and decided to try the restroom at Schuyler’s Funeral Home next door. Bertie’s facility was cramped, there was a cat box under the sink, and the loo paper was rough pink squares of construction paper. Well, it felt like construction paper, and it lent a depressingly cheap air to the place. Schuyler’s restrooms were spacious and cheerful, there were clean serviettes on a low ceramic table, and despite the scent of candles and the hushed voices outside, it felt more like a country house than a chapel. Out in the foyer, there was a pot of fresh coffee and a tray of small, star-shaped cookies. Men in dark suits and women in summer dresses looked at the floor and nodded to themselves. JJ signed the guest book and wrote, “My thoughts are with you,” then drew a small heart next to her name and address. The coffee wasn’t bad, though the cookies were too chewy and left a gummy taste in her mouth that lasted all the way to lunch downtown. She was unprepared for the check that came in the mail a few days later. The deceased was a Portuguese merchant with three ex-wives and an alarming number of children, none of whom had lived up to his expectations. More to the point, none had been very attentive during his long decline and illness. And so, he had amended his will so that anyone who showed up at his funeral would get a check for ten thousand dollars. And anyone who didn’t could go to hell. Read More
September 7, 2017 Arts & Culture Five Hundred Glass Negatives By Mary Jo Bang On the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy (1894–1989), who inspired Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection, A Doll for Throwing. Next year, Germany will celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus, a school that stressed the unity of industrial design and all other arts. The celebration will include Moholy’s work. Lucia Moholy, Self-portrait, 1930. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. In 1915, twenty-one-year-old Lucia Schulz wrote in her journal that she could imagine herself using photography as “a passive artist,” recording everything from the best perspective, putting the film through the chemical processes she’d learned, and adding to the image her sense of “how the objects act on me.” On her twenty-seventh birthday, at the Registry Office in Charlottenburg, a borough of Berlin, she married the Hungarian Constructivist painter Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and became, in the blink of a bureaucratic instant, Lucia Moholy. A few years later, when Moholy-Nagy was recruited to teach as a master at the Bauhaus school, Lucia went with him—she, her camera, her technical skills, and her knowledge of the darkroom. The Bauhaus, a school established in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, would eventually become an influential international design movement. The clean sculptural lines of its buildings, the bent steel and leather Bauer chairs, Marianne Brandt’s elegant globe-and-square tea sets would come to represent a break with the preindustrial past. The look itself would become a signifier of urban modernity and of modern life. When Lucia arrived at the Bauhaus, she became, at Gropius’s invitation, the de facto Bauhaus photographer, albeit unpaid. The glass negatives would remain hers, however, presumably to do with as she wished. Read More