July 6, 2017 At Work Escape Artist: An Interview with Guy Delisle By Simon Ostrovsky Detail from Hostage. Last month, the Quebecois cartoonist Guy Delisle met with Simon Ostrovsky, a journalist for CNN and documentary filmmaker, onstage at Housing Works, in New York, to talk about Delisle’s new book, Hostage. The 436-page comic tells the story of the kidnapping of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) administrator Christophe André in Chechnya in 1997 and his detention, for 111 days, in solitary confinement, chained to a radiator. In his minimal line and with his personable observational style, Delisle, who now lives in the South of France, has also made travelogues of life in Burma, P’yǒngyang, Jerusalem, and Shenzhen. Ostrovsky has reported extensively on North Korea, the West Bank, and Ukraine, where he was captured and imprisoned for three days in 2014. These overlapping experiences in life and work produced a fruitful conversation on storytelling and journalism, the anxiety of living in dangerous places, and André’s uniquely psychological ordeal. —Ed. OSTROVSKY I had the pleasure of reading both Hostage and your earlier book, Pyongyang, and it turns out we share a lot of interests. I covered Chechnya and the North Caucasus in Russia, and I also covered the issue of North Korean laborers working all around the world and earning money for the North Korean regime—that was an obsession of mine for two years. I was looking at it from the perspective of the North Koreans sending their workers out of the country to earn hard currency for this currency-starved regime, and I never had any idea that, as a Westerner, you could actually come into the country and work there, and that’s what Pyongyang, your book, is about. How did you end up working in North Korea? DELISLE I was there in May of 2001, before September 11, when North Korea became the rogue state, the axis of evil and all that. Citizens from a lot of countries were going there at that time. Spanish, French, and Italian animators were outsourcing in North Korea, for instance—it was four times cheaper than China. I was there from France on a contract to supervise the quality of the animation and work with the animation team, though the animators were on the upper floor and I could never really see them. I was working on a monitor, looking at the animation, taking notes—This is good, this is not good. OSTROVSKY The French company would send you the sketches, and then they would have the North Korean workers in a kind of animation sweatshop to fill out the rest of it? How did it work? DELISLE I don’t know about a sweatshop. It was just an animation studio, as there used to be in Germany and France, but everything is outsourced now. It’s exactly the same kind of studio, with fifty or sixty people who work and lay out all the scenes. So in an episode of twenty-six minutes, you have maybe two hundred layouts, and I supervised the boards so that the quality was equal to what they were asking for in Paris. North Korea has a tradition of animation, just like in the Philippines, just like in China, like in Vietnam. They used to have studios that made short films you could see in festivals. Now they don’t do that so much—they do outsourced work, and they make a lot of money. Animation in North Korea was, I think, second in earning money for the country in the year I was there. So I felt that at least they were making money with something other than counterfeiting, drugs, and weapons. Read More
July 6, 2017 On Poetry Queer Bubbles By Andrew Ridker How CAConrad turns ritual into poetry. CAConrad in a still from The Book of Conrad, a 2015 documentary by Delinquent Films. Last year, I attended a reading at Over the Eight, the now-defunct Williamsburg bar and performance space. Eileen Myles was headlining. But another poet, CAConrad, a close friend of Myles, captured my attention. He took his place at center stage, a large man draped in billowy clothes and what he calls his “war hair,” which he hasn’t cut since 2006, on the three-year anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Baghdad. He read from a piece entitled “Power Sissy Intervention #1: Queer Bubbles.” It began with what sounded like a short story or anecdote: “I occupied a busy street corner in Asheville, North Carolina,” he said, “to bless children with bubbles that will make them queer.” He went on to describe the reactions of passersby as he blew bubbles, shouting that they had magical properties to “help rid the world of homophobia, misogyny, racism, and other forms of stupidity.” The audience laughed. Some cheered. Conrad smiled. “Bubbles, of course, do not have such powers,” he acknowledged—but he was serious, serious about the act of standing on a corner blowing bubbles and watching how the world responded. After relating the anecdote, he told us that he’d taken notes on the experience. These notes became a poem, which he read aloud. The poem was completely unexpected—it was not in any way about bubbles, for one thing—but it was funny, angry, shot through with violence and informed by a reverence for nature. The first lines stuck with me: “I was naked / on a mountaintop / kissing someone / who loved me,” and the last: “there is nothing little about the cicada revving up while / we think our car horns / are so impressive.” The audience was rapt. You could hear the uninitiated whispering: Who is this guy? Read More
July 6, 2017 On the Shelf I Started a Joke Which Started the Whole World Crying, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration of Rabelais’s grotesque Pantagruel by Gustave Doré. Oh, it feels good to laugh! Hot tip: try doing it when there’s nothing to laugh about. Try it in a crowd of stone-faced strangers—just toss your head back and grab your belly, spinning in circles as if you’re dancing to the weary tune of some wheezing carnival organ. It’s the key to fixing our broken society. In a new essay, Robert D. Zaretsky argues that we’ve lost sight of the grotesque—and of the immense floodgates of laughter that it alone can open. Laughter that upends hierarchies and undoes centuries of moral self-seriousness, leaving no one unscathed as it washes over the masses. Looking at Rabelais—whose novel Gargantua and Pantagruel loosed wave upon wave of grotesque laughter in sixteenth-century France—and Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous concept of the carnivalesque, Zaretsky wonders how we lost our way—and why we can no longer mock ourselves along with those in power: “Grotesqueness was not an insult, but instead an insight into the human condition. More than half a millennium later, in a world dominated by indignation and outrage, and largely abandoned by laughter, a dose of the grotesque might help to better digest events, if only by having a good—and right kind of—laugh … Laughter is no different than political systems, commercial relations or artistic practices: it evolves over time, the result and cause of material and social transformations. For medieval man, laughter was the great leveler. Preceding Martin Luther’s priesthood of all believers was Rabelais’s priesthood of all belly-laughers. Inclusive and communal, laughter left no one untouched; no less universal than faith, it was a bit more subversive. In fact, as Bakhtin notes, late-medieval laughter marked a victory, albeit temporary, not just over the sacred and even over death; it also signaled ‘the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that represses and restricts’. For medieval man, laugh and the whole world laughs with you—or else.” Share a grotesque chuckle with your barista this morning. Lean in close and whisper, You and I and this single-origin cold brew are helping to extinguish the last dying embers of a whole culture of diners and greasy spoons—what a gas! As Adam Platt notes, diners are in decline, but those who mourn their demise are unlikely to support them: “Like most mass-extinction events, the Massive Diner, Coffee Shop, and Greasy Spoon Die-Off has been unfolding slowly around us for decades, in plain sight. According to a much-fretted-over Crain’s report from a couple of years back, the city’s Department of Health lists around 400 restaurants with the words diner and coffee in their name, a number that experts say is down from a thousand restaurants a generation ago. (Many nouveau coffee shops don’t have coffee in the name.) Like the old Automats and cafeterias of the fifties and sixties, and a generation of classic Jewish delis before that, diners are in decline for many reasons: skyrocketing rents and land values; ever-rising food prices; the spread of a more expedient, highbrow and lowbrow coffee culture; the gentle, inexorable aging of a whole generation of neighborhood ‘regulars’; the difficulty of keeping an ancient, sprawling, ten-page menu in tune with the changing tastes of the times; and the challenges of passing on a family business to a new generation of proprietors, many of whom have the benefit of a college education, and might prefer frittering their days away in barista bars to breaking eggs over a hot stove.” Read More
July 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Nadar’s Livre d’or By Adam Begley Adam Begley interviews Ali Smith in our new Summer issue. Begley’s new book, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera—a biography of the fabled Parisian photographer Félix Nadar—is out this month. The book’s appendix takes a closer look at one of Nadar’s most treasured mementos. The book, the size of a large photo album, has been disassembled, its two hundred-odd pages cut out and placed each in its own transparent protective sheath. Detached, the leather-bound front cover, with Félix Nadar’s flamboyant signature stamped in the center in gold leaf, lies in a cardboard box looking scuffed and forlorn, like exiled royalty. The album is a livre d’or, one of several guest books or autograph albums he kept in successive studios. If you came to sit for a portrait (or a caricature, in the early days on the rue Saint-Lazare), and if you were an artist or a celebrity or preferably both, he would pester you to sign and leave a memento: a quip, a sketch, a poem, a few bars of music. Most sitters complied. Many signed and left only a brief remark, if any; others spent hours over a drawing or a watercolor, leaving on the page work of impressive quality. Félix was very proud of his collection of autographs, each one a token of friendship or a link with an eminent individual. Read More
July 5, 2017 Look Kindly Bent to Ease Us By Dan Piepenbring “Kindly Bent to Ease Us,” an exhibition of paintings by Leidy Churchman, is at Mary Boone Gallery through July 28. Churchman envisioned these works as a comment on “what’s lost and found in the process of translation”; they borrow from images in print and online, altering and reframing them. “If I choose an image and use it to make a painting, people already know that image or something like it and have a relationship with it,” he wrote in Spike in 2015. “We can then study the image together. You’ve seen it but you might not have really been able to get closer, because the devices we use separate our bodies from all these pictures … For me, to paint a thing is really to consume it, to eat it.” Leidy Churchman, Giraffe Birth, 2017, oil on linen, 51 ½” x 75 ½”. Read More
July 5, 2017 On the Shelf Please Destroy My Manuscripts, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Destroy his plays (but not, presumably, his cats): Albee’s last wishes A dead author’s wishes are seldom observed. When I die, for instance, I want my entire oeuvre to go out of print permanently. Only skywriters will be licensed to reproduce my words, in a typeface per my specifications, on beachfront properties throughout America. Finding an executor to comply with these wishes will be hard, but I’m thirty-one and have published zero books, so maybe I can take my time. Other authors, especially those who are already dead, are less fortunate. As Michael Paulson reports, Edward Albee, who died last fall, left very explicit instructions in his will—his works in progress are to be destroyed immediately. But the vagaries of estate law allow for some wiggle room here. Will Albee’s executors follow through on the command, if they haven’t already? “Albee wants two of his friends to destroy any incomplete manuscripts he left behind … Now at stake, at a minimum, are the latest drafts of Albee’s final known project, Laying an Egg, about a middle-aged woman struggling to become pregnant. (Paradoxically, one plot element concerned her father’s will.) The play was twice scheduled for production at Signature Theatre, an Off Broadway nonprofit in New York, and twice withdrawn by Albee, who said it wasn’t ready … James Bundy, dean of the Yale School of Drama, said ‘Edward’s choice strikes me as entirely in keeping with his own exacting standards … It’s no more our business than it would have been if he had made a little bonfire of his work before his death, or shredded some manuscripts one day long ago—perhaps he did … It’s ultimately a good thing for artists to negotiate their own artistic destinies within the framework of the relevant laws: They have no more, and no fewer, rights than would you and I in the same situation.’ ” A writer’s style is critical to his or her success, which is why I’m never seen without my signature garment: a Day-Glo orange safety vest that says to all passersby, When I’m not busy writing, I like to pump your gas in New Jersey. A new book by Terry Newman, Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore, argues that even writers who shrug off the importance of fashion are in some way dressing for success. Vanessa Friedman writes, “The sartorial choices authors make are deeply connected to the narrative choices they make—or, as Beckett put it, ‘the fabric of language’ they use … In developing their own idiosyncratic style signatures, they created trends that fashion itself seized on, was inspired by and still finds a fertile source of ideation today … In the same way that pet owners sometimes come to resemble their animals, writers often come to resemble their discourse (or, in the case of John Updike, their main character—which is to say, suburbia). [Molly] Stern refers to it as a ‘stylistic earmark’ … It makes sense: When you spend a fair amount of time thinking about why a character would wear something, or what marks a character—their value system—it would be almost impossible for that same kind of thinking and analysis not to filter down into your own wardrobe, whether or not the effect was deliberate.” Read More