June 21, 2017 Arts & Culture Mother Monster By Philippa Snow Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in a still from Mommie Dearest. “The makeup job, of course, is the real star,” critic Stephen Schiff wrote for the Boston Phoenix about Mommie Dearest, which first screened in 1981, and starred Faye Dunaway in broad Joan Crawford drag: “a Frankenstein’s monster that hovers perilously between faces, between personas … There’s something biologically askew here: a makeup man could create that face, but human genes and chromosomes couldn’t.” I agree—I’d also guess that when he says “the makeup job,” he means the mouth, Joan Crawford’s outsized lips being more or less her genius loci. What Max Factor called “the smear” and the general public called “the hunter’s bow,” a casual observer might call “inhospitable” or “hostile.” The red of Crawford’s lips never seems like the red of a rose or a Valentine, but the red of a wound. Treating the mouth as the sum of the mother is obvious: it’s a mirror for the mother’s other mouth, and a possible site of tenderness. Insensitive to any and all tenderness—and hypersensitive to imperfection—Faye-as-Joan is a perfect bitch and an absolutely flawless lunatic, which makes her as good at being an icon as it makes her awful at being a parent. If the Crawford mouth—a red, Fontana canvas slash of a maw—does not convey the image of a mother or a woman, it may be because Joan Crawford never wanted to be either: only a big, indelible star. To be a star, you also have to be a bit of a monster, which is why “the smear” resembles, variously, the scowl of a clown, the pout of a scheming drag queen, and the bloodied mouth of a bear in a wildlife photograph. Read More
June 21, 2017 On the Shelf Go Stand in the Corner, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A lot to take in here. Prepositions matter. If you’re standing on the corner, you could be having the time of your life; if you’re standing in the corner, you’re probably not having much fun at all. The corner of a room is a site of inwardness and anxiety, a repository for social insecurities. It’s also just not very exciting to look at. For these reasons and more, as Will Wiles writes in a ranging new essay, writers as various as H. P. Lovecraft and J. G. Ballard are united in their fixation on corners, the locus of so many psychic burdens: “Lovecraft and Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, even though neither had the slightest formal training in the subject … They are connected, through time and space, by that most humble of architectural events: the corner, the junction between two walls. What Lovecraft and Ballard did was to make the corner into a place of nightmares—and in doing so, they reveal its secret history … The Lovecraftian corner could drive men mad, whisk them to terrible other places, and sometimes kill them outright. And the corner of a room is a place of power—uncanny, unwelcome power. ‘That most sordid of all havens, the corner, deserves to be examined,’ writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. Bachelard saw the corner as a shameful intellectual bolthole, in which we are silent and immobile, negating the universe, constructing imaginary rooms around us … In 1967 Ballard made four conceptual advertisements and placed them in the pages of the literary magazine Ambit. One asked: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’ ” JFK talked a big game about art—“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist,” he said, and he seemed to believe that nurturing U.S. artists was a great way to kick Commie ass. But now that the dust has settled, Philip Kennicott writes, we should be honest—the guy didn’t really like art that much: “Kennedy was never an art lover, and to the extent that he respected art, it was in the same way he respected accomplishment in science and sports. Nor was Kennedy moved by music or opera, or susceptible to the introspection offered by paintings or sculpture. He was, however, passionate about winning the Cold War on all fronts, including culture … Kennedy no doubt believed everything he said about art, at least in an abstract way. But notice the words that got cut … ‘Art reminds us that man’s hunger for beauty, and truth and self-fulfillment, knows no national boundaries.’ That cut, eliminating reference to how individuals actually engage with art—the hunger for deeper things and self-fulfillment—is significant … He was mocked even in his own time for being more an enthusiast than a deep connoisseur. In 1965, the Kenyon Review wrote that one of his most engaging statements on the arts, an article he wrote for Look Magazine, was written ‘in a vein better suited to a high school commencement address.’ ” Read More
June 20, 2017 On History From Vienna with Love (and Other Mixed Emotions) By Peter Wortsman Maybe it’s the wine, two glasses of crisp white Grüner Veltliner, downed on an empty stomach to still the flutters at the start of my stay. I flew into Vienna a day early and am waiting for my wife Claudie to join me. She’s French, and for her Austria is primarily a European neighbor nation steeped, like Paris, in culture and history, its capital a jewel of a city with grand boulevards, resplendent palaces, world-class museums and concert halls, and cozy cafés. Maybe it’s my mood and where I am in life: sixty-four, my parents long gone, and the tingle of time nipping at my heels. Dare I let go and indulge in the city’s abundant delights? A looming anniversary brings the past too close for comfort. On March 12, 2018, it will be eighty years since the Anschluß, when German soldiers crossed the border unresisted, jubilant masses mobbed Vienna’s sprawling Heldenplatz to welcome the invaders with a native Austrian at their helm, and my parents fled for their lives. That was then, this is now, I try to tell myself, as if Vienna is just another popular destination and I am just another tourist. Read More
June 20, 2017 Look Once I Had This Dream By Dan Piepenbring “Once I Had This Dream,” an exhibition of paintings by Gretchen Scherer, is at Art 3 Gallery through June 24. Scherer, who lives and works in Brooklyn, paints rambling manses and crumbling chateaux as seen through a fun-house mirror—their staircases swerving, their portraits multiplying, their baroque furnishings collapsing into a labyrinth of distorted decor. “I often think about the way I imagine spaces before I see them and how my ideas differ vastly from the way those spaces actually appear,” she says. “It’s these places we create in our minds that inform my paintings … The images I use to collage are mostly from homes in the Victorian era. These pictures hold a fascination for me and cause me to wonder if there is something lurking under the surface. As I’m collaging I imagine the people that lived in those spaces; I begin to catch glimpses of their former lives.” Gretchen Scherer, Philosopher with an Open Book, 2017, oil on panel, 18″ x 24″. Read More
June 20, 2017 On the Shelf Still Baffled by the Brain, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A reproduction of a portrait of Charcot holding a brain, 1898. It’s time for our annual check-in on the mystery of human consciousness—have the scientists figured it out yet? Reader: No. No, they have not. The upper echelons of neuroscience remain baffled; the philosophers, also baffled; the unkempt man at the train station holding a cardboard sign that says MICROWAVES ARE BRAINWAVES, perhaps less baffled but still not terribly convincing. As the neuroscientist Robert A. Burton writes, every era gets the theory of consciousness it deserves—by using science to explain what philosophy and religion could not, we’re essentially just passing the buck, and soon it will pass again: “As an intellectual challenge, there is no equal to wondering how subatomic particles, mindless cells, synapses, and neurotransmitters create the experience of red, the beauty of a sunset, the euphoria of lust, the transcendence of music, or in this case, intractable paranoia … It’s dawned on me that the pursuit of the nature of consciousness, no matter how cleverly couched in scientific language, is more like metaphysics and theology. It is driven by the same urges that made us dream up gods and demons, souls and afterlife. The human urge to understand ourselves is eternal, and how we frame our musings always depends upon prevailing cultural mythology. In a scientific era, we should expect philosophical and theological ruminations to be couched in the language of physical processes. We argue by inference and analogy, dragging explanations from other areas of science such as quantum physics, complexity, information theory, and math into a subjective domain. Theories of consciousness are how we wish to see ourselves in the world, and how we wish the world might be.” Danuta Kean explores one of the lesser-discussed joys of reading: discovering typos. In a survey of literature’s biggest typographical blunders, she writes, “One of the best literary malapropisms in print appears in Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 classic, An American Tragedy … Two characters dance ‘harmoniously abandoning themselves to the rhythm of the music—like two small chips being tossed about on a rough but friendly sea’ … But the king of all typo-riddled books is Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom. HarperCollins wound up pulping the entire first print run of 80,000 copies after it emerged that an early version of the book was sent to the printers by mistake. As a result, the book teemed with hundreds of mistakes in grammar, spelling and even characterization … The Corrections author discovered the catastrophe surrounding his eagerly anticipated book in a brutally public way. Recording a reading for the BBC current affairs show Newsnight, Franzen came to an abrupt halt and said: ‘Sorry, I’m realizing to my horror that there’s a mistake here that was corrected early in the galleys and it’s still in the fucking hardcover of the book.’ ” Read More
June 19, 2017 Bulletin The Case of the Purloined Portrait By Dan Piepenbring The portrait, now recovered. The Paris Review is renowned for our parties, and we take pride in that. But sometimes things get carried away. Literally. As Page Six reports, a party to launch our Summer issue last week was marred by petty larceny: someone absconded with a portrait of Günter Grass drawn by Tomi Ungerer in 1965. Our digital director, Jeffery Gleaves, discovered the theft the next morning, when he noticed a Grass-shaped hole on the bathroom wall. (The portrait, like most of the Review’s valuables, was hanging near the toilet.) If you were here, reader, you may have noticed a single tear roll down Jeff’s cheek, as he vowed to “hunt the vermin down.” Read More