June 16, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gasps, Giant Cubes, Gay Bars By The Paris Review Toshio Matsumoto’s masterly 1969 debut about queer life in Toyko, Funeral Parade of Roses, has been playing in a beautiful new restoration this week at Quad Cinema; I walked down from our office just a few days ago to see it. Funeral Parade follows Eddie, a small-framed, sensual, nonconforming bar hostess, whose job at a gay bar is complicated by a troubling love triangle and traumatic memories she can’t forget. Late-night rousing with her pot-smoking leftist friends doesn’t alleviate her anxieties. Much of the movie leaves us in Eddie’s head as she relives a cluster of agonizing recollections from childhood: her mother laughing at her when Eddie asks about her father; Eddie finding her mother entangled with a lover on the floor; the first time her mother caught Eddie putting on lipstick (also the first time Eddie herself experimented with a woman’s mask). That these three memories focus on Eddie’s mother should alert you to the Oedipal themes that thunder throughout this heated and beautiful spectacle. Funeral Parade of Roses is, as BOMB says, a “gallery of masks, ones that people wear and occasionally let slip.” —Caitlin Love Early in his one-man show Secret, the English magician and mentalist Derren Brown tells the audience not to divulge any part of his act. I will only say that it was, literally, incredible—the first time I’ve heard a theater full of adults gasp in disbelief. Brown specializes in old-fashioned hypnotism and mind reading, including the oracle routine (magician puts sealed envelope to head, knows contents), but he weaves his tricks into a finale so complex, baffling, and surprising that one wouldn’t know how to describe it, even if it were allowed. —Lorin Stein Read More
June 16, 2017 From the Archive Dads Behaving Badly By Dan Piepenbring Short stories about bad dads from our archive. Happy Father’s Day to one of the best! When you’re living in a patriarchy, every day is Father’s Day. For millennia fathers got by without such a day, looting and pillaging and reigning with such impunity in their workaday dad lives that to set aside a special occasion for it seemed like gilding the lily. But the powerful never tire of celebrating themselves, and when the dads saw that mothers had a day of their own, they became angry. (Angrier, I should say—dads, as a class, have always been hotheads.) Feeling unappreciated, they began to abuse their already capacious tendencies for pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. They would traipse around their homes with their potbellies hanging out of ill-fitting WORLD’S #1 DAD T-shirts, hoping to be noticed. To appease the dads and curb the worst impulses of their droit du seigneur, greeting-card companies some years ago brokered a “Father’s Day,” on which the dads consented to have their rings kissed by family members and to delight in an array of fun new gadgets and scotches presented to them at beery ceremonial barbecues. In exchange, the dads agreed to try to take an active interest in their children’s lives every once and a while, and to keep the drinking to weekends. They now pretend not to notice their cultural senescence, and chuckle agreeably when commercials depict them as primitive morons. A little-known Father’s Day bylaw, legal scholars have argued, makes it possible for you to give your father something he does not actually want—he is powerless to protest, since by obligation he has to “enjoy” his “special day.” Short fiction is one such thing, generally. Dads are not so keen on it. (There are exceptions, of course, but these tend to be the same dads who say they don’t want “a big to-do” on Father’s Day.) If you want to knock your old man around a little bit, try reading him one of these short stories in lieu of giving him an Apple Watch or whatever. He might just blow his stack! Read More
June 16, 2017 On Film Summers and Swimmers By Paula Mejia With a new retrospective, the screenwriter Eleanor Perry gets belated recognition. Still from The Swimmer. The 1972 Cannes Film Festival was marked by protests against Italy’s reigning auteur, Federico Fellini, who had green-lit an ill-advised poster for his movie Roma. Depicting a nude, three-breasted “she-wolf” perched suggestively on all fours, the advertisement drew opprobrium from the venerable American screenwriter Eleanor Perry and five others, who, according to the Chicago Tribune, “stirred up a hornet’s nest when they set up ladders in front of the Carlton Hotel before the [Roma] showing … and tried to deface [the] sign.” The protestors waved signs that read WOMEN ARE PEOPLE—NOT DIRTY JOKES; soon they ascended a tall aluminum ladder “and threw four cans of red paint on the Fellini poster,” the Tribune reported. The cops started “shaking the ladder and trying to knock them to the ground while Mrs. Perry screamed mechant (a French word meaning wicked and evil) and ripped epaulets from their uniforms.” Asked later about the demonstrations, which had sent three people to jail, Perry told the paper: “I adore Fellini, he’s one of my idols, but this ugly distortion of the female anatomy is a humiliating offense to women everywhere.” Read More
June 16, 2017 On the Shelf The Silicon Valley Cult Wants to Eat Your Brain, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Join us, won’t you? Liberal-arts majors: no matter how bad things get, how valueless your diploma seems to be, or how limited your employment opportunities are, never forget that you can always just pack it in and become a tech bro. It’s true: Silicon Valley, the utopia of our time, will always be there, waiting to suck the marrow from your bones in an exchange for a six-figure salary and an “office culture” that boasts free microbrews (and rampant sexism). So don’t get depressed—just join the baddies! In a new review of Scott Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie—a book that argues for more liberal-arts values in the tech industry—Tom Slee sees merely another effort to get humanities types to drink the Palo Alto Kool-Aid: “Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie (fuzzy being a Stanford nickname for humanities and social science students) is a clarion call for you to join the world of digital disruption, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The author contends that Silicon Valley needs you if it is to fulfill the next stage of its disruptive vision: your creativity and your skills of ‘critical thinking, logical argumentation, and complex problem solving’ will make for better technology; your insights into our public institutions and what makes us human will guide technology to build a better world … But there is a critical failure at the heart of The Fuzzy and the Techie: in his eagerness to portray fuzzies doing well by doing good in the technology industry, Hartley too readily accepts Silicon Valley’s flattering self-descriptions of its values and vision for the world. The positivity of entrepreneurship does not sit comfortably with the skeptical outlook that the liberal arts nurture, and Hartley fully embraces entrepreneurship.” Today’s arts conservators, Jacoba Urist writes, face an unprecedented variety of materials and media—the burden of preserving a piece of art has never been more fraught: “It’s difficult to imagine bologna portraits transcending millennia like a classical marble bust or centuries like a Rembrandt. Getting a sculpture made of deli meat to survive the decade could even be a stretch … Today’s art world is filled with artists using seemingly banal, yet wacky household items—from a miniature Algerian town made of couscous to a huge Styrofoam cup cloud—elaborate, significant work that challenges not only what art is, but how exactly, future generations will be able to experience it … These artists are using products that are meant to decompose rapidly by design. For this segment of twenty-first-century art, museums are consciously conserving art as it’s created. Now, scientists must invent ways to preserve the most tenuous of materials, rather than simply restoring pieces to their original—or most authentic—luster.” Read More
June 15, 2017 On Sports Orange Crush By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Photo: Krbo, Flickr Late in the nineteenth century, William Renshaw, an Englishman famed for his tennis game—he’d won six Wimbledons in a row—found himself with a dilemma. He was in sunny Cannes on vacation, planning to make some money on the side by giving tennis lessons. Back then, the game was played exclusively on grass; anything else was heresy. But when Renshaw examined the court at his disposal, he could see that the grass had grown brown and thin beneath the hot sun—it would wilt under the pressure of his well-heeled feet. A light went off in his head: he decided to have load after heaping load of red clay transported from Vallauris, a small seaside town known for its devotion to the ceramic arts. He convinced the town to part with some of its rejected pottery, pulverized the clay into tiny grains, and applied a thin, protective layer to the grass court in Cannes. The clay court was born. Today, it’s a fifteen-minute drive from Vallauris to Cannes, and less than an hour to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the home of the Monte Carlo Open, the first stop in the men’s clay court season. The stylish locales of the biggest clay tournaments—Buenos Aires, Rio, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Paris—belie the true grit at the heart of their tennis. Clay games are a grind; the surface is rooted in a pragmatism made from and infused by the tactile, utilitarian art of ceramics, and it distinguishes itself from other tennis surfaces in its erratic effects. It forces the player’s body to adapt or fail. Shots sponge off the granular surface, slowing down and trampolining back into the air at unlikely angles. Returns that would have been winners on grass and hard courts come ricocheting back to you, sometimes bouncing as high as your shoulders, and players have to slide into their shots. It’s hard to stress how difficult it is to adjust to these conditions. Imagine a two-month span of the basketball season in which everyone was forced to play on a thin layer of sand. Suddenly there’s a premium on probing, strategic shots over straight-ahead power. Read More
June 15, 2017 At Work Writing Walter Hopps: An Interview with Deborah Treisman By Dan Nadel Walter Hopps, in Washington, D.C., in 1978. Photograph by William Christenberry. Collection of William Christenberry. Walter Hopps’s just-published memoir, The Dream Colony, opens with the sentence “My parents collected plein-air California paintings, and that was the art that hung in the Hopps household.” The line is striking for its thumbnail sketch of the pattern Hopps’s life would take: that he managed to turn identifying, collecting, and living with art into a career that vastly influenced post–World War II American art. As a teenager in Los Angeles, the precocious and curious Hopps regularly visited the great collectors and Duchamp supporters Walter and Louise Arensberg and explored the museums and galleries of LA; by night he soaked up the city’s jazz scene, where he befriended Chet Baker and a young Dave Brubeck. In 1952, at the age of twenty, he opened a gallery, Syndell Studio, and, three years later, mounted an exhibition called “Action” in an empty carousel on the Santa Monica Pier. The show introduced both an aesthetic and a group of artists that would engage Hopps for the length of his career: gritty assemblage and abstraction as exemplified by Jay DeFeo, Hassel Smith, and Craig Kauffman. With the sculptor Ed Kienholz, Hopps opened Ferus in 1957. It became the ur–sixties Los Angeles gallery, home to the young artists Wallace Berman, Ken Price, and Billy Al Bengston, among others, and host to Andy Warhol’s first West Coast solo show. Hopps, however, was never very comfortable as an art dealer, and in 1962 he became the curator of the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum of Art), where he gained fame and critical attention for shows that were the first of their kind in the United States, including Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell retrospectives and the country’s first Pop Art overview, “New Painting of Common Objects.” From the midsixties through the seventies, Hopps served in leading curatorial roles at the Washington Gallery of Fine Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where he showed artists as diverse as Walker Evans and Robert Crumb; and the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts, where he mounted a Robert Rauschenberg retrospective and began a friendship with the artist that lasted the rest of his life. In 1980, Hopps began collaborating with the collector Dominique de Menil as a consultant to the Menil Foundation in 1980, and in 1987 the Menil Collection opened; he was its first director, and then its curator of twentieth-century art. Hopps was made adjunct senior curator of twentieth-century art at the Guggenheim Museum in 2001. In 1990, he joined Jean Stein’s Grand Street as art editor. It was there that he began collaborating with the magazine’s managing editor, Deborah Treisman, and the assistant art editor, Anne Doran, on art essays for the magazine and catalogue essays. A few years later, the three began work on his memoir. I corresponded with Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, about the process behind the book and the particular talents of its subject. INTERVIEWER When did you come to this project in its current iteration? TREISMAN I didn’t actually “come to the project,” I was part of it from the conception. At Grand Street, Walter selected the artists whose portfolios appeared in the magazine and often provided the accompanying text. He wasn’t particularly comfortable writing—he was far better at speaking and storytelling—so usually we would talk on the phone, or he would talk onto tape, or he would be interviewed by Anne, and I would turn those conversations into the essays that ran alongside the visuals. We went through the same process to put together catalogue essays for some of the major exhibitions Walter curated in the nineties. At some point, after I had moved to The New Yorker, we started discussing the idea of doing a larger project, a book that wasn’t a direct autobiography but that would cover most of Walter’s life and the many artists he wanted to talk about. I wrote up a proposal for the book, which Bloomsbury USA acquired, and Anne was on board to do the interviewing. She had known Walter for decades and was familiar with many of his stories and with much of the work he’d done, so she was able to guide him and keep him focused on the project, which wasn’t always an easy task. Walter had a tendency to digress! Read More