June 19, 2017 On Music A World of Shared Ecstasy By Adam Shatz A new suite for string quartet weds Western and Arabic music with intelligence, integrity, and feeling. Photo: captain.orange, via Flickr. Mathias Énard’s novel Compass, which won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, has been hailed for its elegiac, meandering portrait of Western scholars of the Islamic world. Few critics have noticed that it’s also a novel about European musicians and composers enchanted by the sounds of the Middle East and North Africa. The narrator, Franz Ritter, is an Austrian musicologist, or, in his words, “a poor unsuccessful academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about.” His thesis, which Énard obviously cares about, is that modern European concert music “owed everything to the Orient”: All over Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Orient to modify the self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony. Ritter’s compass invariably points east, and delirious exaggeration is his rhetorical signature, but the novel offers a suggestive account of Western music’s encounter with its Eastern other. Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt all wrote Turkish-style marches; Debussy, Bartók, and Hindemith were fascinated by Arabic and Asian scales. The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski was so besotted by North Africa that he wrote “Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin,” whose lyrics at one point cry out “Allah Akbar!” Some Western musicians reinvented themselves as Arabic musicians, notably the late Swiss qanun master (and Muslim convert) Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss. Music, Énard suggests, has proven a uniquely fertile ground for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, “a world of shared ecstasy, of a possibility for change, of participation in alterity.” It has rejected the “violence of imposed identities” in favor of “the dual, the ambiguous.” Read More
June 19, 2017 On the Shelf Leave Willy Alone, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Why you gotta be so mean? As a thought experiment, Virginia Woolf once imagined the life of Judith Shakespeare, William’s hypothetical sister—just as artistically gifted, but constrained, as a woman, by every form of harassment and prejudice. A creative person in Judith’s position, Woolf thought, would’ve suffered ‘nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her.’ Rachel Bowlby argues that times have changed: Woolf’s reputation has grown by such leaps and bounds since her death that she is, now, essentially Judith Shakespeare, sitting beside the bard in the pantheon of English letters. Bowlby writes, “Woolf acquired a prime position, becoming something like a queen in the widening world of women and literature. There had been a more doubtful period when her writings were sometimes disparaged or downgraded, and her Bloomsbury associations might detract from her status as a thinker. But by the time she came out of copyright for the first time in 1992, she was all set for the long canonical haul: ripe for instant endowment with the footnotes of scholarly and studently editions. She could be called on at any time and in most contexts for a challenging, memorable quotation—not just about women or literature, but about any topic of current or universal interest, from war to love to money to colonialism to class. Alongside Shakespeare, Woolf is a literary celebrity, to be found in every corner of cultural consciousness and public or private space: from mugs to T-shirts to films and plays … No other non-male writer has received anything like this degree of recognition and attention. It is not clear whether this is more of a consummation or an irony, but without a doubt Woolf has herself become Shakespeare’s sister.” But it’s actually a shitty time to be Shakespeare, let alone Shakespeare’s sister, I’m sad to say. In the wake of the Trumped-up Julius Caesar debacle, protestors have attempted to interrupt Shakespeare in the Park’s production—and other, even more ignorant people have revealed an antipathy for Shakespeare that runs deeper than I’d ever thought possible. Many of them don’t seem to know who the playwright is at all; others may believe he’s still alive; all of them have a disdain for his entire canon. Whatever the case, as Malcolm Gay writes, Shakespeare troupes around the nation—all of whom have nothing to do whatsoever with the disputed Caesar production—are getting loads of hate mail from Trump supporters. Like: “Hope you all who did this play about Trump are the first do [sic] die when ISIS COMES TO YOU [expletive] sumbags [sic].” Another writer wished the thespians “the worst possible life you could have and hope you all get sick and die.” Gay reports, “At Shakespeare Dallas, executive and artistic director Raphael Parry says his company has received about eighty messages, including threats of rape, death, and wishes that the theater’s staff is ‘sent to ISIS to be killed with real knives’ … ‘You have to understand, we work primarily with a 400-year-old playwright: There’s been a lot of water over the dam,’ said Shakespeare & Company artistic director Allyn Burrows. ‘I don’t know that it’s ever been this acute’ … ‘What might be gurgling up for them is their ire around having to do Shakespeare in high school,’ he quipped. ‘They’re like, you know what? I never realized I hated my English teacher as much as I did.’ ” Read More
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