April 3, 2017 On the Shelf Sometimes Poets Are Successful, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Yevtushenko reading before thousands in the Soviet Union. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who died this weekend at eighty-three, reminds us that sometimes a poet can achieve that rare thing: popularity. All it requires is persistence, good fortune, and cultural conditions dramatically different from those of the contemporary U.S. At the height of his powers, Yevtushenko commanded audiences of thousands in the Soviet Union, where his readings gave voice to the hopes and fears of a generation struggling to come out from under Stalinism. In an obituary for Yevtushenko, Anna Nemtsova writes, “He was like a giant loudspeaker sending messages across Soviet borders on behalf of his country, without sarcasm or cynicism, even when his country’s leaders made it impossible to love the state, when they beat down his own love for Russia by banning the best avant-garde art, destroying lives, repressing dissidents, deploying armies to foreign states … Yevtushenko and three other famous poets, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, and Robert Rozhdestvensky, turned poetry into a cult, brought it to stadiums, recited their lyrics for thousands of spectators. Once, during one such poetic concert, Yevtushenko’s fans carried him around Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, as if an Olympic champion of poetry.” Listening to the lounge chanteuse Diamanda Galás, Hua Hsu hears a voice unadorned, “ancient-feeling in its primal ambitions,” and thus at odds with almost everything on the radio right now: “In the early days of pop music, the microphone was still an instrument to be mastered. Singers like Holiday, Sinatra, and Baker explored the possibilities of what amplification could accomplish, cooing and chatting over their bands in a way that felt intimate, as though the words were being poured into your ears alone. Our expectations are different nowadays. Some of the most exciting current experiments in pop music involve processing those voices, using technology not to capture the singer’s quiet whisper but to make the singer sound unfamiliar, pulsing and flickering, swirly and surreal. It’s music conscious of our states of constant distraction, the voice tracking the surges and flows that comprise life in digital spaces.” Read More
March 31, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sorceresses, Sidewalks, Suturing By The Paris Review From Taipei Story. When I hopped over to BAM recently to see Edward Yang’s 1985 Taipei Story, I didn’t realize that I was about to encounter one of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen this year. Taipei Story is a stunning and fluid masterpiece about a couple, Chin (Tsai Chin) and Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien), slowly drifting apart in an increasingly modern Taiwan. They make vague plans to move to America, but they fall through—neither one of them can seem to stop giving money to their struggling friends and family. The movie is sewn through with glorious slow images: of Taiwan’s new, monotonous high-rises (“I can’t tell anymore which ones I designed and which I didn’t,” says Chin’s architect lover); clogged highways; active night markets and cozy karaoke bars. Everything is bent in a glacially paced Weltschmerz. The biggest bummer (spoiler, sorry): when Lung dies, stabbed at the end by a young admirer of Chin’s. It happens so casually, in a muffled street scuffle, that it just seems like another quiet moment in this drifting, sad story. But Yang has flipped the tragedy switch: after his attacker flees, Lung starts to walk away, then stops, pulls back his jacket, and looks at a dripping, red orb on his white dress shirt. He limps down the empty, tree-lined parkway, hoping for a cab. It never comes. —Caitlin Love I watched A Perfect Couple (1979) from start to finish before I realized it was a Robert Altman movie. I should’ve known: it’s a bonkers rom-com including an assault with a fireplace poker, a very horny veterinarian, and a tender moment in the ER, with the doctor interrupting to say, “I don’t think you two should be kissing while I’m suturing.” Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin play star-crossed lovers with troubles at home. He, well into his forties, still lives in the baroque family mansion, where his tyrannical Greek father presides over creaky, oppressive family dinners. She’s a backup singer in Keepin’ Em Off the Streets, a Delaney and Bonnie–ish rock revue whose asshole bandleader insists on grueling, interminable rehearsals, after which the band repairs to the hip loft where they cohabit in promiscuous, cultlike harmony. Altman’s arch, cynical side is here in abundance—he makes love seem like an apocalypse, the sort of thing you’d undertake only if the drugs stopped being fun. But almost in spite of himself, he ends up with a winsome story about trapped people looking for life’s fire exits. (He also sneaks in one of the earliest examples of a happy gay couple in all of cinema.) The sets, designed by regular Altman collaborator Leon Ericksen, are at once airy and labyrinthine, giving the camera plenty of holes to plumb and baubles to dwell on. And the script is quietly lacerating: when Dooley advertises himself for a video-dating service, he stammers, “I’m interested in having a relationship that’s, uh … well I don’t like to say meaningful, because everybody says meaningful.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
March 31, 2017 First Person Searching for Derek Walcott By Matthew St. Ville Hunte A painting by Derek Walcott. “What is the motto of St. Lucia, boy?” “Statio haud malefida carinis.” “Sir!” “Sir!” “And what does that mean?” “Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps.” —Derek Walcott, Another Life “Sir Matthew! Sir Derek Walcott—he die!” Three excited girls bounded into my room at about twenty minutes to eight, as I ate breakfast for a change, to deliver the announcement. One of their fathers worked for Walcott and had mentioned it while dropping her off at school. I called the man, who apprehensively confirmed the story. Walcott was dead—but he didn’t want word of it to spread before the family had made a statement. I assured him that I’d tell no one, and spent the next hour wondering whether emailing someone about it would violate my promise, or indeed basic propriety. Within an hour the news broke anyway. Read More
March 31, 2017 Look Search Light By Dan Piepenbring “Search Light,” an exhibition of paintings, photographs, and drawings by Jane Hammond, is at Galerie Lelong through April 22. The show features what Hammond calls “Dazzle paintings,” works derived from photos, painted in acrylic on a surface of mica sheets over Plexiglas. Hammond infuses these paintings with silver, gold, copper, and palladium leaf, giving them a dense, textured reflectivity. Her photographs, meanwhile, are digitally manipulated to present what she calls “stills from a movie in my head.” In a 2013 interview, she explained, I’ve always worked with found information … When I talk to myself about my paintings, I always use this word jammed. It’s a reference to how each constituent element in the painting is coming from a disparate source, from another culture, from another time. Each one is freighted with the way they drew in England in the 1890s, or an Art Deco sensibility, or the way woodcuts looked in Germany in 1500, or Chinese ink drawings. And I’ve always valued these inconsistencies. You know, there is a rabbit on a branch; the branch is much more detailed than the rabbit is; the branch is seen from the left; the rabbit is seen from the right. That’s what I call jamming. I like the collision of the otherness. Jane Hammond, Paddler, 2016, acrylic paint on mica over Plexiglass with silver, gold, copper and palladium leaf, 37″ x 37.25″ x 3.75″. Read More
March 31, 2017 On the Shelf Dogs Don’t Talk in Times New Roman, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A screen grab from Microsoft Bob. Prediction: Comic Sans MS is due for a comeback. Ostracized and maligned for decades, the world’s most controversial typeface is about to come in from the cold. Books will be printed in Comic Sans. Official memoranda will be typed in it. Highway signs will use it; fashion labels will use it; we will put it on the moon. Vincent Connare, a typographer for Microsoft in the nineties who designed Comic Sans, has begun to campaign for its rehabilitation. He maintains that the font is a perfect marriage of form and content, especially given Microsoft’s ambitions at the time: “One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make computers more accessible to children. I booted it up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense … Type should do exactly what it’s intended to do. That’s why I’m proud of Comic Sans. It was for novice computer users and it succeeded with that market. People use it inappropriately: if they don’t understand how type works, it won’t have any power or meaning to them. I once heard a guy at a Rothko show say: ‘I could have done that.’ He clearly doesn’t know anything about art. He’ll probably use Comic Sans without realizing it’s wrong in certain circumstances.” Oh, I forgot about baseball! Baseball uniforms will use Comic Sans. Bet your life on it. The MLB’s new commissioner, Rob Manfred, is pitching all sorts of wild ideas for the game. Why not a typeface change? After all, Jay Caspian Kang, looking into baseball’s past, reminds us that the game has seen plenty of upgrades since the nineteenth century, when warring New York and Massachusetts factions vied for primacy: “The Massachusetts game featured one-out innings and overhand pitching, and batters could be called out by being hit by a thrown ball while between bases. Typically, the first team to score 100 runs won. The New York game was a bit more genteel and pragmatic: Games were played to 21, not 100; pitchers had to throw underhand; no players had balls intentionally thrown at them; and games concluded before dark. The debates over which version was better centered on manliness, decorum and the pace of play. The Massachusetts crowd argued that it was manlier for outs to require some measure of physical pain, while the New Yorkers said that manliness could never be extricated from gentlemanly manners and that only savages ran around fields pegging balls at one another.” Read More
March 30, 2017 From the Archive Joanne Kyger in the Review By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Elsa Dorfman. We were sad to learn that Joanne Kyger, whom the San Francisco Gate calls “a leading poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and a rare female voice of the male-dominated Beat generation,” died last week at eighty-two. In an illuminating 2014 interview with The Conversant, Kyger discussed her process and, memorably, the role of psychedelics in her work: I participated in several peyote ceremonies and in February of 1959, while taking it with some friends, I had a quite unpleasant experience of massed black energy intercut with animal faces. The fact that I was unwisely taking this trip in my apartment, which was over a bar in North Beach, and was not feeling well, added to a very unstable sense of “reality.” This “black energy” resembled an animal, which I later named, hoping to focus it. A wild animal, which I paid attention to whenever I saw it or saw mention of it. For years I was afraid of stepping over some edge into a loss of self or schizophrenic duality. Living in Japan and seeing the guardian warriors outside the temple doors with their fierce animal-like expressions, I finally realized they were protectors. Fear creates a wall one can be afraid to pass by. If they scared you off, you didn’t have enough courage or knowledge to enter further. I think I was fearful of the energy of the animal self, whatever I thought that was. The Review published Kyger’s poems in the late sixties and early seventies; digital subscribers should check out her work in our Spring 1966, Summer 1970, and Spring 1973 issues. Below is my favorite, “June 7 … ” Read More