April 3, 2017 Our Correspondents Hardware Store Doppelgänger By Jane Stern May contain duplicates. There’s a mom-and-pop hardware store half a mile from my house. It’s the kind of place that if you need two nails, or a small screwdriver, or some bug spray, you might choose it over Home Depot. I really like this store, but I’ve had some weird experiences there—specifically, I’ve been mistaken for someone else on multiple occasions. This doesn’t happen to me a lot outside the hardware store. I have a unique look. I don’t mean that as a boast or a knock; I just don’t resemble many other people. The hardware-store doppelgänger business started about two years ago, when I went in to buy a pint of paint. I noticed a man staring at me, and then sidling up to me, and then changing his mind and walking away. I am not a big fan of sidling, so I made hard eye contact with him, flashing my fiercest what-do-you-want look. Read More
April 3, 2017 On Film Search for the New Land By Adam Shatz Kasper Collin’s new documentary celebrates the vibrant, turbulent life of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan. Photo: Kasper Collin Produktion AB. Courtesy of the Afro-American Newspaper Archives and Research Center. “Every listener to jazz has had a few experiences so startling that they are literally unforgettable,” Nat Hentoff wrote in 1960: One of mine took place during an engagement the Dizzy Gillespie big band had at Birdland in 1957. My back was to the bandstand as the band started playing “Night in Tunisia.” Suddenly, a trumpet soared out of the band into a break that was so vividly brilliant and electrifying that all conversation in the room stopped and those of us who were gesturing were frozen with hands outstretched. After the first thunderclap impact, I turned and saw that the trumpeter was the very young sideman from Philadelphia, Lee Morgan. Lee Morgan, who was nineteen when Hentoff heard him, had this effect on many people. His sound was bright, brash, and sassy: like James Brown’s early work, it had the seductively strutting arrogance of youth. Morgan was a funky, down-home player, with a penchant for “smeared,” dirty notes, but he was also a subtle and calculating musical thinker who constructed his solos as if they were stories. That synergy of soulfulness and hipster cool defined the so-called Blue Note sound in the fifties and sixties, and Morgan was one of the label’s most celebrated artists. As David H. Rosenthal wrote in his classic study Hard Bop, he was the “quintessential hard-bopper.” Read More
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