January 23, 2017 First Person The Trojan Horse of Pop By Megan Mayhew Bergman George Michael. I never minded being thought of as a pop star. People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn’t, I just wanted people to know that I was absolutely serious about pop music. —George Michael 1. Bubblegum It was no Alvin Ailey dance class. Several of us, with teeth in braces and hair pulled back into tight buns, lined up in the corner of the studio, with its splintered hardwoods and floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The instructor put on Wham’s “I’m Your Man” and we cut across the space two by two, hoisting our legs on the beat in grand battements, compromising our posture and smacking gum. I’ll be your boy, I’ll be your man … I’ll be your friend, I’ll be your toy, George Michael urges at the end. Because I was young, naive, and lived in the Reagan-era South, I took these invitations into the world of heteronormative sex at face value. I missed any whiff of insistence, darkness, or double entendre. I readjusted my floral leotard, which had gathered somewhere unseemly, and high-kicked my way to the other side of the room. We came to the center of the studio for pelvic isolations, thrusting our hips side to side, then forward, trying not to laugh out loud as we caught one another’s eye. Read More
January 23, 2017 Literary Architecture Juan José Saer, The Witness By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. The unnamed narrator in Juan José Saer’s novel The Witness is an old man who, in the second half of the sixteenth century, decides to write the story of his life. His voice—intense, measured, meticulous in its details, analytical and strongly contemporary—takes the reader back some sixty years earlier, when, as a thirteen-year-old orphan, the narrator set sail as a cabin boy on one of the first-ever expeditions in search of a passage to India through the New World. Upon its arrival in the Americas and caressing its coastline, the expedition insinuates itself inland by slowly sailing up one of its muddy rivers. During a survey on the seemingly uninhabited mainland, the crew is suddenly attacked by a group of natives who, in a matter of seconds, kill everyone except the protagonist. Read More
January 23, 2017 On the Shelf Kaboom, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Stanisław Notariusz, Explosion, 1922. God, I fucking love profanity! Profanity: shit, yes! It sometimes seems to these jaded ears that oaths and cusses are all we have left, the only solace in this vale of fucking tears. Joan Acocella, reviewing two new books about swearing, writes, “The very sound of obscenities—forget their sense—seems to ring a bell in us, as is clear from the fact that many of them sound alike … Consonants sound sharper, more absolute, than vowels. (Compare piss with pee, cunt with pussy.) It may be this tough-talk quality that accounts for certain widely recognized benefits of swearwords. For example, they help us endure pain. In one widely cited experiment, subjects were instructed to plunge a hand into ice-cold water and keep it there as long as they could. Half were told that they could utter a swearword while doing this, if they wanted to; the other half were told to say some harmless word, such as wood. The swearing subjects were able to keep their hands in the water significantly longer than the pure-mouthed group.” Harold Pinter, who knew from obscenity, offered the London Review of Books a fairly salty bit of verse back in 1991, as the U.S. waged the first Gulf War. Inigo Thomas writes, “After the US A-10 tank-buster bombers known as Warthogs had finished off the Iraqi armored brigades on the Basra Road, Harold Pinter, disgusted by the gratuitous carnage, wrote a poem called ‘American Football.’ ” What struck the editors then as a mere novelty is now penetrating, even pungent. Here are the first few lines: Hallelujah! It works. We blew the shit out of them. We blew the shit right back up their own ass And out their fucking ears. Read More
January 20, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Blush, Babble, Barbed Wire By The Paris Review From the cover of Ardour. I’ve found much solace in poetry since November, and this week (long live the NEA), it fell on Nicole Brossard’s recent book of poems, Ardour, translated from the Quebecois by Angela Carr, to help give my feelings shape. The book’s koan-like epigraph, by Anne Carson—“think of your life without it”—is apt; the nearly hundred poems in Ardour appear as fragments, but their brevity belies their breadth. Brossard’s poems are often concerned with points or moments of transition (“nightfall” and the horizon appear frequently, as do shifts in light and weather) that, though subtly rendered, can signal profound change. “Dawn does not darken,” she writes, “it has upper-case letters / can elegantly juxtapose / vivid smiles / and wounds, if you like.” The poems are flecked with small violences—bites and barbed wire, a “blow of murmurs”—but I feel saved by their intimacy, partly owing to their diminutive size: they feel like whispered truths, or at least consolations. “Whirlwind i also love / the species knotted in dog days and l’intimité / the very depths of respiration / our ‘us’ enumerated flaming new.” —Nicole Rudick Last week, Giancarlo Di Trapano turned me on to Suicidal Realism, a short memoir by the Canadian painter Brad Phillips. It’s not exactly an edifying book. Phillips’s main themes are drugs and sex, in that order: “People who like to get fucked up with other people are not people I like to get fucked up with.” But Phillips has a watchful intelligence and self-knowledge, and an impatient sincerity, that sneak up on you (or at least, snuck up on me). He doesn’t ask to be liked, even by his groupies, but he does want to communicate: “I’m not interested in the ones who are drawn to the creator of the work, I’m interested in the ones who are drawn to the content.” —Lorin Stein Read More
January 20, 2017 Arts & Culture So Long, Farewell By Kate Guadagnino Still from The Sound of Music. The Sound of Music hasn’t tarnished over time; it was always dated, always reviled by the learned. Rumor has it that Pauline Kael was fired from McCall’s for her withering review of it (“the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat”) and that Joan Didion was fired from Vogue for hers, which described it as “more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people … Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.” She’s right that the film hints at the limits of art’s power in the face of real danger. “Believe me,” Billy Wilder said at an industry party when he heard of Fox’s production plans, “no musical with swastikas in it will ever be a success!” Of course he was wrong—this was three years before The Producers—though the film might have contained more swastikas than it does. Before Robert Wise could be convinced to sign on, William Wyler was meant to direct. He’d lost relatives in concentration camps and was angling to add a military scene showing tanks decimating Salzburg. Instead, the film treats Nazism as little more than a vague threat to the Austrian aristocracy. At the same time, it capitalizes on a villain everyone can get behind, rendering the Third Reich a least favorite thing. Who among us doesn’t love siblings, lakeside villas, and grandma-chic floral prints—and who wouldn’t root for a Nazi-sympathizing boyfriend to get dumped? Read More
January 20, 2017 Revisited Painting Flowers By Marcy Dermansky Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Marcy Dermansky looks at Van Gogh’s flowers. Vincent van Gogh, Oleanders, 1888, oil on canvas, 23 3/4″ x 29″. It’s a funny thing, being a writer. Sometimes, I don’t want to write. But I always want to create. I want to make art. I want to take my mind off of the inauguration of a president whose name I cannot bear to say, or the fact that I am not writing, or the many small irritations of the day. I want to go to a better place. So, I paint flowers. Honestly, I find this to be a little bit embarrassing. It makes me think almost antifeminist, anti-Marcy like thoughts. Flowers. How cute. Inane. Painting flowers. It is so easy to devalue oneself. My favorite place to go see art is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This is my favorite museum of all museums. It has always been a special place for me, a place I can always go back to, where I have gone since childhood. I was floored by the audacity of Donna Tartt, who opened The Goldfinch with a nightmarish terrorist attack set in the Met galleries. I often think of that fictional attack when I am there—imagine the smoke and the fear and the smell of burning body parts, as I wander amidst tourists gazing at Dutch masterpieces, oblivious. Read More