January 6, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sisters, Scary Sex, “Sivilization” By The Paris Review From Sisters by a River. Barbara Comyns (1909–92) grew up one of five girls in an old house on the banks of the River Avon. When she was seventeen, her father died; the family was ruined and dispersed. Her first novel, Sisters by a River, is about the lost paradise of their country childhood—a paradise that is often indistinguishable from hell. It is, in other words, a realistic treatment, written (for her own daughters, originally) in a kind of well-bred nursery patois, with the cold gaze of an actual child: “Quite suddenly Chloe and I got a craze for throwing perfectly good things away, it started in the holidays when our other games were rather suppressed. It was always Chloes’s things that were distroyed, we would burn her books slowly, page by page, break her dolls heads off and distroy toys she was really fond of, an awful gleam would come into our eyes and we would tear a teddy bear’s head off, burn it, then throw the body in the river.” —Lorin Stein I snuck away from the office to catch MoMA’s new exhibition “A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde.” This show doesn’t make any new claims, and I’ve seen a good bit of the work before, but I never miss a chance to see it again. And each time I do, I’m awed by the exuberance, energy, and freshness in the artists’ approaches to materials and ideas and to the physical and psychic environments of revolutionary Russia. I also never fail to find new connections with more contemporary art. In her linoleum-cut prints from 1917 to 1919, Lyubov Popova layered collage-like, colored shapes to suggest movement and spatial interaction (what she called “painterly architectonics”): I instantly thought of Lee Krasner’s large, hard-edge canvases from the early seventies, where seemingly cutout curvilinear forms dance around one another. In El Lissitzky’s Proun lithographs from 1920—in which various three-dimensional geometric shapes float around one another as though in a group space walk—I see Rammellzee’s “Letter Racers” from the late eighties and early nineties, his galactic graffiti language writ in sculptures composed of found objects spray painted and mounted on wheels and skateboards. “The artist is transformed from reproducer to builder of a new world of forms, a new world of objects,” El Lissitzky wrote. I’ll bet Rammellzee would agree. —Nicole Rudick Read More
January 6, 2017 The Lives of Others Songs of Mira Bai By Edward White The Rajput princess whose spiritual anthems rejected the patriarchy. Drawings by Kanu Desai. From Mirabai: Ten Pictures from the Life of India’s Greatest Poetess of the Past. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg and sparked the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, thousands of miles away in South Asia, a phenomenon known as bhakti was coming to its conclusion, one that slowly transformed the Hindu faith over several centuries. Just as the Reformation swapped Latin for the vernacular, and Catholic hierarchies for a more direct connection between God and His worshippers, so bhakti—“devotion,” loosely translated—rejected Sanskrit (the ancient language of the social and political elite) for regional tongues, and the didactic wisdom of the Brahmins for the evangelical fervor of ordinary people. Unlike Luther’s plans for reform, bhakti was not a conscious, deliberate movement with a coherent body of thought or doctrine but a radical spirit and style of worship that some liken to the Great Awakening in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, and what one historian has described as “intensely emotional, participatory, demotic and demonstrative … a glorious disease of the collective heart.” The most notable symptom of this disease was the great profusion of songs and poems created by adherents across India and Pakistan. The bhakti canon is vast and glorious. One of its greatest figures is a woman remembered as Mira Bai, whose songs have endured half a millennium, and whose singular significance in Indian society has only increased since the nation’s independence seventy years ago. Read More
January 6, 2017 On the Shelf The Tomboy’s Malaise, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Lego ad from the eighties, featuring a tomboy. The Anglophone world treats homophony like a fun parlor trick—two words sound alike, so let’s make some puns and call it a day. But Chinese culture has a profound respect for, even a fear of, the mystery of homophones. Julie Sedivy explains: “Chinese practices take punning to a whole new level—one that reaches deep into a culture where good fortune is persistently courted through positive words and deeds, and misfortune repelled by banishing the negative. The number four is tainted because of its homophony with the word for death—many Chinese people would never consider buying a house whose address contained that number. In visual designs, fish and bats figure prominently because they are sound twins of the words for surplus and fortune. Gift-giving is fraught with homophonic taboos; it is all right to give apples, because their name sounds like peace, but not pears, whose name overlaps with separation … Chinese speakers are more likely to take pains to clarify the intended meaning of an ambiguous word, even when its meaning should be obvious from the context.” Rachel Cusk, whose outstanding novel Transit is out this month, explains what makes for a good memoir: “The memoirist must have complete ownership of their own fate, to the extent that they can create the illusion of friendship with the reader. But their responsibility is actually more like that of the parent: They are highly visible, especially in their mistakes. Likewise the memoirist occupies an intensely subjective world, while creating a template for, or version of, living in which objectivity is everything. A parent can create a complex and instructive ‘self’ for the child, and it can be distressing when the ‘real,’ flawed self breaks through. The really good memoirist can incorporate these losses of control into the picture.” Read More
January 5, 2017 Look All the Kitsch By Dan Piepenbring John Ashbery, A Dream of Heroes, 2015, mixed media collage, 15 3/4 x 20 1/2. John Ashbery is eighty-nine. In the last two months, he’s published a new collection of poems, Commotion of the Birds, and launched an exhibition of his latest collage work, which appears through January 28 at Tibor de Nagy. Read More
January 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Mürmurings By Chris Pomorski Uluç Ülgen invites total strangers to his home for intimate one-on-one conversations. Uluç Ülgen. All photos via www.mürmer.com. With the possible exception of certain work-from-home professionals whose clients are disposed, for one reason or another, to assume reclining positions, Uluç Ülgen has likely invited more strangers into his apartment than any other resident of New York City. Ülgen, originally from Turkey, is the founder, host, and producer of mürmur, a podcast he records in his one-bedroom Manhattan rental. To find guests, he hangs flyers from phone poles with his name, phone number, and address beside an open invitation. Unless it appears at the beginning of a sentence, the m in mürmur goes uncapitalized, a convention that reflects Ülgen’s egalitarian worldview. The podcast, which has aired 170 episodes since February 2015, has no topical theme. In fact, Ülgen actively discourages visitors from having anything particular in mind to talk about when they show up. In April 2015, a man named Sean Walker told Ülgen about his path from the honor roll to homelessness. A few weeks later, Jordan Theodore stopped by to talk about the year he spent watching a thousand movies. Another time, a woman named Flo remembered giving birth alone during the 2003 blackout. In the popular tradition of eccentric endeavors, the podcast was conceived during a dark period in its creator’s life. Relatively new to New York, Ülgen had become frustrated. He had failed to bring longstanding musical ambitions to fruition and felt unlucky in love. Reflecting that in his bleakest moments—lacking food, money, or shelter—he’d often been helped along by people he barely knew, he resolved to create a platform that would facilitate meaningful interactions between strangers. Read More
January 5, 2017 Our Correspondents Everyone Has Accidents By Amy Gentry Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful often ends up in the bathroom. Still from Unfaithful. I’m always on the lookout for domestic thrillers with weird bodily fluid obsessions, so naturally the toilet fixation in Adrian Lyne’s 2002 film, Unfaithful, caught my attention. A remake of Claude Chabrol’s La femme infidele and Lyne’s last film to date, the film opens with a prolonged peeing shot and closes with a wet bed. In between, there are enough scenes shot in the WC to make anyone regret having chugged down a bottle of Aquafina before pushing play. But then, this is a film about the emotional incontinence of the bourgeoisie. Connie Summers (Diane Lane) is a gorgeously middle-aged suburban housewife who begins an affair with young French Lothario Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez) after being literally swept into his arms while shopping on a blustery day. Lane’s superb, slow-burning performance earned her an Oscar nomination and several other screen-acting awards; her face, often shot in extreme close-up, is so sensitive and vulnerable that her jowly husband Edward (Richard Gere, who put on weight for the role at Lyne’s insistence) looks positively opaque by comparison. Midway through the film, the perspective shifts from Connie to Edward, and from one type of incontinence—Connie’s lust—to another—Edward’s rage, which erupts into violence. The melodrama becomes a domestic thriller, though a reluctant, murky one that focuses more on the crime’s emotional consequences than its legal ones. Read More