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
January 5, 2017 On the Shelf Cool Manifesto, Bro, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Cate Blanchett in Manifesto. Everyone loves a manifesto—in theory, anyway. Throwing down the gauntlet, beating one’s chest, issuing a reverberating cri de coeur about the one path of the true artist … it’s a time-honored way for young people to pass a Friday night. But most manifestoes make for boring reading, their vim notwithstanding. They’re full of pretensions and straw men and hollow self-congratulation. Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, a series of thirteen videos featuring Cate Blanchett, asks us to reconsider the self-serving ambitions of such texts. Blanchett inhabits various rhetorical stereotypes—a conservative mom, a homeless person, a eulogizer—to perform some of the greatest hits of the manifesto canon, including the futurists, the situationists, and the minimalists. Liza Batkin writes, “Having each of the manifestos spoken by a female character … serves to remind us that almost all of the manifestos cited in the exhibition catalogue were written by men (forty-three out of the fifty); they are, as Rosefeldt observes, ‘just bursting with testosterone. Art historians,’ he says, ‘tend to regard everything created and written by artists with reverence and respect, as if, from day one, the artists themselves intended their work to become part of art history. But we shouldn’t forget that these texts were usually written by very young men who had barely left their parents’ house when they reached for the pen.’ ” So let’s not call this next bit a manifesto: In 1960, Denise Levertov contributed a piece about the power and responsibility of poetry to an anthology, The New American Poetry. Maria Popova has just rediscovered Levertov’s words: “I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more ‘in their stride’—the hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.” Read More
January 4, 2017 Look Flying Carpets By Dan Piepenbring David Schorr’s exhibition “Flying Carpets” opens January 5 at Ryan Lee Gallery, where his work is on display through February 18. The series draws inspiration from a childhood pastime of his: playing with toy trucks and race cars on the Persian rugs at his grandmother’s house. David Schorr, Green Tankers, 2015, gouache and silverpoint on linen, 22″ x 22″. Read More