November 17, 2016 On the Shelf Don’t Be Fooled, Nerds Are Evil, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Revenge of the Nerds. In the black art of recent years, Thomas Chatterton Williams sees parables of wokeness: a worldview that sees historical black suffering stretching backward and forward through the generations, marked by fatalism and deeply skeptical of any notion of progress. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award last night, represents his first woke novel, Williams writes, and that makes it a radical departure from Whitehead’s previous work, arguably not for the better: “It’s difficult to accept that Whitehead really did squeeze himself into the artistic confines of wokeness. I would prefer to believe that the story he has given us operates on at least two levels, the second of which many of his new admirers may not immediately notice. I would like to think that he recognizes the patterns we are in thrall to, the ways we have come to rely on concepts such as the legacy of American slavery not as historical fact or even societal debt but as parable, as a teachable moment that can’t be—and never should be—conclusively apprehended. It’s a lesson that gains meaning not in the teaching but in the reteaching. It is here, in the realm of the parable, that most black art right now is being made … But the question remains whether parables of wokeness are the most effective tools for the task. Can you really extinguish a fire with more flames? Can you ever hope to disrupt a cycle of inequality by insisting ever more adamantly that it has and will always exist? At their best, artists like Whitehead show us another possibility.” Remember nerds—the nerds in high school movies? They seem so quaint now, don’t they, always getting shoved into lockers for their squirmy, pale, quietly noble nerd ways. Today’s “nerds,” by contrast, are busy spewing hate online and constructing a massive white-nationalist machine. It makes you wonder, as Willie Osterweil writes, what the notion of “nerdiness” was really obfuscating all along: “The nerd appeared in pop culture in the form of a smart but awkward, always well-meaning white boy irrationally persecuted by his implacable jock antagonists in order to subsume and mystify true social conflict—the ones around race, gender, class, and sexuality that shook the country in the 1960s and ’70s—into a spectacle of white male suffering. This was an effective strategy to sell tickets to white-flight middle-class suburbanites, as it described and mirrored their mostly white communities. With the hollowing out of urban centers, and the drastic poverty in nonwhite communities of the ’80s and ’90s, these suburban whites were virtually the only consumers with enough consistent spending money to garner Hollywood attention.” Read More
November 16, 2016 Arts & Culture A Poem Is a Naked Person By Dan Piepenbring From the poster to A Poem Is a Naked Person. I’m tired of writing about dead people, but people keep dying. Now it’s the musician Leon Russell, who died on Sunday at seventy-four. He’s the archetypally long-haired Southern dude who had his hand in a million hit songs without the public ever growing wise to him. He wrote “A Song for You.” He played piano on the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Elton John called him “the master of space and time,” which I just learned from the New York Times obit. His solo work is an easy slurry of rock, country, and blues: it has an aw-shucks accessibility at first but soon reveals its raw edges and winsome tattered patches. Here’s his song “Hummingbird,” later covered by B. B. King: Read More
November 16, 2016 Books Super Sad Woman By Elisa Albert On Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s La femme de Gilles. From the cover of Melville House’s new edition of La femme de Gilles. It’s probably not unusual to read a novel whose protagonist bears your own name if your name is Jane or Emily or John or Jack, but it’s a neat first for me. What immediate force of recognition! Elisa: a tall, handsome woman, breasts not as high and mighty as they once were, fully vested in domestic life, and holding fast to the hope that domestic life matters, because breasts, like time, go only in one direction. Cry us a river. But Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s Elisa—the centerpiece of La femme de Gilles, and marginalized from the get-go by its clever title!—is massively betrayed by her cheerfully unrepentant husband on page eight. And Bourdouxhe’s Elisa can’t skip off to an artists’ colony and seek revenge with a neurotic sculptor or hop a train down to the city and buy a new dress and flirt with someone at a party or take her kids to live in an intentional community in Vermont, where she’d discover an affinity for orgies and hallucinogens and spinning pottery (as this Elisa might). She can’t write a think piece about having been betrayed, parlay it into a book deal, and promote it via an Instagram account with a chic, aspirational, rural/industrial French aesthetic. Bourdouxhe’s Elisa—known in her own damn novel as Gilles’ Woman, for God’s sake—has no recourse. No practical recourse, and, worse, no emotional recourse. There’s no precedent for middle-aged feminist reinvention in pre–World War II–era rural/industrial Belgium (that I know of). Read More
November 16, 2016 On the Shelf When a Heap Is Not a Heap, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Tailings from a gold mill abandoned in the 1930s. The Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year is post-truth, and if I have to tell you why this is good and smart and funny, well then you can crawl right back into your hidey-hole, young man. Being a dictionary, they’ve provided a definition for the adjective: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” And a history: “Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.’ ” In China, meanwhile, the word on the lips of officialdom is comrade. President Xi Jinping would like to bring the term—tongzhi, in Chinese—back in vogue for the ninety million members of the Communist Party; it went out of fashion during the eighties, as Westernizing influences swept in. But there’s a problem, as Amy Qin reports: “Among gay men, however, tongzhi became a term of affection and solidarity and eventually a catchall label for sexual minorities. A gay and lesbian film festival held annually in Hong Kong has been called the Hong Kong Comrade Film Festival since 1989. And the Beijing center for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people calls itself the Beijing Tongzhi Zhongxin—or the Beijing Comrade Center. Even Google has caught on. Enter the characters for tongzhi guanxi—literally ‘comrade relationship’—into its translator, and it gives you ‘gay relationship.’ ” Read More
November 15, 2016 On Music Love Saves the Day By Dan Piepenbring David Mancuso When I moved to New York I wished that its legendary dance scene, the one from the seventies and eighties that people never shut up about, was still alive—that I could pop in at Paradise Garage or The Gallery or The Loft, maybe wearing tan polyester poplin leisure pants or something pleathery with lots of studs in it, and writhe the night away. I don’t know why I wanted this. It takes three drinks to get me to look at a dance floor with anything other than fear. But I’d listen to the music from this era on my 160 GB iPod Classic (still ticking, thanks be) convinced that I’d been born too late, dreaming up names for twelve-inch house and disco tracks while I walked around. “Susurrations of the Heart.” “Avenue Days, Boulevard Nights.” “Our Ribbon Cutting (Snip-Snip Vocal Mix).” There were other even stupider ones, I don’t know. I’d pass by the old locations of these clubs and think, Well, Dan, that’s where it all happened, alright. I was a disco tourist, guilty of romanticizing a New York I never knew: one that wasn’t made for me, one whose return was made more impossible every day as people like me (straight, white, male) moved here in untenable droves, and I knew that. But I forgot it whenever I put on Dexter Wansell’s “Life on Mars,” or Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face,” or Ashford & Simpson’s “Stay Free.” Those tracks are all on David Mancuso Presents The Loft, a two-disc compilation that I kept in heavy rotation the first year I lived here. Mancuso, the impresario behind The Loft and thus someone who can legitimately claim to have thrown some of the best parties ever, died this week at seventy-two. Read More