November 10, 2016 Poetry Don’t Make a Movie About Me By Johnny Cash This month, Blue Rider Press will publish Forever Words: The Unknown Poems of Johnny Cash. Compiled from a mountain of Cash’s handwritten poetry (all unpublished), the work in Forever Words spans the many stages of Cash’s career. “Don’t Make a Movie About Me” is one of many pieces within that reflect Cash’s “humorous strand,” poet Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction. It reflects “Cash’s own ambivalence about celebrity and the associated tabloid slobbering.” From the cover of Out Among the Stars. Christmas 1982 If anybody made a movie out of my life I wouldn’t like it, but I’d watch it twice If they halfway tried to do it right There’d be forty screen writers workin’ day and niteThey’d need a research team from Uncle Sam And go from David Allen Coe to Billy Graham It would run ten days in the final cut And that would mean leaving out the gossip smutAnd I do request for my children’s sake Don’t ever let ’em do a new re-make The thing I’m sayin’ is, don’t you see, Don’t make a movie ’bout me Even for T.V. Don’t make a movie ’bout me Read More
November 10, 2016 On the Shelf Even Sandwiches Are Real Estate, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring No joy to be had here. In times of hardship, where can we turn to find even one morsel of pleasure, one solitary crumb of joie de vivre? Well: there are sandwiches. Except, no, today even sandwiches are compromised. The chopped cheese sandwich, for instance—ground beef, onions, melted cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes on a hero roll—is a bodega classic, cheap and delicious. Now it’s gone fancy, with bougie versions popping up in New York and London at much higher prices. “This is a classic story,” said Michael W. Twitty, a culinary historian. “You create something in a state of want, a state of necessity, and then it becomes prime real estate in someone else’s hands.” There is thus no solace to be found in sandwiches, for even they are real estate. At the Lefferts Historic House, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, stands the “Monument to the Unelected,” a lawn full of fifty-eight signs for losing presidential candidates. The artist Nina Khatchadourian, who runs the monument, has just added one more. Amanda Petrusich writes, “Neither the designs nor the signs themselves are archival; Katchadourian fabricated each one anew from corrugated plastic sheets. ‘Of course, it’s a project about politics and history, but it doesn’t take a position on who should win any given election,’ she told me. The monument, rather, is ‘a statement of fact—it’s what we have collectively done, up until now’ … Campaign-sanctioned political signs, Katchadourian pointed out—the ones you can order from a local field office—are often purposefully simple, a blunt visual instrument that, like blunt rhetoric, arouses emotions more than ideas. Read More
November 9, 2016 Arts & Culture “I Will Pass Through This … ” By The Paris Review Shunsuke Matsumoto, Landscape with Bare Trees, 1938. In light of the sad outcome of yesterday’s election, here are some excerpts from our Writers at Work interviews that might offer solace, or inspiration, or a cudgel against complacency. People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege. —Marilynne Robinson, 2008 Read More
November 9, 2016 On the Shelf Writers, Start Writing, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Knowledge will break the chains of slavery,” a propaganda poster from 1920s Russia. This site is dedicated to literature, arts, and culture. Electoral politics are usually beyond our remit. On a morning like this, when America has chosen a bigot and a xenophobe as its next president, my job feels pointless. But I don’t want to add to the chorus of despair, because I do believe there’s a role for art at a time like this, and I don’t say that lightly—words like these don’t come easily to me. I would rather make fun of things, and I’m struggling against an inborn fatalism. (My iPhone just reminded me to water my plants, and I thought, why bother?) The creative impulse is such a fragile thing, but we have to create now. We owe it to ourselves to do the work. I want to encourage you. If you aspire to write, put aside all the niceties and sureties about what art should be and write something that makes the scales fall from our eyes. Forget the tired axioms about showing and telling, about sense of place—any possible obstruction—and write to destroy complacency, to rattle people, to help people, first and foremost yourself. Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope. And read, as often and as violently as you can. If you have friends, as I do, who tacitly believe that it’s too much of a chore to read a book, just one fucking book, from start to finish, smash every LCD they own. This is an opportunity. There’s too much at stake now to pretend that everything is okay. Read More
November 8, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery Four Quotes from The Way We Live Now, 1875 By Dan Piepenbring A Donald Trump cake being wheeled into Trump Tower. Photo: Jason Volack, @jasonvolack, via Twitter It’s a good night for Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, at the center of which is one Augustus Melmotte, a financier who runs for Parliament. Read More
November 8, 2016 Our Correspondents O Rangasayee By Jeff Seroy Mark Morris brings back his iconic solo dance. Mark Morris in the original performance of “O Rangasayee,” 1984. Photo: Beatriz Schiller A young saddhu, a lone devotee, with nothing to his name but passion for the form of god he’s chosen to worship and the rag of a dhoti wrapped around his loins, crouches in a ball in dim golden light at the back of the stage. He slowly raises his head and shoulders, stands, and strikes a pose. Then another. The poses form a sequence. They’re reminiscent of figures in Indian temple sculpture, but not quite classical somehow. One arm is outstretched like an arrow; the hand on the other, palm outward, covers eyes that gaze up and away. Or his hands hang limply from his arms, bent like dog paws. Or, with both palms down and open toward the audience, his head bobbles on his neck, looking like something between an elegant Indian dance move and a camp imitation of a kitschy Eastern European tchotchke—you know, the one your mother brought back from Romania. His torso welcomes torque. His fingertips and palms are painted betel red. So are the outlines of his feet. A sitar whines, a tabla strikes, a raga singer with a plaintive voice wills the devotee to action. Thus begins “O Rangasayee,” by Mark Morris, one of the great modern dance solos of the twentieth century. Morris made this work for himself as a young man early in 1984. In December that year, he performed it as part of a sensational program in BAM’s Lepercq Space, after which The New Yorker’s Arlene Croce anointed him the Next Great Thing and he exploded onto the scene. It’s not clear how the audience that night had found their way there—I knew someone who worked a restaurant kitchen with some company members—or what they were expecting—but had a meteor crashed through the ceiling and landed smack in the middle of the gymnasium-like space, smoking and spitting flames at the bleachers, it wouldn’t have been met with a greater sense of awe. Read More