October 7, 2015 At Work Bordellos of the Southland: An Interview with Liz Goldwyn By Erik Morse In the foreword to Liz Goldwyn’s Sporting Guide, Los Angeles, 1897, the author waxes poetic on her discursive trawl through illicit Victoriana: “There are moments when the boundaries between dimensions blur. Time is elastic, and you can slip right through, finding the ground you stand upon dissolving, coming back into focus centuries ago … These are the stories of my hometown and the inhabitants I came to know through dusty archives, in hallucinations and dreams.” It seems appropriate that Goldwyn, a vintage collector and designer, editor for French Vogue, and the author and director of Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens, would emulate the profligate, fin de siècle style of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Proust in a portrait of the late-nineteenth-century demimonde. But her selection of setting may come as a bit of a shock: after all, in the popular imagination, the city of Los Angeles was little more than a sleepy, frontier town before a ragtag group of East Coast filmmakers—including Goldwyn’s own grandfather, Polish businessman and movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn—arrived to establish the movie industry. Goldwyn’s profile of Southland cribs, bordellos, and opium dens explodes that myth with a heady combination of picaresque fiction and Benjaminian psychogeography. Deploying the lost genre of the sporting guide—a then-popular directory of bordellos and cathouses published in most major cities and traded privately among the upper and haute bourgeois classes—Goldwyn assembles a cast of madams, prostitutes, orphans, and drug-dealers reminiscent of those in Zola’s “Les Rougon-Macquart” series. Her Sporting Guide reveals a pre-Hollywood Los Angeles dreamscape, in which streetwalkers, politicians, and industrialists rubbed shoulders (among other things) with the uninhibited libidos of the Gilded Age. On the eve of her trip to the East Coast for a series of readings, Goldwyn spoke to me about her fascination with Los Angeles, the marginal histories of courtesans and prostitutes, and the emotional pleasures of the archive. Read More
October 7, 2015 On the Shelf God Hates Renoir, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Courtesy Max Geller If the prospect of another literary awards season has you rolling your eyes and grumbling about the tastelessness of the establishment, try spicing things up the old-fashioned way: gambling. You’ll find that a well-placed bet, or even a poor one, can bring a certain frisson to even the fustiest book prizes: “I allotted a budget of £100 for the Nobel and Booker combined. My rule was that, with one exception, any winner among the bets I placed had to win me back at least my entire stake. I tend to make three categories of bet: (1) a likely winner; (2) a writer I really admire who’s also a patriotic favorite; (3) a writer I’ve reviewed negatively. There’s often overlap between categories 1 and 3 … Philip Roth has 8-to-1 odds, but I’ve given up on him since he gave up writing books. He seems cursed by Stockholm. I put the rest of my Nobel money on Marilynne Robinson (£4 at 25-to-1) and Don DeLillo (£10 at 50-to-1).” Or you can rage against the arts-and-culture machine with a nonviolent protest, as these enemies of Renoir—who’s plainly the shittiest of the Impressionists—have done outside Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. “The rally, which mostly bewildered passersby, was organized by Max Geller, creator of the Instagram account Renoir Sucks at Painting, who wants the MFA to take its Renoirs off the walls and replace them with something better. Holding homemade signs reading ‘God Hates Renoir’ and ‘Treacle Harms Society,’ the protesters ate cheese pizza purchased by Geller, and chanted: ‘Put some fingers on those hands! Give us work by Paul Gauguin!’ and ‘Other art is worth your while! Renoir paints a steaming pile!’” As unrest seizes the globe and the model of the nation-state faces collapse, theorists are frantically debating the fate of geopolitics—but no one is worrying about the video-game designers. How are they supposed to make a decent historical strategy game when no one knows what it looks like to win the twenty-first century? “In the twenty-first century grand strategy game, we wouldn’t be looking to conquer the world, we wouldn’t be looking to buy it and we wouldn’t be looking to leave it in our technological wake either. So what does that leave? … Perhaps we’re destined to nestle into a historically obscure crack between the tumult of the twentieth century and something spectacular or horrible yet to come. It is nice to think, however, that the times we live in are at least interesting and that maybe we’ll get to see it all laid out in a game one day.” Francine Prose looks at the frightening but tender psychology underpinning Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, The Lobster, which “posits a dystopian near-future in which it has become illegal not to be part of a couple”: “Lanthimos’s films often contain such disturbing moments of unexpected, startling violence that people who have never been able to watch Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to the end might be wise to spare themselves. Like Sophocles, Lanthimos understands that sudden self-mutilation generates a particular kind of adrenaline in the viewer. Consequently, the director’s fans learn to brace themselves every time one of his characters stands in front of a mirror.” Dude: Creedence. Creedence Clearwater Revival. There’s a band. I mean, that’s a band for everyone, a band for all times! Talking to John Fogerty reveals some tricks of the trade, including the band’s go-to themes, “foremost among them the nostalgia for some lost agrarian past. But, of course, that same nostalgia was a founding theme of the South … If this vision was itself a sort of cartoon—a brutal and deadly one, with strange fruit hanging from the trees—an odd thing happened when you spread the cartoonish map of ‘Born on the Bayou’ across the partly real, partly imagined Southern landscape: you got a one-to-one ratio. The result was something like realism.”
October 6, 2015 Inside the Issue Eileen Myles on Reading Out Loud By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of I Must Be Living Twice. Photo: Catherine Opie “The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time,” Eileen Myles tells Ben Lerner in our new Fall issue: There’s a whole kind of inside thing bursting out, and I’m always dying to hear it. I do hear it in my head, but I never read it out loud to myself until I’m in front of people … What is so great—I’ll even say holy—about reading a poem for the first time in front of people is that you’re sharing what you felt in the moment of composition, when you were allowing something. When I’m writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don’t mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness and that’s the birth of the poem. Writing is all performance. Something’s passing through … The performance is us writing what’s using us, remarking upon it. (Subscribe now to read the whole Art of Poetry interview.) Read More
October 6, 2015 Look More Sweetly Play the Dance By Anna Heyward William Kentridge’s elaborate danse macabre. William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015, eight-channel video installation with four megaphones, 15 minutes. All photos © William Kentridge, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Dance has always been aware of death: it lingers just off to the side of the stage, waiting for the performance to end. William Dunbar’s 1508 poem “Lament for the Makers” describes two “state[s] of man”: “Now dansand mirry, now like to die.” In other words, you’re either dancing or dead. Death in the poem is personified as a sort of efficient businessman, doing his best to knock people out of the dance. The more familiar character of Death—the cloaked, scythe-bearing skeleton who fulfills his duties like an overworked godly employee—was around even before Dunbar, an invention of the medieval period, which remains the most productive time in human history for imagining deathly personifications. People then seemed less resistant to death than they are now, perhaps because the threat was omnipresent: one could die from the plague, childbirth, decapitation, infection, or even of indigestion, as Martin of Aragon did at a feast in 1410. The danse macabre, or death dance, another medieval invention, was an allegorical way of resisting as well as respecting the force of death. It comprises a chain of dancers, some living and others skeletons, moving together toward a grave—death being the equalizing force that brings all of us together, finally. Some more modern dances, like the tarantella, present themselves as assertions of survival, proving that one is still alive despite mortal injury. When we dance, the thinking goes, we are at the most alive we can be. Likewise, when we stop dancing, we die. Read More
October 6, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Mother Approved By Sadie Stein Only the best for my boy: the actress Helen Twelvetrees and her son, Jack Woody, in Sydney circa 1936. I used to have a superpower. I never told anyone, of course—that’s the rule with powers—and in the grand tradition, it was a mixed blessing. It was this: mothers loved me. It’s true. Mothers of all kinds wanted me to date their sons. Hell, they wanted me to marry them. Not shockingly, the actual sons in question were less jazzed about the prospect. It seemed like the very qualities that rendered me totally unsuitable to boys my own age—my good manners, my bookishness, my lack of any adult sexiness, even my runty size—were the same things that drew their mothers like catnip. Read More
October 6, 2015 On the Shelf Jeanne Dielman Forever, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from Jeanne Dielman. The filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose 1975 movie, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is arguably “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema,” has died at sixty-five. “Jeanne Dielman is a real-time study of a middle-aged widow who lives with her teenage son in a small Brussels flat. The film follows her as she completes drab domestic tasks and tries to make ends meet through occasional prostitution … The long, frank takes featured in Jeanne Dielman were a feature of Akerman’s work.” As a theater director, Bryan Doerries aims to revitalize the power of the medium: his company performs Greek tragedies at full-tilt for audiences at schools, hospitals, prisons, and army bases, and his goal is catharsis in the fullest sense of the word. “Theater is able to do something that no other medium can achieve,” he says. “It leads disparate audiences into a profound communion … We have lost touch, as a culture, with the importance of coming together and confronting what it means to be human as a community. Theater, and tragedy in particular, has the power to do this … Theater still has the power to create a sacred space, in which we are transported out of our quotidian reality and brought into contact with the transcendent, the heroic, the mythic, and with one another. We still hunger, I think, for this experience, as people, as a culture. And in some ways, because it’s so rare, it’s all the more overpowering and effective when we encounter it.” Today in unlikely longevity: New Hampshire’s Yankee magazine has been around since 1935, and it’s navigated, somehow, many epochal changes in media. What’s its secret? Listen carefully: cover fall foliage as if it’s Mardi Gras, never change, and appeal to a boring, affluent, aging readership. Yankee stands tall because of, not in spite of, its stupefying predictability: “There are tips on travel to destinations like Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, and recipes for Boston cream pie and needhams (an old-fashioned Maine candy made with mashed potatoes). Ads for regional businesses and New England wares still fill the magazine, which now comes out six times a year. The much loved Swopper’s Column—a classifieds page for unusual objects, which first appeared in the magazine’s fourth issue—was not discontinued until 2013.” On Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, which has at its center a stunt that cinema has been waiting for a long time: “Two twenty-first-century phenomena have changed the way moving pictures are made and perceived. The first is the accelerating use of digital technology and the inexorable rise of a cyborg cinema that, by combining animated and photographic images, compromises the direct relationship to reality that had long been the medium’s claim to truth. The second is the trauma of September 11, 2001, which for many provided the ultimate movie experience that was more than a movie—spectacular destruction, broadcast live, and watched by an audience, more or less simultaneously, of billions.”