October 8, 2021 The Review’s Review Quiet Magic By The Paris Review We Work Again includes the only known footage of the Negro Theatre Unit’s 1936 production of Macbeth, staged by Orson Welles through the Federal Theatre Project. Above, a photograph of the production: Charles Collins and Maurice Ellis in act III, scene 4 of the play. I am a lover of old things. I could spend hours strolling through vintage furniture stores or flipping through clothing catalogs from the past, but my favorite is undeniably archival video. Recently, I discovered a treasure trove of streaming links: The Black Film Archive. The site, which aggregates lists of comedies, westerns, dramas, and documentaries made between 1915 and 1979, is updated each month, and accepts submissions from the public. It’s free, and equal parts educational and entertaining. This week, I watched We Work Again, a video commissioned by a New Deal–era public works project, in which a narrator describes an idealized version of segregation in the United States over videos of Black life in the thirties. It was moving footage that I likely would have never come across otherwise. This weekend, I think I’ll watch Two-Gun Man from Harlem, a musical western about a deacon who becomes a cowboy. —Lauren Williams Read More
September 30, 2021 The Review’s Review Strangers and the Moon By The Paris Review 17776 (screenshot), by Jon Bois. Four years after its first chapter was published on SB Nation in 2017, Jon Bois’s serialized multimedia novella 17776: The Future of Football is still my favorite (and some of the only) “new media” lit online. Told through text interspersed with video and graphics that mix satellite imagery, newspaper clippings, and Telestrated sports-field diagrams, the story follows the sentient space probe Pioneer 9 as it flies over the United States of the future: a land in which no one dies any more, but everyone still loves football. With their newfound immortality, Americans have developed more and more baroque constellations of rules for their favorite game, sending their players on elaborate, millennia-long scavenger hunts across the country. An epic reminiscent of Infinite Jest, it’s a dazzlingly idiosyncratic work of art that is equal parts exercise in speculative game design, history of a dying empire, and fable about the meaning of play, humanity, and technology. But 17776 isn’t just an experiment with form; Bois is a startlingly sensitive writer, and scrolling through his simple, color-coded dialogue feels like looking at the 1967 photo of Earth taken by an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission: lonely, but awe-inducing. —Olivia Kan-Sperling Read More
September 23, 2021 The Review’s Review Reproducing Bodies By The Paris Review Linus Borgo, Bed of Stars: Self-Portrait with Elsina and Zip, 2021, oil on canvas, 46 x 68″ (detail). Linus Borgo makes consistently uncanny and gorgeous work, some of which will be featured at Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles this January. My favorite of their self-portraits—deadlocked with Fuzzy FTM Transsexual Amputee Plays with Magic Wand and Poppers (Self Portrait)—is Bed of Stars: Self Portrait with Elsina and Zip, in which Linus lies in a pool of deep blue, star-stamped sheets, an oblique banner of sunlight across his torso and thighs, his body filling the frame, toes nearly poking through the border. It’s a work that questions what it is to reproduce an image, a pet, a body part. Of course, this is the terrain of figurative art. But duplicates also appear within the piece: Linus’s left bionic forearm and its phantom mirror not only each other, but his right forearm; the cat dozing by his ankle complements the stuffed one cradling his elbow; the bedspread underneath him simulates the sky above. The effect is overwhelming, and intensified by meticulousness: blades of hair golden in the sun, creases in the pillowcase, a naval piercing, cursive lettering on a nameplate necklace. In this representation of the self, there is an abundance of selves existing side by side simultaneously. What more could you ask for in a self-portrait? —Jay Graham Read More
September 17, 2021 The Review’s Review These Were the Angels By The Paris Review Illustration: Liby Hays. Courtesy of Hays. Liby Hays’s Geniacs!, a graphic novel out this summer from the art book publisher Landfill Editions, takes place at a hackathon—truly inspired material for slapstick comedy, body horror, and philosophical reflection alike. This tech competition’s goal? Invent a new life-form. “People always think my ideas are dumb … but they’re purposefully so! Their failure is coded within them! It’s like when scientists artificially reanimate the cells of a dead pig’s brain. The brain becomes trapped in an infinite loop reliving the terror of its final moments. But within that narrow terror loop… We might find potential for new forms of thought to arise!” So muses our heroine, a morbidly minded wordsmith undercover as a “po-ent” (poet-entrepreneur). Her (hot, tattooed) slacker partner would rather copy and paste some old code, though, than entertain her inefficiently emo-poetic concepts. Hays’s detailed black-and-white illustrations are as gymnastic, compositionally, as her characters’ dialogue: her panels cut across the page in dizzying fits of polygons and word bubbles that leave us spiral-eyed, minds buzzing, cartoon birds circling our heads. A canny and cryptic meditation on group projects, life, “life,” art, and the cheat code lifestyle only slightly more surreal, though much more fun, than my worst nights of coding. —Olivia Kan-Sperling Read More