April 11, 2025 The Review’s Review A Very Precious Bonjour Tristesse By Mina Tavakoli Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment. Françoise Sagan, who crashed and flipped her fabulous Aston Martin DB2/4 at high speed en route to Saint-Tropez, did not die despite getting her skull crushed beneath her British-made hatchback in Fiesta Red. She did not drown in a yachting accident on the Riviera some four years earlier, nor did she immediately go bankrupt after becoming so consumed by roulette that she personally asked the French Ministry of the Interior to ban her from domestic casinos. Her mutant capacity for indulgence, combined with her other cosmopolitan hobbies (whiskey, morphine, tax evasion), made her so much the poster girl for sixties Gallic glamour that a French newspaper once gave her the topline “un charmant petit monstre”—though a death drive that well oiled could have used something more like what Susan Sontag said about the self-destructive: “Dying is overwork.” Read More
March 25, 2025 The Review’s Review Happy Hundredth Birthday, Flannery O’Connor! By Jamie Quatro Blair Hobbs, Birthday Cake For Flannery, 2025, mixed media on canvas board, 30 x 24″. Courtesy of the artist. A painting in Blair Hobbs’s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O’Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress. She’s flanked by drawings of peacocks and poppies; a birthday cake on metallic gold paper floats above her head. It is titled, like the exhibition, Birthday Cake for Flannery. The number 100 sits atop the frosting, each digit lit with an orange paper flame—marking O’Connor’s hundredth birthday, today, March 25. Glitter and sequins, gold thread and fabric scraps everywhere. The image is candy to my eyes. I grew up in a stripped-down fundamentalist Protestant church—think Baptist but with a cappella singing. Violence and grace, sin and redemption, idolatry and judgment: When I read O’Connor’s stories for the first time, in high school, I recognized her religious concerns as my own. Fifteen years later I moved to Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where O’Connor’s Southern milieu—backwoods prophets, religious zealots, barely concealed racism and classism—was my literal backyard. I raised chickens in homage to her, then repurposed the coop as my writing studio, where I drafted a collection of stories wrestling with Christianity and sexuality in the American South. Read More
March 21, 2025 The Review’s Review On An African Abroad By Toye Oladinni Ọlábísí Àjàlá in June 21, 1957, when he was 27-year-old Nigerian student of Fellows Road. He is pictured here in the early stages of his journey, as way he made his way through England. Alamy Images. When I mentioned Ọlábísí Àjàlá to my Yoruba teacher she told me he died a bad death. He also liked women too much. I could tell because I was reading his travel memoirs, An African Abroad, and in them he describes almost every woman he meets as beautiful: his KGB-appointed travel guide, Natasha; a French-Arab sex worker in Damascus; the shah of Iran’s wife, Queen Farah; his friend of a former-Nazi-soldier friend, Barbara; Golda Meir. The book’s existence is itself proof of his dependency on women, as it was typed up and edited by his wife, Joane Àjàlá, the third of at least five separate marriages across four continents. I’ve been doing my Yoruba lessons online for three years and forget most things I learn; in my Notes app I have long lists of words that passed straight through me. So I’d forgotten that we’d learned about Àjàlá already when I found a copy of An African Abroad, written in English and published just three years after Nigerian independence. I rediscovered that Àjàlá’s journeys began in earnest in 1952, when he set off from the University of Chicago to California on a bicycle wearing traditional Nigerian robes. This was also the start of a lifelong infatuation with statesmen, who are thanked as a group in the preface. An issue of Jet magazine from December 1952 records under the headline “Cross-Country African Cyclist Gets Movie Role” that he was given a small part in White Witch Doctor after screen-testing at the recommendation of Ronald Reagan. After a valiant last stand involving a radio tower and a hunger strike, he was eventually deported from the U.S. for forsaking his UChicago studies and (allegedly) issuing fake checks. He reentered the U.S. and married, got divorced, moved to the UK and married there as well before resuming his travels, this time along the length and breadth of the Eurasian landmass from 1957 to 1963: A roundabout journey from Indonesia to Israel armed with a scooter and nowhere near enough travel documents. This is the period An African Abroad covers. He finds himself constantly in trouble. Borders often make themselves felt, in the simplest sense, as barriers placed between people and their desires. Even more so for citizens of the Global South. Àjàlá did not like these borders. At a farewell party thrown by Radio Jerusalem, in Jerusalem, where he’s been working for a few months, he lays out his plan to cross the militarized no-man’s land between Israel and Lebanon on scooter. His justification conflates the personal and the geopolitical. He says first that as an African he should not be legally bound by the rules of a conflict between Arabs and Israelis, and second that he can’t be bothered to go the long way around. Read More
February 14, 2025 The Review’s Review My Ex Recommends By The Paris Review Jezebel Parker [2], CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia CommonsI fell in love with my best friend in high school because he was the first boy who could plausibly love me back. Angsty boys always had a way of catching my itty-bitty shoegaze heart. My love—it was a crush, but my nostalgic instincts want to call this love—blossomed to my awareness only after he came out, the summer before all our friends and I went off to different campuses in the University of California system. He was cooler than me. He shopped at Hot Topic. He had the look of a tortured artist without having to make any art. He was the first person who introduced me to the Postal Service, in his bedroom; he said it was a new genre called electronic music, which I had never heard of. He adored the Blood Brothers, which I pretended to like but couldn’t stand. The Unicorns was about as far as I could get with the screaming-into-the-mic bit. The Blood Brothers, with their Satanic-sounding band name, were twitchy and manic on the vocals, bringing to mind some skeletal epileptic, screaming as he’s strapped by his wrists and ankles to a gurney before electroshock therapy. Alone, when I listened to the album Crimes, which came out my sophomore year, my mind would just flood with STOP, STOP, STOP. I couldn’t last the two minutes and twenty-three seconds of the opening track. It’s a good soundtrack if you think that high school was supposed to be the best four years of your life and everything was downhill after senior year. I almost want to say that high school was the worst years of my life, but that isn’t true—those were my Saturn return. When I listen to “Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck” now, it isn’t as intolerable as I remember it. I kind of like it. I seem to remember their songs as being devoid of melody, but this one has some discernable arpeggios amid the glossolalia, a sound that conflates the intensity of high school love with indie glamour. The song still smells like a white crew sock with last night’s dried cum. —Geoffrey Mak Read More
February 5, 2025 The Review’s Review New Theater, New York, January 2025 By Rhoda Feng Dead as a Dodo. Photograph by Erato Tzavara. For two weeks at the beginning of January in New York, a cluster of theater festivals—including Under the Radar, Prototype, the Exponential Festival, and PhysFestNYC—stage a confetti cannon’s worth of experimental shows. This year, the first two festivals ended January 19, though some works have been extended into February. Past years have taught me to set modest expectations about intake. I wouldn’t be able to see every show, but many are short enough that you could, if you really wanted to, play calendar Tetris and squeeze two or even five into one day, as I did one Saturday. (Ticket prices also tend to be less prohibitively expensive than shows on Broadway or even sometimes Off Broadway.) The back-to-back scheduling made for a brutal schlep, but it was worth it: During my first week in New York, I saw, among other things, a group of Russian refugee children proclaiming their love for Sarah Jessica Parker in SpaceBridge, a loose confederation of young radicals plotting yes-man-like acts of subterfuge against corporate juggernauts in Eat the Document, and a small sphere lingering ectoplasmically above a group of harmonizing humanoid rats. This last show, Symphony of Rats, was produced by the Wooster Group and can be considered an honorary rather than official part of the festival circuit. The late Richard Foreman, who conceived the show, hovers like that electric-blue ball over much avant-garde theater. (Witness the use of voice-over or television clips or fourth-wall-pulverizing techniques currently in theatrical vogue.) As with previous festivals, there were hits and misses … and more than a few shows “under construction” and therefore closed to review. Not everything was to my taste: Ann Liv Young’s Marie Antoinette, in which the artist berates two mentally ill collaborators and plays punitively loud music quickly wore out its provocative welcome. Another show about a man in Tehran and his imprisoned political-prisoner wife was more soporific than its subject matter seemed to promise. I also managed to be turned away by a few shows (in one case, twice by the same show!) for showing up ten minutes late, on the heels of another performance. So much for my Icarian itinerary. The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy. Photograph by Maria Baranova. One of the first shows I saw was a redux that caused me to quarrel with my own four-years-earlier interpretation of it. The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, staged at New York Theatre Workshop’s Fourth Street Theatre, is adapted from Stanisław Lem’s time-looping tale of the same name, and originated as a filmed in its actor’s modestly sized home closet. Its premise: Egon Tichy, a hapless cosmonaut, finds himself stranded in a malfunctioning spaceship after being struck off course by “a meteor the size of a lima bean.” As his ship’s computer informs him, realigning the craft’s rudder requires two people—a cruel cosmic joke on the solitary spaceman. Happily, some of Egon’s future selves are soon manifested via a “time vortex” and take up residence in the bathroom, library, sleeping quarter, and other modular areas. Unhappily, these selves (who take their names from different days of the week) quickly turn on each other as each one attempts to assert the primacy of his own identity and keep a fingerhold on reality. The variant Egons are projected on large screens, and Joshua William Gelb, the actor who plays all versions of the cosmonaut, delivers a memorable Chaplinesque performance as he engages with his alternates through timed videography. Frying pan duels aside, the Egons’ arguments about selfhood are eminently relatable. Watching Gelb inchworm across his cramped quarters and bicker with other Egons, I relished the panache with which the show fully commits to the contingency of identity. The Black Lodge. Photograph by Maria Baranova. Michael Joseph McQuilken and David T. Little’s “goth industrial rock opera” Black Lodge, commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera, steers us through a series of haunting mindscapes. In one, a man plays a deadly game of Russian roulette with his lover. In another, the same man is slowly mummified in clay and skewered by the woman (now dressed in a doctor’s uniform) with ethereal twigs. An unsettling scene of black-lipped, bandaged men in a desert repeats, turning up like an unlucky penny. The vignettes, which unfold on a cinema screen behind a group of live performers (the band Timur and the Dime Museum along with the Isaura String Quartet), all seem to orbit the man’s abiding regret over killing his beloved. The performance artist Timur, who plays the nameless man, wears a passport expression throughout much of the show, as if in a trance or daymare. McQuilken, the director, has said that he sought to “movie a score” instead of scoring a movie, and it works: the visual montages power the opera’s music, which wheels from berceuse to nu-metal fury to the hypnotic. Earplugs are provided. When Raymond Chandler wrote, in The Big Sleep, that “the world was a wet emptiness,” he could have been describing the atmosphere of Dead as a Dodo, a dazzlingly inventive puppet show produced by the theater company Wakka Wakka. The eighty-minute show conjures an allegory from the depths of a shadowy void, where every sound seems to echo into an infinite abyss. The only sources of light are the glowing orbs of two pairs of eyes, belonging to a skeletal boy and a dodo. We follow this boy and his avian companion as they traverse a desolate realm in search of replacement bones for the boy, who is missing a leg and preemptively lamenting his own imminent “disappearance.” They encounter red spaghettilike scavengers, a hungry iridescent whale, a giant purple worm, and the Bone King, a cigar-chomping figure—half washed-up rock star, half mobster—who presides over the Bone Realm along with his eerie daughter. The production excels in its visual storytelling, blending intricate puppetry with the skillful use of light and shadow. One standout sequence immerses the audience in the River Styx: undulating sheets of plastic become waves, drawing viewers into an otherworldly underwater pursuit. It manages to be subtle and even, maybe, hopeful: as the boy and the dodo struggle to escape their nemeses, the bird begins sprouting feathers. Rhoda Feng is a freelance critic whose work has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, The Times Literary Supplement, frieze, The Nation, and The New York Times.
January 14, 2025 The Review’s Review Glimmer: In Siena By Cynthia Zarin Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, 1344, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The last time I was in Siena there was an earthquake. The first time I was nineteen. My boyfriend, who had already graduated from college, had been in Italy most of the year, in Perugia. The plan was to take an intensive course in Italian—he wanted to read Dante—but then he discovered a passion for painting. Could it have been the day after I arrived that we took the train from Perugia to Siena? Even now, from Perugia, one changes train twice, first in Terontola, and then at Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, a station that decades later would become familiar, arriving in the Val D’Orcia from Rome, and where one afternoon we sat deathly ill in the station bar, beset by what—an ability to go on? But then everything was new. In Umbria, the landscape is mist and the hills are often in shadow, the luminous inner life is a long let-out breath, but as the train trundles into the province of Siena, the light sharpens like a scalpel, and the shadows disappear. The usual bustle at the station. Then, a stone’s throw from the Duomo and the Piazza del Campo—which erupts in July with the running of the horses in the Palio—the Pinacoteca Nazionale is housed in two adjacent palazzos. On four floors, it holds the most important collection of Sienese paintings in the world. The core of the collection was assembled by two abbots, Giuseppe Ciaccheri and Luigi de Angelis, painting by painting, between 1750 and 1810. They knew, somehow, that these unfashionable, strange, mystical, transfixing pictures, which hovered between Byzantine art and abstraction, painted in the margins of the history of art, many salvaged from triptychs and altarpieces that had been sold, dismantled, or lost, were worth saving. On that first visit the galleries were nearly empty. I had been brought up on twentieth-century painting—my grandfather had taken me on Saturday mornings to what was then called the Modern, but I had very little idea of painting as narrative. The only picture I knew that had the quality of continually happening in time was Picasso’s Guernica. But that is another story. Here in Siena was one chapter after another of a different story: the Annunciation, the Madonna and child, miraculous episodes, the Cross, the eternally mystifying Second Coming, the Assumption. There were the perplexing lives of the saints. Each figure was aglimmer, as if these narratives were continually occurring, unfolding even then as we looked on. My own understanding of these stories was limited—it amounted to being taken to see the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue and listening to my father sing carols in the car. But I knew, even as I arrived from that distance, that these paintings from the trecento were ones to which from now on my attention would be directed. Later, when my first child was born—who grew up to become a painter—one of the first places I took her was to see the Italian paintings at the Met, where she fixed her eyes on the gold light. Read More