June 2, 2022 The Review’s Review On De La Soul and Elif Batuman By The Paris Review A still from De La Soul’s music video for “Stakes is High.” I wanted to recommend a different song this week, but it seemed like every news story, headline, and push notification I encountered kept nudging my consciousness into some area within my brain that contains lyrics about firearms, some mental storage locker I rarely open: “I gets down like brothers are found ducking from bullets / Gun control means using both hands in my land, where it’s all about the cautious living.” Kelvin Mercer, aka Posdnuos, rapped those lines on De La Soul’s 1996 single “Stakes Is High.” The eponymous album, Stakes Is High, was a kind of rebuke against the first glimmers of hip-hop’s big money “shiny suit” era and the hackneyed materialism and narrative clichés that came to be associated with it. Posdnuos and his partners Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur and Vincent “Maseo” Mason, were tired of mafioso rap, “video vixens,” weed talk, brags about luxury gear. Dave’s verse, a list of the things that make him unwell, cleverly flips what it means to be “ill” in the hip-hop sense: Read More
May 27, 2022 The Review’s Review On the Far Side of Belmullet By Rebecca Bengal Roger, “Fallmore Granite Stone Circle.” Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. En route to a crime scene down back roads in rural Ireland, Sergeant Jackie Noonan briefly flips down her car’s sun visor to check out the sky. “That is some incarnation of sun,” Noonan announces to her fellow officer Pronsius, and though it falls over a landscape where cows “sit down like shelves of rock in the middle of the fields,” she deems it “equatorial.” “You know where Guadalajara is, Pronsius?” “Is it the far side of Belmullet?” Technically, she concedes, it is. A little later when she asks him, “You ever been anywhere exotic, Pronsius?” he replies, “I been the far side of Belmullet.” The answer satisfies Noonan, who’d prefer to never cross another time zone or pass through another metal detector again—who considers but never splurges on the expensive coffee in the grocery. She will never be exactly content where she is, but would rather find ways to picture the exotic in the local, to imagine rather than reenter the unknown. Read More
May 20, 2022 The Review’s Review On Penumbra, Caio Fernando Abreu, and Alain Mabanckou By The Paris Review Penumbra (2022), by Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable. Press image courtesy of the artists and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. I frequently feel saddened and angry that animals—whom I love, sometimes feed, and never eat—mostly ignore or even run away from me. For this reason, I enjoyed Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable’s animated film Penumbra, which stages a court case against a nonhuman defendant—“representing all animals or the animal as such”—that is on trial for crimes against human beings in contempt of human reason. The judge is an animal, the members of the jury are animals, too; from the beginning, power and numbers are on their side. There are two humans, but they’re dressed as creatures: “Juliana Huxtable,” the defense, is costumed in furry-esque bunny ears, which mirror the headdress worn by the prosecution, and “Hannah Black, genus homo, species sapiens” recalls the animal-headed Egyptian god Ra (in Derrida’s reading of Plato, the father of reason or logos). The CGI places human and nonhuman characters on a fair—and very low poly count—playing field of unreality. And so the debate begins. But it’s really a monologue: Huxtable speaks only rarely; her nonhuman “kin,” never. Animals, here, are outside the realm of representation, in both the legal and the semiotic senses. It’s a canny dramatization of the absurd, unhappy impasse posed by the discourse of anthropocentrism, which, in its attempt to “decenter” people in favor of a more inclusive worldview, must also mute the capacity that enables discourse (and community, identity, thought) itself. This capacity is both subject and object, content and container, of Black’s breathless address. “Through the use of language,” she begins, “I will show you, and you will understand, and through doing so you will have to admit that you do not fundamentally sympathize with the principle of the animal, you respond to abstract concepts, you know how to come when your name is called.” Read More
May 13, 2022 The Review’s Review On Watery Artworks and Writing-Retreat Novels By The Paris Review Jim Campbell, Topographic Wave II. Photograph by April Gornik, courtesy of Sag Harbor Church. “Empire of Water,” on view until May 30 at The Church in Sag Harbor, New York, is well worth a wander out east. The exhibition, cocurated by the Church cofounder and artist Eric Fischl and the chief curator, Sara Cochran, features watery works from forty-two artists including Warhol, Ofili, Lichtenstein, Longo, and Kiefer, and an Aitken that delights. But the cake stealer is hiding in the back corner of the first floor: Topographic Wave II, by Jim Campbell. Tucked behind a partial gallery wall are 2,400 custom-built LEDs of various lengths mounted on a roughly four-by-six-foot black panel and arranged neatly in a tight grid, like a Lite-Brite for grown-ups or a work of Pointillism by robots with OCD. From a small distance, images appear as shimmering figures swimming through Pixelvision water. Walk closer and the picture dissolves into fragmented dots blinking some unrecognizable pattern. For a short time I paced in front of it, goofily leaning in close then stepping back. Distantly, I recalled an instruction to squint when viewing Seurat, so I did that, too. —Joshua Liberson, advisory editor Read More
May 6, 2022 The Review’s Review On Liberated Women Looking for Love By The Paris Review The first paperback edition of Advancing Paul Newman, signed and dedicated by the author to Pauline Kael. Courtesy of Ken Lopez Books and Fine Manuscripts. I became aware of Advancing Paul Newman, Eleanor Bergstein’s 1973 debut novel, through Anatole Broyard’s dismissive review, which I came across in some undirected archival wandering. His grating condescension spurred me to read the novel—one of the best minor rebellions I’ve ever undertaken. (Bergstein is best known for writing the movie Dirty Dancing.) “This is the story of two girls, each of whom suspected the other of a more passionate connection with life,” she writes of the protagonists, best friends Kitsy and Ila. The romance of their friendship holds together everything else: trips to Europe to collect experiences (which, of course, often disappoint), becoming or failing to become writers, love affairs and marriages and divorces, their idealistic campaigning for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. But Advancing Paul Newman is not simply a story of friendship, albeit one between two complicated women. The book is also gorgeously deranged and witty, told in fragments and leaps. “Don’t find me poignant, you ass,” Kitsy snaps at her ex when he happens upon her eating alone in a restaurant. After bad sex in Italy, she says matter-of-factly, “This was a good experience because now I know what it feels like to have my flesh crawl.” Ila is “glorious when in love, undistinguished when not in love,” and sleeps with two men on the day of Kitsy’s wedding. “There were reasons.” When she has a story accepted by The New Yorker, the proofs are returned with only one sentence intact: “Madam, the gentleman across the aisle is staring at my upper thighs.” The novel’s title comes from one of Kitsy and Ila’s duties in the McCarthy campaign: to arrive in advance at Paul Newman’s public appearances on behalf of McCarthy. They act as political fluffers, exciting the crowd and leaving for the next event just as Newman’s car pulls up. (Spoiler: they never meet him.) “Why in the world are you doing that, Miss Bergstein?” Broyard asked, frustrated, in his review. I think I know: the search for a passionate connection with life is chaotic; the lives of young women encompass more than a man thinks they should. —Elisa Gonzalez Read Elisa Gonzalez’s entry in our annotated diary series on the Daily here. Read More
April 29, 2022 The Review’s Review Venice Dispatch: from the Biennale By Olivia Kan-Sperling Jacqueline Humphries, omega:), 2022 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photograph by Ron Amstutz. My mother is a Renaissance historian who specializes in Venice and paintings of breastfeeding; her books and articles have subtitles like “Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture” and “Squeezing, Squirting, Spilling Milk.” I have an early memory of her taking me to a Venetian church to see Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin, a depiction of a three-year-old Mary being brought before the priest at the Temple of Jerusalem. The child Mary is shockingly small. Dwarfed by a stone obelisk carved with faint hieroglyphs, she ascends a set of huge, circular steps inlaid with abstract golden swirls. Onlookers crowd around, including three sets of fleshy women with children who dominate the scene and who, my mother explained to me, are likely wet-nurses. Breastfeeding women are often allegories of caritas: Christian care. This vision of femininity—as carnal, and as both literally and figuratively nurturing—reappears, centuries later, virtually unchanged, as the central conceit of Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams.” In her selections, the woman’s body once again serves as a breeding-ground for personal and political metaphors, and the artist’s relation to her own embodiment as cornerstone of her creative practice. Read More