August 24, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Documentaries, Snapshots, and Glossy Color Images By The Paris Review In his 1962 essay ‘The Poet and the City,’ WH Auden designs the curriculum of his “dream-day College for Bards.” “The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.” Artful parody, Auden knows, is the most demanding species of critical writing. It requires, simultaneously, an understanding of the parodied work so total that it shades convincingly into empathy (the parodist has to be able to think and create within the boundaries of the parodied work) and an unfaltering critical distance. The parody documentary series Documentary Now! on the IFC channel—created by Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, and Rhys Thomas—is a sustained masterclass in just such artistic acrobatics. The series rambles back and forth through the history of documentary—from 1922’s Nanook of the North to 2012’s Jiro Dreams of Sushi—producing unpretentious 21-minute gems that crystallize and elaborate some aspect of the source classic. They are as much commentary as they are comedy, but they are in fact very funny, and often quite affecting—Bill Hader is, I believe, without qualification one of the best working American actors. These are films that the creators have deep affection for, and they put in astonishing, obsessive, painstakingly loving effort to re-create their look and texture, apparently even going so far as to track down the original lenses that Errol Morris used to shoot The Thin Blue Line. Finishing an episode, I want nothing more than to go and immediately watch the original again, to marvel at both the technical and critical achievement of Documentary Now! and the fresh light it retrospectively casts. —Matt Levin Read More
August 17, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Portraiture, Patriarchy, Public Works By The Paris Review Ilya Repin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin, 1884. It is my habit, wandering through the seemingly logicless branching of the Met’s European painting rooms, to collect body parts from portraits, to take certain striking features and make them a synecdoche of the genius of their painter. Goya, for instance, is a masterful painter of hands; the Dutch painter Frans Hals is one of the great artists of the mouth. The course of this habit, though, always leads me to one painting in particular, featuring the most living, searching, despairing set of eyes I have seen in a portrait: the Russian painter Ilya Yefimovich Repin’s portrait of the author Vsevolod Garshin, in Gallery 827 at the Met. Most of the painting is rendered in the smudgy, conspicuous manner of nineteenth-century Impressionism, but the eyes are almost frighteningly photo-realistic, as if Repin had intentionally blurred the rest of the picture for the shock of the eyes, their bracing directness and incontrovertible sadness. Entirely redundantly, the caption informs us that Garshin would throw himself down a stairwell four years later. Portraiture is usually a contest—the subject wants to modulate, manage what they give away, while the artist wants everything. The eyes, in Repin’s portrait, are where that contest collapses, a tear in the fabric where Garshin’s unadulterated self floods out and buries Repin’s brush. —Matt Levin Read More
August 10, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Film Forum, Fallout Shelters, and Fermentation By The Paris Review If you recently found yourself wandering West Houston and Sixth, did you notice the soft sounds of film reels spinning and popcorn popping? If you didn’t, then you weren’t listening hard enough, because Film Forum is reopened for business after its renovation hiatus. Among some of the films stretching the legs of the new theaters are Nico, 1988 (which you can read about on the Daily) and a long schedule of films by the French director Jacques Becker. On Saturday night, I saw Rendezvous in July (Rendez-vous de juillet), a 1949 comedy of jazz-loving, Bohemian-lite young Parisians. Lucien is in love with Christine and wants to go abroad to make a documentary film; Roger is a brooding, brass-playing musician in love with the actress Therese, who will be starring alongside Christine in a hot new play. When these bright young things aren’t dancing in jazz clubs or having dinner parties, they’re navigating their lives away from the strictures of their bourgeois parents’ generation and forward into a new world after the war. At its heart, Rendezvous in July is a wonderful, quick-witted movie about young people, about Paris, about art and love. This was the first film I’d seen by Becker, and I hope to see another. However, if Rendezvous in July doesn’t pique your interest, I’m sure any of the embarrassment of film riches once more available would be reason enough to walk through Film Forum’s recently reopened doors. —Lauren Kane Read More
August 3, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Jewel Thieves and Drunken Companions By The Paris Review The comedy of the New York girl abroad, exemplified in Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, is high among my favorite genres, followed closely by the tragedy of the New York girl abroad—Daisy Miller is one among many Jamesian examples. Eve Babitz’s Black Swans, originally published in 1993, is both the comedy and the tragedy of the Los Angeles girl on her home coast, and it elevates one of my less-favored genres, the personal essay. These autobiographical “stories” are peopled with sad, handsome men (thus the comedy). The tragedy is the denouement of the preceding decades, which is more readily on display in her interactions with women. Babitz lunches in the L.A. heat, dressed comfortably and mindful of her newly middle-aged metabolism, watching her companion, an effortlessly svelte woman her age, fully made-up and dressed in a fine white pantsuit, devour a hamburger, a bourbon, then a custard, a rare holdout of refined excess. The blinding twilight of a bygone era in Los Angeles is Babitz’s lived experience, distilled here into stories with sweet bite, like sour fruit only just past the point of ripe. —Lauren Kane Porochista Khakpour’s memoir Sick doesn’t need much more hype, but I have focused on almost nothing else the last two weeks, deliberately stretching it into as many days of reading as possible. That a book chronicling year after year of physical agony, misdiagnosis, and serial dating never becomes narcissistic or self-involved is a miracle; instead, reading Khakpour’s memoir is more like a chance meeting with someone you’ve always dreamed of commiserating with. It could easily have been a polemic against the health care industry; you’ll quickly lose count of how many providers fail Khakpour. It took her years to get a Lyme disease diagnosis, which, detected in the late stage, signifies a lifetime of health problems and relapses. Polemic typically necessitates ego, but Khakpour’s is absent in Sick. My favorite part of the book is its structure, each chapter set in a new city at a new gig. She is writer adept at snagging grants and fellowships, and her story as a sick person spreads from her hometown of Tehran, to L.A., to Sarah Lawrence College, to Johns Hopkins, to New Mexico, to Pennsylvania, to Germany, and always back to New York. The constant change in geography, in lovers, and in health are immensely pleasurable to read on every page, despite the author’s uncertain future through it all. The very worst moments—hiding in the bathroom with scissors to her arm in Leipzig while her boyfriend has a psychotic episode—are gravid with her joy at being able to write it. In the end, it’s this joy of writing, however grim the content, that is really the subject of Sick. I love this book. —Ben Shields Read More
July 27, 2018 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Summer By The Paris Review Christine and the Queens. When I watch Christine and the Queens, I feel joy in its purest form. Her best songs are perfect pop constructions laced with a delicious, defiant queerness, and unlike most pop songs, they don’t wear out after repeated listenings. They’re songs to dance to, to feel at home inside, to feel sexy in, songs you don’t mind getting stuck in your head. The pleasure of the music is deepened by her music videos—that is to say her body’s movements, loose, earthy, MJ-inflected, charged with the casual charisma of a true star. I’ve spent the year pregnant, my body becoming bigger, stranger, slower, and unwieldy—after giving birth two weeks ago, my body remains a slow moving creature, still unfamiliar to myself. Watching Christine move with such boundlessness, as she does on her latest single, has a new kind of power over me. I feel it, the freedom she has in her body, in my limited one. It holds a place for my body to return to. She’s on tour this fall to promote her new album, and you should not miss the chance to see her live. —Shruti Swamy TMI, maybe, but I’ve had a rough summer so far. Well, so has the world (it’s not summer everywhere, but you know what I mean). I’m reading all sorts of Marxian stuff for a book I’m working on—I don’t recommend this as therapy—and a line from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus keeps coming back to me: “What cogito lacks its evil genius, the traitor it will never be rid of?” But “at least there’s pretty lights,” as the band Men at Work put it. At least there’s the National Park Service’s Bear Cam, a live feed from Brooks Falls in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Right now there’s a lone brown bear in the frame, scratching himself and romping in the river. Sometimes there are five or six, scanning for the salmon that surge upstream. Yesterday, I watched a huge fellow catch a fish, tear it open, then jump, startled, when a seagull alighted briefly on his back, causing him to drop his prize after one bite. The gulls just wade around, or float like ducks, waiting to gulp down what the bears let fall. I’m a bit obsessed with bears. I’ve met a few black bears in the wild, including one last summer in the Catskills who refuses to stay put in a poem. These Alaskan brown bears are bigger, lanky and lumbering but fleet af when they need to be. Now there are no bears in the frame, just the river. I like the river too. —Michael Robbins Read More
July 20, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Laughing Cows, Lo-Fi Bangers, and Convulsing Balls of Snakes By The Paris Review The devil truly is in the details when it comes to Thomas Bayrle, whose first solo survey in New York, “Playtime,” opened in June at the New Museum. His paintings are hypnotic. Large images are made up of tinier and tinier versions of the same image, demonstrating a Pointillism all his own. The first floor of the survey is saturated with color and pattern (even on the walls and floors), an initially delightful effect that quickly becomes creepily unreal. My companion and I sat transfixed, eyes wide and mouths slightly agape, in a theater where the screen played the image of a digitally rendered face, zooming in to reveal that the likeness in fact comprised thousands of screaming mouths, and then zooming back out again. Face after face appeared on the screen, each revealing itself as a honeycomb of horror. Not all of Bayrle’s work is so overtly dark—a lot of it presents itself as playful, as the exhibition’s name suggests. The motif of the Laughing Cow logo is plastered everywhere, but even that eventually becomes warped, the way a word does when you’ve read it too many times. Bayrle demonstrates foresight in his concepts but also in his technique—he used computers to do work long before such methods were taught in art schools the world over. The second floor shows his more recent work, much larger in scale, bereft of color, and focused on the humming spiritual nature of modern engineering and technology. The repeated motions of windshield wipers and pistons are presented as devotional, and as we watched, again transfixed, the arms of a mechanical deity moved to a looping measure from Liszt. —Lauren Kane Read More