March 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Paradise, Polysemy, Porridge By The Paris Review Marianna Rothen, Fear of Fear from the series “Shadows in Paradise”, 2016, archival pigment print, diptych, 17″ x 17″ each. If Barbara Loden directed a film using Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, it would begin to approximate the photographs in Marianna Rothen’s recent “Shadows in Paradise” series, on view at Steven Kasher Gallery. The images elicit a sixties noir and depict women in various guises in isolated scenes of distress, eroticism, and introspection. The series’s title takes its name from Remarque’s 1971 novel; the book appears in one of the photographs, laid open across the lap of a distracted reader. Rothen’s use of it may reference the woman’s (or, more generally, women’s) feeling of a simultaneous absence and doubling in her life: that her identity and her body—physically and psychologically—are always circumscribed by social and cultural forces, so that she becomes two people, neither one of whom, perhaps, she recognizes. In one of the works, in which two photographs are set side by side, the image on the left shows a woman gazing out a window at an overturned chair, a dress, shoes, and a wig on the lawn; the image on the right shows the same scene, but the woman at the window now inhabits the dress and wig and lies prone on the ground, as though dead. Rothen has said that her photographs reference Persona, Three Women, and Mulholland Drive, and too often she wears those influences on her sleeve, but, to me, these are images that couldn’t have been made by a man. Rothen shows an appreciation for the subtle variations of women’s predicament that can only come from having known it herself. —Nicole Rudick I don’t know whether it’s my favorite movie, but I do know Mulholland Drive is the only film I’ve ever seen twice in two days—as soon as I left the theater, I wanted to go back in. And I don’t know whether it’s my favorite moment in the movie, but I do know that when the mysterious woman in the Teatro Silencio opens her mouth and begins to sing in Spanish, and the song turns out to be “Crying,” and then she proceeds to sing the song in its entirety, I have never felt more satisfied, or more uncannily understood, by a work of art. And now, thanks to Beyond the Beyond: Music From the Films of David Lynch, edited by J. C. Gabel and Jessica Hundley, I know that Lynch has called this his favorite moment in all his films. Others may prefer the Woman in the Radiator from Eraserhead, or Dean Stockwell lip-syncing “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet, or the “Locomotion” scene in Inland Empire—as this lavishly illustrated compendium shows, nearly every film or show Lynch has made uses music to deep and mysterious effect. —Lorin Stein Read More
March 3, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Enigma, Exile, Elongation By The Paris Review Raymond Pettibon. I roamed around the New Museum last weekend in awe of the eight hundred or so works on display as part of Raymond Pettibon’s retrospective, “A Pen of All Work,” a name lifted from Byron’s poem “The Vision of Judgment.” The exhibition is stellar: vibrant colors drench the walls; morsels of enigmatic, sometimes illegible prose are, in typical Pettibon fashion, tucked into nearly every work. The show comprises everything from the artist’s self-published zines of the seventies (with titles like Short Teats, Bloody Milk and Tripping Corpse 5) to his iconic drawings of political nimrods (Trump makes an appearance). Pettibon’s work, with its accentuated comic-book style and literary prowess, is a thing of grandeur; walking through, I felt I was being pummeled by it over and over. As Pettibon has said of his drawings, “Even to look at them can be an ordeal, like reading Milton at a sitting.” (NB: for a peek at his work, take a look at our Summer 2014 issue: his dog, Boo, graces the cover, and a portfolio of his work is featured inside.) —Caitlin Youngquist Jaume Plensa is perhaps best known for his monumental public installations: you may remember the fifty-foot-tall LED screens of his Crown Fountain, which once stood in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Familiar with Plensa’s scale, I was intrigued by “Silence,” his exhibition at Galerie Lelong. Featuring roughly seven busts in one room, Plensa perches his sculptures along beams of the same salvaged wood from which they were made. The heads—all women—are unevenly burned black, brown, and ochre. Their eyes are closed, their faces slack. Wooden rings pattern their elongated faces. Like the morbid beauty of L’Inconnue de la Seine, they emanate a sense of timelessness; but they’re modeled on individual women from all over the world, and so they buzz with political relevance. I perceived “Silence” as a diasporic space invested in the gaps and overlaps of history—and allowing for reflective respite from the competing rhetoric surrounding immigration and feminism. —Madeline Medeiros Pereira Read More
February 24, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gunpowder, Gay Saints, Game Wardens By The Paris Review From Escaped Alone. In the February issue of Harper’s, the gospel historian Anthony Heilbut writes about gays in the black church, past and present: “Even when they haven’t been the preachers—and they sometimes are—they have constituted the pastors’ inner circle and praetorian guard. Music dominates the traditional black church; the minister is as much cantor as village explainer. In particular, a good ‘Mississippi whoop,’ or melodic growl, has been the making of many a preacher. And when the minister growled, the gay organist would accent his every moan, while the gay choir members made their joyous noise, and the gay saints (i.e., members of the flock) jumped to their feet, clapping and dancing in the spirit. The whole experience was orchestrated and annotated by gays and lesbians. This is one reason why many straight men have shunned the church—why, for example, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was ashamed to tell his mother that he had joined a choir.” —Lorin Stein Caryl Churchill’s new play Escaped Alone is at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for one more weekend. Go see it—it’s not even an hour long. Four British women, getting on in years, sit in the backyard and wonder where the time goes. They bicker, they ruminate, they joke about Tesco; in a manic outburst of nostalgia, they break into a skillful rendition of “Da Doo Ron Ron.” But there’s a nameless unease in the air—it might just be the apocalypse! Occasionally the stage goes dark and one of the women steps into a frame of terrifying red LED lights, where she recounts what I can only describe as fun facts about the end of the world. (“Smartphones were distributed by charities when rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking.”) If Pinter had lived to see—and sniff at—Black Mirror, he might’ve fused it to Kitchen Sink Drama like this, but it would’ve wanted for Churchill’s warmth. Not to say she’s a softy: the tension, in the play’s best moments, breaks its neighborliness, and a dark, Beckettian ooze seeps out. One of its many fine monologues goes like this: “Terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
February 17, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bey, Bureaucrats, Bloody Hands By The Paris Review From There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. In the early 1920s, a series of unsolved murders terrorized the residents of Osage County, Oklahoma. Most of the victims were members of the Osage Nation—a tribe that had grown rich when oil was discovered on their reservation—but as the killings continued, even their privately funded investigations failed to crack the case, until it drew the attention of an ambitious young bureaucrat in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover. Through heroic and ingenious detective work, Hoover’s agents at what was then called the Bureau of Investigation exposed a cabal of white Oklahomans conspiring to kill Indians for their oil. The case made Hoover’s name, and the Bureau’s, but as David Grann shows in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI—out this April—the true scale of the conspiracy has never been revealed. It is an incredible story, stirring and impossible to put down, by a writer whose true-life mysteries always go deeper than the reader expects. —Lorin Stein In a New York Times opinion piece last November, just after the presidential election, the poet Morgan Parker wrote about being “a thing to be hated”—that is, being a black woman. “Society believes that black women are not beautiful,” she writes, “and so maybe I believe that, too.” Parker’s tremendous new collection, There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé, echoes that sentiment but also takes it to task. Her feelings of invisibility alight in the first poem, “All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood,” which doesn’t somuch open the book as explode from it. “At school they learned that Black people happened,” she says of a group of kids. It’s a small, powerful line whose suggestion—in part that black identity is history and thus forfeit in the present—permeates these poems. Parker, though, doesn’t concede the point (“A secret is during commercials / I am living other lives”), and she derives strength and inspiration from other black women, including Mickalene Thomas, whose photocollage appears on the book’s cover. In a poem written in response to Thomas’s work, Parker captures the embodied fullness of Thomas’s images of self-possessed black women: “Jeweled lips, we’re rich / We’re everyone. We have ideas and vaginas, / history and clothes and a mother.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
February 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Like Art, Like Death, Like … By The Paris Review I’ve been losing myself on the train this week in Gabrielle Bell’s new comic, Everything Is Flammable. It doesn’t come out until April, so I’m jumping the gun here, but once I read it I couldn’t not write about it—it’s that good. Bell writes and draws stories with deep humanity, and, impressively, that humanity—painful, awkward, and uncertain—is her own. This new book spans a year and follows Bell as she travels to and from her mother’s home in rural Northern California, navigating the guilt she feels as an absent daughter and the anxiety she feels in trying to care for her independent mother. Bell’s self-awareness and observations never result in tidy epiphanies; the book’s strips open out into one another, accumulating without resolution. She is also always funny, and her distinct blocky hatching style gives warmth to every panel. The ineffable quality is that she makes all this look easy. —Nicole Rudick Having spent hours puzzling over dumb subway ads (worst recent offender: HelloFresh, whose come-hither copy begs, LET’S MAKE SWEET, SWEET POTATOES TOGETHER) I’m having a ball with Glenn O’Brien’s Like Art—a collection of his columns on advertising, which ran in Artforum from 1985 to 1990. As the title suggests, O’Brien treats ads as art objects, which is to say he understands that most of them are meaningless, even if their effects on us aren’t. Though he offers withering pronouncements (“You can’t run a jingle over emaciated faces and bloated bellies,” he says of an AT&T ad about using your long-distance plan to call Ethiopia) and even occasional praise, really his columns amount to a kind of advertisee’s diary, recording the idle chatter that passes through us as we process hundreds, maybe thousands of ads every week. Here he is on cigarettes: “In London recently there were billions of billboards everywhere with the image of scissors cut out of purple fabric. Near one corner was the British version of The Warning: ‘Cigarettes can seriously damage your health.’ But I couldn’t figure out if this was a cigarette ad or an antismoking ad. It was the most abstract ad I’d ever seen. I wanted to stop people on the street and ask them what it meant, but I didn’t. I still don’t know.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
February 3, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Witches, Wolves, Warlords By The Paris Review From the cover of The Witches by Stacy Schiff. For a brief second, some fifty pages in to The Witches, Stacy Schiff’s history of the Salem witch trials, I almost started to wonder whether any of the accused were guilty. Like, of witchcraft. I spent the rest of the book waiting for Stoughton, Hathorne, Cotton Mather, and the other investigators to come to their senses and call the whole thing off. Of course I know better, but her retelling of the trials is so vivid, and resonates so deeply with current events, that the nightmare seems to unfold in real time, its causes obscure, its conclusion impossible to foresee, like a terrifying story you’ve never heard before. —Lorin Stein “One cannot reason anymore with the President. One life for the life of thousands. Lies lies lies airplanes. Warlords profit false idols prophet.” Reading Kate Zambreno’s first novel, O Fallen Angel, is like getting a dose of electroshock therapy—a galvanizing current of electricity straight into the brain. Written in 2007, in the aftermath of September 11 and in the midst of the second Bush’s presidency, O Fallen Angel was published by Lidia Yuknavitch’s small press Chiasmus the following year; it was fittingly reissued last month, a few days before Trump’s inauguration. The novel is related through three characters’ streams of consciousness: the Valium-popping housewife Mommy, one of literature’s great monsters; her daughter, Maggie, a drug addict who pursues a physical and psychological drive toward death; and Malachi, a street prophet, who seems to foresee, among other events, burning towers. O Fallen Angel is blackly funny and brutal, a radical and clear-sighted antidote for banality and complacency. —Nicole Rudick Read More