{"id":105406,"date":"2016-12-02T15:49:51","date_gmt":"2016-12-02T20:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105406"},"modified":"2016-12-06T12:58:01","modified_gmt":"2016-12-06T17:58:01","slug":"staff-picks-bitterness-blindness-backing-vocals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/02\/staff-picks-bitterness-blindness-backing-vocals\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Bitterness, Blindness, Backing Vocals"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

A still from Notes on Blindness<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This week I read Teddy Wayne\u2019s Loner<\/a><\/em>, an impressively creepy novel of first love, specifically the unrequited, unwelcome, male dork variety. With a straight A student for his antihero\u2014a Harvard freshman who connives his way into the life of a glamorous classmate\u2014Wayne satirizes the teenage male gaze from within. And he does it without ingratiating himself to the reader. At a moment when so many young writers want to join the ranks of the angels, Wayne\u2019s unfashionable wit, bitterness, and tight focus are a gift.\u00a0\u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

This week I\u2019ve been reading Terrance Hayes\u2019s most recent collection,\u00a0How to Be Drawn<\/a><\/em>, which was published last year. Hayes is also a painter and has said that language is unrelated to the physical act of painting, but in this collection, he lets the two brush up against one another to see what comes of it. Some poems are formally adventurous and most are visually expressive in the way the words jostle and play\u2014\u201cThe ladies wear wigs of nots, \/ knots of nots: would nots, do nots, cannots.\u201d They are Mayakovskian in their gusto, though less extravagant and celebratory; on many occasions, his nimble wordplay and punning slow for moments of clear-eyed observation, as when he says of a friend, \u201cA man can be \/ so overwhelmed it becomes a mode of being, \/ a flavor indistinguishable from spit.\u201d Many of Hayes\u2019s artworks appear to be portraits, and I imagine that language isn\u2019t absent from the act looking, even if it\u2019s a deeply internal process. Perhaps the best argument for the overlap between poetry and painting comes when he writes, \u201cI care less and less \/ about the shapes of shapes because forms \/ change and nothing is more durable than feeling.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I recently plopped myself in front of Peter Middleton and James Spinney\u2019s first feature documentary,\u00a0Notes on Blindness<\/em><\/a>, and was mesmerized. Following John Hull, a theologian at the University of Birmingham who went blind in his midforties, the film is a study of what it\u2019s like to be swallowed by darkness. But Hull doesn\u2019t appear in the movie himself; instead, he\u2019s portrayed by the bearded Dan Skinner, an actor who lip-synchs along with recordings of Hull\u2019s voice pulled from an audiocassette diary he kept for three years after having lost his sight. The film traces Hull from paralyzing despair to gradual acceptance and triumph. At first, he agonizes\u2014over not being able to watch his children open Christmas gifts, how dreams become the only way of ever seeing anything again, how routine becomes the only way of ever knowing where he is.\u00a0The scene I love most, though, is when he\u2019s caught in a rain shower; the sounds, he says, \u201cbring out the contours of what is around you,\u201d thunder \u201cputs a roof over your head,\u201d and Hull begins to think of his blindness as a gift: \u201cNot a gift that I want, but a gift nonetheless.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

A still from Tetsuo: The Iron Man<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

When a friend and I couldn\u2019t decide on a movie, we settled for something we were both afraid of: Tetsuo: The Iron Man<\/a><\/em>, Shinya Tsukamoto\u2019s 1989 industrial-grade mindfuck. It\u2019s a kind of hell, but I\u2019m so glad we put ourselves through it. A cult favorite among the Eraserhead <\/em>set, Tetsuo <\/em>follows a salaryman as he turns (violently and anxiously) into a monster made of scrap metal. That\u2019s all there is to it, really\u2014no character development, no heavy-handed allegory, just sixty-seven minutes of a man consumed by wires, pipes, shafts, and raw edges, shot in the grainy sixteen millimeter of a snuff film. Tsukamoto has dredged up the cesspool of his subconscious, and the results are masterly. As disturbing as it is, Tetsuo<\/em>\u2019s imagery is utterly sui generis\u2014unless you can name another movie where a guy\u2019s penis turns into an enormous, lopsided drill bit, whirring with impunity. Why watch it now? Well, the holiday season, with its treacly canon, is upon us: when It\u2019s a Wonderful Life <\/em>and A Christmas Story <\/em>have worn thin, bear in mind that Tetsuo <\/em>is a brutally effective tonic. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

My favorite line from the David Bowie version of Prokofiev\u2019s\u00a0Peter and the Wolf\u00a0<\/a><\/em>seems, at first, a totally useless speech act: \u201cNow just imagine \u2026 Just imagine the triumphant procession!\u201d Bowie intones between two endearingly cartoonish and slow musical passages. I love his repetition of \u201cjust imagine,\u201d the absurd unavoidability of that directive. But I also like the descriptive laziness he allows in order to let the music swagger on and do its work. After all, the whole project superimposes word-based storytelling onto pitch- and rhythm-based storytelling, a technique that melds precision with abstraction. The combination is strange and moving, building not an image but a\u00a0feeling<\/em>. Listeners need to fight for the story, filling it in for themselves as they mark variations in the aural motifs. The LP version that I own includes a performance of Benjamin Britten\u2019s wordless\u00a0Young Person\u2019s Guide to the Orchestra<\/em>\u00a0on side two, and it\u2019s pretty difficult to not continue an unspoken narration upon flipping the record, though the sides are unrelated. Still, from the boisterous horns that begin Britten\u2019s piece, I can almost intuit the swallowed duck\u2019s triumphant escape from the wolf\u2019s cavernous stomach or, in a sadistic moment, the slaying of the wolf himself. \u2014Taylor Lannamann<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Bowie\u2019s Peter and the Wolf<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

This year has claimed many a super-famous musician, but I want to pay my respects to the late Colonel Abrams, a singer whose death last week, at sixty-seven, didn\u2019t even rate a mention in the Times<\/em>. (The Daily News <\/em>ran an obit<\/a>; most reports indicate, sadly, that he died homeless in New York.) In the eighties, the Colonel\u2014that\u2019s his real name\u2014paved the way for house music with his own club sound: elaborate layers of syncopated synth funk decked out with gospel-style backing vocals. His voice, husky but always on edge, was the Mr. Hyde to Teddy Pendergrass\u2019s Dr. Jekyll. To put it differently, imagine being Rickrolled with such crazy zeal and passion that you got Stockholm syndrome for Rick Astley: that\u2019s what listening to the Colonel is like. Echoes of his two hits\u2014\u201cTrapped<\/a>\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m Not Gonna Let You<\/a>\u201d\u2014can still be heard in today\u2019s Top 40, and as their titles suggest, they\u2019re fitting anthems for these Trumped-up times. \u2014D.P.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teddy Wayne, Terrance Hayes, Notes on Blindness, and more in this week\u2019s staff 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