{"id":127740,"date":"2018-07-20T13:00:27","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T17:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127740"},"modified":"2018-07-20T21:48:14","modified_gmt":"2018-07-21T01:48:14","slug":"staff-picks-laughing-cows-lo-fi-bangers-and-convulsing-balls-of-snakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/20\/staff-picks-laughing-cows-lo-fi-bangers-and-convulsing-balls-of-snakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Laughing Cows, Lo-Fi Bangers, and Convulsing Balls of Snakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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The devil truly is in the details when it comes to Thomas Bayrle, whose first solo survey in New York<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cPlaytime,\u201d 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\u2019s work is so overtly dark\u2014a lot of it presents itself as playful, as the exhibition\u2019s 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\u2019ve read it too many times. Bayrle demonstrates foresight in his concepts but also in his technique\u2014he 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. \u2014Lauren Kane\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

With the props of a name and gender conspicuously missing, the narrator of Christopher Stoddard\u2019s At Night Only<\/em><\/a> must search elsewhere for an identity. A passel of self-effacing substitutes offers itself up, composed of drugs, sex, and substance-induced paranoid visions. The dissolution of two relationships\u2014between the narrator and Pedro, a glamorous underground art world celebrity, and then between the narrator and Jacques, a narcissistic emerging actor\u2014give the novel its arc. Pedro\u2019s half of the novel seems more literary than Jacques\u2019s; there\u2019s a brilliant passage revisiting the narrator\u2019s \u201cGoth teenage years,\u201d during which they lit black candles and whispered Wiccan, moving among shadowy individuals whose presence makes the narrator claustrophobic. But the second half\u2019s less flashy prose style is exactly what the narrative calls for. As the narrator edges toward accepting that no one will be their savior, they stop making mythologies out of harmful relationships. This is Stoddard\u2019s story of the I\u2014which, not by coincidence, he often casually drops from his sentences (\u201cRinse off. Get up. Get out of the tub.\u201d). Though dubbed a tragedy on the jacket, At Night Only <\/em>looks unrelentingly for a way out of fake love, fake relationships, and fake identities. \u2014Ben Shields<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>

Ren\u00e9 Magritte, La moisson<\/em> (The Harvest<\/em>), 1943.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In May 1948, Ren\u00e9 Magritte decided at last to put ses pieds dans la plat<\/em>\u2014his foot in it. Magritte\u2019s first solo exhibition in Paris featured just under thirty oil and gouache works from what has come to be known as his off-color p<\/em>\u00e9riode vache,\u00a0<\/em>a spasmodic break from decades of what he called his \u201ctactical conformism.\u201d\u00a0Vache\u00a0<\/em>in French translates literally to \u201ccow,\u201d but the art critic Bernard Marcad\u00e9 unfolds the unceremonious meaning of the word in the context of Magritte\u2019s work. For instance, \u201can unpleasant person is described as a\u00a0peau de vache\u00a0<\/em>(cow-skin),\u201d and \u201camour vache\u00a0<\/em>(cow-love) refers to a relationship [that is] more physical than emotional.\u201d The casually bizarre and crudely fetishistic paintings of the\u00a0p<\/em>\u00e9riode vache<\/em>\u00a0prove this slang to be fitting for Magritte\u2019s ultimate goal: to offend, to outrage. Magritte approaches surrealism scatologically; the hyperrealist style that brought him fame in the thirties is swallowed by the bold brushstrokes and outlandish color of pieces like\u00a0La famine\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Pictorial Content<\/em>. Similarly, Magritte\u2019s rendition of \u00c9douard Manet\u2019s\u00a0Lola de Valence\u00a0<\/em>is a cartoonish parody, literally undressing Manet\u2019s realist portrait and replacing it with a fleshy pink caricature. Of course, Magritte\u2019s 1948 exhibition failed spectacularly\u2014not a single piece was sold. Yet Magritte succeeded in breeding discomfort among his Parisian audience, invoking a sense of disruption and confusion that he believed to be essential to his own brand of surrealism. To experience Magritte\u2019s work firsthand, contemporary viewers can visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, whose exhibition \u201cThe Fifth Season<\/a>\u201d is on view until\u00a0October 28, 2018. \u2014Madeline Day<\/strong><\/p>\n

Henri Michaux, the wonderful and wonderfully strange midcentury Belgian painter, writer, poet, traveler, etc., did not find drugs recreational. As he informs us at the close of his 1956 magnum opus of mescaline experience,\u00a0Miserable Miracle<\/em><\/a> (excerpted in The Paris Review<\/a><\/em>\u2019s Winter 1956 issue<\/a>):\u00a0<\/em>\u201cI regret to say that I am more of the water-drinking type. Never alcohol. No excitants, and for years no coffee, tobacco, or tea. From time to time wine, a little.\u201d In the foreword, he states succinctly of mescaline itself: \u201cShould I speak of pleasure? It was unpleasant.\u201d He does not believe, as his compatriot in mescaline self-experimentation Aldous Huxley seemed to, that drugs are capable of imparting philosophical wisdom or inducing enlightenment. At most, Michaux concludes, drugs are \u201can opening \u2026 only a step.\u201d The impulse beneath Michaux\u2019s mescaline experiments seems to have been literary, driven by a sense of fresh woods untouched by other prose styles. In Miserable Miracle<\/em>, Michaux attempts, like an attentive explorer, to deduce the workings of this strange place, the convulsing ball of snakes that his mind has become. We witness Michaux organically arriving at a Finnegans Wake\u2013<\/em>esque internal logic and prosody: \u201cAnd here it is again just as it was before, with more stories than you can count, with a thousand rows of spasmodic bricks, a trembling, oscillating ruin, crammed, stuttering Bourouboudour.<\/em>\u201d Michaux may not have returned any wiser from his trip, but he did bring news and strange new textures. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Los Angeles rapper 03 Greedo belongs to a class of artists who, out of sheer prolificacy and genius, create their own vortices. Like the outputs of Gucci Mane and Chief Keef, Greedo\u2019s music rewards obsession and demands immersion. This is my favorite type of rapper, and\u00a0over the past month,\u00a0I\u2019ve been absolutely hooked on Greedo, bouncing from his\u00a0Purple Summer<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/i>mixtapes to his collaborations<\/a> with Drakeo the Ruler, eventually landing on his latest project,\u00a0God Level<\/i><\/a>, which promises to launch his career just as he begins a twenty-year prison sentence. I remember when the music of another vortex-creating rapper, Lil B, first clicked for me. On \u201c1 Time<\/a>,\u201d one of the final tracks of Lil B\u2019s weirdo masterpiece\u00a0Angels Exodus<\/i><\/a>, he raps, \u201cI already think I\u2019ma die from the way I\u2019m living \/ I\u2019m by myself eating fast food on Thanksgiving.\u201d These lines, nestled on the back half of an album that includes a joyous ode to the horror video game\u00a0Resident Evil<\/i>, hit like a brick. Greedo has a similar tendency for vacillating moods. He lets you float\u2014his melodies are impeccable, his flows infectious, his beats drenched in the slap and squish of West Coast hip-hop\u2014until he tugs the rope and drops a counterweight, plunging you back into the icy waters of his trauma. On\u00a0\u201cJealous,\u201d a paranoid lo-fi banger, he slips in these lines:\u00a0<\/i>\u201cTell me have you ever slept in the park \/ Fuckin\u2019 cheesy, you just sleep in the car.\u201d What a gift it is to be let into the kingdom of Greedo\u2019s mind. And though he\u2019s earned comparisons to everyone from Max B to Boosie Badazz, and though I\u2019ve spent half of this staff pick placing him in the context of other rappers, Greedo\u2019s style and voice are urgent and wholly his own.\u00a0\u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The devil truly is in the details when it comes to Thomas Bayrle, whose first solo survey in New York,\u00a0\u201cPlaytime,\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[34775,34771,34772,34776,34778,32762,30309,34774,2508,34773,34777,5064,33496,34770],"class_list":["post-127740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-03-greedo","tag-at-night-only","tag-christopher-stoddard","tag-drakeo-the-ruler","tag-god-level","tag-henri-michaux","tag-lil-b","tag-miserable-miracle","tag-new-museum","tag-periode-vache","tag-purple-summer","tag-rene-magritte","tag-san-francisco-museum-of-modern-art","tag-thomas-bayrle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Laughing Cows, Lo-Fi Bangers, and Convulsing Balls of Snakes by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 reads drug-fueled dramas, watches 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