{"id":130537,"date":"2018-11-02T13:37:23","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T17:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130537"},"modified":"2018-11-02T14:21:02","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T18:21:02","slug":"staff-picks-shirkers-sculptors-and-space-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/02\/staff-picks-shirkers-sculptors-and-space-ghosts\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Shirkers, Sculptors, and Space Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from Shirkers<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Little did Sandi Tan know, her first (and only) feature film, Shirkers<\/em><\/a>, would escape her in the exact way its namesake prophesied. In 1992, Tan wanted to write a movie that preserved her punk adolescence in Singapore. Nineteen-year-old Tan and her friends fancied themselves iconoclasts, abrading against a stiflingly conservative art scene; they led dozens of minor revolutions, from chewing gum (which was against the law) to watching bootleg copies of Blue Velvet<\/em> via a \u201cclandestine videotaping syndicate.\u201d Inspired by the \u201cunusual\u201d and \u201cunpopular\u201d films of French New Wave and independent American cinema, Tan concocted an idea for her own: a guerrilla-style road movie in a country that takes only forty minutes to drive across. It would be bold and bright and fizzling with youthful energy, exuding all the naive ambition of a sure-to-be cult hit. Only it never was, because Shirkers<\/em> was never finished. After filming was completed, all seventy reels were stolen by Tan\u2019s mentor and director, Georges Cardona. It took more than twenty years for Tan to be reunited with Shirkers<\/em>.\u00a0She sprinkles the surviving footage into a breathtaking Netflix documentary in which she spends remarkably little time pathologizing Cardona, choosing instead to entertain a more nostalgic, meaningful subject: how Shirkers<\/em> (and its absence) has rippled through the lives of its creators, cast, and crew. Tan in particular feels that she has been permanently fissured by the vacancy that Shirkers<\/em> left behind, not only in regards to her own childhood but also the place her work should have occupied in Singapore\u2019s film history. Alongside her crew members, Tan wonders if it is possible for the lack of something to be felt, even something that never really existed in the first place. But in the end,\u00a0Shirkers<\/em> isn\u2019t just Tan\u2019s wish for what could have been; it\u2019s a beautiful and backward odyssey, chasing down and interrogating her past to find out precisely how her innocence fell by the wayside. \u2014Madeline Day\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yanick Lahens is not much known in the U.S., but critics are right to call her one of the most important living Haitian fiction writers. There are but three of her books available in English translation, the most recent of which is the stunning novel Moonbath<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0from Deep Vellum. Moonbath<\/em>\u2019s narrator, C\u00e9toute Olm\u00e8ne Th\u00e9r\u00e8se, weaves together a compact, but nonetheless epic, family narrative set in a rural Haitian village. Power and corruption are ever present, and their pressures\u2014be they sexual or economic or both\u2014are often impossible to reckon with or escape. Though what\u2019s most surprising is the sense that one has waded fully into the world these characters inhabit, a world so alive that I sometimes forgot I was reading a book at all. In many ways, I\u2019m reminded of first reading Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em>, a book that similarly transported me clean out of my self and into some other world beyond.\u00a0\u2014Christian Kiefer<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know that indentured heaviness you feel on a night (always before you must be up early) when against all methods, you simply can\u2019t fall asleep, and you watch the clock tick well past two and then four? That endlessness is exactly what I felt the first time I read Shirley Jackson\u2019s short story \u201cThe Bus<\/a>\u201d years ago. Although not as violent as \u201cThe Lottery\u201d or as spooky as We Have Always Lived in the Castle<\/em>,\u00a0it\u2019s still completely dreadful and mind-consuming. Anyone who\u2019s read Jackson\u2019s work knows it\u2019s a disservice to say too much, so I won\u2019t. \u201cThe Bus\u201d will take you about ten minutes to read, and it will haunt your brain for a lifetime.\u00a0\u2014Eleonore Condo<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

SpaceGhostPurrp.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of the great tragedies of the streaming era is the death of true discovery. As the rap critic Andrew Nosnitsky has noted on Twitter, the corporatization of music and media consumption benefits only the Monopoly men who hold the money. Any whiff of weirdness is rinsed out. All sharp edges of genre defiance and genuine revolution are cleaved off and smoothed. But when I was in college, musicians were just beginning to reckon with the possibilities of the Internet. Out of the ether would come baffling things: bedroom black-metal artists recording howling EPs over Garageband drums, indie bands revivifying the sound of nineties Chicagoland, Minnesota tweens singing dead-eyed R & B. One of my favorites to emerge from this renaissance is SpaceGhostPurrp\u2019s\u00a0NASA<\/small>: The Mixtape<\/em><\/a>,<\/span>\u00a0a mysterious rap project with a picture of the Hanna-Barbera character Space Ghost emblazoned on the cover. Clocking in at just under a half hour, NASA<\/small>: The Mixtape\u00a0<\/em>serves as a perfect introduction to one of modern rap\u2019s most influential and elusive figures.\u00a0SpaceGhostPurrp\u2019s reference points are Three 6 Mafia, Eazy-E, and Lil B, all of whom Purrp synthesizes into an extraordinary otherworldly sound. He isn\u2019t a terribly gifted rapper; instead, the appeal here is his intuition for building a spooky intergalactic atmosphere. His beats are blown out, gritty, and pulsing with dark matter. He repeatedly samples the pips and whirrs of\u00a0Space Cadet<\/em>,\u00a0the pinball game that came packaged with Windows 95. As an artistic statement, NASA<\/small>: The Mixtape<\/em>\u00a0stands out even eight years on from its release, but Purrp\u2019s career stalled soon after. In the years since NASA<\/small><\/em>, SpaceGhostPurrp\u2019s friend ASAP<\/small> Rocky rose to superstar status, Three 6 Mafia experienced a favorable critical reappraisal, and Florida became a hotbed for rising stars rapping over murky 808s and lo-fi synths. But SpaceGhostPurrp receded into the shadows. He\u2019s seemingly allergic to fame. On \u201cI LOVE LEAN,\u201d he raps, \u201cI\u2019ma change the rap game \/ Can\u2019t sell my soul for green\u201d\u2014a throwaway line in 2010, but an oddly prophetic one from today\u2019s vantage.\u00a0\u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first line of Kate Tempest\u2019s new collection, Running upon the Wires<\/em><\/a>, is at odds with her name: \u201cEven the rain was quiet.\u201d However, Tempest\u2019s work is anything but: she is a spoken-word performer, and her bent for the music of language emanates even from her written word. I was transfixed by her command of rhyme, by the serious, bard-like quality of verse meant to be sung. The collection is the story of a relationship in three parts, moving from \u201cend\u201d to \u201cmiddle\u201d to \u201cbeginning\u201d; in a deft handling of shuffled narrative time (perhaps rightly likened to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/em>), Tempest presents intimately human scenes, composing small portraits of joy, pleasure, obsession, betrayal, insecurity, and loneliness that are honest and vulnerable.\u00a0\u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Walker Percy\u2019s novel The Moviegoer<\/em>, the\u00a0protagonist, Binx Bollings, occasionally seeks out what he calls \u201crepetitions\u201d\u2014sitting in the same seat at the same movie theater watching the same movie, for instance\u2014\u201ctoward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.\u201d I, too, practice repetitions, though not, like Binx, to drop from linear time and chew on its shadow but to put my ear to it and listen to its unspooling. As the center of old steps go smooth and concave from the thousands of feet that have pressed and brushed them, repetitions cumulatively alter the shape of places and things in the mind, in memory. To witness, returning, how a place has changed in your perception, to press your fingers again to the old indentation, is to feel, ever so remotely, the contours of passed time, catch a shimmering glimpse across a canyon of who you once were. Whenever I\u2019m in Chicago, I go to B.L.U.E.S.<\/small> club on Halsted Street; whenever in New Haven, I eat at Frank Pepe\u2019s pizzeria; whenever in Delhi, I visit the Jama Masjid and eat a Shami kebab at Karim\u2019s; and whenever I\u2019m in Berlin, I march through the Bode Museum<\/a>, the sculpture gallery on Berlin\u2019s Museum Island, past rooms of German and Italian, Gothic and Renaissance masterworks of statue and altarpiece, to see but one artist\u2014Tilman Riemenschneider<\/a>, the late-Gothic sculptor of W\u00fcrzburg. Riemenschneider, a genius in wood, is devoted to vividness, shading into lushness his human figures, his saints and apostles, whose expressions are more puzzled than beatific, as if surprised to be so lushly corporeal. Proportionally, they are slightly off\u2014like infants, the heads are too big for their bodies, the fingers very long and thin\u2014though one gets the sense that this is a result of Riemenschneider\u2019s hypertrophied attention to detail, that he is simultaneously attending to each area in close-up. Every vein on a hand is articulated, each facial wrinkle deep-riven. His figures are always extravagantly haired and robed, overflowing with folds and ringlets, as if his exuberance demanded he expand the canvas however possible. They are good company, always content, always new.\u00a0\u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 worries the night away with Shirley Jackson, lavishes in bardic poems, and practices Walker Percy\u2013like \u201crepetitions.\u201d<\/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":[40130,40145,6397,13748,938,40135,1840,1596,40144,1886,20177,3071,40131,130,40133,40147,40142,40129,6158,33892,13474,40134,40143,740,4693,8740,3539,7221,1447,165,40140,40148,40128,40146,40127,37,964,40126,1148,27301,40138,40139,40136,9068,8779,40141,40149,2620,40137,15683,40132],"class_list":["post-130537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-40130","tag-asap-rocky","tag-berlin","tag-blue-velvet","tag-chicago","tag-deep-vellum","tag-delhi","tag-documentary","tag-eazy-e","tag-florida","tag-french-new-wave","tag-gabriel-garcia-marquez","tag-georges-cardona","tag-haiti","tag-haitian-literature","tag-kate-tempest","tag-lo-fi","tag-lost-movies","tag-magic","tag-matt-levin","tag-miami","tag-moonbath","tag-nasa-the-mixtape","tag-netflix","tag-nostalgia-2","tag-one-hundred-years-of-solitude","tag-poem","tag-poems","tag-poet","tag-poetry","tag-raider-klan","tag-repetitions","tag-road-movie","tag-running-upon-the-wires","tag-sandi-tan","tag-sculptor","tag-sculpture","tag-shirkers","tag-shirley-jackson","tag-singapore","tag-soundcloud-rap","tag-spaceghostpurrp","tag-the-bus","tag-the-lottery","tag-the-moviegoer","tag-three-6-mafia","tag-tilman-riemenschneider","tag-walker-percy","tag-we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle","tag-wood","tag-yanick-lahens"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff 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