{"id":140101,"date":"2019-10-11T13:37:02","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T17:37:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=140101"},"modified":"2019-10-12T19:17:30","modified_gmt":"2019-10-12T23:17:30","slug":"staff-picks-monsters-monkeys-and-maladies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/10\/11\/staff-picks-monsters-monkeys-and-maladies\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Monsters, Monkeys, and Maladies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Patti Smith. Photo: \u00a9 Jesse Dittmar.<\/p><\/div>\n

In her latest memoir, Year of the Monkey<\/em><\/a>, Patti Smith writes of Sandy Pearlman: \u201cWe stood on either side of him, promising to mentally hold onto him, keep an open channel, ready to intercept and accept any signal.\u201d It\u2019s the start of 2016, and Smith\u2019s friend Pearlman\u2014a producer and rock critic\u2014has been hospitalized after a brain hemorrhage. As he lies in a coma, Smith recounts the tumultuous year that follows\u2014the loss of friends (Sam Shepard is nearly bedridden), the horror of the imminent election and rise of nationalism, and the impending climate crisis. A reflection on mortality, the book retains Smith\u2019s characteristically flat tone as she wanders through stretches of Arizona, California, Virginia, and Kentucky, stopping at diners for black coffee and onion omelets and conversations with strangers. She hitchhikes from San Francisco to San Diego and back, travels as far as Lisbon, and returns home to the quiet of her Rockaway bungalow to stare at the flowers. All the while, she describes the mundane details of life with incredible vividness: the contents of her suitcase (six Electric Lady T-shirts, six pairs of underwear, herbal cough remedies), how it feels to fall asleep in her coat, and chatty Cammy with her truck of pickles. Smith moves smoothly between the present, memory, and magic, urging us to ask, Is there really a difference? \u2014Camille Jacobson\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

After a sold-out run downtown, Jeremy O. Harris\u2019s Slave Play<\/em> takes to Broadway this fall. Three interracial couples undergo \u201cAntebellum Sexual Performance Therapy,\u201d acting out racialized sexual fantasies and then unpacking them in a group setting facilitated by over-eager lesbian sex researchers. It\u2019s a daring premise for any work of art, and its presence alongside Wicked<\/em> and The Lion King<\/em> makes it all the more risqu\u00e9. But Harris has managed to turn a show in which a man has an orgasm while his lover licks his boots into something decidedly unsexy and profoundly, productively uncomfortable. The stage is set with mirrors so that the audience must watch themselves watching, and a sea of mostly white faces hovers in the background while a black woman implores her white lover to call her a negress (he, insisting that he cannot degrade the woman he loves, shouts out the perfect safe-word: \u201cStarbucks!\u201d). In the group therapy (and, one senses, in the theater itself), the white people are reticent to acknowledge their complicity in white supremacy, but slowly, eloquently, painfully, everyone breaks down. (For sharp insight into how the demographics of the audience impact the experience of this play, read Aisha Harris<\/a>.) I wish only that the play had dared to play it sexier, instead of playing the sex for awkward laughs, and had thereby implicated its audience not only in questions of race, but in the erotic mechanisms of power and desire. In the show\u2019s otherwise extraordinary culminating monologue, Kaneisha mentions dismissively that friends offering relationship advice had suggested, \u201cHave you had a threesome? Have you tried choking?\u201d\u2014without teasing out how, in a society laden with both patriarchy and white supremacy, being choked and dressing up like a slave may just be different points on the same spectrum. Still, that harrowing third act, in all its heightened, careful choreography, is a finely tuned representation of consent\u2019s fluid boundaries. For a show that delves into the fire of our largest, loudest taboos, the underlying subtlety throughout is all the more stunning.\u00a0 \u2014Nadja Spiegelman\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I deeply love Bill Frisell: his slowish solos, the weird, nostalgic, liquid tone of his guitar. His penchant for alternately sad, hopeful, and humorous melodies has always matched the climate inside my head. And while I don\u2019t believe any artist is above criticism, I tend to listen to every new Frisell album with curiosity, openheartedness, and gratitude. Harmony<\/em><\/a>, his first in a new deal with Blue Note, leans toward the song-based and Americana sides of Frisell\u2019s sensibility, rather than the jazz side. The quartet features the vocalist Petra Haden, whose pure, clear voice closely matches Frisell\u2019s guitar; she sings like an angel who\u2019s a bit disappointed on behalf of us all. The two have collaborated many times before, perhaps most beautifully on Paul Motian\u2019s final album, The Windmills of Your Mind<\/em><\/a>. The other members of this group\u2014the bassist Luke Bergman and the cellist and longtime Frisell collaborator Hank Roberts, also sing, adding a thin, vulnerable underbelly to Haden\u2019s lines. Harmony<\/em> is a melancholy, rainy day sort of record\u2014the wordless rise and fall of \u201cFifty Years,\u201d for instance, makes me eager for my next good cry\u2014but Frisell is an expert at this kind of feeling. It\u2019s precious and even hopeful in his hands. He doesn\u2019t really cover any new ground here, though he does cover a couple standards and offer some fresh takes on old gems, including a really<\/em> haunting version of \u201cWhere Have All the Flowers Gone?\u201d But an artist doesn\u2019t have to \u201cmake it new\u201d to make great art; in fact, this album argues in favor of the opposite. \u2014Craig Morgan Teicher<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Patricia Lockwood. Photo: Grep Hoax. \u00a9 Grep Hoax.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patricia Lockwood has become something of a saint among certain women in media, lonely Midwestern poets, and readers of the London Review of Books<\/em>. She writes straight from the amphora, and her uncanny ability to tap into the language we didn\u2019t know we had is just one of her superpowers. Her latest<\/a> for the LRB<\/em> is nominally a review of Library of America\u2019s John Updike: Novels 1959-1965<\/em><\/a>, but it\u00a0doesn\u2019t much matter how you feel about Updike; when you read the crystal-cut opening of Lockwood\u2019s review, you are rooting for her to nail it, regardless of who or what makes up the bullseye. \u201cI was hired as an assassin,\u201d she begins. \u201cYou don\u2019t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you\u2019re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.\u201d Reading Lockwood, I kept thinking of that infamous first line of Don DeLillo\u2019s Underworld<\/em>: \u201cHe speaks in your voice, American, and there\u2019s a shine in his eye that\u2019s halfway hopeful.\u201d Yes, Lockwood speaks in your voice, American. So did Updike at his best (\u201cthe present tense works on Updike the way boutique transfusions of young blood work on billionaires\u201d) and at our worst: \u201cUpdike, in later interviews, maintained that Rabbit would have been an Obama voter. He may have been, but we know who he would have voted for next.\u201d But like any boy listening on the wireless at home, Lockwood, who as a younger woman loved early Updike, demands more from American heroes than capitulation to jock itch. Lockwood is a cultural savant, fully fluent in the twenty-first century with a child\u2019s awe of it. Here is both a look at a cultural critic at the height of her powers (or at least the ascent) and a glimpse of a kindergarten class gazing up at a statue in a corridor, wondering what on earth that man did to get turned to stone. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

Upon leaving the Angelika Film Center last night, I found my senses suspiciously heightened. My mind was quiet, but the world was not, and I felt the hum of every passing sound in my ears\u2014women chatting in Russian, a busker gulping water before returning to his trumpet. Everyone around me seemed soft and full of light, wrapped in fall clothing they had just pulled out of storage. I don\u2019t often feel this way, but such is the effect of Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s Pain and Glory<\/em><\/a>. It features Antonio Banderas as an older filmmaker whose physical and emotional maladies are described at one point in a delightfully mod sequence of illustrations. The film is a light and beautiful look at memory, at pain and what makes it tolerable, what it means to care for another or be reunited with someone from your past. But what heightened my senses most were the film\u2019s glorious details. Title cards backed by patterns like swirling Herm\u00e8s scarves. A dark-green leather jacket. The sound of water splashing onto tile. Almod\u00f3var makes it possible to attend to these details, to take delight in the world, even as it weighs upon us. \u2014Noor Qasim<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a documentary, Where\u2019s My Roy Cohn?<\/em><\/a> strikes too few notes\u2014but the one chord of Cohn\u2019s life, played over and over, is utterly transfixing. At twenty-three, Cohn was the prosecution in the trial of the suspected Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and he succeeded in launching his legal career on their conviction and execution; more than three decades later, he would reflect on that trial during a 60 Minutes<\/em> interview by saying, \u201cIf I could\u2019ve pulled the switch, I\u2019d have done it myself.\u201d The film presents every sound bite and action of his life in between, from the McCarthy trials to his mentoring of Donald Trump and the election of Ronald Reagan, until Cohn\u2019s eventual death from complications related to AIDS<\/small> (he would maintain until the end that he had cancer). At every revelation of corruption and each interview clip (when asked what he would have done about Watergate, Cohn shrugs, smirks, and blithely says that to solve that problem, he\u2019d \u201cdestroy the tapes\u201d), I\u2019d turn to the person with me, and we\u2019d let out a laugh, eyes wide in a kind of delighted shock. There is something both perverse and delicious in the experience of spending time with this man hell-bent on achieving \u2026 what, exactly? The documentary never floats a thesis or suggestion. Yet our fascination is there, eager to be indulged. Even the coming attractions featured Steve Bannon<\/a> uttering the party line of Milton\u2019s most seductive character: \u201cBetter to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.\u201d Why do we get so much out of ogling, like children at a sideshow, a man who scorns moral concern? Cohn\u2019s New York manse is located on East Sixty-Eighth Street; after the movie, we took the train uptown and stood on the empty sidewalk across from the towering home, staring up at its dark windows. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Roy Cohn. Photo: Herman Hiller for the New York World-Telegram and Sun<\/em>. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 lurks outside Roy Cohn\u2019s town house, delights in a takedown of Updike, and yearns for a good cry.<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-140101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Monsters, Monkeys, and Maladies by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 lurks outside Roy Cohn\u2019s town house, delights in a takedown of Updike, and yearns for a good cry.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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