{"id":142792,"date":"2020-02-14T16:00:09","date_gmt":"2020-02-14T21:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=142792"},"modified":"2020-04-07T13:32:37","modified_gmt":"2020-04-07T17:32:37","slug":"staff-picks-swans-sieves-and-sentience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/14\/staff-picks-swans-sieves-and-sentience\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Swans, Sieves, and Sentience"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The male swan ensemble in Matthew Bourne\u2019s Swan Lake<\/em>. Photo: Johan Persson.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I was a dancer, performing Swan Lake<\/em> was a rite of passage. My memories of doing so, though, involve only pain\u2014the pain of standing in regimental lines for impossible stretches of time, of finding the will not to walk offstage. Swan Lake<\/em> epitomizes balletic femininity as much as it does the exploitation of the female body in dance. But Matthew Bourne\u2019s adaptation, which recently concluded a two-week run at City Center<\/a>, challenges the ballet\u2019s traditional gendering by featuring a cast of male swans. Setting Swan Lake<\/em> in Kensington Gardens after dark, Bourne evokes the London of Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson\u2014where a man walking alone at night might come face to face with the supernatural, if not his own psyche. Bourne\u2019s men pound the ground and heave collective, audible breaths. Their movements accentuate the weight of the physical body rather than creating an illusion of birdlike lightness. I am always wary, however, of Bourne\u2019s indulgence in spectacle. Scenes set in present-day London are so saturated with cinematic gimmicks, so staged for a laugh, that their humor undercuts the psychological and choreographic complexities of the darker sections. That said, the Royal Ballet principal Matthew Ball\u2019s performance as the Swan\/Stranger was one of the best New York has seen in years. Bourne\u2019s Swan Lake<\/em>,\u00a0kitsch aside, is a testament to the choreographer\u2019s ingenuity and to the enduring allure of the ballet itself.\u00a0\u2014Elinor Hitt\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dirty Projectors: another extraordinary musical party to which I am a late arrival. Where did this David Longstreth person come from? Who invented him? Under the banner of indie rock, he draws together a wide array of influences\u2014African music, Latin percussion, classical composition techniques\u2014and bundles them all into a kind of pop overload that is almost always too much, though, at the moment, I can\u2019t get enough of it. Dirty Projectors\u2019 2018 studio album, Lamp Lit Prose<\/em><\/a> (Longstreth has a penchant for literary lyrics), is a follow-up to their self-titled 2017 album<\/a>, a belated breakup record about the end of Longstreth\u2019s relationship with his onetime bandmate Amber Coffman (that record, I gather, is supposed to be a melancholy affair, except it sounds to me like Portishead slurped up a big bowl of Bj\u00f6rk and then set it on a roof in the middle of a lightning storm). Lamp Lit Prose<\/em> is a bouncy return to form, a fast-paced and eclectic album that delivers everything listeners have come to expect from Dirty Projectors: overly intricate guitar lines, all kinds of rhythmic feels, multipart vocal harmonies, Longstreth\u2019s rubber-band falsetto, and melodies that are as complicated as they are hard to forget. I can\u2019t get the song \u201cThat\u2019s a Lifestyle,\u201d a kind of political diatribe, out of my head, with its infectious singsong chorus: \u201cThe monster eats its young\u2009\/\u2009till they\u2019re gone, gone, gone \u2026 It wants blood, blood, blood.\u201d As a follow-up, at the end of 2019, the band released Sing the Melody<\/em><\/a>, an in-studio live recording of many of these songs, which is great if you want a second helping. \u2014Craig Morgan Teicher<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Robert Gl\u00fcck.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is a Rufus Wainwright song that is a pretty little number with a pretty little proposition: \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be a lovely headline, \u2018Life Is Beautiful\u2019 on the New York Times<\/em>?\u201d This week, that headline could hardly feel further away. And yet opening Robert Gl\u00fcck\u2019s soon-to-be-reissued Margery Kempe<\/em><\/a>, I felt a similar stroke of whimsy: What if the New York Review Books Classics version of the literary canon were common cultural currency? Like their fabulous covers (about which much has been said<\/a>), these books paint a rich and deviant portrait of human life. Over the years, New York Review Books has sieved chunks of gold out of the caverns of forgotten paperbacks: Cassandra at the Wedding<\/em>, The Juniper Tree<\/em>, Season of Migration to the North<\/em>, Lolly Willowes<\/em>, books that are beautiful and wild and were there all along. Take heart: there was weirdness in the margins, women who cruised by wearing their watches on their pulse. There was room for the strange, and there will be room again. Margery Kempe<\/em> is a classic NYRB Classic. It\u2019s a novel (maybe) that weaves the story of the religious fanatic Margery Kempe\u2014author, in 1438, of perhaps the first autobiography ever written\u2014with the tale of a love affair in eighties San Francisco between an older man\u00a0 and an impossibly beautiful younger one who belongs to the tips of America\u2019s upper class. What connects the threads is erotic love: Margery\u2019s for Jesus, whom she understands herself to be fucking, and the two men\u2019s for each other. The writing is lovely. With the subtlety of the obvious, Gl\u00fcck collapses the centuries that separate the two storylines and zips up the space between erotic and religious devotion. Margery\u2019s orgasms are God-given, a mingling of godhead and maiden, an ecstasy of body and spirit. Aren\u2019t most of us as mystified by our sexuality as we are by divinity? Why not consider the former with the awe we reserve for the latter? With Valentine\u2019s Day upon us, let us kneel. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

As they did for the eighties post-punk bands from which Shopping derive their sound, synths play a prominent role in the punk trio\u2019s new album All or Nothing<\/em><\/a>. I\u2019ve long been a fan of Shopping\u2019s music, and All or Nothing<\/em> continues to mix spiky, danceable compositions with politically biting lyrics that bring to mind the best of Au Pairs and Gang of Four. Highlights include \u201cInitiative<\/a>,\u201d which makes a mockery of nonsense go-getter language (\u201cWhy can\u2019t you show some initiative?\u201d), and \u201cFollow Me,\u201d which slyly turns the tables on the surveillance state. And after you\u2019re finished listening to this one, you\u2019ve got three more excellent albums you can delve into\u20142018\u2019s The Official Body<\/em> (produced by Edwyn Collins), 2015\u2019s Why Choose<\/em>, and 2013\u2019s Consumer Complaints<\/em>\u2014as well as each band member\u2019s other musical projects (including the guitarist Rachel Aggs\u2019s excellent, Postcard Records\u2013esque Sacred Paws<\/a>).\u00a0\u2014Rhian Sasseen<\/strong><\/p>\n

Slipped into all the other early 2020 headlines about the increasingly camp unraveling of our democracy was the revelation that privacy is now a thing of the past. Like so much of the news these days, Kashmir Hill\u2019s stunning investigation into the company Clearview AI<\/a> reads almost like satire. Funded by Peter Thiel and created by Hoan Ton-That, a thirty-one-year-old self-described \u201centrepreneur, computer hacker, guitarist and part time model\u201d (whose past work involves apps such as Trump Hair and Friend Quiz), the Clearview AI facial-recognition app allows you to take and upload a photo of someone in order to learn their name, address, phone number, and any other information available online. Without any public oversight, the technology has already been sold to more than six hundred law-enforcement agencies. There is no regulation in place to prevent it from being sold to private companies or becoming a consumer product. If the company is left unchecked, leaving one\u2019s house with any anonymity will soon become impossible. I read about all this while lost in Joanna Kavenna\u2019s Zed<\/em><\/a>, which depicts a technocratic dystopia so engrossing, prescient, and disorienting that the edges between it and the world blurred, and I could no longer tell if Clearview AI had simply emerged from the novel. In Zed<\/em>, a tech company called Beetle controls the Western hemisphere. Its predictive algorithms are so advanced that people are jailed for crimes their \u201clifechains\u201d suggest they might commit, home refrigerators offer passive-aggressive suggestions, meetings take place in virtual boardrooms where everyone\u2019s avatars are slightly more beautiful, and personal AI assistants attached to everyone\u2019s mandatory wristband (BeetleBand) must be treated with the respect of sentient creatures. As an uprising stirs in the (aptly named) Last Bookshop, Beetle introduces BeSpoke, which translates all speech into a preapproved, algorithm-selected, reduced vocabulary (\u201cThis is not good\u201d). Everything begins to unravel and break, the AI assistants start to speak in poetry, and chaos blooms through the cracks. One of the markers of good art for me has always been its ability to leave a new filter over the world, the way certain museum shows, when one exits the gallery, seem to have transformed the city itself. Zed<\/em> is a novel about our most eternal concerns\u2014free will, identity, language\u2014transposed onto a future that feels terrifyingly present. Pair it with Anna Wiener\u2019s memoir, Uncanny Valley<\/em><\/a>, a kaleidoscopically vivid fever-dream window into the baby billionaires of the tech boom, and you\u2019ll never want to look at your phone again. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Joanna Kavenna. Photo: \u00a9 Alexander Michaelis.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 enters a technocratic dystopia, dances to post-punk, and kneels in prayer.<\/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-142792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Swans, Sieves, and Sentience by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 enters a technocratic dystopia, dances to post-punk, and kneels in prayer.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/14\/staff-picks-swans-sieves-and-sentience\/\" 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