{"id":149797,"date":"2020-12-11T15:33:08","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T20:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=149797"},"modified":"2020-12-11T16:11:20","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T21:11:20","slug":"staff-picks-monsters-monarchs-and-mutinies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/12\/11\/staff-picks-monsters-monarchs-and-mutinies\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Monsters, Monarchs, and Mutinies"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_149823\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/360-image-5.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-149823\" class=\"size-full wp-image-149823\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/360-image-5.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"673\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/360-image-5.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/360-image-5-300x202.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/360-image-5-768x517.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-149823\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Still from <em>Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One<\/em>. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>There\u2019s a gently anarchic spirit to William Greaves\u2019s 1968 experimental documentary <a href=\"https:\/\/www.criterionchannel.com\/symbiopsychotaxiplasm-take-one\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One<\/em><\/a>, which follows Greaves and his crew as they attempt to film two actors staging a breakup scene in Central Park. This description barely scratches the surface of what\u2019s really going on: Greaves himself is playing a role, that of the bumbling director\u2014but he\u2019s the only one in on it. The script is melodramatic; the actors\u2014mostly a middle-class white couple, but other actors of different ages, backgrounds, and races are swapped in and out\u2014overact; the crew\u2014instructed to always have three cameras going, on the scene, the crew, and the park itself\u2014stages a mutiny. Unbeknownst to Greaves, they film their grievances and critiques and present them to him once it\u2019s all over (these make up three major sections of the movie). As one crew member remarks, this is a movie about power. But as it turns out, that was the conceit all along: at one point, Greaves explains that he was hoping they\u2019d call him out on the bad script and provide some lines of their own. (The edits suggested by one crew member are equally terrible, to my ears, but in a kind of charmingly sixties way clearly born out of the sexual revolution.) Toward the end, they stumble across a man who claims to be homeless and living in the park; the last vestiges of an old New York bohemianism, he gives a flamboyant speech about all that\u2019s wrong with the world. As I watched the crew wander again through the park while the credits rolled, something reminded me of <em>A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>\u2014a merry band of revelers, role reversals, the breakdown of hierarchies, that summertime feeling of possibility. Immediately, I queued up Greaves\u2019s 2005 follow-up: <em>Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1\/2<\/em>. <strong>\u2014Rhian Sasseen\u00a0<\/strong><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Earlier this year, I discovered <a href=\"http:\/\/lindsaymagazine.co\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Lindsay<\/em> magazine<\/a>, and I\u2019ve been making my way through their backlog ever since. <em>Lindsay<\/em>\u2019s articles are rooted in culture and place, so reading from their global contributors feels like something resembling travel. I\u2019ve absconded into stories about free diving in Australia and mud-brick buildings in Morocco, recipes from Lebanon. This week I\u2019ve been thinking about the magazine\u2019s 2019 <a href=\"http:\/\/lindsaymagazine.co\/sisonke-msimang\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">interview<\/a> with the writer Sisonke Msimang. Stories, in Msimang\u2019s experience, are transformative, and the telling of them creates intimacy, community. But still, she says, they are insufficient. There is no call to action in stories, so while they can be a tool for social change, they are not the change themselves. It felt potent to read this now, as I try to come to new understandings about stories and what they can do, and writers and what they feel like they have to do. She says she no longer calls herself an activist, just a writer, and others fill in the rest on her behalf. Beyond the burden of those labels, self-imposed or otherwise, Msimang finds freedom: \u201cThis helps storytellers to not feel the burden of people\u2019s expectations and it also helps us to not have big egos. My story is just the story I\u2019m going to tell and people may or may not do something with it.\u201d There\u2019s an agency here for the writer but also the reader: there is no call to action, but there is always the choice. <strong>\u2014Langa Chinyoka<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_149824\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/ror2ss06.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-149824\" class=\"size-full wp-image-149824\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/ror2ss06.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"667\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/ror2ss06.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/ror2ss06-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/ror2ss06-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-149824\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Still from the video game <em>Risk of Rain 2<\/em>. Courtesy of Hopoo Games.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve barely been able to tear myself away from the ever-shifting alien terrains and howling electric guitars of <a href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/632360\/Risk_of_Rain_2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Risk of Rain 2<\/em><\/a>. In this indie game, you play as an astronaut trying to survive an endless onslaught of monsters and scrambling to escape an increasingly hostile world. As you collect items, unlock new characters, and advance the difficulty progression of the game merely by existing, you will die repeatedly. But when you don\u2019t die, you\u2019ll get into a groove: your fights start lining up perfectly, too perfectly. Instead of feeling the jumpy anxiety of the first few areas, you\u2019ll start rampaging through all of these creatures thoughtlessly. And odds are, it\u2019ll be incredibly satisfying. But then one of two things must eventually happen: you will die, or you will win, and flee this dying world. In death, you\u2019re left with the emptiness of what could have been; you once held so much power, but now you\u2019re forced to start from zero once more. If you win, though, the tainted lens of the game falls away to reveal something more sinister\u2014how, in succeeding, you have become the invading force of this world, the extraterrestrial destroying everything in its path. But the game has continued to pull me back in because before the emotional vacuum of either outcome, there\u2019s the romp of getting there. After all this fighting that is routine in many video games, <em>Risk of Rain 2<\/em> makes you look back on why you enjoy it, all while indulging you time and again. <strong>\u2014Carlos Zayas-Pons<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I got into Dirty Projectors through my record-of-the-month club, which sent me a lovely double-vinyl reissue of the band\u2019s seminal <em>Bitte Orca<\/em> on clear LPs with swirls of red and blue. They were yet another band from the aughts that I missed because I was looking the other way, but I was instantly hooked by David Longstreth\u2019s wiry and willowy and wandering guitar work, the dynamic ups and downs of his songwriting, and the band\u2019s utilization of various male and female vocalists. Their new record, <a href=\"https:\/\/dirtyprojectors.bandcamp.com\/album\/5eps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>5EPs<\/em><\/a> (first released separately over the course of 2020 and now collected as an album), features five sets of four songs sung by different band members. Each set has its own mood and sound. My favorite is the first, <em>Windows Open<\/em>, sung by Maia Friedman, which includes \u201cOverlord,\u201d a catchy and sparely arranged pop song that is to die for. For some reason my family\u2019s puppy, Cashew, hates the second group, entitled <em>Flight Tower<\/em>\u2014she barks and whines through all four songs. There must be some supersonic overtone in Felicia Douglass\u2019s voice that I can\u2019t detect; I think it\u2019s lovely. Overall, these twenty songs are lighter fare than the band\u2019s previous albums, but playing through all of them, I feel a sense of renewal, as if the seasons are changing with each EP. I\u2019m pretty desperate for renewal these days, so I\u2019m a fan. <strong>\u2014Craig Morgan Teicher<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We seem to love television that catches the wave of the twentieth century, the way history serves to bolster and electrify the lived banality of ad men and affectless monarchs. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.netflix.com\/title\/80238565\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Derry Girls<\/em><\/a>, an Irish show about a group of teenagers (four girls and one haplessly misplaced English boy) in Northern Ireland during the nineties, rejects any easy metaphors. In season 2, Erin Quinn\u2014a stand-in for the show\u2019s creator, Lisa McGee\u2014writes a hokey poem that she explains is \u201cabout the Troubles, in a political sense, but also about my own troubles, in a personal sense,\u201d to which her teacher flatly responds, \u201cI understand the weak analogy.\u201d Instead of becoming entangled, the foibles of everyday life separate from civil conflict like water from oil, allowing characters to maneuver underneath the fire. Unrest is sometimes literally a backdrop, TV news playing as the Quinn family hypothesizes that Gerry Adams\u2019s voice has to be censored because it\u2019s too \u201cseductive\u201d for the English (\u201capparently he sounds like a West Belfast Bond\u201d) and comments that John Hume is \u201creally dyin\u2019 for peace-like, isn\u2019t he? It\u2019s all he ever goes on about. I hope it works out for him.\u201d A plot to get after-school jobs spirals into the staging of an IRA robbery, which results in a lifetime ban from their favorite chip shop; an integration youth program, Friends across the Barricade, is an opportunity to make out with (Protestant) boys. <em>Derry Girls<\/em> skirts flippancy\u2014season 1 wraps with a moment of sweetly deployed poignancy\u2014but articulates with sharp wit how to live, happily, in an abnormal normal. <strong>\u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_149828\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/derry.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-149828\" class=\"size-full wp-image-149828\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/derry.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"667\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/derry.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/derry-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/derry-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-149828\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Still from <em>Derry Girls<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 escapes quarantine via avant-garde documentaries, magazines, video games, intricate pop songs, and Netflix shows.<\/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":[67827],"class_list":["post-149797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Staff Picks: Monsters, Monarchs, and Mutinies by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 escapes quarantine via avant-garde documentaries, magazines, video games, intricate pop songs, and Netflix shows.\" \/>\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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