Noah Davis, Mary Jane, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 × 52 1/4″. Courtesy and © The Estate of Noah Davis, Private collection of Michael Sherman and Carrie Tivador PROTEAN PAINTER NOAH DAVIS had emerged as a catalytic force when he died of cancer at age thirty-two. His swift evolution promised an exciting future, […]
I FIRST SHARED a TikTok video in my Instagram story on April 20, 2020, right around the time I ran out of tolerable TV series to binge and an inability to read anything other than tweets set in. It took me a while to realize I could download it, the video I mean—a Belgian man’s inexplicably menacing take on the “turn around” portion of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”—because I initially found the app’s interface so counterintuitive that I was reluctant to explore. For anyone used to the polished calm of Instagram, TikTok’s chaotic ugliness is disorienting. Each
NEAR THE END OF SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN, Nathalie Léger’s guerrilla-critical reckoning with Loden’s 1970 film, Wanda, Léger visits a ghost town in Pennsylvania, not far from where the movie is set. A coal seam has been burning underground there since 1962, “an inferno buried beneath the town that slowly, slyly devastated everything, engulfing gardens, swallowing cars, and sometimes apparently children too.” Though a sign reads, WELCOME TO HELL, Léger notices “no sign of destruction, no trace of those terrible events. . . . This is what hell must be: erasure. And down below, the fire rages on.”
Chantal Akerman often said that she carried within her a deep sense of unbelonging. “But someone once told me that when you make films you put your whole self in,” she wrote near the end of her life. “I don’t know, I don’t know myself, certainly not all of myself.” For those wanting more of her, from her, CHANTAL AKERMAN: PASSAGES (Eye Filmmuseum / nai010 publishers, $40) brings to light her lesser-known work as a visual artist. This companion catalogue to a retrospective of eight film installations presented at Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) this summer includes essays that mark the translation
Now I would like to acknowledge that I also feel a responsibility to write for puppets. I have five puppets in my life, they are not ten feet from me in two small cardboard boxes on my desk. They deserve better.
Wilhelm von Gloeden, Girl in a Garden. I met Daniel at 4:00 one August morning in 1999. It was on the roof of my building, where, in the grip of a long bout of insomnia, I would wait for first light to mark the end of another summer night. Daniel couldn’t sleep either. He was […]
I am not the sort of person who would ordinarily elect to dine at Grant Achatz’s radical Chicago restaurant Alinea, which features “mischievous science-project cooking,” as New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton recently described it. I am generally put off by meals that are as much pyrotechnics as pleasure. I am not interested in dried crème brûlée, which appeared on Achatz’s first menu, and I find his description of angelica branches filled with apple puree—one element of the twenty-six-course dinner he prepared for a former Chicago Tribune food writer and his friend—more obnoxious, not to mention exhausting, than enticing:
Know thyself, the ancient philosopher said. Graph yourself, might be New York–based artist Andrew Kuo’s reply. By slice and dicing his stream of neurotic consciousness into flow charts, pie charts, and bar graphs, Kuo renders quotidian thoughts, worries, and speculations as quantifiable and official looking as GDP projections from the Congressional Budget Office. His images—marked by a gleefully saturated palette and puzzle-like complexity—play against staid expectations, calling to mind artists like Gene Davis and Barnett Newman rather than your Econ 101 textbook. The highbrow gloss notwithstanding, Kuo candidly depicts intimate preoccupations. Some are intellectual and reflective, such as “My Selected
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo open Poor Economics, their new treatise on development economics, by citing an experiment conducted on University of Pennsylvania students. Researchers paid students $5 to read one of two brochures about global poverty, then turned around and solicited a donation from the student. One brochure emphasized the magnitude of the problem using numbers—three million malnourished children in Malawi, eleven million in Ethiopia, etc.—while the other simply focused on the plight of one poor child, “Rokia,” whose fate could be transformed with the education and basic medical care that came with a donation of just a few
One might expect a fashion designer—that creature specially adapted to the vainest of industries, and, next to perhaps film production, the industry with the fuzziest math—to avoid mentioning a bankruptcy whenever possible. Diane von Furstenberg gets cagey when asked about her tour of duty on QVC after her dress line went bust, and Roberto Cavalli cried when he had to announce the cancellation of his Just Cavalli line after the licensee folded. Not Yohji Yamamoto. The Japanese designer mentions his bankruptcy on the first page of his memoir, My Dear Bomb, reprinting a letter of condolence from his friend Wim
In 1999, Woodstock’s thirtieth-anniversary festival ended in a wave of sexual assaults, rioting, and fires—an unlikely celebration of the original Woodstock’s “three days of peace and music.” The breed of angry male bands that dominated the festival and the airwaves that year with juvenile sexist resentment (as summed up by Limp Bizkit’s summer hit, “Nookie”) was a reminder that rock’s rebellion is often unfriendly to women. After Limp Bizkit’s inane and sloppy set (during which a gang rape allegedly occurred in the crowd), Rage Against the Machine, a precise and polished band—perhaps the most radical and influential protest group of
“For a collector . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things,” wrote Walter Benjamin in “Unpacking My Library.” “Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” Benjamin’s distinction is illuminating in the context of debates over twentieth-century folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax, who died in 2002, has a permanent place in the pantheon of American music—and yet the legacy of the Ivy League–educated white ethnomusicologist is complicated by his role as a collector of folk songs by poor, uneducated artists, many of them black. Lomax traversed the American
It’s almost impossible to write a book about our nation’s energy crisis that arouses in the reader any more excitement than what’s delivered in a maximum-strength barbiturate. I know this because I recently published one such book and found myself going out of my way, in my reporting rounds, to pursue the most extreme kind of high jinks—choppering out to ultra-deep oil rigs, spelunking into the Manhattan electric grid, even infiltrating a boob-job operation—all in the service of sustaining reader interest. While Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology may sound like a snoozefest, Alexis Madrigal manages—without
A PET PEEVE OF MINE is when people are shocked to find out that a great song was written relatively quickly. Of course it was, I want to say, before quoting one of many dog-eared passages in my worn copy of Natalie Goldberg’s Zen-creativity bible Writing Down the Bones, like, I don’t know, how about this one: “If you are on, ride that wave as long as you can. Don’t stop in the middle. That moment won’t come back exactly in that way again, and it will take much more time trying to finish a piece later on than completing
Every day for nearly a year, I immersed myself in chat groups and websites and forums where photos of lynchings were passed around like funny memes. Where “KILL JEWS” was a slogan and murderers were called “saints.” On the anniversary of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, I watched them celebrate Robert Bowers, the murderer of eleven Jews at prayer, like a hero and a friend. I listened to strangers talk about killing kikes every day. I listened to strangers incite violence and praise murder and talk about washing the world with blood to make it white and pure. I listened to
In 1975, the Black writer Ntozake Shange completed her verse play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. In this work, which has become one of the classics of the modern feminist dramatic repertoire, seven African American women discussed their experiences of racism and sexism in society, and the creative strategies they devised to counter them. One of the characters, the “Lady in Brown,” spoke of her mind-blowing discovery of Toussaint Louverture as an eight-year-old child from St Louis. After entering a reading contest in her local library, she was swept away by how Toussaint had
“White people still run almost everything,” The New York Times’ Australian bureau intoned in 2018 in a devastatingly brutal report on cultural diversity in Australia’s workplaces. The whiteness above is noticed by workers below. Sonia, a forty-something woman of color (she asked me to omit her ethnicity for privacy reasons), has been employed in the same medium-sized private sector firm for a decade. She is a mid-level manager, a position she only achieved after nine years despite consistently positive performance reviews and above-average results that, she tells me, were frequently better than the men and white women promoted ahead of
When I was a graduate student in Texas, the first time I brought a story into workshop, a fellow student told me if I was going to “write about Indians,” I would need to separate my writing more from that of Louise Erdrich. Then this man misquoted from the beginning of Erdrich’s novel Tracks, ostensibly to show how similar it was to my story. At the end of workshop when it was my turn to speak, I corrected his misquotation and suggested in my most polite voice that perhaps to him “Indians” writing about snow all seemed the same. I
My husband and I canceled our spring-break trip because of the pandemic. His parents own a vacation house on a salt pond in Rhode Island that they let us use some weekends. Bummed about the cancellation and bored at home, we headed up there for a long weekend on Wednesday, March 18, thinking we’d return that Sunday or Monday. Coincidentally, that was the week that New York became the worldwide epicenter of COVID-19. Now it’s August and we’re still here.
Spread from Duro Olowu: Seeing. Left, inset: Richard Serra, Prop, 1968. Right: Dawoud Bey, A Boy Eating a Foxy Pop, 1988. © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Duro Olowu has a flair for unlikely combinations. A single collection by the Nigerian-born designer might include flowing candy-striped silks, metallic floral brocades, crushed velvets in high-voltage hues, […]
