YOU OPEN BOX 34, take the typescript from its folder. You can see right away that the song is pretty much finished. He’s got the first four verses locked in, save one lingering question about Ma. Should she be forty but say she’s twenty-four, or eighty claiming sixty-four? Or what if she’s twenty but wants […]
LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIRST SAW JILL JOHNSTON in Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s indelible film Town Bloody Hall (1979),which documents a raucous 1971 “dialogue on women’s liberation.” Norman Mailer, the panel’s token misogynist and nominal moderator, introduces Johnston as “that master of free-associational prose in The Village Voice,” for which (I’d later learn) […]
“WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO BE LIFTED UP and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness?” Could you use “some relief from misery, from melancholy”? Are you seeking a way to feel less “anxious, wretched, bored”? No, nobody is asking you to pay for Transcendental Meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, or a detox diet. Perhaps, […]
IT HAS BEEN SAID that in his greatest roles Al Pacino plays characters who through temperament and actions—whether noble or nefarious—wind up utterly alone. Cut off, even, from some vital part of themselves, the mercy or cynicism that might have restored balance to their lives. But what Al Pacino character craves balance? His Frank Serpico […]
PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, Joan Didion sitting on the floor of a Los Angeles recording studio in 1968, gazing up at Jim Morrison of the Doors, a band she went on to describe as “apocalyptic missionaries of sex.” If our patron saint of Californian disenchantment ever appeared starstruck, even girlish, it was surely here, in […]
JAMIE HOOD: Hello! CHARLOTTE SHANE: Hi! You look gorgeous—make sure to put that in. HOOD: Oh, I will. An Honest Woman (Simon & Schuster, $26) is a sort of origin story, about the boys you grew up with and the cultural milieu of your youth, as well as an erotic Bildungsroman that eventually traces your […]
ON JANUARY 31, 1975, a twenty-year-old man approached the main entrance of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, took off his jacket and shirt, threaded a steel chain through the door handles, then looped it around his wrists and locked it. On his back, stenciled in black, were the words: when i […]
THE BRITISH FILM CRITIC and documentary filmmaker John Grierson famously noted that when a director dies he becomes a photographer. Grierson meant that when a filmmaker runs out of ideas, he takes the easy way out, he falls back on visual beauty. The French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who spent a lifetime turning men’s ideas upside […]
DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, D. W. Winnicott worked on the adolescent unit of the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital. There, just beyond Hyde Park in the center of London—under threat of constant bombing—Winnicott would make his rounds, asking all his patients the same question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Asking […]
IN THE AUTUMN OF 2019, art critic Peter Schjeldahl learned that lung cancer had whittled all but about six months between him and oblivion. (Immunotherapy promised nothing but gave him three years. He died in October 2022 at the age of eighty.) Attention, as performed by Schjeldahl, had always been a live art form, his […]
THIS IS A GOTHIC TALE. In the summer of 2002, a professional illustrator and single mom in Chicago went to her fortieth-birthday bash, a gypsy-themed affair that her young daughter told her not to attend. A premonition? At the party, a mosquito bit her. Perhaps she slapped it dead; maybe it stayed attached, vampirically feasting. […]
MICHEL LEIRIS WAS A SMALL, polite French man who stayed alive for most of the twentieth century and wrote a deliciously dense memoir in four bricks called The Rules of the Game. The final chunk—Frêle Bruit, whose title has been translated by Richard Sieburth as Frail Riffs,rather than the more straightforward “faint noise”—is now finally […]
CHARLOTTE TILBURY LAUNCHED ITS KIM K lipstick in 2016: a vibeless, neutral, basic bitch pink. Kim was in on it, of course. As Phillipa Snow writes in Trophy Lives, her riveting new illustrated essay about fame and art, Kim is “not only a perfectionist but one who never stops working on her art, which is […]
IN 1942, ELLA WATSON WAS A GOVERNMENT CLEANING WOMAN. Gordon Parks was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). That summer, they met and collaborated on a photo essay that produced one of the twentieth century’s most striking images, Washington D.C. Government Charwoman (later renamed American Gothic). It was a breakthrough for Parks, who […]
The new reissue of photographer Richard Billingham’s RAY’S A LAUGH (MACK, $80) declares itself a “director’s cut” and clearly embraces the spirit of that form. The original edition, published in 1996 by the now-defunct imprint Scalo, featured a tight edit of fifty-five wry snapshots, taken by a twenty-six-year-old within the confines of his family’s dingy, […]
“IF YOU WANT A HAPPY ENDING,” Orson Welles once quipped, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” But sometimes, it’s not that the story stops so much as that the audience stops paying attention. This might be one way to think of #MeToo, which, in the years since it has faded from […]
EMILY NUSSBAUM, THE PULITZER-WINNING television critic and New Yorker staff writer, ends her well-researched, somewhat grueling book on the history of reality television, Cue the Sun!, with a reminder that critics have historically dismissed reality TV as a fad. Yet reality TV has not gone away. It’s more than just a fad, she writes, because […]
AVRIL HORNER BEGINS A Savage Innocence, the first biography of the English novelist Barbara Comyns, with the story of her parents’ non-courtship. Once upon a time, a mustachioed man named Albert Bayley was visiting a cottage his parents rented out to a widow named Annie Fenn. Playing in the garden was Annie’s daughter Eva. Albert watched the ten-year-old girl skip around and before leaving informed Annie that once her daughter could cook, he would marry her. At the wedding, ten years later, Eva was already five months pregnant. According to Bayley family lore, Annie permitted the marriage because Albert offered
YOU KNOW KEITH HARING. He drew breakdancers and mushroom clouds and triclops and dicks and death and he drew Warhol’s envy. He painted on the Berlin Wall and on Bill T. Jones and on Grace Jones. He painted CRACK IS WACK and SILENCE = DEATH. He smuggled SAMO into SVA to tag the school’s graffiti-blitzed stairwell. His chalk ikons perfused Ed Koch’s decrepit metro, scrawled on seemingly every empty ad space. They called him Chalkman and the Degas of the B-boys, they called him genius and sellout. Club 57, Danceteria, Area, the Roxy, the Pyramid, the Palladium, the Mudd Club,
ONE OF THE WORST THINGS ABOUT BREAKUPS—aside, obviously, from the heartbreak and the acrimony, the division of belongings, and the general sense of loss—is their ability to make even nominally normal people behave like abnormal people, by which I mean writers. Few other situations lend themselves quite so definitively to casting ourselves in the lead role in our own personal drama. Minor coincidences become dazzling signs and wonders, or dark omens; lovelorn anecdotes are streamlined in the telling, edited and punched up as if we were not merely recounting them to our uninterested friends, but preparing them for future publication.
