• print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Bless This Mess

    Carroll Dunham is weird. (It’s a good thing.) Weird is the most-used adjective in his new book of essays, Into Words, followed by perverse. To Dunham, a renowned painter and frequent essayist on art, these are credentials for interesting, indicating that you might crack the nut, push the envelope, make a break for it, or run the ball out onto the fields of the crazy. Takes one to know one: He guides you to his own end zone of painting with texts from 1994 through 2016, waxing eloquent, or sometimes cranky, about the work and contexts of twenty-five or so

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Mothers of Invention

    “Creating a narrative is a process,” announces Minna Zallman Proctor in “Folie à deux,” the first piece in Landslide: True Stories. This is the kind of silly, self-serious claim about autobiographical writing that would annoy me if it were not delivered with a heavy dose of irony, which, coming from Proctor, it most certainly is. Each of the stories in Landslide is a defiant and gleeful riposte to those who would dare treat narrative as a “process”: the humorless autobiographers and analysts who link sad memory to sad memory in what sometimes feels like a competitive bid for pathos without

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Loss Horizon

    The resolute, earnest, and somewhat wistful grandmother whose byline is attached to What Happened (Simon & Schuster, $30) comes across in its pages as someone you’d love to have over to binge-watch The Crown on Netflix, enjoy meeting up with to see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway, or trust with your small children for a long afternoon as you deal with an unexpected emergency. Only the most credulously stubborn, or stubbornly credulous, of readers could come away from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loser’s-lounge testament believing her to be the malevolent dark angel of Far Right and extreme-Left fantasies.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Block Bluster

    “There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation,” W. C. Fields supposedly said. A title like Trump Is F✳︎cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) (Blue Rider Press, $27) certainly does that. What it doesn’t do is inspire much confidence that the crass political discourse the Trump era has fostered will turn chockablock with bonhomie anytime soon. But Keith Olbermann doubtless thinks he’s fighting fire with fire.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Artful Volumes

    Artists who make books are as varied as artists who make anything else, and they offer just as many reasons for their fixation. For some it’s a documentary form, one that both toys with history and creates it, as in Christian Boltanski’s Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–1950 (Research and Presentation of All That Remains of My Childhood, 1944–1950), a 1969 précis of his childhood that mixes real mementos with found materials. For Sophie Calle, Stanley Brouwn, and others, books begin as interior spaces—diaries or sketchbooks for jotting notes and thought experiments—before inspiring a

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Dos and Donuts

    “This is the Seinfeld cookbook,” Mike Solomonov explained to me earlyish one morning not too long ago. “It’s about nothing.” We were standing in the original Federal Donuts shop, which he and four partners opened in the low-slung, residential, and decidedly uncool Pennsport neighborhood of South Philadelphia in 2011. Sunlight streamed in through a plate-glass window emblazoned with the company’s red rooster logo, and the smells of sugar and coffee and hot fat were in the air. Steven Cook, one of Solomonov’s partners and a cofounder of CookNSolo Restaurant Partners, the pair’s mini empire of Philadelphia eateries, was behind a

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    Fair Game

    A couple of years into devising the signature magazine of the 1980s, Tina Brown decided she was sick of people writing about her gift for generating “buzz.” That made what she did sound “fake and manufactured,” Brown lamented: “It’s a put-down, a dismissal of impact.” Not unreasonably, she wondered if a male editor in her shoes would get similarly trivializing treatment.

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    No Trauma

    I teach memoir writing, and occasionally my students want to learn how to be funny, which fills me with despair. There are many great memoirs—The Liars’ Club, Wild, Autobiography of a Face, Shot in the Heart, The Kiss—and hardly any of them are funny. Real-life tales of suffering, endurance, recovery, emotional survivalism—these are the generally established plotlines for contemporary memoir, what allow writers to indulge literary egocentrism for 280 pages, and what allow readers to be pain voyeurs in a safe, temporary environment. Happily, there are exceptions.Poet Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy (Riverhead, $27) is one.

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    Practical Magic

    “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” So goes the famous William Morris quotation. A great many domestic possessions, of course, are either one or the other. But the world seems short on things that are both. Among my own small trove, I count a wristwatch that belonged to my late father, a silver-dipped porcelain serving bowl I received as a gift, and the original bronze doorknobs in my apartment. We all succumb to the need

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    Artful Volumes

    “I Just Shot John Lennon,” screams a headline from the December 9, 1980, edition of the New York Post. (If there’s anything certain in our precarious world, it’s the Post’s hoary sensationalism.) A facsimile of its front page appears as one of the endpapers in CLUB 57: FILM, PERFORMANCE, AND ART IN THE EAST VILLAGE, 1978–1983 (MoMA, $40),a catalogue that documents the sordid and celebratory goings-on of a time and place in Manhattan that seems fresher, queerer, and more illicit than the swipe-right chickenshit assimilationism of New York City today. Club 57 (and sister haunts such as the Mudd Club

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018
    *Duncan Hannah, Greenwich, CT, ca. 1973.* © Danny Fields.

    Hardy Boy

    Landing in the cratered, tawdry New York City of the 1970s, Duncan Hannah was a distracted art student who became a fitfully aspiring painter-illustrator. Before maturing into the stylish throwback artist he is today—the Evelyn Waugh of painting, beautifully reimagining Bridesheads past and bygone movie stars—he cut a resplendently androgynous figure on the CBGB scene, as both a born bon vivant and a straight sex object who wouldn’t give his gay patrons a tumble. (“A cocktease,” grumped his disgruntled harassers, who were legion.) At one point, he thought of calling this book Cautionary Tales. He was a Gatsby-in-training who was

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    El Libro Supremo de la Suerte

    CUBA HAS LONG BEEN IMPRINTED on the American imagination as a place stylishly, nostalgically lost in time, romanticized in an image vocabulary of architectural ruins, classic Chevrolets, and tiny, tough old ladies smoking fat cigars. In Rose Marie Cromwell’s debut monograph, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, the artist unearths another side of the country, lodged somewhere between surreality and vérité. The title, which translates as “the supreme book of luck,” takes its name from a guide to the charada, a “Chinese-Cuban folkloric number system” Cromwell discovered while hanging out with Havana locals. Each number corresponds to a list of

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    Thomas Struth

    THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN looking and seeing—between mere perception of surfaces and an understanding of their meanings—is a division that photographic art is especially disposed to explore. Photographers have long pressed against their art’s presumed documentary function, creating a subjective sense of the seen by applying the tools of their craft. This persona-driven approach was challenged by Bernd and Hilla Becher, founders of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, whose students included Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth. Known for their typological studies of industrial structures, the Bechers declined to pursue the “decisive moment” and instead sought clarity and

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    Life Sentences

    Toward the middle of his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011), the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina recalls an anticolonial reverie he experienced while getting drunk in a cheap bar in Nairobi as a young man. He had just read Decolonising the Mind (1986) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, which had been banned by the Kenyan government. “It is illegal and it was thrilling, and I had vowed to go back to my own language,” Wainaina writes. “English is the language of the colonizer.” He dreamed of abandoning his professional life entirely, giving up on his plans to

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    Ask Master

    Gig-economy guru Tim Ferriss’s Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World might be the last self-help book you’ll need. Just finishing it proves you don’t need help. You’re disciplined, motivated, open-minded. You accept chaos. It’d be easier to complete the twelve steps and implement all the habits of highly successful people than get through these six hundred pages of non sequitur life tips, offered by more than a hundred high achievers:

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  • print • Apr/May 2018

    Crash, Bern

    Fordham sociology professor Heather Gautney went to work in Bernie Sanders’s Senate office on an academic fellowship in 2012 and then signed up for his 2016 presidential campaign, ultimately playing a role in the Sandernistas’ wrangling over the party platform with Hillary Clinton’s DNC apparatchiks at that year’s Democratic convention. To say the least, aiming for a conciliatory note in the aftermath doesn’t interest her much. Especially when she goes prescriptive, reading Crashing the Party: From the Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement(Verso, $17) can feel like watching a bulldozer try to disguise itself as an ambulance.

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  • print • Apr/May 2018

    Consider the Possum

    It felt inevitable that in Rick Bragg’s new food memoir I would come across a recipe instruction like this one: “If you want crispier possum, bake uncovered for about 30 minutes.” Before I started reading, I’d checked in with a Southern friend, who immediately proclaimed, unprompted, that if there wasn’t a chapter on possum in The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table (Knopf, $29), it basically didn’t qualify as a book about Southern food. There was no way that Bragg, lyrical chronicler of twentieth-century life in the foothills of Alabama, where he grew up, was going

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  • print • Apr/May 2018

    Artful Volumes

    Thirty years ago, the movers and shakers featured in Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (Rizzoli , $55) were right on that gutting-edge where the serrated teeth of subversion and critique met the hard white underbelly of reification. Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and the ever-present Jeff Koons were among the rising stars playing amid the “floating signifiers” of cultural politics, the danse macabre of appropriation and disapprobation. All this is intelligently contextualized via the time lines and essays in these pages—Bob Nickas’s shout-out to the shitkickin’ perspicacity of Donald Barthelme’s 1987 Levine evaluation, très cool! But . .

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  • print • Apr/May 2018
    *Anne Collier, _My Goals for One Year_, 2007*, C-print, 45 3/4 × 55". Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow; and Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles/© Anne Collier

    Play It as It Delays

    Procrastination is the most confusing form of self-destruction. At least heroin addicts get high. Procrastinators watch YouTube videos. They walk their dogs to excess. They go to the gym and revise the first sentence of their first novel in their minds. Then they go back home and get on their iPhones. Before they know it it is 1 AM and they are alarmingly well-informed about the Kardashians. And it is not even as if they are enjoying all this, this incessant shirking of existence, because procrastination is the opposite of embracing the moment. It is passing the time while telling

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  • print • Apr/May 2018

    Souls Against the Concrete

    IT IS NOT UNUSUAL for a photographic project to focus on a single place—a country, a city, a town, a neighborhood—but even so, Khalik Allah’s Souls Against the Concrete is unusually specific. The photographer and filmmaker’s recent book captures people on a single corner, at the intersection of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City. Growing up, Allah passed this intersection countless times, and his earliest impressions were of “drugs, selling and using, accented by a heavy police presence, bogus arrests, and clouds of smoke.” He began to take photographs there, mostly at night. While to some darkness

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