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.
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.
“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
“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
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
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
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
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
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:
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.
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
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 . .
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
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
IN “STAGES OF LAUGHTER,” Art in America’s 2015 roundup of artists’ insights into humor, painter Amy Sillman recounts studying improv comedy as a means to get a firmer analytical grip on the role of spontaneity in her work. “I’ve always painted without a plan,” she admits. “It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing, or that I don’t stop and make decisions. I just work by the seat of my pants.”
Vladimir Nabokov saw the beginnings of literature in a familiar idiom. He imagined a boy “running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels.” The child was shouting, reasonably and referentially enough, “Wolf, wolf.” But this alone was not literature. “Literature was born,” Nabokov says, “on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.”
Garry Winogrand died on March 19, 1984, at the age of fifty-six—too quickly and too soon. Just six weeks earlier he had been diagnosed with gallbladder cancer and gone to Tijuana seeking an alternative cure. Anyone would have left behind unfinished work, but this was Winogrand, who, with his Leica M4, made pictures as prolifically as a digital photographer, so we’re talking mountains. In the end, he left behind 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film and 6,500 rolls of developed negatives that were never printed. Today, the Garry Winogrand Archive at the Center for Creative Photography includes more than 20,000 fine
In the autumn of 2007, I moderated a panel at the New York Public Library called “Julia Child in America.” Its subject was Child’s ongoing and outsize effect on American cooking and food culture. It had been convened on the occasion of a new biography of Child written by one of the panelists, the estimable food historian Laura Shapiro. The other participants were no less expert and engaging: chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, food writer David Kamp, and cookbook author, editor, and FOJ (friend of Julia) Molly O’Neill. Over the course of the
“Old Nat.” You hear people calling Nat Turner that to this day, even though he was barely past thirty when he was executed for leading the single most effective slave uprising of antebellum America. Black people over the decades since that summer-of-1831 rebellion in Virginia have claimed a kind of exclusive intimacy with “Old Nat” in song and folklore. More than a martyr for generations of African Americans before and after Emancipation, he has been an heirloom, a talisman, a cautionary tale, a heroic paradigm. Because so little has been known of the real Nat Turner beyond the “Confessions” transcribed
If an unstoppable stream of verbal and vocal pyrotechnics is your definition of comedy genius, Robin Williams had no peers. Nonetheless, he was hardly the most original or emblematic comedian of his generation. Andy Kaufman was, although any votes for Steve Martin—the first real post-counterculture comic, anticipating Kaufman more than is commonly recognized—will be counted.
