Zines are pretty much over; you can tell because people are nostalgic for them. In Jessica Hopper’s new book, Night Moves, a memoir of her younger years in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, she describes a trip to Kinko’s to Xerox early issues of her zine, Hit It or Quit It, for reissue:
Over the course of his career, photographer Dawoud Bey has consistently reexamined his methods and intentions. In the process, Bey, a 2017 recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has also radically revised our vision, as a comprehensive new monograph, Seeing Deeply, reveals. Raised in Jamaica, Queens, in 1953, Bey first became known in the mid to late 1970s for the series “Harlem, U.S.A.” In those images, and in subsequent works, black-and-white street portraits give everyday people pride of place in the frame. Barbers, shopkeepers, and churchgoers all seem glad to pose for Bey. In a portrait of a blues singer,
William L. Hawkins painted a near-encyclopedic array of subjects: animals both familiar and exotic, the Last Supper, cityscapes, stadiums, winter landscapes, Old West scenes, a bullfight, a jukebox, Jerusalem, the Statue of Liberty, the Nativity, the moon landing, and the rock of Gibraltar. Hawkins was a longtime resident of Columbus, Ohio, but his vision extends to distant locales, taking in everything from Bible history to Mr. T. On almost every one of his paintings you will find his date and place of birth (“William L. Hawkins Born KY July 27, 1895” or some variant thereof) prominently marked in assertive strokes
The cover of the catalogue for Vija Celmins’s recent exhibitions at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and Los Angeles offers a smooth eggshell surface, empty save for two speckled stones and the artist’s name in a modest typeface. With no markers to measure against, these rocks could be pebbles or boulders, though something about their shape suggests they might slip perfectly into one’s palm. Titled simply Two Stones, 1977/2014–16, the objects are nearly identical, except that one is real and the other meticulously modeled in oil and bronze. As Bob Nickas explains in the catalogue’s sole essay, Two Stones
The tragedy of the formative opening episode in Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy, is an American one, never more identifiably so. I’m writing this on the first day of October 2018, and last week millions of us watched the hours of retraumatizing and indignant testimony concerning an episode nearly identical to Heavy’s opening scenario. A fifteen-year-old girl, wearing her one-piece bathing suit under her clothes, is tricked into a bedroom with boys who are seventeen and bigger than her. There is laughter, among other sounds. They close the door. She cannot leave. Across from the closed door is a bathroom. After,
“Of all the modern stimulants, coffee had the greatest hold over Balzac,” Kassy Hayden writes in the afterword to her new translation of Honoré de Balzac’s Treatise on Modern Stimulants (Wakefield Press, $13), which situates this small, wild book firmly in the social, political, and medical scenes of nineteenth-century France. “Coffee helped him sustain his rigorous writing schedule, and he maintained that it gave him inspiration and fired up his intellect. . . . At times euphoric about his drink of choice, he was more often tormented by the knowledge that, although it contributed to his ill health, he could
Five years ago, I edited an anthology of crime stories by women originally published between the early 1940s and the late 1970s. Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives carried the subtitle Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense for a specific reason: “Domestic suspense,” as I defined it—though I did not originate the term—referred to a category of crime fiction that did not rest easily within the largely male, American, hard-boiled school created by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, or in the largely female, British “Golden Age” of detective fiction best represented by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.
James Turrell, Ganzfeld APANI, 2001, neon light: fluorescent light. Installation view, Arsenale, Venice, 2011. James Turrell’s dynamic experiments with light, space, color, and landscape can only be hinted at on the page. Even so, Extraordinary Ideas—Realized (Hatje Cantz, $85) manages to convey much about the artist’s intentions, if not the experience of the work. The […]
WHEN WAS the last time you picked up Sweet Charlatan, Frost in May, Is She a Lady?, or The Departure Platform? Do the names John Heygate (author of Decent Fellows), Inez Holden (Born Old, Died Young), or Jocelyn Brooke (Mine of Serpents) ring a bell? One side effect of reading Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, Hilary Spurling’s biography of the long-lived (1905–2000) British novelist, is realizing how many writers in his various circles have passed entirely out of civilized memory. Doubly sobering, for some of us, is the possibility that his books might be joining this invisible
The detective work in Between Worlds is so engrossing that one may be forgiven for forgetting that the book is also an exhibition catalogue. It accompanies an extensive retrospective, now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, of Bill Traylor’s paintings and drawings. Traylor, who died in 1949, is considered one of the most important “folk” or “self-taught” American artists. But this project demonstrates in magisterial manner how his work exceeds these limiting categories.
Henry Taylor painted an impressive range of subjects that included close friends and total strangers, the famous and the unknown. It’s a gallery that includes Miles Davis and Eldridge Cleaver; the children of fellow artists; and anonymous figures (a panhandler, a child modeling a new dress) caught in scenes of daily life. He ranges through African American achievements and grievous injustices to depict, for instance, Alice Coachman (above), the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal, as well as a lifeless Philando Castile in a 2017 work, The Times Thay Aint A Changing, Fast Enough! Like Kerry James
Long before Billy Lee Brammer died at age forty-eight in Austin in 1978, he’d become something his native Texas hadn’t been familiar with until he popped up: an authentic, homegrown literary legend. Katherine Anne Porter had bailed for the East Coast early, and her mandarin reputation was a horse of a paler color in any case. The grand old man of Texan letters at the time, J. Frank Dobie, was a folklorist and Western historian to whom “provincialism” was no insult and never would be.
On March 6, 2015, just before International Women’s Day, authorities in cities around China rounded up feminist activists to preempt a planned public demonstration. The women were sent to a detention center in Beijing, where they were held for over a month on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” While in custody, the activists were isolated from friends and family, subjected to constant interrogation, and deprived of medical care. Their offense? A plan to distribute anti-sexual-harassment stickers on public transportation. “Had they not been jailed, their activities likely would not have attracted much attention,” Leta Hong Fincher writes of
Few acts in pop-music history have a reputation quite as lenticular as that of the Beastie Boys. As such, their new memoir Beastie Boys Book (Spiegel & Grau, $50) seems to pinball from one reputational-perspective tug-of-war to the next. Are Ad-Rock, Mike D, and MCA innovators or carpetbaggers? Serious musicians or stumblers onto greatness? Agents of positive cross-racial understanding or flimsy bridges between cultures? Curious creative-class kids or schmucks?
Ashes to Ashes, the second volume of Chris O’Leary’s song-by-song chronicle of David Bowie’s work, reaches its title track around page 155. Of 1980’s “Ashes to Ashes,” which was Bowie’s second-ever No. 1 single in the UK—the first had been “Space Oddity,” to which “Ashes to Ashes” was the mischievous sequel (We know Major Tom’s a junkie)—O’Leary remarks that it is, “in a way, his last song, the closing chapter that comes midway through the book. Bowie sings himself off-stage with a children’s rhyme: eternally falling, eternally young.”
BENJAMIN KUNKEL: The scenario of your book is different from our own world, although our present is increasingly resembling the future of The Wall (Norton, $26). Could you outline the world of the novel?
here is a scene in Douglas Keeve’s 1995 documentary, Unzipped, in which Keeve films his then-lover, the American fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, getting a haircut. Mizrahi’s mane is wild, a crimpy bristle that forms a compact tangle over his forehead as single corkscrews try to escape the mass. Mizrahi, thirty-three at the time, is more or less oblivious to the snipping happening around his face. He’s too preoccupied with explaining his vision for a new fall runway collection, which he says came to him in a bolt of revelation before Christmas. “It has to be this kind of, like, you
Twenty years ago, Nigella Lawson, at the time a freelance op-ed columnist and sometime book reviewer, sat down for a revelatory working lunch. Her husband had suggested that Lawson, a former London restaurant critic, write a food book, but even as she discussed her enthusiasm for the subject with her agent, she expressed vehement opposition to putting it between covers. She felt she would be “looked down on” and seen as “the little woman,” as she recently put it in an interview. Whereupon her agent, as great agents have been known to do, pronounced his certainty about this marriage of
Vivian Maier, New York City, 1959, C-print, 10 × 15″. Vivian Maier, Miami, FL, 1960, C-print, 10 × 15″. The entry of Vivian Maier—a Chicago nanny who died in 2009, leaving an enormous trove of unpublished and often unprinted images—into the first rank of American postwar photographers has proved as revelatory as it was precipitous. […]
There is little to recommend the rich, except of course their money. After all, the greater a fortune, the more likely it was ill-gotten. (No one ever hit pay dirt performing a good deed.) Until the revolution comes, we still have taste as the great leveler, evidence of democracy in action. What distinguishes good taste from bad, however, matters less than the fact of its presence at all. The worst plight is having no taste whatsoever, of being boring. Far better to vigorously exercise the right to get it all very, very wrong.
