print • Feb/Mar 2017
In the jet-set portrait extravaganza Slim Aarons: Women, the captions home in on a subject’s status like surface-to-air missiles:
- print • Feb/Mar 2017
Now that Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) is out of contention, it’s safe to say no sitting Supreme Court justice has the adoring fan base Ruth Bader Ginsburg has. It’s rare for a justice to acquire any sort of public personality; Samuel Alito and Stephen Breyer, for instance, are both ciphers. Clarence Thomas is a mostly mute memento of his bruising confirmation hearings twenty-six years ago. Even Chief Justice John Roberts occupies an eerie middle ground between the Federalist Society’s version of a Blade Runner replicant and the half-forgotten actor who played the heroine’s dim boyfriend on some crappy 1970s sitcom. But
- print • Feb/Mar 2017
It is bracing, in a way I could never have anticipated six months ago, to read a book that chronicles the exploits of dictators who rose to power in the twentieth century alongside descriptions of the food they liked to eat. Dictators’ Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants (Gilgamesh Publishing, $23) is filled with photos and food-related anecdotes from this most exclusive club—all male, of course, though a few infamous wives, like Imelda Marcos and Elena Ceauşescu, make cameos—as well as a recipe for each despot. These days, it feels a little less like a lighthearted romp through
- print • Feb/Mar 2017
In HIGHWAY KIND (Aperture, $50), we see Justine Kurland’s on-the-road photographs as if through a film of fantasy—a very masculine, very American fantasy, about freedom and self-reliance and the big wide open. There are shots of trains running through majestic Western landscapes—a pass, a canyon—and of hobos sitting in trees or reclining on riverbanks. Like Joel Sternfeld and William Eggleston before her, Kurland pays special attention to the quotidian aspects of back-road American life: rail yards, litter-strewn campsites, tires piled outside auto-repair shops, the parking lot of a motel or a 7/11. There are wide vistas, and then there are
- print • Feb/Mar 2017
“THEY COULDN’T BE quite as wild as artists.” This was how a colleague explained the psychologist Donald MacKinnon’s choice of architects as subjects for his landmark 1958–59 study of creativity at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality Assessment and Research. MacKinnon had begun to focus on creativity a few years earlier, but he recognized one clear problem: Creativity could obviously take many forms—from the poet’s mad genius to the scientist’s brilliant logic. MacKinnon could never hope to gather all creative types into a single study. But what if he could find a middle ground, a creative practice where imagination evolved in
- print • Feb/Mar 2017
NOT LONG AFTER Robert Frank’s still photographs in The Americans, published in 1958, definitively revealed the grim underside of the 1950s American dream, he put his Leica away and embarked on a new career as a filmmaker. This set of publications and DVDs, packaged in a handsome wooden case the size of a large-format art book, chronicles the half century of movies that followed. The book features a 1985 interview with Frank’s close friend and collaborator Allen Ginsberg, who says the photographer shifted to filmmaking to sidestep the pitfalls of being an acclaimed artist, to “stay with life as it
- print • Feb/Mar 2017
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to say which is a greater source of nostalgic longing—classic American cars or the gritty New York of the 1970s. These fond memories are a bit of a puzzle, because the time they celebrate was hardly a golden age. Both the cars and the town, judged from our current vantage, were dangerous, environmentally damaging, and back then taken to be prima facie evidence of American excess and decay. Of course, those negatives probably constitute the very reason for the longing, our desire being for indulgence and abjection rather than prudence. In Cars—New York City, 1974–1976, photographer
- print • Feb/Mar 2017
The fiction of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, one of Russia’s most celebrated living writers, can be divided into two categories. Her realistic work deals mostly with the lives of Soviet women, presenting a picture bleak enough that the stories were unpublishable in the USSR. In the US, Petrushevskaya is better known for the surreal, dystopian stories she describes as “real fairy tales.” Yet despite their fantastical elements, these stories, too, are grounded in Soviet reality: Their characters are preoccupied, as were citizens under Stalin, with food, housing, and violent death.
- print • Feb/Mar 2017
Among the iconic Hollywood Westerns of the 1950s, High Noon, with Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane, remains a classic movie in the most basic sense. More people know what it is than have seen it. High Noon has, in many ways, been reduced to one black-and-white image: Gary Cooper walking down an empty western street, wearing his badge, ready to draw his gun and face his enemies alone. In 1989 this film still was used, with an added red splash, as the campaign poster for Poland’s Solidarity movement, Cooper-as-icon standing in for the trade-unionist Lech Wałęsa in his quest
- print • Apr/May 2017
WHAT IF YOU ADAPTED the 2016 election campaign into a play? How would you stage this grueling saga about a bunch of uniformly unlikable characters in unhappy situations saying patently ridiculous things? You could start by looking at Mark Peterson’s new book from the campaign trail, Political Theatre, in which he presents our nationwide absurdist freak-out as a stark melodrama. His pictures of media scrums, starstruck Trumpkins, forlorn Jeb! events, Village of the Damned–looking Rubio fans, Bernie in various grumpy poses, and tragically overconfident Hillary rallies remind us exactly why our national anthem might as well now be three letters
- print • Apr/May 2017
Starting with its unsolemn title, onetime Florida congressman Trey Radel’s Democrazy: A True Story of Weird Politics, Money, Madness, and Finger Food (Blue Rider Press, $27) is the most puckish political memoir in recent—or, for that matter, remote—memory. Then again, winning readers over by projecting wry self-amusement does come in handy when you’re hoping to convince people you aren’t a blithering idiot. Known as the “hip-hop conservative” for his ideologically incongruous—but disarming—love of classic fight-the-power rappers Public Enemy and NWA, Radel is the freshman Republican who got busted in 2013 for cocaine possession just ten months into his term. There
- print • Apr/May 2017
“Existence is grounds for dismissal,” Jim Harrison wrote in an essay called “Food and Mood” originally published in Brick magazine in 2006. “It has only recently occurred to me that I might not be allowed to eat after I die.” If anyone could pull off eating in the afterlife, it would probably be Harrison, well known for all kinds of appetites here on Earth. Adventurous of both palate and mind, he was also a world traveler who loved Montana and Paris equally, he seemingly never said no to a road trip. One of the most memorable has to have been
- print • Apr/May 2017
The main thing that hits you about the hefty IRVING PENN: CENTENNIAL (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, $70) is how, over decades of fastidious work, the photographer managed to create and maintain a minutely controlled approach where diversity dissolves into uniformity. His figures are decked out in veritable uniforms, whether modeling chichi hats and indigenous costumes or posing as “themselves.” Across so many different venues, from Vogue, high-end books, and middlebrow advertising to strikingly decorative ethnography and abstract studies (nudes, obviously, and a whole gorgeously grimy series on, less obviously, cigarette butts), his classicism transformed all the world into
- print • Apr/May 2017
The cover of Sarah Schulman’s new book shows a pretty sunset. Its title hovers in white letters over pink and blue clouds like a benign choir of aircraft. Schulman clearly intends to parachute her book into the debate over how people should respond to and resolve conflict. She is the author of ten novels, many plays (produced and unproduced), and five previous works of nonfiction, including influential, often combative books like The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009), and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (2012), about queer
- print • Apr/May 2017
When Making It was first published in 1967, it ripped through the airless parlor of American letters like a great belch. The man responsible, the literary critic Norman Podhoretz, sat smirking with relish at the revolting thing he’d just done. At the time, he was the editor of Commentary, the magazine that, along with Partisan Review, had published many of the midcentury writers who came to be known as the New York Intellectuals, so he’d had a private view of their jousting egos and venomous political squabbles. Making It pried all this open. It electrified the previously staid public reputations
- print • Apr/May 2017
I must start with the ending: In a postscript to her collection of highly crafted stories of desire, French novelist and professor Anne Garréta undermines the project she has developed in the preceding chapters. Throughout, she conjures past lovers and those she has wanted—one woman after another, fashioned into words from memory. Then she casts doubt on the entire pursuit. Why write about women who incited desire—even if the desire held a terrifying sway—when we live in the time of the logorrhea of desire? There’s surely nothing transgressive left about it in our age of “pornocracy.” How to write about
- print • Apr/May 2017
In February, Amnesty International published a report on the Saydnaya Military Prison in Syria that made for especially gruesome reading. The headline revelation, that the Syrian authorities killed up to thirteen thousand people in extrajudicial executions at Saydnaya between 2011 and 2015, surprised exactly no one familiar with the structure of the Syrian state or the regime of Bashar al-Assad and its long-standing use of torture. Amnesty estimates that there are now up to twenty thousand detainees in Saydnaya, virtually all of them nonviolent demonstrators who never joined the Free Syrian Army or the Islamic State or any of the
- print • Apr/May 2017
In 1895, two neurophysiologists issued a book-length report on experiments they had been conducting with a group of young women suffering from a cluster of mysterious ailments. In a series of often dramatic case histories, the authors described the revolutionary new technique they had been using with these patients: listening to them. To be sure, the experiments were not double-blind, the publication wasn’t peer-reviewed, and both real and potential conflicts of interest went undisclosed. But the technique showed promise, and one of the report’s authors, Sigmund Freud, would go on to gain a measure of fame.
- print • Apr/May 2017
Children’s picture books are often our first acquaintance with storytelling. In a board book devoted, say, to trucks, what appears to an adult to be a series of discrete images will, for a preverbal child, provide a narrative: Embedded in the facing images of a pickup and a monster truck is likely a tale of growth and diminishment, or maybe simplification and elaboration. Of course, this is a rough surmise; we can’t be sure exactly what’s going on inside the kid’s head. But we can assume a basic human impulse to look for order and imbue it with meaning. In
- print • Apr/May 2017
Kate Zambreno’s first novel, O Fallen Angel, published in 2010 and just reissued by Harper Perennial, takes place somewhere between Middle America and hell, if hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously indicated in No Exit, is other people. There certainly seems to be no exit in O Fallen Angel, set in the suburban Midwest in a “Dreamhouse in the country far far away from all the scary city people alright let’s just say it in a whisper the scary (black) people they keep on coming closer and closer we keep on moving farther and farther away.” Mommy, an archetypal suffocating mother,