Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, when she was 39 years old. By this time she was a divorced single mother of two sons and a respected teacher with a master’s degree in English from Cornell. She was an established a senior editor at Random House, the only Black woman in that position at the publisher. She’d championed Black authors and emphasized Black literature in the mainstream, including developing and strategically bringing out autobiographies by such Black Power luminaries as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. She was a close friend of influential participants in the Black Arts Movement, like the poet Sonia Sanchez. Yet in Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the most recent documentary released on Morrison, she recalls being unwilling to submit The Bluest Eye, a novel about a little Black girl that longs above all else to have blue eyes, to Random House because she was, in her own words, “Just an editor. Not a writer.” [Read more…]
The Aesthetic Of Nostalgia In Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood
Nostalgia has replaced epochs in the modern culture. There is the increasing feeling that while technology certainly races ahead in its advancement, culturally we are obsessively looking to the past. Vinyl is sought after by the kids who are convinced it sounds better than digitally remastered albums on CD or streaming. The look of videotape is being recreated for music videos and even entire film projects. Music scores are reviving the techno sheen of the 1980s. Millennials, having just missed out on the 80s and consuming art while growing up highly influenced by the 70s, are desperate to reach back. With consumer culture now defining the times and creating stagnation in any new art forms or styles, the past takes on a new glow. But few filmmakers can make art out of nostalgia quite like Quentin Tarantino. His new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, defines nostalgia itself. In its look and sound it feels like a brain working in overdrive to recall a specific moment in its archived history. [Read more…]
Our Future Revisited In Paula Rego’s Untitled: The Abortion Pastels
During a time in which eight U.S. states have passed bills to limit women’s rights to abortions, Paula Rego’s Untitled: The Abortion Pastels seems timely and relevant. Made between July 1998 and February 1999, this series of ten works features personal and quietly anguished portraits of women who have just undergone or are undergoing, at-home, illegal abortions. Rego, born in Portugal and living in Britain, was motivated to create this series about her home country after a referendum to liberalize existing abortion laws was proposed and defeated in Portugal during the summer of 1998. She saw this as a rallying cry for change and used her art as a response and motivator. [Read more…]
Don’t Call Me A Person of Color: I’m Black
A strange thing happens when you say the word “Black” as it pertains to race. People will often curl their lips up, as if you’ve said something distasteful or inappropriate; the color might drain from their faces in an expression akin to dread. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” triggers the knee jerk response of “All Lives Matter.” The FBI identifies those that fight for Black American rights as a terrorist group under the title of “Black Identity Extremists.” And. increasingly, “Black” is used interchangeably with “Person of Color,” POC, which ostensibly is much less racially charged. This is a strange and disturbing phenomenon, since Black is not synonymous with POC: all Black people are persons of color, but all persons of color are not Black. And non-Black persons of color, or NBPOC, still benefit from and can practice anti-Black racism. [Read more…]
Art At The Crossroads: Artists Addressing The U.S./Mexico Border
With the threat of closing the U.S./Mexico border looming, people whose lives do not intersect with the border on a regular basis are thinking more about the border than usual. But before this recent wave of attention, artists have been drawn to the border and have been drawing attention to the myriad issues it raises through performances, street art, public art, photography, and augmented reality (AR). [Read more…]
Jan Švankmajer’s Insects: On Meaning in Surrealist Film
Last year, Jan Švankmajer, the great master of surrealist cinema, returned to his roots with another stop-motion film mixed with live footage in the same vein as his classics Alice (1988) and Faust (1994). Yet there is something that is immediately striking in Insects (2018), namely that it keeps breaking the fourth wall and working with meta-levels. There is, first, an introduction where Švankmajer speaks directly to the audience, offering cues to how the movie is supposed to be understood. Then, throughout the film we see how the practical and stop-motion effects were created; we witness various stage directions to the actors, who each talk about their dreams to the camera. Finally, as Insects is somewhat of an adaptation of a play by the brothers Čapek, we ourselves witness an amateur theatre group working on its adaptation. [Read more…]
Norman Rockwell v. The State Of Public Art
Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, & The Four Freedoms
A traveling exhibition, with Reimagining the Four Freedoms
currently at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Washington, DC (through April 29)
Reviewed by Kevin Baker
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine
The fight over which of our public monuments should remain where they are is as complicated as the American past they commemorate. For all the fighting over who and what we should not honor from our past, there is one vital element that has been missing from the argument: that is, what we should honor and aspire to now. [Read more…]
Alone Within the Revolution: Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment
The writer wanders the seaside of a great island lost in his own thoughts, lovesick and grappling with a changing world. Such is the enduring image of Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s masterpiece Memories of Underdevelopment, which remains the greatest jewel of Cuban cinema. First released in that fevered year of 1968 to worldwide acclaim, it remained largely unavailable in the United States for decades, eternally referenced in film scholarship yet not easy to actually view. Now thanks to the Criterion Collection, it has returned to us, beautifully remastered and stunningly relevant. Made when the Cuban Revolution was merely a decade old and still enflaming passions in the hemisphere, it now speaks to us in a restless yet post-revolutionary moment, when its audience sees it from a the vantage point of dashed dreams and uncertain hopes. When Alea first made this movie his protagonist was an intellectual questioning himself within a society determined to inaugurate a Marxist future, today he would feel at home in a world where nobody can say what is coming. [Read more…]
A City No More: The Rise Of The World’s Largest Gated Community
by Kevin Baker
From “Death of a Once Great City”
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine
New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great. [Read more…]
NYC Supertalls And The Narrowfication Of The City’s Architecture
by Aaron Timms
From “The Needles and the Damage Done”
Courtesy of The Baffler
What kinds of people did I expect to find here, in the public garden at the foot of 432 Park Avenue, New York’s tallest residential building? In the days before I arrived in Manhattan to chart a course across the city, I’d studied the plans and websites of the “supertalls,” the new crop of skeletal residential towers rising one thousand feet and more above midtown. The architects’ renderings of these new superstructures were charged with all the clichés of the genre: the plate-glass exteriors knifing skyward, the unobstructed views of the miniature city below, the lobbies at once massive and discreet. The humans were harder to grasp. Artists’ impressions showed the supertalls’ residents-to-be in a variety of unnatural poses: a couple in formal wear touching each other next to a baby grand, a woman alone on a balcony with a dining table set for eight. But it was the passers-by sketched at the periphery who interested me most. Would the people here be like they were there, smudged and passive with the bready limbs of a disaster movie’s sacrificial-crowd-in-waiting? [Read more…]
James Dickey’s Black Mask: Deliverance as a Runaway Slave Narrative
When Burt Reynolds died last August, the obits recounted the strange life of an iconic American actor. Particularly weird was how Reynolds often lied about where he was born. He said he was born Waycross, Georgia. Why anyone born in Lansing, Michigan would want to be from Waycross, Georgia is a baffling question. What we do know is that Reynolds, who always identified as southern, and even affected a twang to fit the image, was, with this odd fib, participating in a cultural practice with roots dating back to nineteenth-century plantation culture. Burt Reynolds was “storying.” [Read more…]
Why Frank Zappa Is The Voice America (Still) Needs
“It’s time for a revolution, but probably not in the terms that people imagine it.” –Frank Zappa
This December marks 25 years since the death of DIY genius, comical cynic, lyrical satirist, musical innovator, social commentator, sardonic iconoclast, political debater, and composer-slash-rock-star Frank Zappa.
Throughout his eyebrow-raising career, Zappa parodied the plastic people, brain police, valley girls, dancing fools, and hungry freaks across America. His prolific body of work is a symphony of observations of human absurdity, expressed through such mediums as political meetings in the Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia, experimental advertisements for razors and cough drops, a violin bow tickling a bicycle wheel, a surrealist claymation music video, and a grotesque potato-headed puppet named Thing-Fish. He aimed to “shake people out of their complacency… and make them question things.” [Read more…]
The Farce of Imperial Pageantry In Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite
We begin with an evening walking through the artificial cities of the Fox Studios lot, accompanied by a Turk who can read a star map, graced with a name that has a royal origin. She inevitably helps us find our way among the maze of this place. It is but a day after the republic has cast its vote in another election embodying well these mad times. We walk through the false New York streets of the lot, nestled within the west side of Los Angeles. Like power, the city within this city is but an illusion. Such are the perfect conditions to enter the world of The Favourite, the new film by Greek enfant terrible Yorgos Lanthimos. Like his ancestors, Luis Bunuel, Tristan Tzara and other practitioners of the surreal arts, Lanthimos captures this era in civilization better than almost any other director. This new work reaches back into the past, yet has a timeless force in its dissection and sheer mocking of the pageantry of empire. [Read more…]
The New Blackface
Or The De Facto Proxy Of Non American Blacks In Black American/DACS Roles
By Seren Sensei
There’s been a quiet hostility simmering within the Black diaspora.
It is most apparent when discussing media representation. It tensed when veteran American actor Samuel L. Jackson wondered what a Black American — what I call the descendants of American chattel slavery (DACS) — might have brought to the American-charged racism of ‘Get Out,’ and when fellow Brits John Boyega and Iris Elba came to star Daniel Kaluuya’s defense. It arose again with the casting of British actor Daniel Ezra as the lead in the CW’S newest teen drama: a football show titled, ironically, ‘All American,’ and based on the life of real life DACS football player Spencer Paysinger. [Read more…]
Death By Streaming: Is Cult Cinema At An End?
by Judy Berman
Courtesy of The Baffler
The defining cult film of the Twenty-First Century is neither a mirror held up to nature or a hammer used to shape reality. The Room, released in 2003, is like a ninety-nine-minute episode of The Real World as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of no one. It is an incoherent broadside against evil women (or all women) and a backwards vindication of all-American male breadwinners who buy their girls roses and befriend at-risk teens. It’s a tragedy not just because it ends with a suicide, but also because sitting through it requires a robust Dionysian death drive. The Room is so bad that when you point out its idiocy, the idiocy of stating the obvious bounces back and sticks to you. [Read more…]
Factory Farming, Though Vile, Does Not Equate To Chattel Slavery
A quiet wave of veganism has tacked its roots in pop culture. Veganism, vegetarianism and to a lesser extent, pescetarianism — existing for so long on the fringe — are finally having their moment in the mainstream, with many adopting the practices of eating solely vegetables and/or cutting out red meat, pork, poultry and dairy. Celebrity chefs, actors, athletes and musicians extoll the virtues of going vegan. Vegan challenges, wherein participants attempt to go entirely vegan for an allotted amount of time, are wildly popular. Smoothie bowls run rampant on social media; vegan options have crept onto menus everywhere from five star restaurants to fast food restaurants. (The popular California hamburger chain Fatburger, was recently the first fast food chain to introduce The Impossible Burger, made entirely of plant protein.) [Read more…]
Cultural Processes: A Quantum Approach
An Interview with Artist and Theorist Johanna Drucker
by Broc Rossell
Johanna Drucker’s newly published work, The General Theory of Social Relativity, addresses the fundamental question of how we are to understand the forces at work in the social world, and presents a radically innovative framework for thinking about social processes. A century ago theories of quantum physics and general relativity exposed the limits of Newton’s classical, mechanical, approach to explaining the forces at work in the physical world. But the social sciences, including critical aesthetics rooted in 19th century political theory, remain caught in a mechanistic paradigm. Drucker’s formulation offers a non-mechanistic approach to the understanding workings of the social world and the affective forces at work in non-linear politics and aesthetics.* Broc Rossell, publisher of The Elephants, spoke with author Johanna Drucker in Vancouver and Los Angeles last month regarding her new book with The Elephants, The General Theory of Social Relativity. [Read more…]
Revisiting The Art-Life Balance In The Square
The new film, The Square (2017) is not marked by a tight plot; quite on the contrary it can be said to be built on vignettes, or even more precisely, by performances. Now, ‘performance’, of course, recalls Performance Art, the ‘movement’ that started out in the 1960’s; and as The Square is dealing with the contemporary art world, this connection is in no way accidental. Yet, the movie’s protagonist also explicitly refers to the work of Nicolas Bourriaud, who wrote extensively on the art of the 1990’s, which he differentiated from the issues and problems that were raised by the art movements of the past (cf. Bourriaud 2002: 7f.). He distinguishes the two in as far as Performance Art is following in the footsteps of avant-garde modernism, with its attempts to disrupt the standardised flow of our daily lives and to sketch out bold utopias with its manifestos; while for the Art of the 1990’s, or as he calls it, Relational Art, “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real” (ibid.: 13). The Square opens up a discussion between these two conceptions of the role of art within society, the one leading up to the 60’s/70’s and the other starting out in the 1990’s, which are based on two different interpretations of what modernity is. Let us look at them separately and see what different forms they take within the movie. [Read more…]
Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. And The Pulitzer
Kendrick Lamar recently made history as the first non-jazz, non-classical music artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for 2017’s DAMN. Immediately it was a polarizing move. Many felt it promptly elevated Lamar’s status to “Greatest Of All Time,” catapulting him into a cohort that includes the likes of Nas and Jay-Z. Some questioned the authenticity of the win; was it a consolation prize of sorts, after Kendrick lost the 2017 album of the year Grammy and also best rap album of the year several times in the past? In a similar vein, was it an attempt to appease the #OscarsSoWhite set by giving the award to a Black hip-hop artist, the first ever. Was it also an appeal to hip-hop loving youth (as hip-hop recently surpassed rock ‘n’ roll – another Black American creation – as the most listened to genre in the United States), many of whom had no idea there even was a Pulitzer Prize for music? Or was it a well-deserved award given to a deserving artist, one of the most critically acclaimed of the last decade (so acclaimed, in fact, that some argue that DAMN. isn’t even Lamar’s best album to date, wondering why the award didn’t go to 2015’sTo Pimp A Butterfly instead)? [Read more…]
The Silence and the Fury: The Passion Of Joan of Arc At 90
“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”—Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard
If I had to choose one face as the truest and most magnetic testament to Miss Desmond’s proud claim, that face would belong to Renee Maria Falconetti in the 1928 classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Falconetti, who was a stage actress and comedienne (Joan of Arc was Falconetti’s only major film role, and her final one) delivered what you might call a virtuoso facial performance, unparalleled in its plasticity of range and soul-felt expressiveness. Or in the words of the late film critic, Roger Ebert, “You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti.” [Read more…]