Tag: Books

The New Yorker

Max Mayo3 Comments

In the Fall of 2012, my late Grandma Lydia and my father came to visit me in college at SMU. My Grandma brought with her several copies of a magazine called The New Yorker. I was vaguely familiar with this magazine, but had never actually held a copy before that point. On one of those afternoons, resting in their hotel room before heading out for the next activity, I eyed one she had left on the couch. Enticed by its colorful cover design, I picked it up, slumped in a chair and began to flip through it; within minutes I knew this was something I needed.

It was the September 10, 2012 Fashion issue. I really only turned the pages, reading little bits here and there, but I knew. In that issue, as in all of them, there were endless descriptions of New York City’s surplus of cultural events, trendy political commentary, personal essays by famous writers, long form journalism, long form culture articles, short fiction, poetry, cartoons and reviews of what at that time seemed like everything. My grandmother, noticing the glint in my eye, urged me to keep that issue. In the days that followed, I read that magazine from cover to cover, a rarity for anyone familiar with it. My thirst unquenched,  I then signed up for the trial subscription. And when that was finished, I became a yearly paying subscriber which has been the case for the last 5 years. In that time, I’ve received the magazine weekly, devouring and struggling to keep up with that relentless pile, often bringing my own stacks of back issues on vacations and holidays.

As of April 9th, 2018, I am no longer a subscriber. Without going into detail as to why, I instead want to use this space to reflect. The magazine was, without a doubt, one of the integral catalysts for my broader intellectual curiosity late in college. I can honestly say I wouldn’t be who I am today without it. Despite any criticisms that have led me to this decision, it is more true to say that my leaving the The New Yorker is a signifier of just how influential it has been. Perhaps I will be a subscriber again one day, and I will still be loosely following it online (within the 10 free articles a month constraint). But for now, a heartfelt goodbye and thank you to The New Yorker.

Week in Review: March 26th – April 1st, 2018

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The Constitution of the United States – I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it’s surprisingly short and simple, elegant even. The Founder’s laser focus on preventing future authoritarianism remains striking, though I’m most impressed with its inherent capacity for self-correction and evolution.

A Film Like Any Other – My first step in an effort to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group political films he made, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, in the wake of the failed French student revolution of 1968. This conceptual film consists of nearly two hours of political discussions between a group of French communists sitting in a field, occasionally intercut with montages of the ‘68 uprising. There are two simultaneous audio tracks of independent debate one gets to read through, and the frame limits your vision to the backs of the comrades in the surrounding tall grass. . .only Godard. This is an excruciating sitting, recommended for Godard completionists only.

Kaili Blues – Bi Gan’s very beautiful Chinese drama from 2015. Set in a rural Chinese town, a doctor feuds with his step-brother over the raising of his nephew. The second half of the film, following the doctor on the road looking for his nephew, is punctuated by a roughly 40 minute continuous shot, the camera traveling several miles via two motorcycles, a car, a boat and then circumambulating an entire town on foot, all while following multiple characters repeatedly interacting. Its impressive stuff, though I was even more taken with the still photography throughout the film. Bi extracts a somber moodiness from the sort of detritus typified by a rural town undergoing uneven development. Wet concrete, cloudy skies, industrial materials, unfinished construction and slow motorcycle rides are expressionistic cues that build out the emotional thrust of the work. The Chinese title translates to “Roadside Picnic”, the same name as the Russian science fiction novel that would inspire Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Though the influence of Tarkovsky is notable on Bi, that potent comparison doesn’t keep this first film from feeling a bit under-baked. Perhaps a re-watch would help but I felt there was too little going on plot-wise. Still, Bi’s visual instincts appear fully formed. This is an auteur to keep an eye on.

Barry – SNL alum Bill Hader’s new HBO show. Hader stars, directs, writes, and produces here, and surprise!, he’s good. Like, really good. Hader plays a lonely assassin, former marine, who rediscovers the joys of human connection in a hack L.A. acting troupe while honing in on his next mark. Like many of the dark, anti-hero led prestige television shows from the last decade, there’s a certain perversity baked into the concept. The show requires the viewer to root both for Barry’s emotional fulfillment and his professional success (i.e. killing people). If the pilot is any indication, these two things will rarely be aligned.

Colossal – The premise is unique: a woman’s self-destructive alcoholism in upstate New York personified as a rampaging kaiju in Seoul. In execution, this movie falls apart. The ‘fight scenes’ were often unintentionally laughable and tonally awkward. Worse, the film clumsily alternates between which characters are deserving of your sympathy during any given scene. I would normally leave it here, but in the wake of Barry, I have to mention Jason Sudeikis. The contrast with the talent and ambition of Hader is stark. I don’t know if it’s the script, the direction or him, but Sudeikis is unusable in this film. Every dramatic moment involving his character feels false, a cartoonish depiction of alcoholism and personal resentment. I like him, I find him hilarious at times, but at this juncture I’m skeptical that he has the dramatic chops to do anything but broad comedies.

Translations – Brian Friel’s 1980 play about the Irish-English cultural divide set the 1830’s. During this time, the British Empire was actively employing the Royal Engineers to standardize Ireland through language and cartography. Their job was in effect to rename the entire country. The majority of the characters are Irish people speaking Gaelic but this is all performed on stage in English. Likewise, the Royal Engineers obviously speak English. Thus, very cleverly the language and cultural barriers of that time are conveyed using a common language for the audience. Fitting too, as this play was a pointed commentary on the then ongoing Troubles with its central theme around translation. The question of how to translate a random street crossing with a nearby well becomes an existential dilemma of whether one should fight to maintain a cultural heritage or assimilate into what will be the future paradigm.

Week in Review: March 19th – 25th, 2018

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Conversations with Tyler: Martina Navratilova – This is my favorite podcast and I am lucky to live near where it is recorded. The guest was tennis superstar and LGBT activist Martina Navratilova. David Foster Wallace noted in his review of Tracy Austin’s autobiography that the greatest athletes usually lack the ability to express their genius through language, that their expertise lies in physical exertion and instinct. Navratilova certainly bucks that trend, yet there remained a lacking psychological depth in this conversation.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold – The 1981 novella by Gabriel García Márquez. This is either García Márquez at his most drawn-out or his most concise depending on where you fall on his style. I opt for the latter. García Márquez was a journalist before a novelist, and here he experiments with a journalist’s prose in a recognizably Garcimarquesian narrative structure. A few hours over a single night and early morning chronicling the murder of Santiago Nasar are meticulously detailed over a mere 120 pages. Our narrator constructs the event 20 years after the fact, jumping from perspective to perspective, and back and forth along the short timeline of events, only revealing at the very end what was foretold from the beginning. García Márquez is analyzing a society complicit en masse; No one body with enough personal responsibility yet dozens with moments where intervention was possible. This novella is a remarkable tracing of the contours of fate, and leads to some unpleasant questions about the trajectory of civilization. The political history of Colombia circa 1981, and the current events in the region more generally, cannot be ignored here.

The Death of Stalin – In the wake of Stalin’s death, the remaining members of Stalin’s committee – a pack of spineless, incompetent, morally bankrupt buffoons – squabble for control of the Soviet experiment. Armando Iannunci (Veep, In the Loop) directs this black satire, maybe the first comedy to encapsulate the Trump presidency. The slap-stick here is particularly good.

Yi Yi (A One and a Two…) – My favorite Edward Yang film and sadly his last. As mentioned in my partial reviews of Taipei Story and A Brighter Summer Day, this three-hour family melodrama is unique in Yang’s filmography for its embrace of a broad humanism. The fatalism and ennui that typifies his characters still remains, but no longer does Yang emote these feelings with them. The film follows the layered personal crisis’ of the Jian family after their matriarch goes into a coma. As with the earlier films, Yi Yi is an extraordinary document of a specific time in Taipei’s history that will only grow more nourishing as our world evolves. Yang’s use of glass here is a masterclass.

Doctor Strange – Mediocre movies are often the most frustrating movie experiences, as was the case for Marvel’s Doctor Strange, a lazy rip-off of The Matrix and a colossal waste of Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelsen and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

National Symphony Orchestra: Noseda conducts Verdi’s Requiem – My first time hearing and seeing Guiseppe Verdi’s Requiem, and doubtfully the last. At 90 minutes, with no intermission, this part opera, part choir, part symphony about mourning for salvation at the horizon of the apocalypse is both over the top and totally engrossing. Predictably, the Dies irae segments are most memorable, the few moments where nearly every player is turned up to 11. Verdi wrote the piece as a memorial to Italian writer Allensandro Manzoni and I’m also told that Verdi was likely a non-believer. That Christianity has so often been a conduit for great art begs the question: How often is that religion actually the subject matter for a work, and how often is it merely a veil for more personal expression?

Bluets – Maggie Nelson’s short book of over 200 short essays? poems? tweet-sized thoughts? All of the above? Whatever you label Nelson’s collection, Bluets functions as a meditation on the color Blue. For Nelson, the color symbolizes both her innate depressive nature and the intensity of a recent love. Her success here hinges on a montage effect, oscillating between a potent personal thread and an intellectual discourse on the color blue throughout art history.

Foxtrot

 

Week in Review: March 12th – 18th, 2018

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D’Annunzio’s Cave – Another Heinz Emigholz architecture film, this time about the home of Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio. I was unfamiliar with the man, or his celebrated novels, but it seems his political ideas may have influenced the eventual spread of Italian fascism. For this fact, or for the ghastly interior decorating, Emigholz directs this space as a horror film. As the camera does its usual Emigholz tessellations, an experimental discordant score by David Byrne and Brian Eno puts one in a perpetual state of unease. The rooms of the house are uniquely dark, jarring, over-stuffed, lacking any recognizable or appealing style. It feels like the home of a serial killer.

Koyannisqatsi ft. The Philip Glass Ensemble – Philip Glass was back again, again with friends! This night was a screening of Godfrey Reggio’s city-symphony classic, Koyannisqatsi, with Glass’s original score played live by him and his Ensemble. The Washington Chorus was also there to help. The performance was shaky during the slower nature sequences, but the stage found its groove mid film in time for the rapturous climax. The film remains as relevent today as it was in 1983, and we are still catching up with Ron Fricke’s cinematography.

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez’s surprising and delightful, if bittersweet novel about the power and importance of impassioned love at any age. Stylistically, Márquez abandons the literal magic here, and instead refines his near mystical talent to twist his characters in new directions throughout their lifetimes. The majority of the pages are devoted to several of the steamy 622 love affairs of our hero, Florentino Ariza, as he bides his time, waiting over 50 years for another chance at his first love, Fermina Daza. By the end, you have felt the draining strain of time on Florentino and Fermina as they approach Death’s door-step, but even stronger, you feel these character’s natural will to revivify a type of passion most only get to feel once in a lifetime. That this may be self-delusion is irrelevant to Márquez. The magnetic strength of this urge inspires him, and the reader, above all.

A Brighter Summer Day – Edward Yang’s 1991 epic four-hour coming of age story is a lush time capsule into early 1960’s Taipei. Yang’s primal filmic theme is the erosion of filial piety and A Brighter Summer Day may be his deepest exploration of this process. His narrative strategy this time involves rhyming disparate threads utilizing similar motifs – illumination vs darkness, architectural framing, pop cultural fixations – to layer his multiple story threads. For me, this is the pivot point for Yang’s output, an integral piece of the puzzle in how he moves from the outright fatalism of Taipei Story to the broad humanism of Yi Yi.

Saturday Night Live – This week’s episode with host Bill Hader hit a lower mark than the Sterling K. Brown episode, but there continued to be sketches that were pushing the show’s normal absurdity boundaries. One featured Cecily Strong sitting on her geriatric husband (Hader) in an electric wheelchair during a game night with her girlfriends. His Cialis has just kicked in and they have a limited timeframe to take advantage. In response to the consternation of her friends sitting across the table, Strong pleas, “Its no different than breastfeeding!” A second brilliant skit was a fake ad for an office lamp toilet that you can keep on your desk. Beck Bennett, the office worker who becomes addicted to the lamps, is second only to Kate McKinnon as the most consistently funny and versatile players in this cast.

Plants – I’m told that Chilean film is on the up and up, and was excited to see this 2015 effort by Roberto Doveris. It’s an atmospheric sexual awakening tale about a young girl named Flor who’s family unit is in the midst of decay. Her brother is in a coma (one of the titular plants) and her mother is in the hospital with a terminal illness. The father is out of the picture. Flor spends her free time going to comic conventions, preparing dance choreography with her friends, and naively messaging guys on chatroulette. Real life chat windows, plant life and comic book drawings feature sporadically in the frame as Flor sexual urges lead her into some dangerous encounters. Ultimately, this movie feels like a stew of visual ideas that never congealed. Pablo Larraín remains the face of this emerging cinema, but Doveris could be a director to watch, especially with a more cogent script.

Week in Review: February 26th – March 4th, 2018

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Sampha: Process – A Malick-like collage of performances set in urban London, the beaches of Sierra Leone and in a giant empty diving pool, among others. It amounts to an experimental album film, consisting of no linear plot or dialogue (or full songs for that matter), but one gets a vague sense of Sampha’s background and concerns around his mixed global identity.

Sullivan’s Banks – Another short collage, this one about eight banks designed by American architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924). Heinz Emigholz directs the structures one at a time by simply placing the camera at various angles for observation. Shot in the 1990’s, each analysis begins with a few elliptical master shots where you can see how each building blends in to a small town square. Only when the camera moves closer do you begin to see their quiet radicalism and idiosyncratic nature. Sullivan was a fan of ornament and the density of details and materials on these banks absorb you as the camera tessellates around them. While the film offers no opinion per se, if there is an argument being made it is that Sullivan was a modernist and a visionary that American architecture stopped following.

Maillart’s Bridges – This is another Emigholz short film that is part of his Architecture as Autobiography docu-series. It examines 14 structures, primarily bridges, designed and built by Swiss engineer Robert Maillert (1872-1940) early in the 20th century. Maillert was notable for his creative use of reinforced concrete to minimize material usage and structural footprint. Emigholz’s camera replicates the approach to Sullivan’s banks, with one caveat: as the camera pivots around the sturcutres we almost never see their functional tops. Instead, Emigholz is fascinated with looking at the bridges the way Maillert may have, admiring and exploring the visual play of curves and lines amongst the Swiss Alps’ landscape.

Blind Spot – Teju Cole is one of my favorite creative minds and his first photobook does not disappoint. As he notes within the text, the book represents the 4th segment in a tetralogy about looking. A photography project shouldn’t come as a surprise though. Cole’s penchant for flaneuring in his literary works helps elucidate the formal continuity between the four projects. The photographs, representing over a decade of international travels, are often stunning but he lets none of them speak for themselves. Each image is coupled with a piece of text on the opposite page that contains a reaction to his prolonged exposure to his picture. The pairs are organized thematically and they elliptically build out a continuous stream of thought around his philosophical, aesthetic and political ideas. With this photobook, one looks at Teju Cole looking at what he was looking at.

Chef’s Table – It’s hard not to chuckle at the self-serious formula at this point, which is unfortunate because the chefs are still anything but formulaic. I watched Season 3, Episode 6 about chef Virgilio Martínez of Central based in Lima, who’s ecosystem inspired dishes are fascinating. He and his team scavenge around Peru for hundreds of unique ingredients used nowhere else in the world, and then combine them in groupings based on elevation. Apparently some of the dishes aren’t even designed to taste good.

Solaris – Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1973 three hour Russian science fiction classic. This was a re-watch as part of my Annihilation post-mortum and I can confirm that it still holds up. The film is much broader than I recalled, though I think its possible to read the film as Tarkovsky’s personal crisis over the then obvious shortcomings of the Soviet experiment. A telling 5 minute sequence set in a futuristic Moscow is merely a drive around the multi-tiered infrastructure and booming skylines of Tokyo.

Taipei Story

The 90th Academy Awards – I watch the Oscars every year for shallow reasons that I can’t quite reckon with. It is almost always the same: a drab four hour affair punctuated by a few funny presenting bits and the ensuing consensus of whether or not the host was any good. This year I was pleased by the #MeToo tone of the evening and Jimmy Kimmel’s general presence, but there just weren’t any surprises in this stagnating event. I uncharacteristically did not make a prediction list, but I didn’t need one. All most all of the wins were predictable. The one spark was when Kimmel took a caravan of stars over to a local movie theater, interrupting an ongoing film’s audience with candy baskets and hot-dog canons. The bit ran too long, and it honestly looked like chaos, but it contained the potential for disaster and thus was exhilarating. If the Academy really wants to expand the broadcast audience, they need more uncertainty.