Search Results for: This Magazine

The Resplendent Photography of Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems, Woman playing solitaire, 1990. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

For T, The New York Times Styles Magazine issue “The Greats,” Megan O’Grady profiles MacArthur fellow Carrie Mae Weems, “perhaps our greatest living photographer” as the artist prepares for a trio of shows in Boston, Ithaca, and New York City.

O’Grady takes a look back at the works that made Weems’s reputation and gives a pulse on today’s art world amidst the culture shifts that Weems helped to usher in.

In one of the indelible images from “The Kitchen Table Series” — possibly the most famous picture Weems has ever taken — a young girl and her mother are looking in matching mirrors while applying lipstick. It’s the kind of effortless-seeming image that complexly plays with ideas of feminine subjectivity, recalling the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot’s 1875 painting “Woman at Her Toilette” in the way in which it shows a private act that anticipates public exposure. In Weems’s version, a young girl is also learning, perhaps unwittingly, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be looked at by men. “What do women give to one another? What do they pass on to one another?” says Weems, recalling the girl who modeled for the picture, whom she spotted in her neighborhood in Northampton, Mass., where she was living and teaching at the time. “I just thought she was the perfect echo of me as a young person. The same intensity and the same kind of hair.”

After her parents’ divorce, Weems moved with her mother and siblings into a large house owned by her grandfather. She would pirouette down the long wood-floored hallway and look out the attic windows, wearing her mother’s work smock, imagining she was a dancer or an actress. “I was simply becoming interested in this idea of being an artist in the world in some sort of way, not knowing really what the arts were,” she says. “I had these great, grand visions that I would move to New York City and that I would always arrive fabulously dressed, and I would always arrive late, and I would always leave early and everybody would want to know who I was. ‘Who is she?’ That was my fantasy.” After a visit from her drama teacher, her mother agreed to send her to a summer program in Shakespearean theater, freeing her from having to earn money by picking strawberries with the other kids in her neighborhood — giving her permission, essentially, to create. The program led her to other opportunities in theater and street performance, “dancing at the crossroads at night to bring up the gods,” she tells me.

We still live in a world in which the highest price ever paid for a work of art by a woman (in 2014) was Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” for $44.4 million, while dozens of male artists sell in the hundreds of millions. Of her own work, Weems tells me, “It is not embraced in the marketplace. And this is a sustained problem across the board, in the ways in which the work of women is valued and the work of men is valued. This is a real problem. And it’s worse for women of color, for sure. And I make a fine living.” Recently, her work was up for auction around the same time as the artist Kerry James Marshall’s. “And it was fascinating. My work sold for $67,000 and his sold for $21 million. Kerry Marshall and I became artists together, we were friends together, we were lovers together, we participated in this field together. On the social value scale, we’re equal. But not in the marketplace,” she says. The numbers are stark and shocking, but Weems’s real value is reflected in the vast scope of her influence, visible in the intimate photographs of Deana Lawson, the transhistorical portraits of Henry Taylor and the subdued longing of Kara Walker’s silhouetted paintings.

Elena Ferrante and the “My Brilliant Friend” Adaptation for HBO

BEVERLY HILLS, CA - JULY 25: Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco of 'My Brilliant Friend' speak onstage during the HBO portion of the Summer 2018 TCA Press Tour at The Beverly Hilton Hotelon July 25, 2018 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

For the New York Times Magazine, Merve Emre writes about the pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante in advance of an eight-episode HBO adaptation of the first novel of the Neopolitan series, My Brilliant Friend. 

Emre discusses the creation of the series with director Saverio Constanzo, who relied on Ferrante’s copious notes throughout production to bring the story of Lila and Lenù to the screen. To dive deeper into the ethos of the world the two collaborators created, Emre also interviewed the elusive Ferrante, with mixed results:

I tried again with a question, only this time my tone was less sentimental, more acerbic. I observed that contemporary writing on motherhood has an irritating tendency to treat children as psychological impediments to creativity — as if a child must steal not only time and energy from his mother but also language and thought. But her novels are different: They entertain the possibility that motherhood might be an experience conducive to creativity, even when it is tiring or onerous. For a short time, Lila transforms motherhood into an act of grace, and though she finds her children burdensome, Lenù’s greatest professional success comes after she becomes a mother. What did she take to be the relationship between time spent taking care of words and time spent taking care of children?

She was more receptive, if a little scolding. “I very much like the way you’ve formulated the question,” she wrote. “But I want to say that it’s not right to speak of motherhood in general. The troubles of the poor mother are different from those of the well-off mother, who can pay another woman to help her. But whether the mother is rich or poor, if there is a real, powerful creative urge, the care of children, however much it absorbs and at times even consumes us, doesn’t win out over the care of words: One finds the time for both. Or at least that was my experience: I found the time when I was a terrified mother, without any support, and also when I was a well-off mother. So I will take the liberty of asserting that women should in no case give up the power of reproduction in the name of production.”

There was something different about the style of this answer. The “I” she wielded seemed more present, the defenseless voice of the writer behind the author. I asked her to say more about being a terrified mother. What, I asked, was the nature of that terror for her?

She retreated, adopting the impersonal tone of the commentator once again. “I’m afraid of mothers who sacrifice their lives to their children,” she wrote. “I’m afraid of mothers who surrender themselves completely and live for their children, who hide the difficulties of motherhood and pretend even to themselves to be perfect mothers.” It is tempting to rewrite these statements to reclaim the immediacy of her “I”: “I was afraid of sacrificing my life to my children; I was afraid of surrendering myself completely.” But nothing authorizes it. It may not even be the right interpretation; she may really be talking about her fear of other mothers. Why do I want to make it about her? To do so would be to traffic in fiction. But the traffic in fiction is pleasurable. It prompts me to study her language carefully, to appreciate anew the words she has chosen, the phrases she repeats, how easily she moves between sentences. It prompts me to rewrite her words to project fears I may or may not have onto the figure of the author — the character she and I are sustaining. It lets me speak without speaking for myself.

Read the story

Remembering Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange (right) in a scene from her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, a seven woman ensemble that was nominated for a Tony Award in 1977.

Ntozake Shange, whose choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf ran on Broadway for 742 shows between 1976 and 1978, making her the second Black woman to have her work performed on Broadway, died on October 27 at age 70. (The first was Lorraine Hansberry with “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 1959.) Besides her canonical play for colored girls, Shange was the author of more than a dozen other plays, four novels, five children’s books, and several collections of poetry. She’d suffered a long illness, but released a new collection of poems  just last fall, and had been working on another new book and performing spoken word around the United States in recent months.

Shange was raised in an upper middle class household in New Jersey and St. Louis where luminaries like W.E.B. DuBois and Miles Davis encircled the family. She took degrees from Barnard and USC. In a 2010 piece for The New Yorker about the feature film adaptation of for colored girls produced by Tyler Perry, Hilton Als said seeing the show  in 1977 was an introduction to a familiar yet dazzling “world of unimpeachable cool.” It showed seven different Black women on a stage dancing, singing, and speaking a language that was determinedly itself and not at all stilted by pressure to be polite or respectable. In Shange’s words, it made, “drama of our lives,” and showed future artists who were queer, female, and / or people of color that the stuff of their specific worlds was good enough material to create from.

Shange’s death produced an outpouring on the internet, and it’s a loss that marks a shift. The access and visibility of queer and female people of color in mainstream media is something we can very well nearly take for granted, and the reckonings around sexual misconduct in the public sphere owe much to the space Black women like Shange, who in for colored girls and other works “explor[ed] the various trials that black women often confronted, from rape and abortion to domestic violence and child abuse,” opened up in the ’70s.

we are compelled to examine these giants in order to give ourselves what we think they gave the worlds they lived in

Ntozake Shange, from the forward to three pieces (spell #7, a photograph: lovers in motion, and boogie woogie landscapes) 

More on Shange:

 

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Oli Scarff / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jean Guerrero, Lauren Weber, Doug Bock Clark, Dara Horn, and Dan Nosowitz.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Let’s Talk About Sex Scenes

Anna Sastre / Unsplash / Pexels / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

The first sex scene ever filmed was not a sex scene at all. It was a kiss. And there was way less kissing than talking. May Irwins’ make out session with John Rice, a recreation of the smooch from the Broadway musical The Widow Jones, took all of one second. Filmed in 1896 at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio, the soundless footage — titled, simply, The Kiss — opens with Irwin deep in conversation with Rice. While it is impossible to tell what they are saying, the two actors appear to be discussing logistics. Thirteen seconds in they seem in agreement. Both pull back, Rice dramatically smooths out his moustache and, while Irwin is still talking, he cups her face and the two of them peck. Or, on his end, nibble. All in all, the actual moment their lips touch is almost nothing — 94 percent of the first sex scene was actually the discourse around it.

Were this to happen today, the actors would have had clearer direction. Last week Rolling Stone reported that HBO would be hiring intimacy coordinators for every show that called for it after “The Deuce” star Emily Meade, who plays a prostitute in the series, asked for help with her sex scenes. The network consulted Intimacy Directors International (IDI), a non-profit established in 2016 that represents theatre, tv and film directors and choreographers specializing in the carnal. “The Intimacy Director takes responsibility for the emotional safety of the actors and anyone else in the rehearsal hall while they are present,” their site explains, alongside a standard set of guidelines called The Pillars: context (understanding the story), communication, consent, choreography and closure (signaling the end of the scene). Read more…

Theater of Forgiveness

Illustration by Buff Ross

Hafizah Geter | Longreads | November 2018 | 32 minutes (8,050 words)

 

On Wednesday, October 24th, 2018, a white man who tried and failed to unleash his violent mission on a black church, fatally killed the next black people of convenience, Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Jeffersontown, Kentucky Kroger. Today, I am thinking of the families and loved ones of Stallard and Jones, who the media reports, along with their grief, their anger, their lack of true recourse, have taken on the heavy work of forgiveness.

***

June 17, 2015, two hours outside my hometown, a sandy blonde-haired Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That night, Roof, surely looking like an injured wolf, someone already on fire, sat with an intimate group of churchgoers, and I have no doubt, was prayed for. If history repeats itself, then surely so does religion: the 12 churchgoers like Jesus’s 12 apostles in a 21st century fable. Roof the Judas at this last supper. As we know, Roof would wait a full hour until heads were bowed in prayer and God had filled every corner of the room before reaching into his fanny pack.

By June 19, 2015, two narrow days beyond the shooting, there would already be reports of absolution. “I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof at his bond-hearing. “I forgive you,” said Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the nine dead, her son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, not yet buried.

Intimately, I have been held by this wing of southern Black religiosity. My father is of Black southern Baptists who, originating in Georgia and Alabama, found themselves one day in Dayton, Ohio. Growing up, I was as curious about my Black American family’s white God as I was about my Nigerian mother’s African Allah. Much of my childhood was spent either at the foot of my mother’s prayer rug or beneath the nook of my paternal grandmother’s arm — grandma’s fingers pinching my thighs to keep me still, awake, and quiet in the church pews. At the church I attended with my Black American family, they were always praying to be gracious enough to receive forgiveness or humble enough to give it. A turn-the-other-cheek kind of church, it was full with products of the Great Migration and they were always trying to forgive white people.

As a child, though I could never quite name the offenses of white people, I could sense the wounds they had left all over the Black people who surrounded me. The wounds were in the lilt of Black women’s voices, in the stiffened swagger of our men; it was there in the sometimes ragged ways my boy cousins would be disciplined. And I knew this work of forgiving had somehow left bruises on my aunts so deep it made their skin shine. In church, we prayed and forgave white people like our prayers were the only thing between them, heaven, and damnation.

It’s left me wondering: Does forgiveness take advantage of my people?

Read more…

Nic and David Sheff on ‘Beautiful Boy’ and Telling Addiction Stories Responsibly

Nic and David Sheff at a book signing in 2008. Shawn Ehlers / Stringer

Zachary Siegel | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,640 words)

Some books have a way of finding you at just the moment you need them. That’s been the case with me and the father-son memoirs that serve as the source texts for Beautiful Boy, a new film about a family wrestling with addiction, starring a worried-sick Steve Carell as David Sheff, father to his dopesick son, Nic, played by Timothée Chalamet.

Nic Sheff’s drug memoir, Tweak, was resting on my friend’s coffee table with little crumbs of weed on the black and red cover. It was 2010 and I was a 21-year-old daily smoker of black tar heroin. I rarely left my apartment in Denver, which had become a dark opium bunker, burnt tin-foil and hollowed out Bic pens (“tooters”) strewn about. One day I left to buy some weed from a friend, and there was Nic’s book. I asked to borrow it; nonchalantly, I should add, making it seem as though addiction was only a cursory interest of mine, as opposed to a ghost that had been following me for years.

I devoured all 352 pages in a couple days. Melting wherever I sat, hours-long reading sessions on heroin were quite comfy. But after a few hours I’d have to shut one eye to keep from seeing doubles. I’m realizing only now that I never returned Nic’s book to my friend — I swear I’m not that guy anymore. Read more…

After World War I, Horror Movies Were Invaded By an Army of Reanimated Corpses

"J'accuse!" 1919.

W. Scott Poole | an excerpt adapted from Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror | Counterpoint | October 2018 | 23 minutes (6,219 words)

The murderous folly of the Great War chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.

Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.

Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland. Read more…

The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester

Illustration by Lily Padula

Sara Fredman | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,913 words)

 

In the second season of Stranger Things a tentacled smoke monster forces its way into poor Will Byers’ mouth, taking up residence inside his body. When his mother draws him a warm bath, he refuses. “He likes it cold,” Will intones creepily. The demon inside is invisible to others but exerts its will on Will, who is himself but also something else. As I watch the story unfold, the human being growing inside my body moves frenetically, as if it is popping and locking to a beat I cannot hear. This flurry of activity makes my stomach look like a potato sack with several distressed squirrels stuck inside; this is likely due to the cookie-dough ice cream I have recently eaten. I, too, have something inside of me; it also likes it cold.

“Pregnancy has every element of an alien invasion,” I read on the NPR website. “The human placenta is one of the most invasive placentas.”

We often turn to the extraterrestrial when we describe the phenomenon of growing a new person inside of an existing one. Early ultrasound images recall the classic imagining of alien form: a giant head attached to a smaller, translucent body set against a black abyss. It’s not just the optics. As pop icon and formerly-pregnant person JLo once remarked, “Pregnancy and giving birth are weird, strange. The growing life inside you — it’s like an invasion of the body snatchers.” I assume this creepy description reflects the way in which the growing fetus influences, commandeers even, so many of the bodily processes of its host. Google “alien” and “pregnancy,” and the least-frightening video that comes up will confirm: “Clearly, the fetus has no qualms about doing whatever it needs to do to get things for itself.”

Read more…

The First Time I Moved to New York

Alexander Chee in Polaroid, taken by Michael James O’Brien at the Lure in New York for XXX Fruit’s launch party.

Alexander Chee | Longreads | October 2018 | 10 minutes (2,448 words)

 

My first move to New York begins at the back of a Queer Nation meeting in San Francisco in 1991, with a man visiting from New York with his boyfriend who tried to pick me up. I turned him down as a way of flirting only with him. He seemed at a loss as to what to say next, and so I said, When can I get you alone?

We stood at the back of that meeting for some time, not quite willing to walk away. We hadn’t known each other long but the attraction we felt that would end up tearing up our lives and remaking them was already in charge. We exchanged addresses, deciding to be pen pals, then wrote each other letters for months. We met up again at a writers conference, then wrote more letters. He broke up with his boyfriend and got an apartment by himself. The answer to my original question then seemed to be, Seven months from now, in New York. And so I put my things in San Francisco up for sale and boarded a bus for New York that summer, with a copy of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess as reading material, and my best friend, who we’ll call S.

S and I dressed more or less alike for the trip, as we had for much of our friendship. If memory serves, we were both reading the same book. We made White Goddess jokes the whole way. We wore jean cutoffs, combat boots, and sleeveless hoodies, and sat in seats next to each other, emerging from the bus for smoke breaks. Our aesthetic then was modeled mostly on the comic Tank Girl and what we could remember of issues of The Face, and I had recently shaved my own head after a long night in Oakland that served as something of a private goodbye to San Francisco. S was coming with me a little in the way of a best man or a bridesmaid, as if I were getting married. I wasn’t used to getting what I wanted from love, and survived through intense friendships instead. We had been inseparable best friends since meeting, writing in coffee shops and stalking used bookstores for books by Joy Williams, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn Hacker, and, yes, Joan Didion, and so while he joked he wanted to make sure of me, and I wanted him to — I didn’t trust myself — we were also, I think, preparing for being without each other on a daily basis.

Read more…