One afternoon last week, on vacation in British Columbia with my family, my boyfriend and I slipped away from the boozing and card playing for a quick visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery. We arrived at the museum shortly before closing and walked into the first gallery we saw, a small dark room where we found Fiona Tan’s 21-minute, two-channel video installation Rise and Fall (2009). I loved it.
* Gina Balibrera *
A wild idea occurred to me as I made my way through Chekhov’s plays this spring. If I asked nicely, would my friends agree to stage some modern tableaux vivants from Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard? I had been thinking about how silence and stillness work in these plays, and how humor and misunderstanding creep into moments of deliberate pause in these plays. I wanted to study these moments in the paused, familiar faces of my friends in the roles of Chekhov’s most familiar characters. This is the sort of idea that appears lucid in a dream, that most sensible people dismiss after waking.
Tableau Vivant, Part II: Leftovers Read More »
* A.L. Major *
In some ways, what I search for in literature, I search for in a game: a world that completely consumes, excites me and engages me intellectually. Truthfully, not very many videogames accomplish all three.
“Sex: what puts you in contact with people you might otherwise never know.”
“False modesty: the writer enraged Toni Morrison’s won the Nobel Prize, but unable to come up with the name of someone he’d prefer.”
A Man and an Epigram Walk Into a Bar: A Review of Thomas Farber’s “The End of My Wits” Read More »
* Eric McDowell *
What can you do in eight hours? Work a full day’s work or log a solid night’s sleep. Run 60 eight-minute miles—that’s over two marathons—or microwave 240 Hot Pockets. Or watch Sátántangó .
Béla Tarr’s “Sátántangó” Read More »
* Claire Skinner *
Last fall, I became obsessed with AMC’s show Breaking Bad. It was like developing a crush. Slow at first, then a headlong swoon. I found myself sidling out of social events earlier than usual, claiming that I needed to get some sleep. But instead of sleeping, I’d flop myself on the sofa and watch Walter White, the conflicted main character, cook meth in a trailer parked somewhere in the endless New Mexico desert. I’d watch episode after episode, each one as acidic and delicious as the strawberries I popped in mouth, cold and wet from the refrigerator.
The Best Show in the World Read More »
I recall standing on a platform before a television set, which was shrouded in funereal black cloth, and which played on loop a talk given by a grave white-haired scientist in a lab coat. The screen was grainy in a way I discerned to be fake: each trawling black worm was evenly sized, evenly spaced on the screen. The actor playing the scientist would cough when the screen broke up, due to an untimely earthquake disrupting the calm of his lab; the cough gave him away as an actor. My suspicion that the scientist was an actor made the film in which he appeared no less terrifying to me, a sensitive child, a nervous child.
Thirteen Ways of Talking About a Volcano Read More »
by Zhanna Vaynberg
Having grown up in a very loud and direct Russian family, there’s something about this straightforward type of behavior that I’m very drawn to. Because, to me, politeness seems to be more a defense mechanism than anything else. My fiancé (an Israeli, coincidentally enough) and I are always lamenting that Americans, unless you’ve known them for years, are not very forthcoming; it is often hard for us to talk to them about things heavier than TV shows we have in common, work, or the latest regional gossip. Sometimes it feels like Americans are so afraid of being disagreed with or disliked that topics of conversation have no choice but to stay trivial. And it’s not even the topics of conversation, really, but more the level of conversation. It’s like filling up on appetizers and never getting to the main course–a lot of speaking gets done, but by the time you get to something real (if you ever do), everyone is picking up the checks.
‘by A.L. Major’
In April, the Atlantic Monthly published an article that was so ill-advised I hesitate to post a link to the article for fear of increasing its page count and further sensationalizing the author’s bogus argument. The article was about creative writing programs. An impassioned, somewhat jilted, author, Jon Reiner, makes a case for why instead of going to MFA schools, wanna-be published authors should go out and live—similar to arguments for why writers need to have “real-life jobs” before writing. Considering the sheer number of Creative Writing MFA programs in the U.S, there is a high likelihood that young, well-educated, straight-out-of-college aspiring writers are going to slip their way into those cherished programs, but of the many faults, Jon Reiner made, the gravest perhaps is how he grossly misjudges the lives of those “young” students. His stance that younger students have not lived comes from a ridiculously, narrow and American perspective; for he assumes MFA students grew up in American suburbs and were pampered by their middle to upper class families. But, believe me, I don’t want to write a post about his article article, especially so belatedly. In fact, I’ve only mentioned it to say how it got me thinking about my lack of long-term job experience and how as a young girl growing up in a developing country jobs, first jobs especially, didn’t always seem like a job in the quintessential sense.
What Do You Do For A Living? Read More »
by
Gina Balibrera
Louis Malle and Andre Gregory’s brilliant adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Vanya on 42nd Street, begins on the street. A group of actors converge early in the morning, sip coffee from styrofoam cups, and make their way to rehearsal in a dim theater. Once inside, a groggy Wallace Shawn reclines on a bench and closes his eyes for a nap. Around him, Shawn’s fellow actors chatter nonchalantly, their backstage voices easing into Chekhov’s words.
Tableau Vivant, Part I: Wild Lust, Deep Misunderstanding, and Silent Pauses in Vanya Read More »
