Skip to main content

Touch Someone with a Camera, and Other News

Ed van der Elsken, Vali Myers dancing at La Scala, Paris, 1950. Photo via The New Yorker/Nederlands Fotomuseum

 

  • So there’s this guy, Zoltan Istvan? He ran for president as a kind of single-issue candidate: he wanted to make America live forever. Literally. Steering his coffin-shaped “Immortality Bus” around the States, he laid out a transhumanist platform advocating for the abolition of death. He attracted a small but plucky band of volunteers, one of whom, Roen Horn, turned out to be especially fervent. Mark O’Connell talked to Horn about the promises of eternal life on Earth: “ ‘You know one really cool thing about being alive in the future?’ [Horn] asked. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Sexbots … You know, like A.I. robots that are built for having sex with.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard of sexbots. It’s a nice-enough idea. You really think that’s going to happen, though?’ ‘For sure,’ Horn said, closing his eyes and nodding beatifically, in momentary reflection upon some distant exaltation. ‘It’s something I’m very much looking forward to.’ ”
  • Nan Goldin remembers discovering Ed van der Elsken’s photography when she was nineteen: “When I first saw Ed van der Elsken’s book Love on the Left Bank, I realized I had just met my predecessor. My real predecessor … In my own life, I have been obsessed with photographing the people who were my lovers, had been my lovers, or whom I wanted as lovers. Like Ed, I wrote myself in as the lover. Sometimes, the obsession lasted for years. It was photography as the sublimation of sex, a means of seduction, and a way to remain a crucial part of my subjects’ lives. A chance to touch someone with a camera rather than physically. It is this notion—of being obsessed with someone, and, through photographs, making that person iconic—that resonated with me in his work.”

  • At Lincoln Center this week, those who came to see Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony got a surprise: during the last movement, a group of singers took to their feet throughout the auditorium, singing the words to “Ode to Joy” in English. They were, it turns out, singers from the Concert Chorale of New York. (“You millions, I embrace you / This kiss is for all the world!”) Alex Abramovich caught up with one of them, David Bryan, after the show, and he said: “In the fourth movement, in the dialogue between the cello/double bass and the rest of the orchestra, which then gives way to that beautiful melody and countermelodies so familiar to most of the Western world, the poetry of the text hit me pretty hard … No matter what’s happening out in the world, and regardless of individual political persuasions, in that moment people can’t be sitting there fuming about politics … And, as I sat there, I wondered: all of these people with all the power and money and control … have they ever performed Beethoven’s Ninth? … I just don’t see how you could bomb people overseas one day and then sit on a stage the next with an instrument, performing such a cathartic piece of music. I believe music is the answer to all of the conflict the world is in right now. It always has been.”
  • Sam Kriss thinks you should watch Planet Earth II, especially for its reckoning with humankind: “The final episode, showing animals in the city, is spectacular. The natural world is no longer out there, in the eternal wilderness, divided from our own lives by an absolute ontological barrier, and interacting with humanity only insofar as we destroy it. Instead it’s rising up from underneath with a mocking challenge to the world we think we’ve built … Animals do something to the city and its spaces; they remind us that we’re not really free.”
  • It’s often said that an education in the humanities opens one’s mind, safeguarding it against myopia and provincialism. But Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English literature, is proof that books aren’t always morally instructive. After all, anyone who sees—as Bauerlein claims to—shades of Whitman in Trump’s fitful, coarse mutterings about “American carnage” can’t even be called a student of literature, let alone a professor of it. “I will take the inauguration speech,” Braulein said. “That was simply a firm and vigorous reiteration of everything he promised in the campaign. It sounded the hyperpopulist message that many found reminiscent of Huey Long and other demagogues. I actually found it closer to the populism of Walt Whitman and his paean to the working man, and the fact that the great spirit of America is not to be found in the legislatures or the executives but in the people, the ordinary common man.”


from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2luXMJ5

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more