Category
Essays
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Law, Written in Spray Paint
“Paying attention to the temporary markings etched onto the asphalt, we are afforded a glimpse into the otherwise hidden world that lies below the city’s surface.”
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This is What I Mean When I Tell My Dad He’s Alright
Mattie Wechsler’s essay won the 2014 Katherine Fullerton Gerould Award Prize at Bryn Mawr College. When I was growing up, my father kept a pronunciation dictionary of the English language by his seat at the table. This way, if there were ever a dispute during dinner about how to pronounce a word correctly, he could…
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The Corner Office
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. At the corner of 60th and Madison, high-end retail logos create an upscale fantasia: DKNY, Calvin Klein, and Bally. Byron Breeze, Jr., also known as “Soulja,” has made this corner the “office” where he does most of his…
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Abney Park Cemetery
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Salvation Army officers don’t die; they are “promoted to glory.” In Abney Park Cemetery there have been many such promotions, as most of the founding generation of the Salvos, including William Booth and his family, are buried here. Abney Park,…
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Translating The Magic Flute
When I got a call last year about translating a new Magic Flute libretto for an English-language production at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The Magic Flute had always been one of my all-time favorite operas, though I’d never paid particular attention to the libretto. Mozart composed the…
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Mysteries
In medieval England, craft guilds—nailmakers, woolworkers, saddlers, grocers—designed scenes from Biblical history, beginning with Genesis, coursing through the life of Christ, and ending with Judgment Day. Guild members performed these so-called “mystery” plays annually on the feast day of Corpus Christi. Each scene was performed over and over again throughout the day, on a wagon…
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The M Word—In Multiplex
We don’t know where the coy linguistic practice of using-while-not-using so-called offensive words by appending the term “word” after its initial letter and preceded by “the”—as in “the N-word”; “the C-word”; “the F-word”; “the R-word”—came from. The practice functions in spoken and written speech the way the “bleep” does on television. Everyone presumably knows what…
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How to Buy a Guitar in Chicago
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In its still relatively new location on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago’s Northcenter neighborhood, the Chicago Music Exchange immediately dazzles visitors with row upon row of guitars mounted on the walls. Chandeliers drip from the high ceilings, lending a tone of…
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Caught in the Game
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed the fields of Democratic Kampuchea as they were—barren—and the glorious “new people” of the nation as they were—starving and devastated. When…
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Carrie Mae Weems at the Guggenheim
The Carrie Mae Weems retrospective cries out for the spiral at the Guggenheim. But instead 30 years of work, asking bigger and bigger questions, is split across two side galleries two floors apart, while the Italian Futurists bluster their way up the curved ramp. On the lower level are Weems’s family pictures from 1978–1984, their…
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Notes on a Reading
We asked novelist and Public Books contributor Ellis Avery to tell us about the Public Books event she recently hosted at Three Lives Books in Manhattan’s West Village with Ruth Ozeki, the author of A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.…
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Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac
In the New Republic, Eric Sasson centers his review of Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac on the belief that “[o]ne can’t make a movie about nymphomania and not have it be about female sexuality.” While this more or less may be true, it is no less true that a movie entitled Nymph()maniac need not be concerned (primarily)…
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Video from Panel Discussion with Thomas Piketty
On April 17, 2014, in New York City, Public Books and the Institute for Public Knowledge hosted a panel conversation with Thomas Piketty, Julia Ott, David Stasavage, and Frédéric Viguier on Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the…
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That Silver Building on Powers
East Williamsburg is fast becoming one of the most dramatically gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, with glass-fronted condo buildings shooting up in their narrow lots like beanstalks in a developer’s fairy tale. It also continues to be one of the ugliest. The problem with the area’s housing stock may be vivid to anyone who has read…
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Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of domestic objects), things that are monotonous and discourage exercise, prone only to dishearten children and make them stupid. — Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction…
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Humans and Other Animals
Toward the end of Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana (2013), an elderly mother and her daughter enjoy fast-melting ice cream bars while returning from their pilgrimage to a hilltop temple in rural Nepal. “We’re like children still learning how to eat,” the younger woman comments, as much to her mother as to the camera.…
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On Christopher Street Pier
This is the inaugural installment of Public Streets, a series of observations on urban life curated by the novelist Ellis Avery. I’ve seen that child before, a boy of 10 or 12 in suspenders and a newsboy cap. He plays the cello. He rides a unicycle. Once I saw him in a sycamore in Abingdon…
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Michael Nyman At 70
When asked to name a “minimalist” composer, most would say Philip Glass. Steve Reich, John Adams, and Terry Riley resonate with those a bit more familiar with classical music. Yet few know that it was the English composer Michael Nyman who coined the term in a 1968 piece he wrote while working as a music critic and…
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Rotten Love
In the mid-1940s Fritz Lang made two films in quick succession, both starring the same trio of actors: Edward G. Robinson, Dan Duryea, and Joan Bennett. The first of these works has the more notable pedigree; The Woman in the Window (1944) was among the crop of Hollywood exports to France that would, along with…
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Changing Landscapes
The Museum of Modern Art recently completed its 13th annual Documentary Fortnight, a two-week festival of international nonfiction film. In a city flush with film screenings, the Fortnight is notable for its wide-ranging social interests as well as its commitment to the limits of documentary form. “So much that defines documentary today is about the…
