Tag
Masculinity
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“If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It”: Ander Monson on “Predator” and the Monster of American Masculinity
“I see actual male friendship, in a way that I don’t in almost any other action movie from the 80s.”
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Double Dirty Work: Sex Research and Symbolic Contamination
“Your skin is very dark,” a hostess in a Ho Chi Minh City bar complains to sociologist Kimberly Hoang. The woman has taken Hoang under her wing to help her become desirable to the bar’s Vietnamese clientele. “You need to buy foundation that will make you look lighter,” she adds. “You are lucky because you…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Transparent”
Jill Soloway’s original program Transparent abounds with firsts: the first TV series to feature a transgender character as its protagonist; the first transgender-themed series to win Golden Globe …
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Is That All There Is?
“Is That All There Is?” became a hit for Peggy Lee in August 1969, the month that followed the July 29 moon landing featured so prominently at the end of the first half of Season 7. Though not much time has gone by, the televised Nixon speech that comes later in the episode dates it…
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Plastic Fantasies
The doll lies, tranquil, her nude body pale and her vulva hairless and unnatural. Her hand prominently clutches a lamp, but her head is just out of sight. A tendril of blond hair draws the eye, hinting at the unseen face. We peer through eyeholes onto the scene, a two-room installation depicting, perhaps, a “frenzied…
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Linklater’s Gooey Realism
Richard Linklater’s acclaimed Boyhood is an ambitious film about a Texas boy named Mason, a millennial everyman played by Ellar Coltrane, as he matures from ages 6 to 18. Along the way, he proceeds through the more or less familiar milestones of middle-class life, including, among others, recognition of a disenchanted universe (magic is a…
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Return to the Fold
At first glance, Rectify may seem like another variation on that favorite TV conceit of recent years: a damaged, asocial male struggles to reconcile with the modern world (see Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos, True Detective—the list goes on). And in broad outline, this Sundance Channel (now SundanceTV) original about a recently released death…
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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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Conversion Sickness
“Nathaniel P. is George Eliot. Nathaniel P. is Tolstoy.” Thus proclaimed a friend of mine in adulation of young novelist Adelle Waldman’s widely acclaimed debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Waldman’s Nate Piven is a writer in the New York of the very recent past, after the city’s center of literary gravity slid across the…
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“We” Includes Me
In my world, which is populated by people obsessed with race, statistics about black men and boys are ubiquitous. Study after study lays out how few graduate from high school, how many wind up in prison, how few are employed, how many are killed by the police. I can find a number for nearly any…
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The Joys of Multiplicity
Translation contains multitudes. Since there is no one right way to translate most things worth translating—though there are many wrong ways—translation opens up a sphere of multiplicity in which you can elect to enjoy your Bovary à la Lydia Davis or in the style of Steegmuller. Whose Crime and Punishment was Edward Snowden reading in…
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Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from unlikely friends from Boston with ambiguous relationships to exotic lands, to the “ordinary horror” of living through Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence; from…
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Wanting Out
I can remember the first time I met Mark Anthony Neal. I was a graduate student, and he was visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching a class entitled “(Il)Legible Blackness.” The course aimed to familiarize students with recent work in black aesthetic theory and included discussion of a wide range of artists and…
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Sequester This!: The Perils of Masculinity and The Truth About Sex
It’s hard to be a man these days. For years, men enjoyed the trappings of hegemony unencumbered by guilt, reproach, or self-loathing. Men smoked like Don Draper, drank like Foster Brooks, and drove like Jimmy Dean. The world was theirs, and they paved American roads as pathways to their enjoyment. Men worked hard and dallied…
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A Conversation with Ellis Avery
Set in 1927 Paris, The Last Nude is inspired by the Russo-Polish Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young woman who modeled for her most famous painting, Beautiful Rafaela. De Lempicka met Rafaela on a walk in the Bois de Boulogne and drove her back to the studio: the two women became lovers,…
