Books and Arts

Monday

January 3, 2022

Who killed Bambi?

It never occurred to me that one day, I would review Bambi (the novel). If it had, I would not have expected that its story and backstory would, among other surprises, include the Nazis, a communist, pornography and talking leaves. In fact, I didn’t even know that the film had been preceded by a novel. Felix Salten wrote Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde in Vienna, where it appeared as a newspaper serial in 1922 before being published in book form in Germany the following year. It debuted in America in 1928 as Bambi, a Life in the Woods, translated by none other than Whittaker Chambers, already a communist, but not yet in the Soviet agent phase of his astoundingly protean career.

Amanda Craig

The invisible hand

Few of us like cleaning our own homes, so it’s scarcely surprising that the cleaner, or maid, occupies a particular place in our imagination. To those who resent the imposition of domestic hygiene as an intrusion on privacy, cleaners can be sinister and even vengeful presences — as famously depicted in Jean Genet’s play The Maids. For those who feel guilt over the structural inequalities of capitalism, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help added an extra dose of racism and feminism. But to those who see only the relief of having their dirt lifted by someone else, the cleaner is a bringer of joy who deserves everything from a Dior dress (Paul Gallico’s Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris) to a rich husband (the J.Lo vehicle Maid in Manhattan).

Patrick Hastings

One hundred years of Ulysses

A few years ago, the private school where I teach asked me to offer an evening class on James Joyce’s Ulysses to adults. The idea was to remind alumni, parents and other community members what it feels like to be in one of our enriching classrooms. For over a decade, my Ulysses senior elective had been a major feature of our course catalogue; now, a few adults were about to pop the hood on this infamous tank of a book. As course registrations began to trickle in, I recognized the surnames of current and former students. Then an administrator joined the course, and I had a flutter of nerves at the realization that one of my bosses was actually going to read Ulysses and encounter the disreputable content that lurks within. My cover was blown.

Alex Perez

On literary cross-dressing

When Carmen Mola won Spain’s Planeta literary prize for her crime thriller, The Beast, it was widely assumed that she was a female professor with a hardboiled literary style. Think again, mis amigas. Mola was the pseudonymous literary creation of three men: Jorge Diaz, Antonio Mercero and Agustin Martinez. The three scriptwriters smirkingly accepted the million-euro prize at a ceremony in October, and the literary world, home of uppity puritans and shrill wokesters, immediately found itself enmeshed in a scandal highlighting issues relating to authenticity and authorial freedom.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Style and substance

In Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s thinly disguised account of the final years of the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, the narrator Chick and his close friend Abe Ravelstein go on a shopping spree in Paris sometime in the 1990s. For all their highfalutin philosophical talk about Athens versus Jerusalem and the like, Bellow makes it clear that there is a Dionysian as well as Apollonian cast to the bond between Chick and Abe. After departing the Hôtel de Crillon, their first stop is Lanvin. There, Abe is smitten by a beautiful flannel jacket retailing for $4,500. He buys it.

Alexander Larman

Stacking up

"It feels almost like there is money in writing again.” So the historian and New York Times bestselling author Dan Jones tells me. Is he referring to increased book sales, or lucrative adaptation deals? Not this time. Instead, he’s discussing Substack, which launched in 2017. It has now become the platform of choice for writers to develop their careers on their own terms, without having to give substantial percentages away to agents, publishers and lawyers. For years, authors have felt that they have been little more than galley slaves, flogging themselves and their wares for the profit of multinational corporations. Now, finally, they have been given an opportunity to take back control of their own careers and destinies. The format is a simple one.

Mario Naves

Kandinsky’s colors

The paintings of Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) have never looked quite as good as they do, right now, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It’s worth mulling why that is. I mean, Kandinsky is old news, right? He’s a mainstay in the common consciousness of those who make art their livelihood, and the paintings remain on view at any institution that presumes to untangle the story of Modern art. Given the current vogue for politics and inclusivity, Kandinsky seems an unlikely figure for reappraisal: he’s a tough nut to enlist for this or that cause. As for excluding him from the canon — forget it. Dead white male though he may be, Kandinsky is immovable. Granted, his status as the first abstract painter has been called into question.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Wynton’s works

Jazz has periodically seen the rise of so-called “young lions.” The phrase was first used in 1961 as the title of a Lee Morgan LP put out by Vee-Jay Records, a black-owned company, with cover art that sports a photo of four lions lounging on a stone ledge. Then, in 1983, Elektra Records released an LP that was also titled The Young Lions, featuring Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin and a number of other young musicians who were focused on reclaiming the bebop tradition. Now, in late November, as Marsalis celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at the Rose Theater, his baritone saxophone player Paul Nedzela (as the New York Times reported) called out during a rehearsal, “It’s the Young Lions!

Jane Coombs

How did Walt Disney learn from Ancien Régime decoration?

"Make it pink! Make it pink!” says the chubby fairy Flora, aiming her wand at Princess Aurora’s new ball gown in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959). A few magic sparks must have fallen on the walls of Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle in Anaheim, California, which have been painted (and repainted) in several shades of cotton-candy pink since the faux fortress opened in the summer of 1955, well before the film itself was completed. Two centuries earlier, in 1757, Jean Hellot, the general inspector of the porcelain factory at Sèvres, invented the slightly deeper “rose Pompadour,” a ground color named in honor of Louis XV’s chief mistress and the factory’s most important patron. This pink appears on the scallop-patterned lids of two large Sèvres vases (c.

Robert S. Erickson

Truth in Duluth

The Venerable Bede writes of a pagan priest in seventh-century England who, sizing up the meager life of man, compares it to a sparrow flying through a well-warmed dining hall on a stormy winter night. The priest admits to knowing nothing about the cold darkness before or after the brief passage. He can only speak to the time the bird spends in the light. In Girl from the North Country (open run at the Belasco Theatre), the season is the Great Depression in 1933, and the dining hall is a flophouse in Duluth, Minnesota, where down-and-outers blow through like so many birds on the wind. The innkeeper, Nick Laine (Jay O.

Alex Perez

Jake Gyllenhaal is guilty

Jake Gyllenhaal is losing it. As with so many of his films — Demolition, Southpaw and Nightcrawler, to name a few — the actor’s latest, the unconventional crime thriller The Guilty, finds him yet again portraying a troubled man, beaten down and about to crack up. Joe Baylor is an LAPD cop relegated to working at the 911 call center as the result of misconduct some eight months before. Surly and apathetic, Joe answers the nightshift calls, ranging from drunken mishaps to carjackings, with a disgust he doesn’t care to contain. He longs to return to the streets. The night turns, however, when Joe fields a call from a woman (voiced by Riley Keough) who’s been abducted and is being held in a white van.

Peter Tonguette

Richard Lester at ninety

No matter how many years have passed since they first hit American airwaves, or how many of its members have died, or how aged its surviving members have become, the Beatles will always be, in our minds, forever young. To a large extent, the public perception of John, Paul, George and Ringo as personifications of youth, zest and zeal was a byproduct of their classic faux-documentary musical comedy, A Hard Day’s Night, released in the summer of 1964, just months after their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. It comes, then, as something of a shock to note the ninetieth birthday this month of the film’s prodigious and gifted director, Richard Lester. The maker of the Beatles movies (he also directed 1965’s Help!) a nonagenarian? It can’t be! But so it is.

Jessa Crispin

Carry that weight

You feel a weird twinge, and your doctor doesn’t have an opening for four months, so it’s almost inevitable you’ll go looking for more information on the internet. You know it’s not a good idea, that it can’t possibly end anywhere good, and yet you feel compelled. The result is usually the same: WebMD and Yahoo Answers will tell you it’s cancer, YouTube will tell you your bowels need flushing, some guy calling himself a fitness guru with very white teeth will try to sell you capsules of some exotic sounding herb for $125, and soon your Google ads are filled with prescription medication designed to fight Alzheimer’s or lymphoma.

Thursday

November 18, 2021

The Spectator

Books of the Year 2021

Matt Labash I read a lot of books. Probably well over sixty in the last year. I’m not saying that in some little-kid braggadocious way. After all, I’m fifty-one years old. Though some have said I read on a fifty-two-year-old level. In addition to the couple of books I have open at any time, a good deal of my book consumption comes via audio: I have an audiobook going in my car or on my MP3 player at all times. And at my advanced age, if I don’t dog-ear and underline a book, it’s lost down the memory hole forever, no matter how much I liked it. But one I do remember liking so much that it bears mentioning, is John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet (Penguin, $28).

Robert D. Kaplan

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is finally appearing

In the mid-1970s, exiled from the Soviet Union for exposing its vast crimes against humanity, and having won the Nobel Prize in Literature for that endeavor, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn turned his back on the lionization that awaited him in New York and other cultural capitals of the West and instead settled with his family in the woods of Vermont. Avoiding visitors for the better part of the next two decades, he churned out half a dozen or so books, averaging roughly 750 pages each, that together tell the story of the Russian Revolution and its antecedents. This act of sheer energy, self-discipline and renunciation of the conventional worldly pleasures bestowed by the literary elite was in the spirit of Russia’s own eastern monasticism.

William Boyd

The Road Not Traveled

Meredith Swann is driving in her new car under the M40 flyover, checking on her GPS system to see if she’s following the flowing arrows correctly. She has switched off the woman’s voice — “Turn left in 200 yards” — because it reminds her uncannily of her mother, all calm, quiet advice with a subtext of disapproval. She turns and turns again. Now she is on a road of towering glass office blocks. Is she lost? No, there it is — Sainsbury’s Homebase. She parks, steps out of her car and pulls down her T-shirt to cover the neat dome of her pregnant belly. The car magically locks itself as she walks away, its lights giving her a knowing wink of acknowledgment. In the vast Homebase she is daunted and diminished by the size of the place.

Andrew L. Shea

A brush with Joan Mitchell

“I am not a member of the make-it-ugly school,” Joan Mitchell told Irving Sandler for an ARTnews article in 1957. No argument there. As the major retrospective of more than eighty significant paintings by the second-generation Abstract Expressionist (1925-92), now on at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, reminds us, Mitchell’s artistic life was an unabashed pursuit of the beautiful. Her paintings, derived from nature but fired in the kiln of memory and intuition, are testaments to that pursuit, showing us at once just how devilishly out-of-reach true beauty can be, and just how important it is to stretch one’s arms and go for it.

James Panero

Prints of Wales and elsewhere

The print is a curious category in the world of art. Prints are not singular, of course — not typically at least. They are not ubiquitous, either — at least, again, not typically. They exist somewhere between art objects and art products. Printmakers often use the tools of sculpture to create works on paper. Three-dimensional carved objects become two-dimensional printed products. Think about it and you realize prints are far more curious than they let on. While art history typically does not know what to do with its curiosities, artists can sometimes make much out of the opportunities of hybrid creation.

Robert S. Erickson

Broadway’s back(side)

Six, a British musical about the wives of Henry VIII, is a scrupulously specious masterclass in frivolity. These onetime queens, blinged and bedazzled as fabulous pop-diva Kweens, undertake a six-way singing competition to decide who had “the biggest, the firmest, the fullest... load of B.S. to deal with” from their kingly husband. Backed by a live band, the sextet’s set amounts to the love child of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Super Bowl halftime show. Those hoping for revisionist revenge fantasy will leave disappointed. Those seeking dramatic tension, character development, tragedy — anything having to do with the second half of the phrase “musical theater” — won’t find it here.

Jane Coombs

A dream of a dress

In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, now at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, leads with a quote from Jesse Jackson: “America is... like a quilt — many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.” Odd, then, that framed above the first wall panel is a drab, blank-faced suggestion of an American flag constructed from just two rectangular pieces of faded denim. Created by Sterling Ruby as a mourning garment — a model huddles under a wearable version in the exhibition poster — “Veil Flag” (2020) sits awkwardly next to the bright patchwork skirts, dresses, trousers and jackets also on display in the first room. Yet it’s the right way to open a fashion exhibition that makes you think, not swoon.