| | | Oppositions by Mary Gaitskill review – wide-ranging, unsparing essays | | by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty Jan 2, 2022 | | From Nabokov to Talking Heads, these insightful and revealing pieces stubbornly reject groupthink In one of Mary Gaitskill’s best short stories, The Agonized Face, a female journalist watches a “feminist author” read at a literary festival. The author begins by complaining about her biographical note in the festival brochure, which, she feels, has played up her past experiences with prostitution and psychiatric wards to make her seem like “a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff”. But just after she has persuaded the audience of the unfairness of such a portrayal, the author reads a funny story aloud from her book, which leaves the journalist unimpressed. The story – about an encounter between a man and an older woman – is flimsy and provocative, where the complaint had been tender and serious. “She sprouted three heads,” the journalist writes, “and asked that we accept them all!” The feminist had evaded something important, according to the journalist, by changing gears so abruptly: “the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene.” Gaitskill’s characters are often unjustly perceived as kooky people doing unimaginable stuff, but her stories are neither silly nor obscene. In Secretary – later made into a treacly film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader – you can never quite tell how Debby feels about being abused and spanked by her male boss. Unlike in the movie, there is no blossoming relationship between boss and secretary, but might Debby be looking for dignity in the routine humiliation? In Oppositions, a new collection of Gaitskill’s essays, she asserts that the tragedy of the story is not so much that Debby is a victim, but that a “hunger for contact underlies her perversity and to some extent drives it”. It is a wordless yearning that contemporary feminist discourse now and again skips over in its quest to invert the male gaze and normalise female desire. And yet, as the journalist in The Agonized Face suggests, “sometimes you wish it could be that easy”. Continue reading... | | | | | Classical comeback: the pandemic proves the need to support musicians and orchestras | | by John Gilhooly Jan 2, 2022 | | Covid may have put an abrupt halt to cultural life but the response shows the sector is part of national recovery In March 2020, live classical music and much of cultural life worldwide came to an abrupt halt overnight. Since then, we have seen the gradual reopening of concert halls in all four nations of the UK, as organisers, orchestras and musicians struggle to recover a loss of income, talent and confidence on an unprecedented scale. As we enter 2022, it’s far from life as usual. Most institutions report that only around 65% of pre-pandemic capacity had been reached before the emergence of the Omicron variant. Undoubtedly, more government intervention is needed if the sector is not to be diminished further. Music is the soundtrack to our lives and classical musicians are major contributors to the UK’s reputation for cultural innovation and excellence. Continue reading... | | | | | Licorice Pizza – Paul Thomas Anderson's joyously nostalgic coming-of-age tale | | by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic Jan 2, 2022 | | Anderson crafts an offbeat love story that manages to be sweet, hilarious, absurd – and wholly believable There’s something propulsively intoxicating about the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. Watching Punch-Drunk Love left me in exactly the state described by the title; Inherent Vice demanded to be inhaled rather than watched; I wanted to wrap myself in the poisonous couture of Phantom Thread. Anderson’s latest takes its title from a hip record store (reportedly named after an Abbott and Costello gag), and appropriately enough the result spun me round like a record. This is heady stuff, an evocation of the San Fernando valley in the early 70s, as personally nostalgic as George Lucas’s American Graffiti, albeit with an insanely adventurous edge. Screen newcomer Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) is Gary Valentine, a high-schooler with a Brian Wilson haircut who’s also a child actor and go-getting entrepreneur. “Where are your parents while all this is happening?” asks Alana (musician and feature first-timer Alana Haim), the twentysomething Gary meets when she’s working as an assistant to the school photographer, and whom he declares to be “the girl I’m going to marry one day”, despite her insistence that “we are not boyfriend and girlfriend”. Continue reading... | | | | | Retrieved after decades: the painting supposedly 'bought' by the Nazis | | by Vanessa Thorpe Arts and media correspondent Jan 2, 2022 | | A new book recounts one woman’s struggle to find looted art – and then convince a major museum to give it back Fresh proof that the Nazis set up fake auctions and phoney paperwork to disguise their looting of art and valuable possessions has been uncovered by an amateur sleuth researching her own family mystery. French writer Pauline Baer de Perignon’s investigation has revealed the fate of a missing collection of art that included work by Monet, Renoir and Degas and also exposed the reluctance of Europe’s leading museums to accept evidence of the deceit. Continue reading... | | | | | Garbo by Robert Gottlieb review – distant darling of the silver screen | | by Peter Conrad Jan 2, 2022 | | The renowned editor wittily explores the appeal of the actor, whose ability to charm and mystify mesmerised admirers – until her abrupt retirement in the age of the ‘bombshell’ In more innocent or credulous days, the faithful sat in the dark to gaze at strange beings with detachable heads who were actually phantasms of light. Among the stars in this custom-made galaxy, the most alluring and yet the most distant was Greta Garbo, whose persona alternated between carnal heat and ascetic frost. After wickedly enticing her male victims in The Temptress, she redeemed herself as the dying courtesan in Camille; in Queen Christina, she was exalted by sacrifice and in a last mesmerising closeup all emotion blankly drained from her face as she renounced the throne and sailed into exile. Gradually this astral creature edged down to Earth. Publicists issued an excited proclamation when Garbo talked for the first time on screen in Anna Christie, even though she began by gruffly demanding a whisky in a waterfront bar. In Ninotchka, she made headlines all over again by contorting her alabaster features in a sudden fit of laughter. Continue reading... | | | | | The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest | | by Charles Kaiser Jan 2, 2022 | | Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague have produced an indispensable and alarming ground-level record of how Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election played out in precincts and ballot-counting centers in key states In their terrific new book, the veteran reporters Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague argue that the mob that invaded the Capitol in Washington almost exactly a year ago “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”. The “real insurrection” was the one “led by Trump and his coterie of sycophants” in Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. It “was only slightly better organized than the mob but considerably more calculated and dangerous”. Continue reading... | | | | | New year arts: Observer critics pick the culture to get us through to spring | | Jan 2, 2022 | | From live music to glass sculpture, game-changing performances to fitness podcasts… our writers on cultural treats to light up the months ahead Kathryn Hunter appears in The Chairs, Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist apocalypse drama, translated, adapted and directed by Omar Elerian at the Almeida in London from 5 February. One of the great reimaginings of the past decade, Martin Crimp’s version of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the fights are rap battles, returns with the incandescent James McAvoy; Jamie Lloyd’s fiery production is at London’s Harold Pinter from 3 February, before moving to Glasgow. At London’s Donmar Warehouse from 11 February, Kit Harington stars in Max Webster’s modern staging of Henry V, which sets out to investigate England’s relationship with Europe and asks if we get the leaders we deserve. Also in London, from 10 March at the Gielgud, Rafe Spall becomes Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel is directed by Bartlett Sher and designed by the mighty Miriam Buether. Susannah Clapp Continue reading... | | | | | |
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