Fleabag, Let Things Get Lost

Wonder, confusion, and why film needs more of it.

I want to talk about wonder in film. Wonder isn’t some starry-eyed luxury. It’s tantamount to messy, confused, vulnerable searching where all the possibilities of one’s world are up in the air, and one’s bearing is anxious. Wonder peeks out in mainstream film, but filmmakers should follow it and see ...
Read More
Placeholder

Blood for the Future

The Northern Ireland “Troubles” in Les Levine’s Resurrection

These events form part of the Holy Cross Dispute, a period of eight months of acute sectarian tension in Northern Ireland. During this time, Holy Cross Girls Primary School, a Catholic elementary school in a Protestant enclave of Ardoyne, north Belfast, was picketed by hundreds of loyalist Protestant protestors trying to stop ...
Read More
Placeholder

Silenus’ Cup, Drained by AI

A Review of The Dead Walk into a Bar

Set within an ‘orbital facility’ in an un-specified future, the film opens inside a cavernous hall. The scene carries a strange echo for visitors to Steyerl’s show: a musty provincial gallery, sepulchrally lit, clad in dark wood -- that is, much like the Armory, where the entire work was filmed. ...
Read More
Placeholder

True to the Paradox

An exhibition for the centennial of a contradiction

This essay was originally published on August 21 2019. To mark the centennial, The New School approached Anna Harsanyi and myself (we are both alumni of The New School) to curate an exhibition in the Sheila Johnson Design Center. For me, the task raised many questions, bringing me back to the ...
Read More
Placeholder

Twins, the Equinox Boycott, and “The Hunt”

Past Present Episode 193

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Some of the most popular social media content features identical twins. Natalia referred to this Smithsonian article on twin research, and to Yunte Huang’s book Inseparable.When Stephen Ross, CEO of Related Properties, held a lavish fundraiser for President Trump, members of portfolio properties Equinox and SoulCycle were enraged. Natalia referred ...
Read More
Placeholder

An Unexpected Concertmaster

How Shakespeare Influenced the Romantic Era

You thought Shakespeare was all about the language? Not according to the scholars who estimate there are over 20,000 Shakespeare-inspired pieces of classical music! During the Romantic Era, composers such as Johannes Brahms, Giuseppe Verdi, and Antonín Dvořák drew inspiration from tragedies like Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. They gravitated to ...
Read More
Placeholder

The Outcast State

Shakespeare’s Unlikely Connection to Black Subjectivity

Now that race is the hottest topic of discussion, Othello is everywhere, positioned as the Shakespeare on race. This past semester, while we were reading the play, there were no fewer than four different Othello adaptations nearby: Bill Rauch’s production at the American Reparatory Theater, Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol’s Othello in the Seraglio, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, and a ...
Read More
Placeholder

A Different Way of Reading

Samuel Beckett, Melanie Klein, and the Voices of Intuition

It's not that I'd never tried before. But something had to have happened, it seems, to make it possible to read the novel -- and that something appears to have been a period of depression. The reasons were complex -- to repeat someone else's phrase, a cocktail of circumstances -- and I’m not ...
Read More
Placeholder

Dynamic Symmetry: A Mathematical Structure in New School History

While Orozco’s murals now speak of the past, students at Parsons today continue to learn about the Modular sequence in architecture and other courses.

In his autobiography, José Clemente Orozco described his murals at the New School for Social Research as an opportunity to investigate the “geometric-aesthetic principles of the investigator Jay Hambidge.” Hambidge, an aspiring writer, was the inventor and proselytizer of a newly-popular compositional theory, Dynamic Symmetry. Orozco learned of Hambidge’s ideas through his ...
Read More
Dynamic Symmetry: A Mathematical Structure in New School History

Feelings-Positive and Glamour-Obsessed: An Interview with Ben Fama

The New School poet’s forthcoming collection, Deathwish, examines the alienation of post-Internet life.

Death interviews me about my apparel, asks who I’m wearing, who I’m looking forward to seeing tonight. Not having had voice lessons or PR coaching, my answers fall flat. —Ben Fama, “The Function of Fantasy in the Lacanian Real” Welcome to Ben Fama’s Deathwish, a poetry collection that catalogues a world where “evil ...
Read More
Feelings-Positive and Glamour-Obsessed: An Interview with Ben Fama

The Universal Memoir: An Interview with Nora Krug

The NBCC autobiography award winner on Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by critics themselves. MFA ...
Read More
The Universal Memoir: An Interview with Nora Krug