Robert Brustein, who just passed away at the age of 96, was one of the titans of American theater in the 20th century: producer, critic, mentor, public intellectual, playwright and adaptor, educator. I studied with him only from afar, but I learned something very important from him — to assess artists and institutions by the body of their work, not on the basis of hits and flops. I interviewed him a few times for major publications (the New York Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre) and made many pilgrimages to Boston to see shows at the American Repertory Theater. I felt respected by him, which meant a lot to me as a young journalist and theater critic. I just posted the text from my 1987 American Theatre cover story — check it out here.
Krystal Orwig invited me to be a guest at her Must Love Memoir monthly reading series devoted to personal stories. I will be reading from my latest book, Daddy Lover God, along with Felice Cohen and Minda Honey. The reading happens Tuesday, October 10, at 7:30 pm at Jake’s Dilemma, a sports bar on the Upper West Side with a cozy event room in the basement. Come say hello! Free admission. Good selection of beers!
When [Daniel] Lopatin [who records as Oneohtrix Point Never] was still living in Boston, and working at a textbook-publishing company, he started making what he called “eccojams”—essentially, chopped-and-screwed remixes of treacly ballads, paired with videos that featured strange repeating imagery. The publishing gig was stultifying. “I was nothing,” he said when I asked what the job entailed. “I was a piece of furniture. I could just feel the life draining out of me.” Lopatin began uploading the videos to YouTube, and in 2010 he put out a hundred copies of “Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1” on cassette. “B4,” the most beloved of the eccojams, features a mesmeric sample of “The Lady in Red,” an awful song recorded by Chris de Burgh in 1986. On its own, de Burgh’s voice has a weird, cadaverous quality; when Lopatin loops an isolated bit from the chorus (“There’s nobody here!”) nineteen times in a little more than two minutes, it becomes a kind of surreal Mayday call, lonesome and eternal. The video features a reiterative graphic—a pulsing stretch of rainbow-colored highway—from Laser Grand Prix, an eighties arcade game. Watching it made me think of ancient Gregorian chants, and the droning, pentatonic laments of northern Greece, and certain Indian ragas, and, eventually, any sort of music that makes your vision blur, or gets the mind soft enough to see God.
Both the song and the video were assembled entirely from found material. Yet the release of “Eccojams” was also a Big Bang: it was the dawn of vaporwave, a genre of electronic music obsessed with aestheticizing relics of the recent past. Attempting to define vaporwave is sort of humiliating: like most Web-based phenomena, it deploys an idiosyncratic grammar that remains mostly inscrutable to anyone who has recently gone outside. The visuals tend to involve 3-D graphics, screen savers, dolphins, dead malls, VHS tapes, corporate training videos, bad graphic design, and Greco-Roman statues. The primary instruments are synthesizers and YouTube. There’s a kind of aching pathos to some of it. If you’ve ever wandered around a flea market and felt a peculiar pang after coming across, say, an inkjet printer from 2008, an old cable box, or an unopened Sony MiniDisc player, you know what I mean: the accelerated obsolescence of commercial technology can feel like a kind of memento mori. Nothing is relevant forever.
Lopatin is credited as one of vaporwave’s earliest practitioners; he is probably its inventor. The genre had an oddball moment in the sun in 2012, when Rihanna performed her hit “Diamonds” on “Saturday Night Live” before a projection of vaporwave-ish graphics: a weird neon peace sign, a ceramic bust, a checkerboard, a spinning globe, fractals, palm trees. The fact that “Diamonds”—a pop ballad—is not a vaporwave song, in any sense, doesn’t matter. Boundaries, systems, context: these are also relics of the past.
–Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, October 2, 2023
The fine novelist Jennifer Egan spent a year or so hanging out with unhoused New Yorkers and the people diligently working to create and maintain solutions to chronic poverty and homelessness. The result is an extraordinary piece of reporting published in this week’s New Yorker. She focuses particularly on one supportive housing project in Brooklyn that has shown considerable success in managing the physical, medical, and mental-health needs of its tenants. Egan’s compassionate, clear, human attention is exemplary. One of several people she tracks over time is a vivacious woman named Ileasha whose rough life (including losing a foot in a subway train accident) landed her in a wheelchair but who was excited to be photographed for the article and then disappeared. Months later, Egan learns she died of an overdose the day before the scheduled photo shoot.
Key passage: “In a broader sense, I know what happened to Iishea Stone: a luminous and extraordinary woman was failed repeatedly—by her family’s pathologies, by poverty, and by a social safety net that couldn’t seem to catch her. Had Iishea grown up with the advantages I had, she might have accomplished anything. Instead, she suffered acutely and slipped away so invisibly that, thus far, the Kelly does not know what was done with her body. How many Americans are we losing this way? How can we—the wealthiest nation in human history—tolerate those losses? The fact that we can, and do, despite knowing that it’s wrong, is what is meant by the moral cost of homelessness.”
The article, “From Homelessness to a Room of One’s Own,” is long, beautifully written, compelling, sad, at times enraging, upsetting and inspiring. I so appreciated the love and intelligence that went into producing it. You can read the entire piece online here.
Circumstances conspired to allow me to trek to Malvern, PA, to see the People’s Light production of Sam Shepard’s True West, directed by Mei Ann Teo with an all-Asian cast and crew. Read my full review online here at CultureVulture.net.
another eye opens 