A Brie Grows in Brooklyn

Art Fair Real Talk With David Everitt Howe

ArtReview sent me and David Everitt Howe to review the Armory Fair in New York, which includes stalls by 200 galleries from over 30 countries. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun writing anything in my entire life. David and I are like the Statler and Waldorf of the art world. Check out what we came up with here:

http://artreview.com/home/the_armory_show_new_york/

Not published — probably for good reason — was initial impressions after walking around the fair with our friend Conrad Ventur. Conrad is the most famous person with whom I text, and he was a great third wheel. If you’re looking for more insight about things like the furniture and what people were wearing and how much champagne cost at the VIP opening, read on below.

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Parade’s End: A Review

It’s a good thing people who lived through World War I are almost all dead, because if I have to read, hear, watch or think about another Great War drama, I’m going to fucking off myself. 

That might be the most offensive thing I’ve ever written. I don’t wish anyone dead except for myself, really. 

But so much of our cultural discourse in the 20th century was dominated, perhaps necessarily, by the two World Wars — in art, in literature, in critical theory, in theater, even (or perhaps especially) in fucking films. Even at the end of the 20th century, motherfuckers like Steven Spielberg could not stop making pictures about that shit. I used to be pretty into it, but now I’m have it up to HERE. (Imagine me marking a space in the middle of my forehead with my hand, and then yelling at a chid.)

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Gone Girl: Here’s To Wishing For More Bloodbaths, A Review

A large part of the appeal of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is the big reveal that happens half way through the book. What you think is an ordinary sort of Scott Peterson story turns into a portrait of a psychopath. You realize that the narrator has been unreliable, and that you’ve been duped. Or so I assume that’s why fans of the story really love the book. They feel like they’ve been taken on a ride, and because of it, have really gotten their money’s worth.

I know that “Gone Girl,” without even looking at bestseller lists, was one of the most popular novels of 2012. I can tell because even in 2013, I saw no less than five other women reading it on the subway, one of them who was sitting right next to me. “I started yesterday,” she said, holding up the book so I could see she was 3/4 finished. It’s like the fucking “50 Shades of Gray” of thrillers, only better written and without any anal licking (and let me tell you, it suffers from the lack). It’s also extremely addictive — I flew through all 419 pages in less than 3 days.

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Side Effects: A Review

I’m feeling depressed — what else is new? — so it seems relevant to write about “Side Effects,” Soderbergh’s new — and apparently, gasp!, last — film. I would have put the gasp in em dashes, but I think that’s grammatically incorrect? Anyway, fuck you.

The film, ostensibly, is about a depressed young woman — Rooney Mara — whose husband —”Meatball Face” Channing Tatum — has just been released from prison after serving a four year term for insider trading. I have a terrible desire to just fill up this page with em dashes — also, has anyone ever told you depression heightens insecurity? That’s why I keep on talking about the fucking em dashes, because I’m not sure how to use them. Like you give a shit. Do you give a shit? Fuck you. 

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Life Is But A Dream: Deleted Scenes

I clearly watched Beyonce’s “Life is But A Dream” film this weekend. It’s basically a 90 minute commercial for the Beyonce industry — which currently only includes albums and tours, but no doubt in the future will encompass fashion lines and lifestyle brands. It’s kind of embarrassing for HBO that they got bamboozled into running advertising for free — unless Beyonce did, in fact, pay them to air the “documentary.”

If you’d like to get to know the real Beyonce, you won’t learn anything new from the final cut of the film. The good news is that I was given access to some deleted clips* that provide a little more intel on Queen Bey, which I describe in detail below.

*Not!

1. In the opening scene, Beyonce says to the camera in regards to her life, “I feel so…fragile,” and immediately follows it with, “I feel so…hungry.” The end part is cut because according to her multi-million dollar deal with Pepsi, she can no longer acknowledge that she feels anything but satiated. Also, she’s been told by her handlers that she can fight childhood obesity if she herself stops eating.

2. Beyonce sits on a white couch, sans make-up, talking to an invisible person sitting behind the camera. A second camera pans out from the scene, and the person turns out to be Beyonce’s illegal Guatemalan housekeeper, who doesn’t speak English but is still a very good listener.

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On Money by Martin Amis and Why I Think You’re An Alcoholic

I’m not really sure how to begin this review, or why I’m even writing it. My general impression of “Money” by Martin Amis, the entire time I was reading it, was that I disliked it. But I finished it anyway, and on occasion, even chose it over watching a television program. Which, if you know me at all, says a lot.

“Money” is about a British man named John Self who has made a pile of cash directing controversial television commercials in the late 70s and early 80s. Flush with material possessions and bored out of his mind, he decides to make a feature length film with a producer named Fielding Goodney, who is based out of New York. There is a lot of meta stuff that goes on as the narrative develops — for example, one of the characters whom John Self frequently encounters is named Martin Amis. Martin Amis a bookish author who keeps to himself and ends up re-writing the screenplay for John Self’s movie when the original, written by a lithe lesbian named Doris Arthur, turns out to be something of a joke. Martin Amis is also the name of the actual author of the book, and John Self is either the self hidden in him, or the self hidden inside of us. Or something stupid like that.

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Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright: A Review

I’m positive that I have nothing interesting to say about “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief” by Lawrence Wright, but I’m going to write a review because I have nothing else to do. Please god (by which I mean you), give me a suggestion of a fucking television show or movie to watch, or a novel to read, because I am going to lose my eyesight writing things on this computer.

The book, as you know, is about L. Ron Hubbard and the rise of Scientology. If you saw the movie “The Master” last year, you probably most of the story of L. Ron, even though PT Anderson won’t admit it’s about him. The film, I think, is far more intellectual; it delves into nuances of human behavior which the book barely skims. I can’t tell that if Wright, by writing an extremely digestible text, sacrificed depth and philosophizing. Because the best way to describe the text is that it reads a little bit like a Vanity Fair article, which means like a long-form tabloid piece.

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Zero Dark Thirty: A Review

I’m tired, and frustrated, and want to write something brilliant about Zero Dark Thirty, but probably won’t be able to. Sentences are coming out with misplaced modifiers, or some shit, and I can’t connect subjects with adjectives. I think. I don’t know anything about grammar—I’m a youngster! Mostly I just feel intimidated by the subject matter, so I don’t know where to begin. Worst introductory paragraph ever. 

The reason why I want to write something brilliant is because I think that Kathryn Bigelow, who directed the film, is absolutely brilliant. Much (not just, because she’s better) like me, she received a graduate degree in critical from Columbia in the 1970s, only hers was in film, not art history. Unlike me, she also went to the extremely prestigious Whitney ISP program, which is where all of the sick homies and illiterati (by which I mean to say intellectuals, but the word eluded me until I finished the sentence) go to become legitimate academic art world stars.

What I admire about Bigelow is not just her brain however—or her impossibly lithe gams—but the fact that she uses it not to make average (and even intelligent) people feel stupid, like so many people with advanced theory degrees, but to digest really complex, heady ideas so that they are accessible to a wide swath of the population. 

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Les Miserables: A Personal History, Reviewed

I’m going to start this review by saying that if you weren’t a fan of Les Miserables as a child, then going to see the movie version is a fate worse than death, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. 

Because not only is Les Miserables long and somewhat incoherent, it’s also a fucking musical. Which means that rather than saying, for example, “I slept with a man who left me with a child, and look at me now, I’m a fucking prostitute,” it must be sung in long, winding passages that build and build and build until they crescendo in heart swells that leave you in raptures. Because without the heart swells, no one would go see musicals, because they are fucking boring.

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Django Unchained: A Movie Review

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about this week is nihilism, a juvenile preoccupation, no doubt. I’m thinking about it mostly in terms of gun control. If we controlled guns, would we really make the world a better place? Because obviously, human nature is such that violence has, and always will, be part of our nature. If it’s not guns, then it’s knives, and if not knives, then it’s fists, and if not fists, then teeth, and if not teeth, then nuclear bombs. Or something like that. This is not a fleshed out idea.

(I’ve got to write this review quickly, because my sister and I are going to see Les Miserable in an hour.)

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Silver Linings Playbook: A Review

There was a point today when I knew how I was going to start this post, but I lost the idea to a bowl of chili, so instead, I’m going to launch right into a synopsis.

Silver Linings Playbook is a romantic comedy starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solatano, a bi-polar high school teacher with tendencies towards psychosis and violence, and the impossibly hot Jennifer Lawrence plays a slut with an unspecified personality disorder. (Then again, aren’t all personality disorders unspecified? Ba dum dum ching. You’d only get that if you were my brother Stuprendan.)

It opens with Pat in a state mental institution where he has been interred, you later learn, for almost beating a fellow teacher at his school to death. The teacher fucking deserved it, because he was eating out Pat’s wife Nikki’s sweet little vajayjay in the shower, and Pat found them. Maybe Nikki needed her sweet vajayjay eaten out though, you say to yourself as the audience member, because Pat was having paranoid delusions and acting like a complete psychopath.

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Seven Psychopaths, Argo and The Life of Pi: Three Reviews

I was reading the critic’s picks for 2012 in New York Magazine last night, and realized that despite being an art critic myself (fledgling), the only choices I identified with were in movies and television. Go figure. By identified with I mean, “knew what they were referencing,” but it’s been a very long week, and I am very fatigued.

You can read the list here. But before you listen to the real critics, here’s some little blurbs from me about movies I’ve seen in the past few weeks, but haven’t had a chance to write about on this blog. 

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Anna Karenina: A Review

I have to write everything so quickly these days, that nothing that comes out of me is very good. But I’ve been meaning to write about Anna Karenina since I saw it last week, and want to get it out before the harpy that is the first season of The Good Wife traps me with its siren song, emitted from my Apple TV. 

I’ve read not Anna Karenina, but rather an abridged version of Anna Karenina that my mother got me from the swap bin at the library. I assume that the abridged version must have cut out all of the nonsense about good religious men and peasants, or else I never would have gotten through it. Still, it was many years ago I read it, and I had forgotten what Anna Karenina’s fate was meant to be.

On second thought, I also saw the 1935 version of Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo, and remember many scenes, but not the final one. For some reason, my mind must have blocked out Anna’s fate, either for its own posterity, or because, like most romantics, I refuse to believe in anything but happy endings.

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Liz & Dick: A Review

I just wrote an entire post on Liz & Dick that got deleted by fucking Tumblr, which doesn’t autosave, and is maybe the worst platform ever. Now I’m fucked for time. This review will be brief, and Tumblr should get their shit together. 

To begin again, last night, I watched Liz & Dick, the Elizabeth Taylor biopic on Lifetime, which stars Lindsay Lohan.

If you are a media whore like me, you know that it got terrible reviews. But I must ask the people harping about it: “What the fuck did you expect, it’s a fucking Lifetime movie.” I’m not a connoisseur of the medium—the only other Lifetime movie I’ve watched in recent memory was “Will & Kate,” which might as well have been enacted by cardboard cutouts—but I certainly did not expect it to be even remotely decent. 

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