TNI Blogger Announcement #5: Imp Kerr
We begin day two of blogger announcements with a creative genius who has had as much of a hand as anyone is creating the new TNI. Imp Kerr is the enigmatic designer/creator/blogger/prankster behind the new shelton wet/dry and the fake-turned-real American Apparel ad campaigns, as well as the amazing wall street casinos graphic series. Hamilton Nolan at Gawker once said of her: “I don’t think it’s exaggerating the case to call this fake postermaker an educator.”
Imp not only designed our new home, but she will continue as the TNI Creative Director on the site and the electronic magazine. But we also talked her into a new blog called Shines Like Gold that will include her current links-image style blogging and all sorts of expression we hesitate to use our puny words to describe.
TNI Blogger Announcement #4: Evan Calder Williams
Our final announcement for today is Evan Calder Williams, who will be starting a new blog at TNI called The Noonday Shadow. Evan recently closed down his long-running blog Socialism and/or Barbarism to much counter-public sorrow, and we’re happy to cheer up the sewer-dwelling tentacle beings among our readers. In addition to his blog, Evan has published two books: Combined and Uneven Apocalypse and Roman Letters and writes often for Mute, Film Quarterly, and us. To date, he is the only member of our blog squad to be profiled in Italian Vogue. We all shudder at the very thought of what he’ll do with his blog’s margin notes feature.
TNI Blogger Announcement #3: Christine Baumgarthuber
We thought we could stop at two today, but the drive is too great. We’re proud to announce our third blogger, Christine Baumgarthuber and her blog The Austerity Kitchen.
You’ve probably seen Austerity Kitchen at TNI before, and we’re ecstatic it’s going to have its own home at the new site, logo and all. Maybe you recognize Christine from her interview at Bon Appetit or Lapham’s Quarterly. Whether you’ve been lucky enough to see her writing yet, you’ll be seeing plenty starting next week, including the sharpest historical look at food culture on the web, and recipes for the broke among us.
TNI Blogger Announcement #2: Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
We just couldn’t wait, as soon as we got started we couldn’t stop. The second announced member of the TNI blog squad is Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, with her blog The Beheld.
You may recognize Autumn’s excellent work from TNI before, particularly her recent piece on erotic capital. Or maybe you’ve seen her in higher-profile places like The Hairpin, Jezebel, or Feministe. When it comes to beauty, the body, labor, social performance, and more, Autumn is one of the most sought-after writers out there and we’re thrilled to have her on board.
Stay tuned, we ain’t nearly done yet.
TNI Blogger Announcement #1: Aaron Bady
In the lead up to the launch of the new New Inquiry next Monday, we’ll be announcing our outstanding blogging team. And we couldn’t be more proud to start with Aaron Bady and his blog Zunguzungu.
Aaron is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley in African Literature and an active participant in and chronicler of Occupy Oakland. He drew applause from all corners of the internet for his coverage of the Wikileaks releases and Aaron’s constant first-hand reports from the occupation are among the best out there.
His blog starts at TNI on Monday, until then you can follow Aaron on Twitter here or read his blog at its current home here. And stay tuned, we have six more show-stopping bloggers to come.
Working Beauty
The disappearing work-life divide and the feminization of abstract labor in Sleeping Beauty
By Malcolm Harris
In the opening scene of Julia Leigh’s debut film Sleeping Beauty, Lucy (Emily Browning), our beautiful college-student protagonist, serves as a medical test subject. She leans her head back as the doctor slowly threads a tube down her throat, then fills a balloon in her chest with air while she holds the tube in place. Lucy cooperates excellently and leaves with an envelope of money and a smile.
Her still, submissive choking and gagging lend the scene a heavy erotic charge, an allusion to the sex work the viewer may already know is to come from reviews and trailers. In this first scene, Lucy is already selling her body; the distinction between this and prostitution is a symbolic technicality.
What’s most off-putting in this scene is Lucy’s ability to hold a smile on her face throughout the ordeal. If Lucy’s remaining still while holding the tube down her airway as her body jerks around isn’t work, then I don’t know what is.
Though she usually wears the uniform of an Anthropologie model and often seems to be doing not much at all — there are a few scenes of her cleaning up a coffee shop after working a closing shift and others of her biding her time in the copy room of the office where she’s an assistant — almost all of what we see Lucy do in the film is work. We know she’s working, but she hardly looks like a worker.
But what does a worker look like? Even the most traditional economic models, as well as revolutionary counter-currents, had to deal with changes over time in the character of what they called labor.
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Consultancy Rock
The solace of sociological distance in the music of Rush
by Rob Horning
Certain rock groups persist as their own subgenre. The venerable Canadian band Rush is one of them, maintaining a legion of loyalists willing to stick with them as they release album after blandly titled album — Power Windows, Presto, Test for Echo — that defiantly sell in the millions despite little mainstream notice or media excitement. Like the devotees of other cult bands (Phish, Dave Matthews Band, etc.), Rush fans seem to believe that ostentatious musicianship excuses indistinguishable songs — that tracks from, say, Rush’s 1993 grunge disc Counterparts are somehow over the heads of ordinary music fans rather than simply being inaccessibly boring.
But maybe the Rush cult is right. Though the band’s music often belatedly reflects rock trends, Rush seems to deliberately exist outside the hype cycle and the desperation it fosters in listeners who try to keep up with it or, worse, direct it. Bands and songs can easily become phonemes in a musical-taste language meant to express cultural capital. Unreflexive music consumers — if such people can even exist in a Spotify universe — may not be invested in the status games that often enshroud pop music, but their listening habits are still shaped by the zeitgeist, which constrains what is possible and what gets circulated. The appeal of Rush, however, is that being a Rush fan seems to exempt one from such constraints and anxieties, from feeling required to validate tastes by advertising them. No matter how counterintuitive or ironic things become, throwing on a Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to “YYZ” isn’t likely to impress anyone.
How did Rush get there, beyond irony, beyond cool and uncool?
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Il Salvataggio Selvaggio
A letter to Micky Arison, CEO of Carnival Cruiselines, and Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises
By Evan Calder Williams
Dear Micky Arison,
I was sorry to hear about the Costa Concordia. What a big fuck-up, a große Verhau, as Kluge would put it. A sad one to boot.
I saw that you tweeted that “our thoughts and prayers are with the passengers and crew” so I can tell that you’ve been thinking about it a lot.
The concern in the media has been, above all, with those passengers and crew living, dead, and unconfirmed, as it well should be. It seems a fair coverage, although I wish the Brits would stop gendering the wrecked boat: as a BBC correspondent put it, “because although she sits behind me looking fairly solid there, she’s not quite as stable as she looks. She’s sitting on a ledge and if she was to move not too far, there’s a danger that she could slide into very much deeper water. The authorities just couldn’t take the risk of having divers and other rescue workers on board if she was just that unstable.” The sad fact of a scuttled behemoth capsized just offshore, guts bursting with marine-life-killing fuel, may have certain elements that are funny. But it is not hysterical, at least in the sense of a late Victorian misogynist pathology.
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Dance With the Devil
The systematic genius of Krasznahorkai’s Satantango
by Dan Bevacqua
Twenty-seven years after it was first published in his native Hungary, László Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, Satantango, has materialized in America. Published by New Directions, it is the third of Krasznahorkai’s works to be translated into English by George Szirtes, Hungarian-born poet and winner of, among other honors, the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry for his book Reel. (Szirtes’ work deserves more than a nod; it is a terribly skilled and patient man who can translate, as he did with Krasznahorkai’s novel War and War, a seven-page-long sentence motored by madness without missing a single rhythm, beat, or complex plot point.)
Set in an unnamed Hungarian village, Satantango is the story of an almost forgotten group of people, forgotten to themselves, to one another, and to the world, who wait — fighting, and dancing, and drinking, and dreaming, and trying to get it on all the while — for a pair of saviors to rescue them from the misery of their lives. Imagine if, instead of waiting on Godot, Vladimir and Estragon were themselves a reckless, absent, and know-it-all God? How hard up and bad off would the poor bastards waiting for them have to be?
Pretty hard up and bad off, as it turns out. The citizens that populate Satantango are some of the most miserable characters in literature. They make Thomas Bernhard’s monologists (to whom Satantango’s narrative point of view eventually owes a great debt) seem as sentimental as they truly are. By this reviewer’s count, there are only two moments of actual kindness in the book. In one, a bar owner cleans the mud off a drunk cripple. In the other, a boy teaches his mentally retarded sister the best way to commit suicide. (She thinks of it as a type of favor.)
In Satantango, sex is a meaningless act, except as a way to make money or cure boredom. Teenage girls turn tricks in an abandoned factory. A certain Mrs. Schmidt (her beauty, in a wonderful way, matched only by her girth) sleeps with every man in town but, so it would seem, her husband. Furthermore, everyone despises everyone — and with good reason. Every single character in Satantango, in their own way, is trying to cheat, betray, wound, destroy, or escape the other. All this drama is set inside a rain-pelted, fog-swallowed, dark and crumbling village, where, as the image of the once impregnable, now decayed estate at its edge suggests, the words comrade and serf are all but interchangeable, and as equally dehumanizing and ridiculous.
While the ghosts of feudalism and a dying communism linger and affect the characters in Satantango, Krasznahorkai is not merely interested in how the Hungarian psyche suffered under failed sociopolitical systems. He is more interested in the illness of the human individual inside all systems, and the visions we experience and delusions we create in order to “attempt to forget despair.” Krasznahorkai’s mastery of structure, character, and language is matched by his ability to simultaneously weave all three together; readers can feel themselves physiologically immersed in the world of the book, itself a finely orchestrated system.
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The Future Is Female
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, women are nowhere and everywhere
by Samantha Hinds
A tea-soaked palette floods recession London. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we see the khaki styles and filing boxes of an empire packing itself away. Director Tomas Alfredson, known best for his gentle adolescent vampire tale (Let the Right One In, 2008), stays orthodox to neither John le Carré’s text nor the sonorous lurch of the film’s TV predecessor. Alfredson instead stacks rapid visual clues, beginning with a title sequence of offbeat jazz to underpin chain-smoking functionaries. With its singsong suspense among the classified stacks, Tinker has a bureaucratic bebop. Alfredson, a Swede, in an admitted second-language evasion, storyboards with the comic-book cuts of a kid who ran straight past the Oxford Classics to Tin Tin.
In Tinker, the Cold War strikes soothing, senile hues: mint, rose, brown. Le Carré’s MI6, dubbed “the Circus,” stands in brick and imperial ivory, its ponds marred by dead leaves. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, born 1971, resurrects 1973 through a dusky haze of cigarette smoke and locker-room steam. Despite a lively pace, weary tones pervade. Wiretappers huddle under red-veined ecru maps. Even bleak Soviet torture is conducted in a pastel room where a bun-haired monitor crisply folds her newspaper. As Václav Havel said when asked to recall the 1970s on the other side of the Curtain, “The first half of the decade is a single, shapeless fog.”
Tinker’s plot turns on the search for a KGB mole, but le Carré’s story really invokes dying glory — specifically, the duty and defeat of a Blitz-battered old guard under amoral new management. Gary Oldman’s George Smiley, the cast-off spy brought back to investigate a possible sleeper agent, is accordingly reduced and ruminative. We see him don oversize frames that highlight under-eye bags and jowls. He is a disheveled pensioner on an empty bed whose emotional range peaks at silent gagging.
Compare this to television’s Smiley: an arch Alec Guinness, playing the entire scale of upper-crust talk with a percussive lilt. Directed by John Irvin, the 1979 BBC serialization of Tinker suited only the ascetic. Viewers had to commit to six claustrophobic hours of calculated old-man maneuvers in thickly wallpapered rooms. The matryoshka doll of the series’ title sequence, nesting and revealing, indicated its nature: cramped but analytically gratifying in the extreme. The late Ian Richardson did “dandy in aspic” Bill Haydon best here: haughty, sniveling, and slim. (Colin Firth’s version in the new film swaggers out of turn.) BBC screenwriter Arthur Hopcraft ensured the old Smiley had a tense and inquisitive agency. Oldman — working with the redacted language of writers Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan — seems stunned silent by comparison, if touchingly so. He matches Guinness’ musicality only when describing an encounter with Soviet arch-nemesis Karla. Both actors convey Smiley’s dignity, but only Guinness gave him carriage.
The genius of the Smiley character is in his sublimation. Though under acute suspicion, Smiley is no Condor on the run. Nor, thankfully, is he an avenging “codger with cudgel,” avoiding spy actor Michael Caine’s reactionary turn to raging Harry Brown (2009). Smiley is too discreet for blood — at least among his own. Forgiven his vocation, Smiley would be the witness archetype at its moral best. A custodian of unspoken codes forged in wartime, spent Smiley watches former British knights-errant be bought off by the highest bidder. Tinker thus marks the point when the rational neoliberal approach to intelligence collection ousted the honor-bound gentlemanly spy culture of the Second World War.
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The New Inquiry is proud to announce that Reanimation Library, the project of our contributor and friend Andrew Beccone, will be temporarily relocated to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the Print/Out exhibition, part of Print Studio from January 23 until March 9.
Join us for the Library’s opening reception on Thursday, February 2, 6:00-9:00p.m. The reception is free and open to the public. Reserve tickets here.
Accounting for Beauty
(Image via)
Erotic capital doesn’t set us free. It yokes women’s careers to the whims of men
by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
Before I actually read Erotic Capital, sociologist Catherine Hakim’s treatise on how women should flex their powers of sexual allure in the workplace, I wanted to like it. As Hakim presents it, erotic capital is a combination of physical assets (beauty, style) and know-how (liveliness, charisma, social skills) that can make those around you want to help you succeed.
Who can argue with that? I cheer a vivacious, charming acquaintance who thrives in her career because she strives to make her workplace convivial; I recall repeatedly going out of my way to help out a strikingly handsome colleague who always smiled at me in the hallways, even though I wasn’t particularly attracted to him. Even as a “radical feminist” — the sort of person Hakim blames for limiting women’s sexual power in the workplace — I’ve used erotic capital. When I was teaching English as a second language, I suspected that being a well-groomed, friendly, lively American woman helped me keep students’ attention.
In fact, it was because of my feminism that I wanted to like Erotic Capital: Whether from nature or nurture, women have traditionally excelled at “soft skills” like taking the emotional temperature of others, listening, adjusting one’s behavior to any given situation, and cooperating. These all happen to be skills that, until fairly recently, have been undercompensated in the workplace. In Hakim’s book I anticipated a deftly written argument that would reclaim the value of women’s work so that maybe we’d eventually start paying people in the professions that make use of those skills — say, teaching and nursing — their true value.
That’s the book I wanted to read. The book I actually read was more like this: Men supposedly have higher sex drives than women, creating a “male sex deficit,” which means men are always in a state of wanting more of what women supply. (Hakim has some convoluted theories about gay men and lesbians, but the book assumes people with actual power are heterosexual.) So women who are willing to address that deficit, by either having actual sex with men suffering from it or presenting themselves in an enchanting manner to exploit it, have erotic capital that can be traded for other forms of capital.
Erotic capital has many guises: from “trophy wives” whose skilled self-presentation becomes a part of a man’s public persona, to men or women who style themselves in such a way as to garner attention at their workplace, to women with otherwise limited means who sell their erotic capacity (whether forthrightly, as with sex workers and performers, or more covertly, as with sales jobs) to establish themselves. It’s “sell yourself” meets “sex sells.” What’s most surprising about all this is that Hakim seems to think she’s saying something new.
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