Sarah Nicole Prickett

• 

  film June 06, 2017

  Weirder Things

  “BLUE IS THE WRONG COLOR FOR ROSES,” says the crippled, disconsolate Laura in The Glass Menagerie (1944), my favorite Tennessee Williams play. “It’s right for you!” says Jim, her old high-school crush. They are about twenty-three years old and have been reunited in the one-sided hope that he’ll pick her out, pick her up, and carry her off. Once, all those years ago, she told him she was sick with pleurosis, which he misheard as “blue roses.” The mondegreen stuck. “The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of,” he says to her. “Because other

• 

  film June 01, 2017

  Wild Thing

  LAWS IN THE WORLD OF DAVID LYNCH are unnatural but do not lead to order, and things disordered lapse into “thingness.” This should be one of Lynch’s favorite words, lent to him in that book by Dennis Lim: “In his own speech—and in the speech patterns of his films, with their gnomic pronouncements and recurring mantras—the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound. To savor the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature.” Write down the “academic definition” of “Lynchian,” suggested and sent-up by David Foster Wallace in his notes from the set of Lost

• 

  film May 23, 2017

  Eternal Return

  EUCALYPTUS TREES, WEAKENED BY DROUGHT, are on their last legs all over Los Angeles. One fell and knocked out the power lines next to my friend’s house, where I am staying, in Eagle Rock, and we stood on the deck drinking Vinho Verde––delicious, like if wine were beer––watching the action. A fire truck loitered for an hour, produced no helpers, and left. Disruption made the street its own neighborhood. Homeowners came out wondering, hands synchronized on hips. One man retrieved his digital camera and tripod and took commemorative photos. Another ambled the length of his driveway twice an hour to

• 

  diary May 02, 2017

  Last Calle

  SOPHIE CALLE WAS SMOKING AND TEXTING on stone steps in a green velvet dress, which I wanted to touch. She said sure, so I felt up the hem. It was heavy, deluxe. I asked her where she got it, and instead of answering, she asked me why I liked it. Suddenly I heard myself talking about my childhood, my mother who sewed dresses, and the velvet dresses I always asked her to make me, even after I knew how much the material cost. I stopped, embarrassed. Was I telling a secret? But anyone could see I had been a child, and it was obvious green velvet would suit me. Calle opened a map on her phone and

• 

  diary April 18, 2016

  Whatever Works

  MORE NIGHTS THAN NOT THIS PAST WINTER, Amanda Bates, a bartender at Public in North Adams, Massachusetts, would see her favorite new customer, Alex Da Corte. He would walk in from the museum across the street, where he and his two assistants and a team of seven workers were installing his eight-room survey, “Free Roses,” and order a glass of sangiovese or a mezcal with ice, depending on his stress levels. By the time it got to be spring, she was pouring a fair amount of mezcal, but she never saw him drunk. She would ask him about work; he would complain, gently, about a lack of sleep or a supply

• 

  picks April 08, 2016

  Sojourner Truth Parsons

  Strawberry-flavored Dippin’ Dots, Sobranie Slims, Himalayan salt lamps, the ombré hem of Gwen Stefani’s wedding dress, the drunk tank at Santa Clara County, carnations on Mother’s Day, orchids, a love stone, Cam’ron in mink, Sissy Spacek as Pinky in 3 Women (1977), a Juicy Couture velour tracksuit, a Jem doll’s hair, Bazooka gum, an inflatable flamingo, Pucci lingerie from the 1960s, Wet n Wild 901B in a black plastic tube: These are the shadings of pink in Sojourner Truth Parsons’s new paintings that involve, variously, a Dalmatian, flowers, cigarettes, acrylic nails, and a temporary tattoo

• 

  picks March 11, 2016

  Berlinde De Bruyckere

  Berlinde De Bruyckere is an artist whose work has made me cry in public. It’s remarkable when art makes you cry, unlike when you cry at a movie or listening to music, since hot tears are fine in the dark, yet unerotic and, at best, often disgusting in a white space. De Bruyckere is a master manipulator who doesn’t care how you feel. There is no other explanation for the horses she shows dead and hog-tied, one at a time or three together, piled in a mahogany armoire like the victims of a massacre.

  Before you get to the great roan bodies in “No Life Lost,” you have to encounter them flayed out and

• 

  print December 2015

  The Year in Sex

  AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE gets bodied, the question on everybody’s tech vertical this year is: Should humans and robots have sex? The answer would seem to be no—obviously not. Thousands of years of earth’s history suggest that unless robots envy a life of permanent and unnecessary drama with a two-thirds chance of (incurable) herpes, they should stay far away from human flesh. Not even a sitting president or a movie star married to another movie star is safe from the ramifications of screwing a mortal. Sex with humans wrecked the home of the Greek gods and obliterated that other Olympus,

• 

  picks September 18, 2015

  Sue de Beer

  A major pleasure of reading is the stream of images that comes bidden into one’s head over the course of a book, produced by the exchange of one’s memory and the author’s imagination and occasionally syncing with, but always illuminating, the words. In Sue de Beer’s work since the early 2000s, we get to see—the way we don’t see our own—her personal image-streams on a wall, excellently crystallized into a series of lucid and fey film installations: Disappear Here, 2004, with a title from Bret Easton Ellis and a monologue from an untitled (and so far unreleased) novel by Alissa Bennett; Black Sun

• 

  diary August 28, 2015

  Search Party

  AT 6:37 AM on the taxi’s clock a week ago today, we went uptown to catch an off-hour of Agathe Snow’s Stamina. A twenty-four-hour video of a twenty-four-hour party in 2005, Stamina was being screened at another twenty-four-hour party, this one at the Guggenheim, with drink tickets and security guards and some parents. In one of the seven panels on screen a woman in a leotard danced, dedicated to the party shift no one wanted. In the rotunda of the museum, two male teens discombobulated themselves on the disco floor, having the most amazing of times, but in a few years they’ll know that isn’t

• 

  picks August 04, 2015

  Andrea Crespo

  In Andrea Crespo’s company, more than two is far from a crowd. The artist’s second solo show their first in New York is themed by “multiple systems”—the state of being one or two or six in a single body—but it’s less an expedition into relatively unmarked territory than it is a slumber fort for those who’ve never really been at home. Four microfiber shades, drawn with hydra-headed creatures, lead-colored flecks, and/or pale motifs such as the Celexa logo, palliate the sun in the windows. On the floor, a small machine (polymist: echolalic transponder, 2015) tries to sift remembering from pain

• 

  film June 19, 2015

  Cheers (Drink To That)

  IN MIA HANSEN-LØVE’S EDEN (2014), a story based on her brother Sven’s life as a DJ, communication often gets lost in “the mix of machines and voices” that, as another DJ says early on, make garage and house music special. The year is 1992; the city is Paris. A teenage Paul (the very decent Félix de Givry) grows up in the night. Entranced by the flavor of club jam that will come to be known as “French Touch,” Paul all but lives in basements and warehouses, returning to his family’s apartment only to sleep. He dreams of doing something like Daft Punk, so he and his friend Stan (Hugo Conzelmann)