This is whipstitch, a monthly record of what I’ve read, watched, & thought about.
At the opening of Kevin McNamee-Tweed’s show at Dutton Gallery two weeks ago, the poet Bradley King spoke of the artist’s aversion to masterpieces and his disinterest in the monumental. Since then, I’ve been thinking about literary and artistic matter that could be considered the opposite. An atomized approach to creation: splinters, parings, morsels, sketchings, everything detached from the whole. A paragraph instead of a page. A short story instead of a novel. All the glitter strobing on the sidewalk outside my apartment: pieces that, in their brevity, can be caught by the wind and dispersed to us.
For June’s whipstitch, I’ve chosen things that reassemble fragments without ever fully uniting them. There’s KMT’s room full of tiny ceramics, a collection of short stories I read recently, a film that follows a similar structure, and a solo performance by a musician who uses “microtonal gestures,” the last of which is somewhat beyond my comprehension but still feels somewhat on-theme.
KMT’s work is presented in two registers. Stoneware slabs hang on the wall, each roughly the size of a palm, with warped and misshapen edges. Below, handmade wooden shelves hold cluttered arrangements of curios: miniature vessels, wooden blocks, fragments of paper, like keepsakes one might find scattered in the home. Their diminutive scale invites closer investigation. To trail along the peripheries of the space feels like reading a sentence left-to-right, top-to-bottom.
The exhibition’s lexical experience is no accident, for it’s been titled after the pilcrow, a symbol that marks the beginning of a new paragraph. While the artist’s range of references to the written word—and the types who consume it—remains ironic and mischievous, it seems they have become more complex in his latest show. Many of the quaint vignettes in his “pictorial ceramic” pieces hold images of clay vessels, too: scattered about interiors, or filling up the space of the tile with a pot which itself contains a narrative scene. The visual content has been folded neatly into container after container, forming intimate microcosms in which KMT’s characteristic subject matter of cartoonish figures and witty symbolism become a sort of marginalia. Yet the physical presence of vessels in the exhibition space widens the scope, as we stand in a scene that resembles those of the ceramics. The experience of “reading” his work involves the natural caesura of a picture book, the organic pauses we take while consuming information. His clever system of dispersion allows his work to mimic the paragraph as a “stray, passing epiphany,” or a truncated and visually discrete thought that carries weight by virtue of its brevity and isolation. Such is the purity of a paragraph.
She stopped in front of the best painting in the room. Huge and blue and hard to look at up close. Helen's best painting, which contained three of her worst. I could remember the third, the one below the surface, but I had no idea what the first and the second ones looked like—perhaps I'd never seen them. Helen said she herself often forgot, and there was no way to find out. The layers couldn't be peeled back, the way wallpaper can be. I imagined chipping away at it, flaking off colors in pieces that might or might not jog our memory. Mine, hers.
Eventually we'd glimpse the canvas. A little bit of not-quite white, like hitting bone. But I don't think we'd want to see that, I think we'd stop once we'd seen that.
In CS’s stories, plainly-named characters move through deceptively pedestrian settings and events. The author maintains a detailed photorealism, a palette of grays and pale yellows with an occasional prick of red: a picked scab, a sunburn, a bitten lip. They are nevertheless devastating, especially deeper into the collection—once CS’s pattern of obsession begins to emerge. There are wives and mothers and grandmothers and cousins, there are people laid out in strange relation to one another, and most of all indistinct young women adrift in cities. These vagrants take odd jobs on craigslist, become obsessed with celebrities or long-lost stepbrothers, lie in bed and sweat through their sheets and descend into an understated type of insanity. In every story, pockets of isolation, phantoms of secrets and things unsaid—lives that are private or doubled, knowledge that has been omitted or tampered with, revealed in a gradual peeling-back motion. Beneath layers of miscellaneous information there are faint truths in sentences that land like a swift hit. I’d like to think CS has a Modernist streak in her writing, if a self-conscious one. She doesn’t write in flashy fragments or with disjointed narration, but she captures all of the same elusive parts of reality: dreams of searching for lost objects, long conversations that lead nowhere, the feeling of encountering many unknown faces in a crowd. Most of all, the literary metaphor as a machine that broke down on us long ago, only spitting out the indecipherable.
Camilo Ángeles is an experimental flutist and composer from Peru, currently living in Mexico City, who came to perform in Brooklyn on a startingly cold evening in May. His was the first act of a three-part performance in the back bar at Sisters—making for a sort of calibration, or perhaps an entry point, for an evening of feisty tumult. This will be no easy listening: his presence on the stage in a knee-length yellow coat demands our sincerest attention, an initiatory hush in the room as he approaches the microphone. Then, a composition that reminds me of a crushed windpipe. CA harnesses the percussive nature of breath, opening and closing spaces against his instruments (flute and bass flute) with enormous sound spectrums, shaped by the use of his voice and other acoustic alterations, as well as electronic processing and his unique approach to electroacoustic synthesis. Every rapid pluck and push of his mouth is amplified in harshness, slipping along the dissonant feedback of the sound system as he seeks out inhuman vocal rasps between beats. It’s punk, it’s death metal, it’s ancestral music, it’s absolutely none of the above: it descends through genres and eviscerates them into vapor and dust. What we’re hearing seems to demand everything of the senses, maneuvering between dark and bright, drawing out the tension between registers. His music fills the room with an incessant energy, a serpentine urgency as the instrument twists, turns, and thrashes about, as if fighting to live. We can’t tear our ears away. The eruptive performance seems as if it has been laid out meticulously, yet every new capability of CA’s sound cannot be anticipated. We’re in the wind tunnel, we’re in the black hole, we’re in the portal to hell, and this is what it sounds like. (Listen for yourself on Instagram and Bandcamp).
Adapted from the short stories of Maile Meloy, Kelly Reichart’s Certain Women sets its sights on the small towns of Montana and the wintry expanses between. A lawyer watches a stubborn client finally accept the fact that he doesn’t have a case, but only once she has a male colleague tell him the same words that she’s been attempting to for eight months. That simple okay becomes her object of desire. For a wife, it’s a pile of sandstone in the ruins of her neighbor’s yard, which she maneuvers a frail old man into selling her so she can add an “authentic” touch to the house she wants to build with her husband. Then, a rancher drives across the state to see a teacher she’s fallen in love with, once the teacher quits the job because she’s found the commute to class too arduous. KR has threaded together these three self-contained narratives, one after the other, before returning to each briefly in the conclusion. At first, it’s difficult to pinpoint what these vignettes have in common—what about the heroines make them certain women?
In many ways, they are everywomen. They navigate their trajectories by rote, circumscribed in the mundane confines of their jobs and obligations. Their sense of being “stuck” feels at odds with their wide-open surroundings, but rather than having any of them act out in ways that would somehow puncture their limitations, the film bears passive witness to the ways their desires evade them: acceptance, support, simple human contact. The stories waver between having your way but not getting your way, giving careful attention to how characters respond to their small hindrances and achievements, and what it reveals in them. Challenged by the medium of this rather sparse, unscored film, KR exchanges the interior information offered by the source text for simple atmosphere: the repetition of pale light, white fields, and barren trees. Some of the most arresting shots place characters’ faces behind windows, in which the reflected landscape forms a veil, half-concealing their expressions. Somehow, we still get that quintessential guilt or longing.
SHOUTS
⌿International Art English, by Alix Rule and David Levine for Triple Canopy, isan incredibly well-researched and eloquent mockery of how people have been writing about the arts for the past few decades. For better or worse, I imagine this will be one of my most influential reads of the year. Yes, it caught me red-handed, but I’m starting to feel more enlightened than punished.
⌿ The Dead Silence of Goods: Annie Ernaux and the Superstore, by Adrienne Raphael for Paris Review. Most of the writing on AE since her Nobel has broadly focused on her oeuvre’s impact, so I loved how this review hones in on just one of my favorite motifs in the author’s writing (and in general).
⌿ Bookends, by Charlotte Muth for Insecure Tea. I can’t help but plug a dear friend, and the one-year mark of her substack deserves a shout from the rooftops! This letter, lyrical and festive, left me starstruck. It was an honor to be accidentally called by her name the other week. ;-)
& OTHER MURMURS
All the illogical habits and purchases I’m influencing on this month:
⌿ Advice to past selves. Typically we write notes to our future selves: we bury a time capsule for the end of a decade, or mail a postcard for the end of the summer. But why not keep up the other half of the correspondence? When you’re feeling a little less green than usual, it’s good to reflect on how far you’ve come—plus it can double as back-pocket advice to anyone in your younger self’s shoes. Pairs well with nostalgia-dosing.
⌿ Acqua Panna. When I first met C, I used to refer to Essentia (his preferred bodega buy) as “hot boy water.” My flirting skills have much improved, but even years after moving to New York, I am still stunned by the sheer number of options everywhere, always so beautifully lit behind refrigerator doors. I think I’m the most delighted whenever I manage to get my hands on a bottle of AP. I think it’s just the branding for m: European countryside summer boy water? Pairs well with a few days of tap water refills (to draw out the vibe for as long as possible).
⌿ Bar crawls. They can readily double as an excellent tour of a city’s drinking culture, fodder for ethnographic research on the young and wild populous. Reprise: Charlotte’s a genius for making this her birthday activity. I’d readily advocate for festive experiences to be more involved and drawn-out like this. There’s plenty of walking and talking with everyone tagging along, plus strength in numbers for any psycho-male encounters along the way. My advice: bring cash, start with liquor, pace yourself.
⌿ A big clip-on ribbon bow. I mean, duh, an irresistible summer accessory. Pairs well with picnics and a good pal to ensure whether or not it’s evenly fixed onto the back of your head, not upside-down, etc.
⌿ Botanical gardens. It’s the season of going outside for the sake of “getting a little sun,” and the gardens are just like going to the park, but on crack. If you have a little cash it’s a total treat: pick a free day, go in the morning, and wander around directionless for hours. Maybe I’m baby, but I loved sniffing everything and reading the placards out loud in different voices. Pairs well with SPF.
⌿ Faux rain noise. I’ve been using white noise on and off to fall asleep for years, and I’ve found a gentle loop on a 45min sleep timer does the trick to stave off bad dreams these days. Now, paired with allergy meds? Best sleep of my life.
⌿ Irish coffee. Particularly from Dead Rabbit—it’s so perfect that it’s the only reason to be in Fidi, really. Pairs well with taking the ferry from Brooklyn on a cool morning.
⌿ Lip stain. I think I’ve been subconsciously looking for lip stain my entire life, and the darker shade from this pack plus a little bit of gloss makes it look like you’ve been eating cherries. Pairs well with fake (or real) freckles for that Strawberry Shortcake Doll look.
⌿ Spontaneous phone calls. I have a dear friend who is a true master of the impulse ring. I haven’t seen Ben in well over a year, and when he calls it’s never to complain, just to gift me with the familiar sound of his voice. Every time I pick up I’m delighted to hear what he’s been reading, watching, listening to, and thinking about too, and I especially love getting to vividly envision his new life in Chicago. Certainly beats the what’s-new-with-you text. Pairs well with the resolution to stay in touch.
⌿ Watches that don’t work. A nice little metaphor for the wrist—I got mine at a flea market last week. Pairs well with ironic gestures and always being late.
DESIRE OF THE WEEK: GALL
When spite and venom come naturally, it’s a good life lesson to know where to put them, or at least how to handle them with grace. For most of my time on earth, I’ve thought this meant pretending that they simply don’t exist. Brave-face-grin-and-bear-it. I’m a nice girl! I still believe in patience as a form of maturity, and I’ve tried my best not to let the city corrupt my temper with its manifold inconveniences, local harsh inflections, and everyday skirmishes between strangers on the street. I’d like to think I’ve made self-de-escalation into an art.
The truth is that I’m not actually that good at it. Recently, I’ve found myself bubbling over and often embarrassing myself. I’m not sure if I’ll ever manage to intimidate, or really make myself a worthy opponent in any true conflict, but I’ve realized recently what I need now is gall. Nerve. Chutzpah. Balls. Welcome the anger, acknowledge it, and see it through, just for the sake of becoming more comfortable with its inevitable appearance. I want to understand that part of myself better, the more uncomfortable flipside of the chill woman costume. Maybe I can save the Zen for my sixties.
All illustrations are courtesy of Anna Lustberg—see more of her work on her website and Instagram!
For more of these reading/recommendation columns every month, subscribe for free. Longer personal essays and cultural studies are also available for $5/month.
