Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan was a comprehensive retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum, curated by Joel Smith, the institution’s groundbreaking first curator of photography. Michals’ photography epitomizes the conceptualist method—narrative and performed, illusionistic and dreamlike.
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A letter from Mrs. Smith closes the collection, like a Greek chorus commenting on the tragedy. “I am glad you agree with me that we must not grieve for our friend,” she writes to Porter’s friend Jean Howard after he died in 1964, “for he will never have to suffer again. This is the end of an Era. Three great and good men have left the Waldorf now: General MacArthur, Cole Porter, and Herbert Hoover, this year.”
Only in America.
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Playing in two parts that run to nearly seven hours, and the fact that it explores the impact of AIDS on the lives of gay men in America, The Inheritance inevitably invites comparison with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
MoreTHIS ISSUE’S THEME refers to sexual orientations that are not generally covered in this magazine, whose style manual recommends the use of “LGBT,” but the phrase could also extend…More
Beyond “Goat Head,” Jaime is Howard’s most forceful expression of her politics, and it could have only been recorded at this point in American history.
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IN THE YEARS before the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was “very much a work in progress”: most of its roads were muddy mires, neighborhoods were far apart by horseback, and much of the city sat in a genuine swamp to which most Congressmen had to travel from far away. In Bosom Friends, Balcerski conveys the roughness of the city in you-are-there detail …
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PARIS, 7 A.M. is a quietly striking novel that imagines poet Elizabeth Bishop’s first trip to Europe in 1937.
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WHEN we first encounter the title character of Nicole Dennis-Benn’s intergenerational family saga, Patsy, she’s standing in line outside the U.S. embassy in Jamaica, dreaming of America. The year is 1998.
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CHANTAL AKERMAN’S memoir My Mother Laughs is similar to her films: layered, defying time and space, concerned with the quotidian. Her work is woman-centered, often lesbian-centered, and focused on describing the position of women in society, including how the oppressive forces of patriarchy inflict both physical and emotional trauma on women.
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Reading Love Unknown is like touring Bishop’s word-ridden, complex, and stirring worlds. With an atlas and a book of her poems close by, it delivers a highly satisfying ride.
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