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Good morning, and welcome again to The Daily’s Sunday tradition version, during which one Atlantic author reveals what’s conserving them entertained.
Today’s particular visitor is the Atlantic deputy editor Jane Yong Kim, who oversees our Culture, Family, and Books sections. She’s keen on Laura Dern’s dino-dodging style in Jurassic Park, the late English environmentalist Roger Deakin’s paean to swimming outdoor, and the “wildly imaginative” video artwork of Wong Ping.
But first, listed here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Culture Survey
The final museum or gallery present that I liked: The final artwork reveals I bear in mind feeling actually impressed by have been side-by-side Wong Ping displays from 2021, one on the New Museum, and the opposite at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. A self-taught animator primarily based in Hong Kong, Wong makes wildly imaginative movies: colourful landscapes that use surrealism to convey oddball, engrossing, typically disturbing tales concerning the loneliness and disappointments of recent life. (One video, An Emo Nose, depicts a person who discovers his nostril is delicate to “negative energy”; in an try and preserve it completely happy, he dispenses with polarizing actions equivalent to speaking politics and focuses on cheerier ones equivalent to consuming ice cream and having intercourse.) The reward of Wong’s work is the juxtaposition of cartoonish early-internet aesthetics with intricate, gripping themes.
Best novel I’ve lately learn, and the most effective work of nonfiction: I simply completed, and liked, Lisa Hsiao Chen’s debut novel, Activities of Daily Living. It’s a hanging meditation on time and the issues we fill our lives with—the tug-of-war between jobs and fervour tasks, productiveness and curiosity, minutes spent and minutes gained. A lady named Alice is preoccupied, in her off-work hours, with Tehching Hsieh, the sensible efficiency artist identified for his prolonged “endurance” items within the Eighties. Hsieh’s explorations of time have been psychologically and bodily demanding: In one, he tied himself to a different artist for a 12 months with a chunk of rope; in one other, he punched a time card each hour for a 12 months; in yet one more, he spent a 12 months inside a cage. Alice’s analysis into Hsieh begins seeping into facets of her each day existence—interactions together with her household, her actions by way of town. The novel is a fantastic, refined learn; it tenderly builds an argument for seeing our lives extra clearly.
On the nonfiction entrance, I’ve been making my method by way of Waterlog, a beautiful e-book by the environmentalist Roger Deakin that takes readers on a swimming journey by way of the lakes, rivers, and tarns of Britain. Deakin, who died in 2006, was an incredible author, capable of render his adventures with immediacy, readability, and wit. Following together with him as he goes seeking little-known waterways and outdated open-air swimming swimming pools is an actual delight. [Related: Swimming in the wild will change you.]
My favourite blockbuster and favourite artwork film: I’ll reply this one with film theaters in thoughts.
Jurassic Park is without doubt one of the first true blockbusters I bear in mind seeing in a theater, and that place of honor colours my relationship with it. The mix of excessive stress and pure camp—the rampant hubris, the captive goat, the raptors on the hunt (these tapping claws!), Laura Dern’s knotted shirt and khaki shorts—is pitch excellent. And the expertise of watching it in a row stuffed with different terrified children is an indelible reminiscence.
The art-house model of this reminiscence, for me, is watching Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue. It’s really a collection of one-hour movies initially made for Polish tv. Each movie takes free inspiration from one of many Ten Commandments, following characters who all stay in the identical neighborhood in Eighties Warsaw as they cope with the ethical messiness of their lives. I first noticed The Decalogue in highschool, at an indie theater near dwelling that occurred to be enjoying it, and was transfixed by its moody, understated profundity. Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy is arguably his better-known collection, however this earlier group of movies about human frailty has at all times been my favourite. [Related: I just wanted to watch people get eaten by dinosaurs.]
Something I lately rewatched, reread, or in any other case revisited: I lately reread No Longer Human, a cult novel by the Japanese author Osamu Dazai. It’s simply as arresting as I bear in mind it being once I first learn it greater than 15 years in the past. Dazai, who died by suicide in 1948, at 38, wrote discerningly, typically scathingly, about disenchantment. His younger male protagonist is alienated from society, spending a lot of his time noticing all the methods during which the world round him appears faux or unusual or irritating. Dazai’s prose type is spare, and his observations about life in Thirties Japan are startlingly acidic. [Related: Of Women: A story]
A portray, sculpture, or different piece of visible artwork that I cherish: The Visitors, by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, charmed me once I first noticed it and has caught with me since. The idea is deceptively easy: Across 9 screens, viewers see footage of the artist and a bunch of his musician buddies performing collectively from totally different rooms in an enormous, run-down home in upstate New York. Kjartansson himself performs the guitar from inside a bath stuffed with soapy water; different folks, perched on beds or by home windows, sing and play cellos, accordions, the piano.
Kjartansson’s 2012 work, which is presently on view on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, hit a nerve in the course of the pandemic, for apparent causes. The solitude of the performers is noticeable; the movies draw consideration to the visible stillness in every scene. In flip, the collective sound the performers produce—individually however in unison—is a strong reminder of music’s communal potential and the brand new methods we’re at all times studying to be collectively. It’s an art work to spend time with in particular person, one which rewards slowing down and lingering.
Read previous editions of the Culture Survey with Clint Smith, John Hendrickson, Gal Beckerman, Kate Lindsay, Xochitl Gonzalez, Spencer Kornhaber, Jenisha Watts, David French, Shirley Li, David Sims, Lenika Cruz, Jordan Calhoun, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert.
The Week Ahead
- The sixty fifth Annual Grammy Awards (broadcasts stay on CBS tonight)
- Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to Ok-Pop, a sweeping examine of human creativity by the Harvard professor Martin Puchner (hits bookstores Tuesday)
- Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third and last installment of the director Steven Soderbergh’s male-stripper collection starring Channing Tatum (in theaters Friday)
Essay
The Band That Best Captures the Sound of the ’70s
By Kevin Dettmar
No decade is dominated by a single style of widespread music, however the Nineteen Seventies was arguably extra motley than most. What is the sound of the ’70s? Is it … people rock? (Neil Young’s Harvest turned 50 final 12 months.) Progressive rock? (Prog’s nadir, Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, was launched in 1973 and promptly crashed beneath its personal weight.) How about disco? Punk? Post-punk? New wave? Reggae? Rap? Yes, sure, sure, sure, sure, and sure. And what can we do with Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, one of many 10 best-selling albums of the last decade? Is bombast a style?
But in case you have been to drill down by way of the last decade and pull up a core pattern of ’70s pop, it could come up Blondie—and would look, the truth is, very very like the band’s eight-disc field set, Against the Odds: 1974–1982, which is nominated for the Best Historical Album Award at this weekend’s Grammys. As the tutorial and artist Kembrew McLeod has written, Blondie was a mediator between the experimental music and artwork scene of downtown New York City and the bigger pop viewers. But extra essentially, I’d argue, the group was additionally a conduit and popularizer of all kinds of latest rock and pop sounds.
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Photo Album
Check out snaps from a figure-skating championship in Finland, a rugby event in Afghanistan, the Magh Mela pageant in India, and extra in our images of the week.