The moment I finished reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be I started searching for Margaux Williamson’s paintings online. The book, which calls itself “A Novel From Life,” tracks Heti’s adventures among the young bohemians of Toronto. It’s self-conscious literary tone and explicit descriptions of her love life have earned the young writer some notoriety, and also comparisons to Lena Dunham. I actually think Heti describes artistic ambition and physical love quite powerfully. But the real subject of the book is female friendship, and how a strong one can sustain one emotionally and intellectually. At the heart of the book is Heti’s relationship with her best friend Margaux Williamson, which is challenged as their identities swerve too close to one another during a trip to Miami, and then recovered when they’re both back home and able to identify the very particular ways each supports and inspires the other.

Heti’s language is light and she describes things by brushing over them. The memoir, though it covers one year chronologically, has a porous quality, as if it’s a mass of memories captured at just that moment before they settle into a proper novel (from life). Williamson’s paintings are, necessarily, concrete. But there’s a similar hovering quality in her hand. There’s also a wonderful dissonance in the way she locates figures wthin space. The people she paints are often at odds, both spatially and dramatically, with their surroundings, as if they’re trapped inside the wrong world. Do Williamson’s paintings illustrate Heti’s book? No, but they give voice to the same kind of searching, unsettled spirit. Expressed so precisely by these two artists, this condition might be a sign of the times.

The Weeds by Margaux Williamson

October 11, 2012 by Nalina Moses

My taste in television is lamentably lowbrow. So I favored comedian Louis CK’s older show, Lucky Louie, over his new one, Louie, that’s been so highly acclaimed. The older show is a dimmer, grittier version of a standard network sitcom, like Good Times with a white family. I found the new series pretentious formally, filled with too many artfully composed frames, meaningful silences, and dramatic close-ups. Each time I watched I wanted to say to Louis CK, actor/writer/director/editor, You’re a comedian, so just concentrate on being funny. Nonetheless I kept watching, encouraged by the occasionally outright hilarious bits like Blueberries.

And then, this season, came the gorgeous surprise of David Lynch guest starring as a network television executive who guides Louie through an important audition. Lynch is playing an exaggerated version of himself, a show business old-timer with a quivering bouffant, flat western accent, and off-kilter timing, and he looks like he’s simply reading (and shouting) his lines off cue cards. But his presence is both indelible and satirical; you can’t turn away. This titanic character (as well as the three-episode story arc it’s part of) tips the tone of the goings-on from comedy to something a little bit deeper. And, in the director’s presence, the show’s visual design becomes charged with Lynchian meaning. It is, finally, believable that the entire series unfolds from Louie’s specific, sometimes strange, point of view. The face of his boy-manager looks like that of a carnival freak. Three hooks on the back of his dressing room door shimmer with menace. The doorbell in his apartment sounds like it’s ringing from outer space. It all makes Louie’s dithering, ordinary-guy cluelessness enormously touching. It’s hard for sitcoms that are trying to do something fresh strike the right visual and emotional tone. (Watch how The Mindy Project is struggling right now.) Louie nailed it.

October 10, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The funniest dance I’ve ever seen has got to be the one in Bring it On when former high school cheerleader-princess Campbell performs as the basketball team mascot – a leprechaun – at the inner city high school she’s been abruptly transferred to. She does so winningly, shaking her rump around in a furry green jacket, high-waisted plaid trousers, and a gigantic grinning leprechaun mask. The dance is great fun because you can, right through the costume, sense the good will of the character (and also the actress, Taylor Lauderman), and because it begins to reclaim the tiresome ethnic stereotype of the leprechaun.

In our sophisticated, post-racial age, there are still a lot of these little green fellows running around. There’s the one on the Lucky Charms box, the ones that preside over the Notre Dame sports teams and the Boston Celtics, and the whole lot of them that comes out of hiding just before St. Patrick’s Day. Perhaps, because people of Irish descent don’t see to be too vocal about it, it’s all good fun. But the little boxing leprechaun that the law firm Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald (F&F) use in their logo is something particularly awful. It’s meant to suggest that F&F lawyers are, like all Irish people, pugnacious and relentless. One reason it bothers me so much is because it rubs up against my own just-as-dumb belief that Irish people are dreamy and literary. F&F are a major New York City subway car advertiser, so on a slow, crowded, commute, I often end up face to face with one of their ads, tinted green and adorned with leprechauns. Who would want to retain a lawyer from a firm with a mascot, especially one like this?

October 08, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Seeing the Antonio Lopez show at The Suzanne Geiss Company in SoHo is like stepping back into the city in the early 80’s. More accurately, it’s like stepping into the fantasy of that place I had as a high school student in suburban Connecticut, one that I cobbled together from issues of Details and Interview. In this world, I believed, people hung out at CBGB’s and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, wore asymmetrical Japanese clothing, and survived on coke and champagne. One gallery wall at Geiss is covered with Polaroid portraits of the Lopez’ glamorous lady friends including Grace Jones, Paloma Picasso and Grace Coddington, women who weren’t natural beauties but brittle, self-styled divas. The gallery itself has been painted a dazzling white and decorated with lush potted plants and a neon light, like the interior of contemporary Richard Meier house.

I’d always thought of Lopez as a fashion world character, but this exhibit shows what a skilled and versatile illustrator he was. He handled a broad range of materials comfortably: watercolors, pencil, pastel, ink, photography and collage. And he rendered with a vivid, fluid hand, one that captured details of garments faithfully while also charging the entire image with a seductive, kinetic energy. His finest work is soaked in fantasy. There’s a lovely, lyrical pencil drawing of a naked woman sitting with her hands across her lap while antlers grow out of her head. Lopez’ imagination perfectly served the pulsating, eccentric energy of the time.

Illustration by Antonio Lopez from the New York Times Magazine, 1966

October 05, 2012 by Nalina Moses