Skullphone, Clear Channel Digital Billboard, Los Angeles, California, 2008, copyright Curtis Kulig.

JR, 28 Millimeters, Women Are Heroes, Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2008, courtesy JR.

Paolo Buggiani, Minotaur, Brooklyn Bridge, NYC, 1980

Filippo Minelli, FACEBOOK, Bamako, Mali, 2008, courtesy Filippo Minelli

Nick Walker, Mona Lisa, London, England, 2007, courtesy Nick Walker

Joey Krebs the Phantom Street Artist, Los Angeles, California, 1993, copyright Anthony Friedkin

Thundercut, Chinatown Walker, New York City, 2007, courtesy Thundercut

ZEVS, Liquidated McDonald’s, Paris, France, 2005, courtesy ZEVS

Harald Naegeli, Death Series, Cologne, Germany, 1981, copyright Hubert Maessen.

All images courtesy TASCHEN.

The post The Last Outlaw Art Form? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Lawrence Bender is a film producer well-known for his long collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, dating back to “Reservoir Dogs“ and continuing to “Inglorious Basterds“. But Bender’s work on “An Inconvenient Truth” brought him offers to make more documentaries on a similar theme-“The Inconvenient Truth of Blank,” he joked. His latest effort, “Countdown to Zero“, which Zócalo and KCRW screened at the Arclight Hollywood, takes a look at the history and present-day danger of nuclear weapons. Below, Bender answers our In the Green Room Q&A.

Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick?

A. Sugar.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?

A. Food.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. With my son, at gymnastics.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. Skydive.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. Yes.

Q. What surprises you most about your life today?

A. The joy that I get out of spending time with my son, and the extraordinary people that I get to spend time with through my work.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. A garbage man.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?

A. Into outer space.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?

A. President of the United States.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. My house.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. Gandhi.

The post Lawrence Bender appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942
by Olivier Philipponat and Patrick Lienhardt

–Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib

The novelist Irene Nemirovsky did not merely live through the early 20th century. Her life was a consequence of its cataclysms. Growing up in Ukraine in a privileged family, she came of age as an exile in France because of the Russian Revolution. Driven out of France after the German invasion, she died at Auschwitz in 1942. Nemirovsky’s incomplete novel series Suite Française, in which she aimed to show life in France under Nazi occupation, bears witness to this storied, varied life. And in a new biography, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky, French writers Olivier Philipponat and Parick Lienhardt spotlight the drama, at once public and private.

Beginning in Kiev, Ukraine, the biographers follow Nemirovsky’s highs and lows, first from the perspective of a wealthy, cosmopolitan Russian banking family (shopping in Paris, carnival in Nice), and then from that of an émigré fleeing persecution – a fortified house in Moscow, a sparse Finnish border town, the shocking splendor of Stockholm, and finally Paris again. The city is colorful, jubilant after the war, a refuge for exiles, where “you might hear the popular cry ‘Izvoshchik’ normally used to hail one of the three thousand Russian taxi drivers in the capital.”

It is in Paris that Nemirovsky becomes a literary sensation, conveying, as the critic Robert Brassilach put it, “the vast Russian melancholy in a form that is French.” In Paris, where her father dies after frittering away his fortune, Nemirovsky marries, raises her children, and becomes the primary breadwinner of her household. And finally, it is Paris that Nemirovsky flees after the Nazis take the city – only to be arrested, separated from her family, and eventually sent to Auschwitz.

Through meticulous research into Nermirovsky’s journals, letters and drafts, which surfaced in 2005, Philipponat and Lienhardt have succeeded in fleshing out this enigmatic artist’s life and persona. Nemirovsky was a disciplined writer who took her vocation seriously, paying the bills with short stories and using her novels to explore broad social themes and in-depth characterization. Her most celebrated work is Suite Française, which she planned as a series of five historical novels about the very history unfolding around her. She was killed before she could complete this feat of social observation, leaving only two novels and a bare outline for a third.

One of the great delights of this biography is the scrupulousness with which the biographers trace the links between Nemirovsky’s life and her fiction. While the autobiographical elements in David Golder – in which a self-made Russian-Jewish banker ends his life in ruin and exile – are explicit, it takes a literary detective to connect the dots between the Basque countryside where Nemirovsky spent her summers and the beach in Le Maltendu where a society woman falls in love with a penniless worker.

Throughout the book, Philipponat and Lienhardt also confront the allegation that Nemirovsky’s writings contained anti-Semitic elements – her characters are often interpreted as caricatures of the Jewish bourgeoisie. The biographers provide valuable context by tracing different themes in Nemirovsky’s writings on a timeline. For instance, Nemirovsky’s complicated relationship with her mother, in her own terms, her “exquisite hatred” for her mother, transferred itself into much of her early autobiographical fiction. But draft notes for a late-period short story, “Fraternite” show that Nemirovsky struggled to depict “that race that had not dropped their guard knowing that the roof belonged to them, that their house belonged to them, like a French peasant, but that everything could be taken back.”

A biographer’s job is a precarious balancing act – between describing the world that the subject lives in, and describing the subject against the backdrop of that world. Too often, Nemirovsky’s biographers err on the side of privileging her subjectivity. We see her mother and her marriage and France through Nemirovsky’s eyes. It is almost as if Nemirovsky’s “exquisite hatred” for her mother transferred itself to the biographers: her mother is referred to variously as a “fickle and contemptuous woman” and “‘as lustful and mendacious as she was venal’. Surely the facts of Nemirovsky’s life and the fiction she wrote are eloquent enough without such commentary. And yet, this is a fine flaw for a biography. To see Irene Nemirovsky’s life through her eyes is a gift in itself for readers who have been tantalized by too little, too late.

Further Reading: Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky and Irene Nemirovsky: Her Life And Works by Jonathan Weiss

Shahnaz Habib is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.

*Photo courtesy Pedro Simoes.

The post A Writer’s Life, Defined and Ended by War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Salomón Huerta started painting for a practical reason. “There were three sisters born before me, and I was the first boy. But once my brother and my little sister came along, I realized I needed to do something to get attention,” Huerta said. Below, Huerta, whose work has appeared at the Whitney Biennial, the Gagosian Gallery, and LACMA, answers our In The Green Room Q&A.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. I used to go to yoga but I hurt my wrist, so, probably in front of my computer.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. I wish that I had gone to New York after graduating from art school.

Q. What music have you listened to today?

A. On Pandora, I typed in Massive Attack, then I get all the other songs that go along with it.

Q. When do you feel most creative?

A. When I’m in a relationship.

Q. Who is your favorite fictional character?

A. Neo from “The Matrix.“

Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles?

A. Everything is nearby – the mountains, the beach, the desert – and you can drive there.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. A policeman.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?

A. I want to come back as a painting.

Q. Whose talent would you like to have?

A. The mixed martial arts fighters.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. My juicer.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most want to meet for dinner?

A. Francis Bacon.

To read about Huerta’s talk, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

The post Salomón Huerta appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

David Pagel, an art critic and associate professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University, grew up in Wisconsin before heading to California for college, and to the East Coast for graduate school. “But I beat a hasty retreat right back to California, because it’s such a fantastic place to be,” he said. Below, Pagel takes our In The Green Room Q&A.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. At home playing with my kids.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. Nothing, actually. I’ll try anything once.

Q. What music have you listened to today?

A. Absolutely nothing. I’m a silence person. I like to listen to the wind blowing into the car or, when I’m riding my bike, the sounds of the street.

Q. When do you feel most creative?

A. In the early morning. I love to get up early and write, before I’ve talked to anyone, before anyone else’s words are in my head, and have that emptiness, that silence. The mornings are great for producing things and afternoons are great for editing things.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. Purple.

Q. Who is your favorite fictional character?

A. Slothrop from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Is that sufficiently nerdy?

Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles?

A. I love how you can feel like you’re discovering things. There are so many different micro-communities and micro-places. There’s so much private public space.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. A race car driver, then a doctor, then a psychiatrist, and then an art critic, believe it or not.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?

A. I have really fine bicycles. I have a Pinarello Dogma made of magnesium, a Dario Pegoretti made of scandium, and a bike I had as a graduate student 26 years ago that I just got restored.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?

A. A philanthropist.

Q. Whose talent would you like to have?

A. Da Vinci’s would satisfy me.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. It would be a fight between two of my bicycles. I think the magnesium one would win.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. John F. Kennedy. I think he’d be fun.

To read about Pagel’s interview with Salomon Huerta, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

The post David Pagel appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Charles Bukowski lived and wrote all over Los Angeles. He devoted a short piece, a June 1974 installment of his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column in the L.A. Free Press, to the hunt for home. He recalls his moves from the famed (and recently landmarked) DeLongre Avenue court, to a house with a girlfriend, to a “modern apartment,” and finally to Hollywood and Western, where he felt “in love with the world again.” Below, the newspaper column in full, pulled from a new collection featuring his unpublished or long unseen work, Charles Bukowski: Absence of the Hero, edited by David Stephen Calonne.

To find the proper place to write, that’s most important; the rent should be reasonable, the walls thick, the landlord indifferent, and the tenants depraved, penurious, alcoholic, and lower middle-class. With the advent of the high-rise apartments, small courts, with their own private entranceways, have more and more vanished, and the wonderful characters that once infested these places have vanished along with them.

I lived for eight years on a front court on DeLongpre Avenue, and the poetry and the stories flourished. I’d sit at the front window typing, peering through excessive brush onto the street; I’d be surrounded by beer bottles and listening to classical music on the radio, sitting in my shorts, barefooted, my fat beer belly dangling. I was surrounded by rays and shadows and sounds, and I made sounds.

My landlord was a drunk, my landlady was a drunk, they’d come down and get me at night…. “Stop that silly typing, you son of a bitch, come on down and get drunk.” And I’d go. The beer was free, the cigarettes were free, they fed me; they liked me, we talked until 3 or 4 in the morning. The next day they’d knock on the door and leave a bag of something: tomatoes or pears or apples or oranges, mostly it was tomatoes. Or often she’d come with a warm meal – beef stew with biscuits and green onions; fried chicken with gravy and mashed potatoes, and bean salad with cornbread. They’d knock, listen for my voice, then run off. He was 60, she was 58. I put out their garbage cans every Wednesday, eight or 10 cans gathered from the courts and the apartments in back. The alcoholic next to me fell out of bed at 4 each morning; there was an ATD case in one of the apartments in back; 14 Puerto Ricans lived in one of the center courts, men, women, and children, they never made a sound and slept on the rug next to each other.

Mad people came to visit me – Nazis, anarchists, painters, musicians, fools, geniuses, and bad writers. They all imparted their ideas to me thinking that I would understand. Some nights I would look around and there would be from eight to 14 people sitting about the rug, and I only knew two or three of them. Sometimes I would go into a rage and throw them all out; other times I just forgot it all. Nobody ever stole from me except one who professed to be my friend and was always fingering my bookcase, slipping first editions and rare items under his shirt. The police raided continually but only took me in once or twice, yes, it was twice. Once they came bearing a shotgun, but I told them I was a writer and they left. Yes, it was a good place to live and to write.

Then love came and I moved out and into this house with this lady. She was good to me and it worked well, I liked her two children; there was space and shadow, a crazy dog, and a large backyard, a jungle of a backyard with bamboo and squirrels and walnut trees, wild rosebushes, fig trees, lush plants. I wrote well there – many love poems and love stories; I had not written too many of those. I walked about and it felt as if the sun was inside of me; I was finally warm, and things seemed humorous, gleeful, easy; I felt no guilt about my feelings. Yet, that finally went bad as those things do go bad. One or both begin to build resentments; things that once seemed so marvelous no longer seem that way. Each blames the other – it’s you….you did this, you said that, you shouldn’t have acted that way, you….

I had to move quickly. I searched the streets for a plausible place, somewhere a man might possibly get off a short poem. The afternoons and mornings mingled: First and last month’s rent, $200 security, $75 cleaning, references. None of the places even seemed livable, and the landlords and managers gave off the worst of vibes: greedy, suspicious, dead-meat creatures. One of them wouldn’t even look at me; he just kept staring at his TV set and tolling off the charges. I began to feel dirtied, like an imbecile, a man without a right to hot and cold water and a toilet to rent as his own. There was actually no place to be found. In weariness I simply paid somebody and began moving in.

It was a modern apartment, a place in the back, up one flight, apartment 24. There was a garden in the center and two managers, man and wife, who lived downstairs and they never left the premises; one of them was always there, especially the lady, who dressed in white and walked around with a little brown bag and often caught the leaves as they fell from the bushes; she got them before they hit the ground. She was immaculate, face heavy with white powder; she wore much lipstick and had a rasping voice, a voice that always gave the sound of somebody lying. Her husband had the booming voice, and he boomed about the Dodgers and about God and about the prices in the supermarket. My first night there the phone rang and he told me that my radio was on too loud; they could hear me all over the court. “We can hear you all over the court, Hank,” he said. He insisted that we call each other by our first names. My radio had not been on loud. I turned it off. Then somebody started playing an accordion. “Oh, that’s beautiful!” I heard a voice. The guy ran through all the Lawrence Welk tunes.

She was always there, ubiquitous, most ubiquitous, and I’d have a hangover, be coming down the stairs, listening, thinking, she’s not around, I’ve gotten by her this time. And I’d have my bag of empties full of ashes and crap, the bottom wet and wanting to rip open, myself feeling like vomiting, I’d get down on the ground and then go through an opening in the back garage in between the cars, trying to get to the trash container, and out she’d pop with her broom: “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” “Oh yes,” I’d say, “it’s a nice day.”
And she was always at the mailboxes when the mail came, she was out there with her broom; you couldn’t get your mail. Or if somebody unknown came to the court she’d ask: “What do you want?” On warm days she placed herself in one of the deck chairs and reclined, and it seemed as if all the days I lived there were warm. And others came out and joined her and one was allowed to listen to their voices and their ideas.

The modern apartment-dwellers are all the same; they spend much time scrubbing and waxing and dusting and vacuuming; everything glistens – stoves, refrigerators, tables; the dishes are washed immediately after eating; the water in the toilet is blue; towels are used only once; doors are left open, blinds parted, and under the lamps you can see them sitting quietly reading a safe paperback or watching a laugh-track family-affair comedy on a huge TV screen. They buy knickknacks and ferns, things to hang about, fill the spaces; a Sunday afternoon at Akron is their Nirvana. They have no children, no pets, and they get intoxicated twice a year, at Christmas and at New Year’s.

There were two small couches in my place about a foot and a half wide. Upon one of these I was supposed to sleep. It was impossible to make love to a woman on either one of them. I discovered 18 roaches behind the refrigerator, and whenever I typed the woman below me beat up on her ceiling with a broom handle. And there was always somebody knocking on my door saying that I was disturbing them. Then one day all the tenants were given forms saying that there would be an automatic $5-a-month boost for each apartment. The roach spray I used almost cost me that. The writing had dwindled, almost stopped. My editor phoned me and assured me that every writer had his slumps. He said that I had five years left; that I needn’t write anything for five years and that I still could make it. I thanked him….

And I lucked it. I found this court just off of Hollywood and Western; I found it by getting the inside that somebody was moving out before that somebody moved out. It is my kind of neighborhood – massage parlors and love parlors are everywhere; taco stands, pizza parlors, sandwich shops; cut-rate drugstores full of wigs and old combs, rotting soap, hair pins, and lotions; whores night and day; black pimps in broad hats with their razor-sharp noses; plainclothes cops shaking down people at high noon, checking their arms for needle marks; dirty bookstores, murder, shakedowns, dope. I walk up Western Avenue toward Hollywood Boulevard and the sun shines inside of me again. I almost feel in love again, My people, my time, the taste of it….

I’ve only been here a week and just last night I looked around, beer bottles were everywhere, the radio was on, and in my place there were some people who live in this court: a guy who runs one of the love parlors, two guys who work in a dirty bookstore, and a dancer from one of the bars. We talked about dildoes, shakedowns, some of the ladies of the boulevard and the avenue; we talked about the freaks and the good people and the hard-hearted; we talked all through the night, the smoke curling, the laughter O.K. We ran out of beer and the delivery boy came in high and screwed-up and stayed an hour. We sent out for chicken and potatoes and cole slaw and buns. The night rolled easy. Finally I called an end: I’d been drinking beer since 11 a.m. They left in good form. I went to the bathroom, pissed, and then went to bed. Hemingway couldn’t ask for better. The light was coming through; I was in love with the world again. Ah.

Copyright 2010 by the Estate of Charles Bukowski. Reprinted from the new collection Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays Vol. 2 1946-1992, Edited and with an introduction by David Calonne, by permission of City Lights Books.

*Photo courtesy revrev Homepage photo courtesy Roger Jones.

The post Charles Bukowski Finds Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A veteran Variety reporter, Nicole LaPorte wrote The Men Who Would Be King at the risk of never lunching — or breakfasting or dining — in this town again. Her book catalogs in precise detail — from boardroom blow-ups to red carpet premieres — the rise and fall of DreamWorks studios, the brainchild of Hollywood’s biggest moguls since the golden age of the studio system. “There was money, it was the 90s, Clinton was in office,” LaPorte said. “The movie business is always a risky  business, but back then, there were many more people willing to place bets.” Unfortunately, no matter how big the men behind it or how many hits it made in the early years, it didn’t keep DreamWorks alive, as LaPorte explained at Zócalo’s offices.

*Photo courtesy just_kelly.

The post Nicole LaPorte on DreamWorks appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

William Dalrymple is the author of several prize-winning travel books and histories. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was 22. Dalrymple is also author of The Age of Kali, White Mughals, and City of Djinns. He lives on a farm outside Delhi with his wife and three children. Before he delivered a talk on his latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, he sat down for our Green Room Q&A.

Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick?

A. I’m really bad at kicking habits….

Q. Who was your childhood hero?

A. This is a nerdy answer, but I used to be a passionate childhood archaeologist, so someone like Howard Carter or [Austen Henry] Layard of Nineveh, digging up the Assyrian bulls.

Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?

A. A glass of champagne does quite a lot.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. In bed.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. Most of the things I want to do I can do. I don’t have any great urge to take my clothes off and run across the street naked or anything.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. Serendipity.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?

A. A firecracker mojito that I had an hour ago. It’s got some sort of Tabasco in it.

Q. Who is your favorite fictional character?

A. Anna Karenina.

Q. Whose talent would you like to have?

A. I’m very envious. I could give you a long series of answers. I get out of bed in the morning because of envy. I’m envious particularly of contemporaries and friends, whoever is doing better than I, at the moment.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?

A. Easter Island.

To read about Dalrymple’s talk, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

The post William Dalrymple appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions
by G. W. Bernard

–Reviewed by Ralph Walter

Anne Boleyn is a woman of legends. She is the six-finger seductress that ruined Henry’s marriage to the “good queen” Catherine of Catholic myth. She is the French-trained (a pejorative in Tudor England) courtesan that destroyed the arch-Machiavellian Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.  She is the protestant martyr that mothered England’s greatest monarch, Elizabeth I.  She is the questionably fertile harpy that Thomas Cromwell swept away so King Henry VIII could marry for a third time. Anne is very much remembered as the English Cleopatra, a woman using all her guile and attraction to make it in the man’s world of Tudor court intrigue.

But the controversial scholar G. W. Bernard finds none of this folklore in his close reading of original sources. His Anne is a conventional but ambitious woman of the period, very much a traditional wife who obeyed her husband, and one whose relationship with the Cardinal was, contrary to popular belief, entirely befitting a queen. Of course, this doesn’t mean she was entirely strait-laced, and Bernard makes one particularly shocking claim against the influential queen.

Anne became Henry’s mistress in the fullest sense around 1527. It was Henry who suspended their sexual relationship. Unwilling to risk questions about the legitimacy of a long-desired son, Henry decided to replace the menopausal queen Catherine with Anne. Bernard builds the case for Henry’s early indiscretion and later reversal in a document from the Vatican archives. After a divorce wasn’t forthcoming, Henry made a moot petition to the pope to marry Anne, in which he begs indulgence to marry a woman with whom he has slept.

Most radically, Bernard argues that Anne was actually guilty of adultery. The usual historical interpretation is that Anne was the victim of a plot either by the defenders of the ‘old religion’ or by Thomas Cromwell in self-defense. Bernard dismisses the feckless Catholics and the minister as causes. Instead, citing a contemporary French source, he attributes Anne’s fall to the peccadilloes of one of her ladies in waiting who, when confronted about her own affair, defended herself by saying that the queen was also so failed.  Within a month, Anne was dead and Henry was remarried.

Why would Anne take such risks? Bernard’s answer is hubris and necessity. As queen, Anne felt that she was protected from detection – an error of American presidents also. Henry’s increasingly frequent impotence decreased likelihood of the son that would secure Anne’s position. Anne, always a risk-taker, took lovers, and paid the ultimate price for it. In her final days, jailed in the Tower of London, Anne made the remark that Bernard takes as the basis for her religion, a half-reformed faith: Anne laments of her “good deeds” and yearns for communion, leading Bernard to question her commitment to the English church.

Historians will debate whether such close readings by Bernard are myopic, and in any case, he has never been one to shy away from historical disagreement. But Bernard’s book, at least, is a thought-provoking and accessible read. There are no long quotes with 16th century spelling or paragraphs of multiple phrases from several sources, all too common conventions among current historians. While Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions strays from the traditional portraits of E.W. Ives and Retha Warnicke – and is denser than popular biographies like Antonia Frasier’s or Showtime’s bodice-ripping series “The Tudors” – Bernard offers an erudite and controversial portrait of the legendary queen.

Ralph Walter is a member of the Zócalo board of directors.

Further Reading: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII by Retha Warnicke and The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church by G.W. Bernard

*The photo above depicts Traitor’s Gate in the Tower of London, through which Anne Boleyn passed on her way to execution. Photo above and homepage photo courtesy wallyg.

The post The Real Anne Boleyn? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.