The Paris Review Spring 2011
Janet Malcolm has written many books of non-fiction and magazine articles since her publishing debut in The New Yorker in 1963. Yet for all the volume of her output (and its quality), her largest claim to fame still probably rests on one 26-word sentence she wrote more than 20 years ago. The sentence reads: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." That declaration, found on the first page of her book The Journalist and the Murderer, was a lightning rod for debate back then and truism though it may be, it's lost none of its power to provoke since.
Malcolm fans, then, are going to be feasting on the 26-page interview she gave to Katie Roiphe here. As you might expect, it's full of interesting things and pithy observations (One of my favourites: "Trials offer exceptional opportunities for the exercise of journalistic heartlessness."). It's also a bit shifty in that Malcolm, who's now 76, has this knack for appearing both forthright and evasive. For instance, she tells Roiphe that being an ambitious writer and a devoted mother (of a daughter) was often a tension-filled pas de deux - but then breaks off her answer by saying it's "too deep a subject for an e-mail exchange," one better discussed in "a dark bar."
American Photo April 2011
Paul Simon had a big, big hit in 1973 with Kodachrome ("Makes you think all the world's a sunny day ... Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away") so it's a bit distressing to learn that a supposed scheduling conflict prevented the singer-songwriter's mug from being included in one of the 36 frames on the last roll of 35 mm Kodachrome film stock ever made. The roll was given to the famous National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry during a 2009 visit to Kodak headquarters in Rochester, N.Y. In April 2010, McCurry loaded the precious cartridge into an old Nikon F6 and for the next three months proceeded to "honour this film by shooting iconic people and places." The journey took him to New York where Robert De Niro agreed to be photographed (good lad), then to the south of India and finally to Parsons, Ka., pop. 11,000. There, he gave the completed roll to Dwayne Steinle, at that time the owner of the world's "final outpost for processing Kodachrome."
American Photo includes many of McCurry's Kodachrome images here and what can I say, except that they look great. Shooting on film "felt like second nature," he tells writer Jack Crager. But he admits he kept looking at the back of his Nikon "expecting to see an image."
ARTnews April 2011
No denying video games can be clever, involving wastes of time. But can they also be works of art? The answer seems to be a firm maybe. As Carolina Miranda writes here, in the last 10 years there's been a mini-boom in game-related exhibitions in such "serious" art venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. It's hardly a surprising development as artists have forever fastened their flags to sundry technological innovations and fads. Given the ubiquity of video games, they're clearly an idiom ripe for deconstruction, appropriation, recasting and all the other things artists are wont to do. But for some game theorists, this is precisely the problem: at a conference last year titled The Art History of Games in Atlanta's High Museum, a participant complained that "for games to be embraced by art institutions, they have to give up their gameness." As a result, artist games often seem more like installation works than opportunities for fun and play. Sometimes, too, they fall into the realm of "why bother." Feng Mengbo's Long March: Restart takes a player through Mao's famous 10,000-kilometre Long March of the 1930s but at heart it's just a big-format (16-metre by three) riff on Street Fighter and Super Mario Brothers.