Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Many things come easy in life to smart, beautiful women. Melissa Febos, the author of "Whip Smart", understands this. It is what allows her to nail job interviews and collect boyfriends with ease. But Febos also has gifts as a writer, including a knack for self-deflation. "Whip Smart" is a memoir about the author's four-year career as a dominatrix in a dungeon in midtown Manhattan. "An hour alone with a naked man with whom you do not intend to have sex can be a very long time," she recalls thinking on the day of her first session. Already we like her.

Now a writing instructor at SUNY Purchase College and the Gotham Writers' Workshop, Febos begins her story with her search for a job that pays better than her gigs in publishing. She was then a recent graduate of the New School university in New York, with a minor heroin habit, an inborn curiosity and a petite and curvy figure. Her neighbour, whose apartment bears such signs of sophistication as an Egon Schiele print and air-conditioning, is a dominatrix who seems to enjoy her job. The two women talk: trade secrets are shared, seeds are sown.

Febos locates the Dungeon of Mistress X through an ad in the back of the Village Voice. The place is nicer than she had expected, a sprawl of spotless dungeons outfitted with hanging cages, riding crops, paddles and coffins. Coffins? "For clients into sensory deprivation," explains Febos's superior during the tour. Ah, yes. She is hired, and her asking price will be $75 for an hour-long session, plus tips. Work starts the following Monday.  read more »

Sleet spattered over VIPs queuing outside for the opening of the Whitney Biennial on February 23rd. We suffered in silence, in darkness, our conversations drowned by the monastic groaning of an outdoor installation that cast an eerie blue hue. Dumpling trucks prowled and rogue cameramen interviewed some on a scrap of red carpet. We inched along as the storm intensified, sentries sifting us into various purgatories.

Once inside, past menacing squads of security officers and Blackberry-wielding event planners, we were rewarded with heat, light, DJed electronica, crowds, food, wine and, eventually, art. We began our tallying for our respective cost-benefit analyses: was it worth the wait?

The Biennial spans three floors—more when counting "Collecting Biennials", a nearly year-long show of permanent-collection works by artists featured in Biennials past, in celebration of the show’s 75th year. Francesco Bonami, this year’s co-curator, broke it down for us: floor four is “spectacle”, three is “video” (the first Biennial to devote an entire floor to the medium) and two is “creepy”. We are meant to choose our own path, but the most convenient approach is to take the elevator to the fourth floor and walk down.  read more »

It sounds too cute to be true, but these are the facts: Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss met when he waited on her table at a restaurant in New York. She was dining out with her mother; he was a former member of Poison the Well, a Florida post-hardcore outfit. Conversation turned to music and lo, Miller had been chewing over a new musical project for months while Krauss, a fourth-grade teacher in the Bronx, had a secret past singing in Rubyblue, a girl pop group. The pair got to talking, and Krauss, it seemed to Miller, was just the ticket. And vice versa.

The two formed Sleigh Bells and recorded a demo of loud, fuzzed-out songs. Success unspooled quickly. Attention from Sasha Frere-Jones ("my favorite band in New York") and Pitchfork, plus a much-hyped performance at CMJ, cemented the band as one to watch.

With Miller handling beat production, song writing and guitars and Krauss on vocals, the two engage onstage like a duo that's been performing together for a decade (in fact it's been less than two years). Other things they have in common include shiny hair and a willingness to unleash great sonic blasts of music upon unprepared audiences. More Intelligent Life caught up with Miller to discuss their sound, the recording process and Sleigh Bells's forthcoming debut album.

More Intelligent Life: The New York Times classified your music as "electronic dance rock". How would you describe it?  read more »

Penis jokes are a hoary chestnut of the stand-up comedian. Ever hear the one about the Catholic who converts to three different branches of Judaism and—surprise!—gets circumcised anew each time? You will if you go see "Circumcise Me", an autobiographical one-man, off-Broadway show by Yisrael Campbell.

Yisrael—Chris to his friends back in Penn-Wynne, Pennsylvania—has been telling the true story of his conversions and genital depredations for a few years now, mainly through a club stand-up routine. "Circumcise Me" is a wider project, his first aimed at a general audience, which weaves the wince-inducing aspects into a larger meditation on spirituality, alcoholism, Middle East politics and life in Florida. Dressed, as he puts it, “for 17th-century Poland” (black hat, black coat, beard and peyot, or religious side curls), Campbell is surprisingly nonplussed for someone who has just made the jump from playing events at Jewish community centres to an extended run off-Broadway.

After a show one night, Campbell sat down with More Intelligent Life to answer a few questions about jokes, Judaism, faith and cheeseburgers.

More Intelligent Life: I’ve seen your stand-up act (in the Berkshires). This is your first one-man show, and it has a lot more sadness and drama. Have you recently been exploring your emotional side?

Yisrael Campbell: I’ve been doing for years the hour of stand-up you saw. I wanted [this show] to be more relevant to both Jewish and non-Jewish groups. I picked up a producer along the way, and she sold me on the idea that it had to be a piece of theatre. Unless your name is Jackie Mason, people want to see a dramatic arc.  read more »

Does size matter? For Shaquille O’Neal his very existence offers a larger-than-life answer to that question. Standing at 7’1”, weighing 320 pounds and strutting about in size 22 shoes, Shaq casts a long shadow. His appetites and ambitions are similarly colossal: a professional basketball star, he has also worked as an actor, rapper, memoirist and reserve police officer, and is now working on a PhD in organisational behaviour. Now, thanks to the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, Shaq can cross another item off his to-do list: curate an art show. “Size DOES Matter” features 66 works chosen by the man himself, and a catalogue with an essay by James Frey (yes, that James Frey).

An outsized gimmick? Perhaps. The line to attend the show's opening on February 19th snaked outside for nearly a block. And Shaq's selections, which feature a range of contemporary works of varying, eye-teasing sizes, were plucked from more than 200 images supplied by FLAG's founder, Glenn Fuhrman, and director, Stephanie Roach, over dinner after a game. Still, this playful show holds up as a satisfying examination of size and scale in art.

The works are by 43 artists, including Elizabeth Peyton, Cindy Sherman, Ron Mueck and Richard Phillips. Quite a few of them send viewers through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. Robert Therrien’s "No Title (Table and Six Chairs)" from 2003 achieves this most dramatically. The installation is so big that visitors are granted the perspective of children, peering up at the seats with curiosity about the grown-up world “up there”.  read more »

Tony Candido's resume includes a roster of legendary mentors. After studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, he worked as an architectural designer for I.M. Pei and contributed to Konrad Wachsmann's groundbreaking Air Force airport hangar design.

But Candido has also pursued his own vision. He began painting professionally in the early 1950s, using sweeping brush strokes to create abstract explorations (as with "Night Paintings", from 1956), figural studies ("Asahikawa Heads", in 1988) and conceptual, architecturally driven works, such as his continuing "Cable Cities" series (pictured), which depicts structures embedded in the landscape.

Now aged 85, Candido paints regularly and teaches at Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. Students in his studio class tackle the idea of the urban farm, a concept Candido pioneered in the 1990s that intersects ideas of farming, architecture and urban planning. This month Cooper Union has mounted "The Great White Whale is Black", a retrospective exhibition honouring five decades of Candido's work. The day the show opened Candido took a moment to speak with More Intelligent Life about his approach to painting, his fascination with spatial relationships and the relationship between cities and their surroundings.

More Intelligent Life: You've worked with some huge names in the architecture world, including Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei. Did either of them influence you as an artist?  read more »

Devotees of communism evoke a grim picture of stern and ascetic men and women in sparsely furnished rooms, free of bourgeois luxuries. And then there is the glamorous Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer and political revolutionary. An exhibition of 35 of her photographs now on at New York's Throckmorton Fine Art gallery, "Tina Modotti: Under the Mexican Sky", recalls the life and talent of this rare seductress.

Modotti was 16 when she left Italy for California, where she began her transformation from factory worker to bohemian ingénue. In Los Angeles, she met and modelled for Edward Weston, a pioneer of photography, who soon became her lover and mentor. He left his wife to be with Modotti, and in the early 1920s they ventured to Mexico, a country then brimming with artistic and political excitement.

Still reeling from a decade-long revolution, Mexico's politics were volatile. Painters and muralists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros had joined with a host of radicalised expatriates to help lead the struggle for political and social reform. Modotti embraced this fusion of art and politics, and collaborated with the muralists in creating work with political intent. But Weston had little time for art in the service of politics. He rejected what he described as “too much sentimentality over the proletariat. Too much deification of the Indian.”

Taken between 1923 and 1930, Modotti’s sepia-tinted portraits of Mexican workers and expatriate revolutionaries are indeed romantic—beautiful, sturdy and idealistic. Yet we get the sense that her subjects aren't merely symbols—vacant and projection-ready—but real people. These photographs feel intimate and real.  read more »

Legendary design, drivers from central casting, opposing seats and easy wheelchair access—London’s taxis may be the world’s best. But only if someone else is paying. After seven years here, I’m still shocked by the fares.

Not that one minds paying for quality. Before London I lived in Boston, where the average cabbie seems to be re-enacting a ”Speed”-inspired, gasoline-fuelled death wish. The questionable driving is matched by suitably depraved manners. Cabbies in Mexico City may have a nasty habit of kidnapping their passengers, but at least they seem to understand the value of human life.

In taxis, as in finance and theatre, London’s only real rival may be New York. A yellow cab is nearly as iconic as a black one, but cheaper. Paddington to the Museum of London’s taxi exhibit costs the same as Penn Station to Brooklyn’s Transit Museum (60% further). And in New York it’s easy to pay by credit card, many taxis are energy-efficient hybrids and drivers (sometimes) help with luggage.

New York drivers are occasionally as crazy as their Beantown colleagues. Once I noticed my Manhattan cabbie drifting between lanes. He was relieving himself into a Snapple bottle. But, I got where I was going without delay. In New York the crazy is mostly deployed to your benefit.

Surely, somewhere manages both British sanity and American-style service? For taxis as for everything else, the answer is Canada. Vancouver’s taxis are perfect. But drivers are so careful and friendly it’s like being given a ride by an elderly relative. I forgot I was in a city.  read more »

In an inspired move, our colleagues over at Democracy in America, The Economist's American politics blog, compared President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech to the work being done over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they are trying to repair a Picasso painting that was ripped by a clumsy visitor. It's hard to restore broken masterpieces, just like it is hard to restore the promised glory of Obama's presidency, now that it has been tainted by the nasty work of governing.

The president has been in a tight spot—the kind of place he tends to emerge from, Houdini-like, with some masterful speechifying. But this has proven much harder in office, where the nitty-gritty of policy must inevitably displace the beauty of promises. So instead of dazzling us once again with skilful oratory, he delivered a speech that has been generally derided as ho-hum: smart, pragmatic, overlong and unstirring, bogged down in numbers and wonk.

Were we entitled to expect otherwise? How can a president both make decisions and rise above their messiness? Isn't this what we complained George Bush did with his insidious "War on Terror" narrative? Junot Diaz put his finger on this visceral, childish yearning for a good story in the New Yorker:  read more »

The late Arthur Miller has once again confounded critics who claimed that his plays would not stand the test of time. A revival of “A View from the Bridge”, his dark domestic drama set in 1950s Brooklyn, has just opened on Broadway. In a recent preview of this production, directed by Gregory Mosher, a packed audience sat transfixed as the woeful narrator warned of the show’s “bloody” preordained conclusion.

The show has already enjoyed quite a bit of press for marking the Broadway debut of Scarlett Johansson, who stars opposite the brilliant Liev Schreiber. Given the power of Hollywood starlets to pack theatres, regardless of their skills on stage (a mediocre Katie Holmes helped sell out a limited run of “All My Sons” on Broadway in 2008), sceptics were quick to roll their eyes. Yet Johansson-reined in with modest clothes and dark hair—makes for a convincing 17-year-old Catherine, the fraught object of her uncle’s desire. Schreiber, as the tormented Uncle Eddie Carbone, swaggers about the stage and once again steals the show. But Johansson certainly holds her own.

“A View from the Bridge” is not as well known as Miller’s “The Crucible” or “Death of a Salesman”. But like the others, it captures the tragedy in the ordinary. With the lyricism of an epic poem (complete with a one-man Greek chorus-Alfieri, the lawyer-narrator, played by Michael Cristofer), Miller tells a simple story that leads unswervingly to its nightmarish end.  read more »