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Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night features a vampire heroine who claims her victims in a chador:

Performed entirely in Farsi, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is set in Bad City, a fictional Iranian ghost town (played by Taft, California, situated in the San Joaquin Valley) where oil rigs pump continuously and corpses are dumped in ditches. Plot is subordinate to mood and atmosphere … aspects enhanced by the film’s high-def black-and-white imagery. Yet punctuating the film’s pleasingly languid rhythm are jolts of fear and desire.

The girl of the title (Sheila Vand), never identified by name, slinks through Bad City long after sunset cloaked in a chador. She coolly observes the evil that men do before bearing her fangs and exsanguinating them, the fate that befalls her first victim, a heavily neck-tattooed pimp and drug lord (Dominic Rains). Those not guilty of any crime—besides possessing the XY chromosome—are still not above suspicion; in a demonic growl, our undead heroine warns a wide-eyed seven-year-old tyke wearing a tatty sport coat, “Till the end of your life, I’ll watch you.” This vigilante upholds a gender-inverted Sharia law.

Melissa Leon recommends that viewers reserve judgment about the movie’s gender politics:

The vampire of Amirpour’s film preys only on men, ostensibly to balance the abuse women suffer at their hands in the film … which has prompted many, perhaps prematurely, to label the film as “feminist.” (The Girl doesn’t necessarily always operate with gender equality in mind. She does kill one homeless man just because she’s hungry.) Amirpour herself calls just one character in the film a feminist: A TV infomercial host who reminds women of their precarious positions in society and implores them to join his network of prostitutes. That is, a TV infomercial pimp. … The infomercial, playing on a character’s TV, comes less than five minutes in, setting the tone for the world the film’s women live in. Amirpour sees the pimp as a liberator rather than a predator.

“If there’s one feminist thing in this movie that I would lay claim to, it’s that that pimp is a feminist,” Amirpour says. “He’s just giving these women a chance to still take control of their life by using something that, you know, could be useful. Become an entrepreneur, a small business owner.”

Meanwhile, Sheila O’Malley, in a review of the movie, suggests its rich visuals offer the strongest political statement: “The image of a female vampire skateboarding down a street, her voluminous veil flying out behind her, does the job with more poetic satisfaction and truth than any explicit monologue about the repression of women could ever do.” She finds that Amirpour prefers celebrating pulp cinema to fighting the patriarchy:

Along with [Jim] Jarmusch, “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” is steeped in other influences: Spaghetti Westerns, 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, gearhead movies, teenage rom-coms, the Iranian new wave. There’s an early 1990s grunge-scene club kids feel to some of it, in stark contrast to the eerie isolation of the nighttime industrial wasteland in which the film takes place. The number of influences here could have made “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” yet another movie-mad parody or an arch exercise in style; instead, the film launches itself into a dreamspace of its own that has a unique power and pull.

The images are suggestive and symbolic, resonant with intersecting meanings and emotion, nothing too spelled out or underlined. Some of the images sit there unmoving for too long, but that very same stasis also helps create and enforce the underlying tension, the tormented space between people even when they are standing very close together. The film feels extremely personal. It is clear in every frame that Amirpour has put her own dream onscreen.

Andrew O’Hehir, who raves that the movie “moved me and thrilled me in ways I totally did not expect,” also applauds its range of influences:

This really is an American film and an Iranian film at the same time, and I think it relates as much to Abbas Kiarostami’s “Ten” and Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly” as it does to Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch. It marks an entirely new way of assimilating the immigrant experience, in this case by exploring the connections between Iran and the enormous expat community in Southern California on a subterranean and psychological level. But you don’t need to know any of that to roll with the spectacular chiaroscuro wide-screen images of cinematographer Lyle Vincent, the awesome sound design or the wordless scenes of reverie set to Iranian and/or American indie rock. It’s a tale of past tragedy and future hope, a story about a beautiful girl, a handsome boy and the car that just might get them out of the bad dreams of Bad City. If you can’t relate to that, you simply aren’t alive. Or undead.

We haven’t featured any of Raymond Carver’s short stories on the Dish yet – a major oversight, given the writer’s reputation and influence. “Cathedral” generally is considered one of his finer works, and here’s what Carver said about it in an interview:

The story “Cathedral” seemed to me completely different from everything I’d written before. I was in a period of generosity. The character there is full of prejudices against blind people. He changes; he grows. The sighted man changes. He puts himself in the blind man’s place. The story affirms something.

The story begins this way:

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-laws’. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job.

She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: HELP WANTED – Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She’d worked with this blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social-service department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose – even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.

Read the rest here. This story also appears in the collection that bears its name, Cathedral. Peruse previous SSFSs here.

In an interview about her book Citizen: An American Lyric, the poet and playwright Claudia Rankine recalls visiting Ferguson, Missouri a week after the protests began this summer. She describes how visiting the memorial reminded her of classical tragedy:

It was a very hot day, and there were a lot of people standing around, waiting for something to happen. Things were happening at night, the police force was coming out at night, but during the day they were just sitting in their cars, watching out the windows. And so there was a kind of odd, steamy, hot August waiting happening.

Really, I just kind of looked at the memorial and stood. And then I found myself being approached by people. A man stood next to me, and saw a picture of Michael Brown at the memorial, and said, “He looks like me.” I didn’t want to say yes, because I didn’t want to align him with a person who had passed away. So I said nothing. And then he said it again, he said, “He looks like me.” So at that point I looked at him and looked at the photo, and he did look like Michael Brown. And I began to think, I wish there was a way to stop him from identifying with somebody who is dead. But the real understanding was that he too could be dead, at any point. He just stood there. He was a teenager. He was still in his pajamas.

And then there was a woman who came up to me with a toddler. I had taken out my iPhone to take a picture of the memorial, so the woman grabbed the toddler’s hands and put them up in the air and said to me, “Take his picture.” But again, I didn’t want to take a picture of a toddler, with his hands up in the air, surrendering to the police that was going to shoot him anyway. So I didn’t take the picture. I just put the phone in my bag and then bent down and talked to the child.

Those two interactions—they exhausted me. Because they just had a sense of inevitability. It almost felt Greek. Predetermined, and hopeless. And then you had all these police cars with white policemen and policewomen, just sitting inside the cars, looking out at you. It was like you were in a theater, and they were this encased audience. It made me think of Antigone. And so that’s what I’m working on—a rewriting of Antigone, as a way of discussing what it means to decide to engage. The dead body’s in the street. What do you do now?

Not long ago, we featured Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” as our Saturday short story. This week, she accepted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards, and gave a brilliant acceptance speech, seen above, in which she stated her desire “to share the honor with her fellow-fantasy and sci-fi writers, who have for so long watched ‘the beautiful awards,’ like the one she’d just received, go to the ‘so-called realists.'” And then Le Guin reminded us of why fantasy matters:

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Philip Gefter’s Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, his new biography of the curator Sam Wagstaff, reveals how Wagstaff’s romantic relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe aided the latter’s rise as a highly celebrated and controversial photographer in the 1970s and ’80s. In a preview of his book, Gefter describes their meeting this way:

In 1972, when he was a 50-year-old man about town, he met and fell in love with Mapplethorpe, a struggling artist half his age. Mapplethorpe, who attended Pratt Institute, a pre-eminent art school, had gotten his cultural education at Max’s Kansas City and the Chelsea Hotel but had not yet claimed photography as his medium. He was still making collages and assemblages with found photographs from physique magazines and Polaroid self-portraits, often naked. Wagstaff thought they were in keeping with the conceptual work being done in that period, but the unapologetic homoerotic component was completely new.

Fan Zhong’s review of the biography sketches a telling scene of what Wagstaff did for Mapplethorpe:

On February 5, 1977, a floppy-haired boy from Queens named Robert Mapplethorpe truly arrived. Following the opening of the 30-year-old photographer’s New York exhibitions at Holly Solomon’s venerable SoHo gallery, where he showed refined studies of flowers, and at the Chelsea alternative art space the Kitchen, where he showed refined studies of S&M acts, 200 guests in black tie filled One Fifth, a stylish Art Deco restaurant off Washington Square. Diana Vreeland, Catherine Guinness, Elsa Peretti, and Halston; the art dealers Klaus Kertess and Charles Cowles; Danny Fields, the notorious manager of the Ramones and Iggy Pop; and Arnold Schwarzenegger all circulated amid a riot of downtown’s demimonde. Mapplethorpe turned up in a velvet dinner jacket—the feral photographer  at his art world cotillion.

Presiding over this motley affair was Sam Wagstaff. Tall, charming, and beautiful in a richly disheveled fashion—he liked to wear a tuxedo with white sneakers and a studiously rumpled shirt—Wagstaff is remembered as the Diaghilev to Mapplethorpe’s Nijinsky, the older lover-patron who helped guide his protégé to renown. In the mid-1970s, when photography had yet to be taken seriously by the art establishment, Wagstaff, with his mix of élan, pedigree, and scholarship, became its ideal ambassador. “Sam Wagstaff was considered a great photography collector,” Holly Solomon observes in Patricia Morrisroe’s 1975 biography Mapplethorpe. “I wouldn’t have touched Robert without Sam.”

Martin Filler emphasizes Wagstaff’s impact on the rise of photography as a fine art:

For most of the twentieth century, many questioned photography’s legitimate place among the fine arts, and the audience for even the greatest historical examples was limited to a few true believers. However, when Mapplethorpe dragged Wagstaff to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1973 exhibition The Painterly Photograph: 1890-1914, Wagstaff had an epiphany. Gazing at Edward Steichen’s impressionistic 1904 views of Manhattan’s Flatiron Building, he became convinced that photography was an art form, not a mere mechanical process.

This revelation prompted a decade of frenzied acquisitions by Wagstaff, who came from an old New York family and used his substantial wealth to buy some of the most important photographs by dozens of forgotten early masters including Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Marville, and his favorite, Gustave Le Gray. An indication of how successful he and his friends were is the extent to which these artists are now prominently featured in leading museums. Gefter’s extensive interviews with Wagstaff’s inner circle, among them Paul F. Walter (who specialized in nineteenth-century photographs), John C. Waddell (who favored interwar modernism), Pierre Apraxine (curator of the estimable Gilman Paper Company collection), and Daniel Wolf (whose 57th Street photography gallery was the best in America at the time) reveal how several of them worked in concert.

In a conversation about the novelist John Williams – most famous as the recently rediscovered author of Stoner – Charles J. Shields and William Giraldi compare his posthumous reputation with that of Herman Melville, riffing on why his writing resonates now:

Charles J. Shields: The literary parallel that comes to my mind is what happened to Melville. He died in such deep obscurity that more than one New York newspaper began his obituary with a sentence like, “The current reading generation will not be familiar with the name Herman Melville, but there was a time when the writer’s work was on everyone’s lips.” The Melville Revival didn’t occur until 45 years after his death. Williams didn’t die unknown of course in 1994, but he saw nothing during his lifetime like the attention that’s been given to his novels recently. And I bring up the Melville-Williams connection for another reason, too. You mention “the architecture of an expert craftsman.” As an experiment, I broke one of Melville’s shorter chapters in Moby-Dick into free verse — it read and sounded gorgeous. Williams was that sort of craftsman, too. … What’s your opinion about why Williams is being carried into the pantheon dead instead of living?

William Giraldi: Our need for beauty and wisdom is such that we will find it: sooner or later, one way or another, beauty and wisdom will have out.

Williams’s fate was such that he couldn’t be granted the laurels he deserved while living, and that’s a familiar enough story among great artists. Would he have been less resentful in life, less prone to drain the bottle and smoke his lucks black, had he been awarded the fame that his tremendous talented warranted? Impossible to say, since fame is its own kind of noose. I like your correlation to Melville because in many ways America was unready for Melville’s cosmic vision; it took the cataclysm of the First World War to bring Melville’s far-reaching mythos back into our grasp. Although nothing on that scale has happened to precipitate this Williams revival, I do think that entire zip codes of readers are thirsting for the purity and depth of Williams’s prose, for his expert craftsmanship, his gorgeous storytelling. Discerning people everywhere are fed up with electronic inanity, with the sovereignty of cyberspace. They feel blitzed by it all and are seeking the sane and lasting pleasures in the breed of literature Williams created, in those perfect sentences you mentioned.

Previous Dish on Williams’ Stoner here, here, and here.

Mark Slutsky describes his absorbing website, Sad YouTube, as being comprised of “[m]oments of melancholy, sadness and saudade from the lives of strangers, gleaned from the unfairly maligned ocean of YouTube comments.” In an interview, he expands on why he started the site and what might be its deeper meaning:

How did the idea for the site come? Was there a crystallizing moment? How long have you been running the site?

For a long time, I had noticed that there was something … else going on in the YouTube comment section. Something besides the usual racism, insults, obscure shout-outs and general noise.

Particularly on videos of old songs (either legitimate music videos or fan-uploaded audio tracks with slide shows or home-made clips accompanying the music), people had been leaving little stories. Memories they associated with the music, stories with such touching specificity and seeming honesty that they stood out among all the other comments. It intrigued, and honestly, delighted me in a perverse way, that in that part of the Internet universally acknowledged as the garbage heap of our civilization, I was finding such moments of beauty.

I knew that these comments were ephemeral; they’d either be driven so far down the page by the “bad” ones that no one would ever find them, or the video they were associated with would be deleted—either way, they’d be lost. So I started Sad YouTube in the fall of 2012 to preserve them.

You write, “I almost feel like you could write a Studs Terkel oral history of America culled entirely from YouTube comments on pop songs.” That’s fascinating. Could you talk a bit about that? What’s the value of an oral history? What can it capture or dramatize that others documents cant?

There’s a truth to oral histories that you don’t find anywhere else. You get stories, details and emotions you don’t find in any other form of history. Very few of the comments I’ve chosen tell stories significant or dramatic enough, at least from the outside, to make it into the news, let alone the history books. But each one conveys something about what it felt like to be alive at the time. Or what it feels like to be alive at all.

Phantom Terrains is an experimental tool that makes Wi-Fi audible by streaming digital signals to a listener’s hearing aids:

Each Wi-Fi element – such as router names, data rates and encryption modes – are assigned their own tones, which are sent to a phone and picked up using his hearing aids. The foreground and background layer of sound are built up through the strength of the signal, direction, name and security level on these networks. For instance, distant signals sound like click and pops, while stronger networks play a looped song.

Frank Swain, who was inspired to create the project after receiving a diagnosis of hearing loss, describes what it’s like to use the platform:

In essence, I am listening to a computer’s interpretation of the soundscape, heavily tailored to what it thinks I need to hear. I am intrigued to see how far this editorialisation of my hearing can be pushed. If I have to spend my life listening to an interpretative version of the world, what elements could I add? The data that surrounds me seems a good place to start. …

“On a busy street, we may see over a hundred independent wireless access points within signal range,” says [sound artist and project co-creator Daniel] Jones. The strength of the signal, direction, name and security level on these are translated into an audio stream made up of a foreground and background layer: distant signals click and pop like hits on a Geiger counter, while the strongest bleat their network ID in a looped melody. This audio is streamed constantly to a pair of hearing aids donated by US developer Starkey. The extra sound layer is blended with the normal output of the hearing aids; it simply becomes part of my soundscape. So long as I carry my phone with me, I will always be able to hear Wi-Fi.

Listen to a Phantom Terrains “data walk” above.