The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
the b-side
Thursday, September 15, 2016 — 3B

By MERIN MCDIVITT

Daily Arts Writer

In a museum that often focuses 

on 
cutting-edge 
contemporary 

pieces, 
UMMA’s 
most 
recent 

exhibition came as a bit of a sur-
prise. To be fair, the museum is no 
stranger to variety. Detroit factory 
architecture? Of course. African 
scrap metal sculptures? Why not?

But ... Elizabeth Taylor? That 

was something new, and certainly 
unexpected. After all, the world 
of Serious Art hasn’t had much to 
do with celebrities since the age 
of Andy Warhol. In spite of this 
seeming mismatch, or perhaps 
because of it, photographer Cath-
erine Opie’s exhibition “700 Nimes 
Road,” a series of photographs of 
the interior of actress Elizabeth 
Taylor’s home, may have been the 
most intimate, thoughtful collec-
tion shown this year.

At first glance the photographs 

are sometimes dull, sometimes 
lustrous, capturing Taylor’s tables 
and rooms, her enviable closets 
and boudoirs. While the images 
are visually striking when taken 
as a whole, particularly in their 
artful arrangement of colors and 
textures, each individual photo-
graph feels a little off. In some, 
like those of Taylor’s dressing 
table or her famed jewelry collec-
tion, Opie has eschewed the easy, 
alluring snapshot in favor of more 
awkward lighting or an inferior 
vantage point. There’s something 
odd at work beneath the surface. 
Where’s the shine, the patina of 
fame, fortune and a life lived in the 
dazzling, blinding spotlight? The 
answer may lie in the gap between 
famed public persona and private 
life.

The 
incredible 
proliferation 

of “personal” information about 
celebrities, now and then, prom-
ises that you’re really getting to 
know the star, that they’re just 
like you. But do these images show 
anything about their subjects? And 

do the lives of the stars represent 
something relatable, if not attain-
able, to their admirers, or is it just 
a sweet escape, a chintzy mirage 
that revels in its own artificiality?

The nation may be fed up with 

plain old reality, beamed at them 
from the nightly news or shoved 
roughly through the mail slot each 
morning, but our obsession with 
“reality” is at an all-time high. Rat-
ings for dishy shows like “Keeping 
Up With The Kardashians” and 
competitions like “The Bachelor” 
keep on rising, promising audienc-
es a no-holds-barred leer into their 
subjects’ personal lives. They spin 
a web of false intimacy around the 
viewer, complete with tell-all con-
fessionals and dramatic, choreo-
graphed reveals.

Even LIFE Magazine, once wit-

ness-bearer to some of the last cen-
tury’s most significant events, now 
hawks glossy and expensive spe-
cial editions, mining their archives 
for 
never-before-seen 
glamour 

shots of the stars of yesteryear. The 
lacquered faces and taut, midcen-
tury physiques of these dead celeb-
rities simper next to Kourtney and 
Khloe on the rack at the check-out 
counter.

Into the lurid fray steps Cath-

erine Opie, a respected art pho-
tographer well known for her 
work depicting everything from 
queer subculture in Southern 
California to drab, sun-bleached 
planned communities. In 2010, 
she was given access to Taylor’s 
home while the lauded actress 
was away. Unlike Taylor, whose 
public appearances were marked 
by high drama and oodles of cos-
metics, the house was left just as 
it was: lived-in, not fixed up or 
polished for the camera.

The photographs have a curi-

ous untouched quality, as though 
Liz has just stepped out to run 
errands, leaving clothes and cos-
metics in benign disarray. The 
viewer feels like a teenage neigh-
bor, housesitting for the first 

time — running their fingers over 
the glamorous haute couture in 
the closet, fiddling with the TV 
remote and almost knocking 
over an Oscar on a crowded end 
table. The images are flat and two 
dimensional, of course, but they 
are remarkably tactile — gossa-
mer fabrics hanging alongside 
their ilk in an overstuffed walk-
in, the glint of sharp, sparkling 
jewels carefully placed in dusty 
shoeboxes and labeled with their 
bestower: 
“Michael 
Jackson, 

2005,” “Richard, 1961.”

If modern celebrity culture is 

a floodlit snapshot of life, show-
ing everything and revealing 
nothing, Opie’s exhibition is the 
photo negative, so to speak — 
the antidote. By focusing less on 
Taylor’s larger than life person-
ality, and more on the human, 
almost ordinary aspects of her 
home, a strange near-intimacy is 
achieved with Taylor, the absent 
subject whose presence none-
theless permeates each image, 
like musky perfume that lingers, 
stale, in the air long after the 
wearer has left.

Opie may not have delivered 

the glittering facade that charac-
terized Taylor’s life and mystique 
— a disappointment, perhaps, to 
some diehard fans. Touring the 
exhibition felt a lot like walking 
through a stranger’s home for 
the first time. The viewer wants 
to know the owner, but they’re 
always just out of sight. More 
conventional images of Tay-
lor, bathed in glamour, seem to 
promise the instant closeness 
of “reality,” where everything is 
somehow familiar and remote 
at the same time. Opie’s work 
gets closer to the uncomfortable 
truth. This home, its luxurious 
silks and carpet stains, piles of 
old pictures and years of accu-
mulated dust and memories, is 
that of a stranger. We may know 
“Liz Taylor,” but we don’t know 
this woman at all.

A conversation with 
author Nathan Hill 

CAROLYN GEARIG/Daily

“700 Nimes Road” was at UMMA for three months this summer.
An intimate ode 
to ‘Nimes Road’

BOOKS

By RENNIE PASQUINELLI

For the Daily

Nathan Hill was in Ann Arbor 

this Tuesday, reading from his 
debut novel, “The Nix,” at a beloved 
spot of every book enthusiast — 
Literati. In case you haven’t heard 
that name or title, Hill’s “The Nix” 
became available in books stores 
across the world in late August 
and received a warm welcome in 
the literary community. Actually, 
“warm welcome” may well be 
an 
understatement. 
Before 
it 

was even published, “The Nix” 
had been compared to works by 
several groundbreaking novelists, 
including but not limited to, John 
Irving and Charles Dickens. And, 
just to reiterate: “The Nix” is Hill’s 
first novel.

“The Nix” is 600 pages filled 

with what Hill refers to as a 
magical bag Hermione Granger 
could pull anything out of. It’s 
a story of many characters and 
several plots, but centers around 
a video game-addicted English 
professor 
(Samuel) 
and 
an 

estranged relationship with his 
mother, Faye. The novel covers 
the Chicago riots of 1968, a mother 
trapped in a suburban lifestyle in 
the 1980s, as well as the lives of 
the modern college student and 
professor.

Hill’s 
warmer-than-warm 

welcome 
transcended 
the 

reviews he’s received for “The 
Nix” at Literati. Those who were 
fortunate enough to attend his 
reading couldn’t get enough of 
both Hill and his book. Before he 
began reading from “The Nix,” 
Hill quoted an email from a fan 
that he described as a reason being 
a writer is so rewarding, which 
included the lines “I am old. I have 
read many books. Yours is among 
my favorites. Please do not take 10 
years to write the next one. I am 
82.”

The Daily had the chance to sit 

down and talk to Hill about the 
novel, his sudden rise to fame, and 
what we can expect next.

---
TMD: “The Nix” took you 

about 12 years to write, which 
is about a quarter of your life. 
In a previous interview, you 
said you poured all of your good 
ideas into this book, your first 
book. Why write one book? Was 
it difficult to make all of those 
ideas cohesive?

NH: Yeah, it was. To the first 

point, about why writing one book, 
I guess I put all of these ideas into 
the book and chopped stuff out 
where they didn’t belong. The first 
draft was 1,002 pages long, and 
the final draft is 620, so a lot of 
stuff got cut out. Maybe that stuff 
might find another appearance 
in a book somewhere down the 
line. But really I was just trying 
to find something out in the 
world that would be confusing, 
or interesting, or would make me 
mad, or I wouldn’t know how I 
felt about it, and I would think, 
“Could I use that in ‘The Nix’?” 
It became sort of like the filter 
that you see the world through. 
Anytime I had a really good idea, I 
felt like I could use it, and I didn’t 
censor myself. I just put it in there. 
For better or worse. It took a long 
time to write the book because of 
it. But at the same time I feel really 
happy, because I feel like it’s just 
packed with things that hopefully 
make people think.

Of course. And I’ve seen 

some fan tweets to you, one that 
said there is a true sentence on 
every page of “The Nix.” I’m 
sure that felt good to hear.

That was a cool one. I don’t 

know, it was mostly like I was 
trying to write a book that I would 
really like to read. And those are 
the kinds of books I like to read; 
the ones that have interesting 
characters and are also full of 
ideas.

That kind of brings me to my 

next question. Presumably you 
read a couple of books while 
you were writing “The Nix.” 
Which ones would you say were 
most influential to writing it?

In terms of content, the books I 

list in my acknowledgments page. 
I did a lot of research, especially 
about the 1968 section, because 
of course I did not live through 
that, so those books were really 
important 
to 
me. 
Especially 

Norman Mailer’s book, “Miami 
and the Siege of Chicago.” It was 
interesting, because most books 
about Chicago in 1968 are histories 
told by history professors. They’re 
really useful and helpful, but to see 
Normal Mailer do it, I mean he’s a 
literary writer, and to see someone 
approach it from that direction 
with the purpose of telling a story, 
rather than the purpose of telling 
a history, was really helpful to me. 
I read those books until I felt like 
I knew enough about the period to 
write about it myself.

I assume it takes a lot of 

confidence in your knowledge 
base to feel comfortable writing 
about something you didn’t 
experience first hand.

So, my wife is a classical 

musician. And classical musicians 
have this phrase where they 
rehearse something until they 
have it “under their fingers.” You 
know, which is kind of like, in 
the body. You work and work on 
a certain run until you just kind 
of have it, and don’t have to think 
about it too much. For me, I did 
research until I had it under my 
fingers, until I could write about 
the time period without having to 
consult all the time. I just felt like 
I could do it.

How 
did 
you 
tap 
into 

womanhood in an era you didn’t 
live through?

Again, a lot of research helped 

me out. There was a book called 
“Young, White, and Miserable” 
that I liked a lot, about young 
women in the ’50s. That gave me 
a lot of good ideas. And, (“The 
Nix”) is Samuel’s retelling of the 
whole thing. It was almost like I 
was writing Faye through Samuel’s 
eyes. Kind of like what he would 
think. And he’s, of course, looking 
at it through a great distance in the 
future. Really it was just looking 
around, too. I found websites 
that had old advertisements for 
woman’s beauty products, and they 
were just so transparently sexist. 
And you’re like, “I cannot believe 
this was normal.” So to have Faye 
working against that, and Samuel 
writing it with our eyes today felt 
like a really nice tension.

Right. And I’ve heard you 

say you have felt connected to 
the character Samuel, because 
you played a lot of “World of 
Warcraft” in a period of time 
where you felt in limbo as a 
writer. What was that like for 
you?

That was a time when I just 

finished grad school and moved to 
New York. My first month there, 
all of my (writing I had done in 
grad school) was stolen. I was 
really sad about that, like really, 
really sad, and a buddy of mine 
suggested that we play this video 
game together. He just wanted to 
keep an eye on me I think. You 
know, you can chat through the 
game. And I guess it was just a 
couple years where I was trying 
to write what eventually became 
this book but in a very different 
form, and it wasn’t going very 
well. And I wasn’t making any 
money in New York. I was there 
working at a poetry nonprofit, so 
you can imagine how much the 
salary was.

So I was just barely treading 

water in New York, and the 
writing wasn’t going very well, 
and I was getting rejected all over 
the place. But, I was playing this 
game, and I could be really good 
at this game, right? So I felt like 
in the rest of my life I was failing, 
but I was not failing at this game. 
So it made me play it a lot, for a 
little while, until I finally realized 
I was spending way too much 
time doing it. I gave it up cold 
turkey one day and really launched 
myself into the book. That feeling 
of the video game replacing, I don’t 
want to say replacing real life, but 
the video game becomes a place 
where you find meaning where 
you lack meaning elsewhere. That 
idea stuck with me, and it’s in 
both of the characters Samuel and 
Pwnage.

Well, this is your first novel. 

Before it came out, you were 
compared to John Irving and 
he compared you to Charles 
Dickens. 
Countries 
bid 
on 

publication rights, which is 
rare for a first book. How are 
you taking all of this positive 
reception and recognition?

A lot of people have asked me 

that question, and I still don’t know 
how to answer because it still feels 
so strange, you know? For the time 
that I was writing the book — for 
the years and years it took — the 
only person who knew anything 
about what I was doing was my 
wife. I would read her pages. At 
first she requested me to read 
pages; I was always very shy about 
my first drafts. But, eventually, I 
read her a few pages and she said 
she really liked them and wanted 
to hear a couple more, and that just 
became our routine. For 10 years 
you’re working on a book, and one 
person in the world knows about it, 
so there’s this fear that you’ll send it 
out into the world and it’s not going 
to make any sense to anybody. 
That’s not happening. That people 
are saying nice things about it is 
really gratifying. And kind of a big 
relief, too. The 10 years would’ve 
been well-spent no matter what, 
but I’m glad that the 10 years is 
meaningful to other people, too.

You clearly view writing as 

something internally beneficial 
as opposed to just rewarding 
because of external praise.

You can’t work on something for 

this long and have all of your hopes 
pinned on it being published. It 
will just drive you crazy and you 
won’t do very good work. What I 
discovered, sometime around the 
time that I quit “Warcraft” and 
really started getting into a routine 
with the writing, is that there 
needs to be something (in) the 
writing itself that is intrinsically 
valuable to you. And for me, writing 
became the place where I would go 
to try to figure out my emotions 
and things I was confused about. 
The way I’ve been comparing it 
to lately is to someone who keeps 
a garden. Nobody thinks their 
garden is a failure if a bunch of 
other people don’t see it. Nobody 
keeps a garden to get famous. It felt 
like that. Part of the prerequisite 
for writing all the scenes I wrote in 
the book was that I had to find joy 
in it. I had to enjoy it, I had to like 
it. There needed to be something 
about writing that scene that was 
pleasurable to me, or interesting 
to me in some way. That’s how 
it became worth it intrinsically. 
Beyond any of the praise, it was a 
good project to undergo in a cheesy 
personal growth kind of way.

I’ve read that you have 

considered yourself a writer 
since second grade, when you 
were writing “Choose your own 
adventure” 
novels 
yourself. 

But is there a book that really 
convinced you to become a 
writer?

I’ll tell you two books that are 

radically different from each other 
that made me feel like “I want to 
do that.” The first one is called 
“Sixty Stories.” It’s a collection of 
short stories by Donald Barthelme. 
He’s an absurdist, avant-garde 
writer. He’s just hilarious. And 
goofy. He’s a weird combination of 
high-intellect and high-absurdity 
crashing into each other. And 
you’ll finish a story and be like 
“What in the world was that?!” I 
found him in college, and at the 
time I had become an English 
major and was reading a lot of 
really ponderous prose in some of 
my other classes, and I found him 
and just found him delightful. 
That sense of humor, I just love. 
The second one is Virginia Woolf, 
“Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the 
Lighthouse.” I didn’t read her 
until grad school. Oh my god. I 
love the way she dives into her 
characters’ brains. The tone of the 
novel is the voice of the character 
from the inside. I love that so 
much. You know how you have 
certain bands that you listen to 
that hit you in the right time of 
your life? Those two for me were 
the bands that hit me at the right 
time.

Can we expect another magic 

bag of ideas and stories from 
you in another 10 years?

Yeah, I don’t know if it’s going 

to be … No, it totally will be that. 
I’ve started working on another 
thing, and I’m only about 50 pages 
into some exploratory material. 
But, the things I’m stuffing into 
the bag right now are marriage, 
authenticity, gentrification and 
the ’90s. That’s in the stew right 
now. We’ll see, we’ll see.

MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW

YG’s music video for “Why 

You Always Hatin?”, a single 
off his sophomore album Still 
Brazy is, in a 
word, lavish. 
The first 40 
seconds have 
the rapper 
casually 
hop out of a 
helicopter 
and hop 
into a red 
Mercedes. 
The next 
three-and-a-half minutes 
follow a similar trend, with 
an array of shots of YG, 
Drake and Kamaiyah rapping 
from moving convertibles, 
drinking Hennessey, popping 
champagne, dancing next the 
the cars they were previously 
rapping out of and even in 
Kamaiyah’s case, receiving 
foot massages from really 
buff shirtless dudes. There is 
also a conspicuous lack of a 
helicopter in the final three 
and a half minutes, which is, 
in its own way, lavish.

Over-the-top displays of 

wealth are nothing new in 
the rap video world. So much 
so that a video without some 
excessive display of wealth is 
considered avant-garde. This 

video is not avant-garde. It is, 
however, a perfect match for 
the single and the album.

Still Brazy is an homage to a 

simpler time, a West Coast ’90s 
rap album with skits and jokes 
and funky baselines. It’s also 
an album made in 2016, with 
references to Aisha Curry, 
Drake verses and rampant 
anonymous internet hate. 
“Why You Always Hatin?,” a 
happy song about haters, is the 
albums’ mascot.

The duality of the album 

allows the cliché-but-not 
video to work. There are 
rented drop tops, but there are 
also men giving foot massages 
when, unfortunately, the 
prevailing lavish rap video 

rarely has men in subservient 
roles. There’s are bottles of 
champagne popping over 
lobster dinners, but an oddly 
disarming set of shots with 
YG and his friends goofing 
around in a parking lot. This 
is a YG video, but people are 
enjoying themselves.

This video isn’t anything 

artistically groundbreaking, 
but in between the cars and 
money and liquor you can see 
YG winking at us, making a 
little joke that plays off the 
fact that, on the surface, the 
video is so derivative. It’s a self 
awareness we want to see, but 
rarely do when paired with 
exuberant displays of wealth.

- HARRY KRINSKY

B

Why You 
Always 
Hatin?

YG

DEF JAM