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 »

Scene: ground floor of the Royal Exchange, London, 1983, 8:30 am. The bell sounds, prompting a roar from hundreds of men wearing orange, red and blue jackets, shouting orders for all manner of financial contracts. Phones ring, clerks scribble instructions from clients and rush into the pits shouting the order and dealer's name. By noon, thousands of trades have been made; millions of dollars have been won or lost.

When outsiders observed the London Futures Exchange (LIFFE) from the balcony above, they likened the scene to a gladiator's pit or a bullring. It was a roiling, sweating, shouting and laughing manifestation of global capitalism, the market made flesh. All eyes—hundreds of them—were glued to the ticking movements of prices on the screen above the floor. Nicknamed "Maggie's boys", these traders thrived in Margaret Thatcher's England, a time when a certain rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial spirit challenged the City’s elitist status quo. They are the subject of "Day One Trader", John Sussex’s colourful book about life in the pits of the exchange in the 1980s and 1990s, before electronic trading put these men out of business. A former trader himself, Sussex was on the floor when LIFFE started in 1982, and continued on 20 years later, when the exchange was sold to Euronext and the open outcry method gave way to computerised trading. The result is a somewhat wistful account (with help from Joe Morgan, a journalist) about an era and a group of men who now seem anachronistic. On March 1st Frankfurt's stock exchange—Germany's largest—announced it would also end its traditional floor trading and move to an electronic system.  read more »

When reading Elif Batuman’s "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them", her debut book of essays, it’s easy to feel as though you are witnessing a love affair. “Half understanding” is how she describes her infatuation with Russian literature. She adores the way reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, et al, involves oscillating between visceral resonance and terrified confusion. The result is an intellectual thrill—both for her and her readers.

Batuman’s “fascination with Russianness” began casually. As a child, a first-generation Turkish-American in New Jersey, she found herself bewildered by the eccentric mannerisms of her Russian piano teacher. Mystification becomes bewitchment after she discovers an old copy of "Anna Karenina" as a teenager at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara.

“How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small—so serious and so light—so strange and so natural?” What Batuman loved about the novel is what she would later love about Russian literature in general: these seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes. For her "Anna Karenina" is “a prefect book, with an otherworldly perfection; unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a supercharged grey zone between nature and culture.” Indeed, the book's contrast echo Russia itself, that sprawling country peppered with weird little villages.  read more »

Every image is essentially an illusion—a representation of a thing, never the thing itself. For many artists the illusion is itself the art. From early trompe l’oeil paintings to Juan Munoz's close-up photographs of sleight-of-hand card tricks, artists have long shown an affinity for the ploys of grandstanding stage magicians.

"Magic Show", a newly published catalogue to accompany a travelling exhibition of the same name, explores the relationship between art and magic. Written by Jonathan Allen and Sally O'Reilly, who co-curated the show for London's Hayward Gallery, the book discerns the connection between "lowbrow" trickery and loftier manipulations.

Many of the 24 contemporary artists featured (in both the show and the book) borrow directly from iconic magic tricks. Sinta Werner's "Disjunction" plays on the idea of a disappearing act, but in this case it is the viewer who vanishes; the site-specific installation creates the effect of approaching a mirror without a reflection. Susan Hiller's "Homage to Yves Klein" is a more upbeat take on his rather dark photo-montage, "Leap into the Void" (1960). The result is a charming play on the trick of levitation.  read more »

How exciting! A brand new books podcast from The Economist! It's like Charles Dickens himself whispering sweet nothings into your ear. As Otis Redding might say, take a listen:

As an X-certificate actress, Sasha Grey perfected a thrashing sensuality far more cathartic and psychologically fraught than her moaning, grunting contemporaries. Her smouldering looks and unapologetic public appearances snared millions of mostly male fans and turned the teen porn performer into a cult figure. She is considered cool to watch.

Buoyed by her status as an underworld icon, Grey has participated in fashion spreads, starred in a Smashing Pumpkins music video and worked the talk-show circuit. Then at the age of 21 she made her first foray into “legitimate” cinema, landing the role of the laconic escort in Steven Soderbergh’s "The Girlfriend Experience". But Grey might better be suited to highbrow performance art than Hollywood glitz.

She spoke with More Intelligent Life after appearing at PERFORMA 09–a biennial performance-art festival organised by RoseLee Goldberg. She had just performed in "Case", a six-hour theatrical reading of William Gibson’s science-fiction classic "Neuromancer", arranged by Brody Condon, a performance artist, and adapted by Brandon Stosuy. She appeared in the role of Molly Millions, a clawed, mercury-eyed assassin.

Grey, who was home-schooled, retains the strange intellectual sparkle of a true autodidact. Here she considers the line between porn and performance art, the cultural appeal of pre-war Berlin and the beginnings of a new cyber-hierarchy.

More Intelligent Life: How did you get involved in this performance piece? Did they approach you with the part, or you them?  read more »

The director Michael Hoffman is a master at embellishing stories with period trappings; he has proved as much with films like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Restoration". "The Last Station", based upon Jay Parini’s 1990 biographical novel of the same name, recounts the final, tempestuous months of the life of Leo Tolstoy, incarnated on screen by Christopher Plummer. Hoffman endows this adaptation with misty steppes, waxed moustaches, peasants bundled in swaths of linen and an ample supply of those droshkies without which no character from any of Tolstoy’s own novels would have gotten very far.

Trappings aside, the plot itself is a knotted one, with almost enough characters to warrant one of those genealogical charts that Tolstoy himself so often provided. We gain access to the writer’s private life by way of Valentin Bulgakov, a naïve young scholar (played by a baby-faced James McAvoy), who is hired on as Tolstoy’s secretary. In contrast with Valentin’s vulnerability (he’s a virgin with a nervous cough), Tolstoy appears luminous, his greatness blinding, complete with a biblical white beard and gauzy robes. Upon arrival at the estate, Valentin is immediately pulled into a venomous struggle between Tolstoy’s wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), and the author's scheming disciple, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). The two vie for the rights to Tolstoy’s work: the countess is wary of seeming greedy as she grasps for her inheritance, while Vladimir, a commune leader, conspires to transform Tolstoy into an icon.  read more »

In the summer of 2007 a friend of mine forwarded me an e-mail from an artistic collective he was affiliated with here in New York City. The group was planning a “literary pilgrimage” to Cornish, New Hampshire--the purpose being to urge J.D. Salinger to make public everything he had written since he ceased publishing his work in 1965 (because surely he had written something in the intervening years). The members of this group had decided that Salinger was selfish for keeping his writings to himself, and for allegedly threatening to burn them.

Their plan was to rent a couple of cars and drive up to Cornish, find his house and deliver their message to him. This visit was to be preceded by a letter to Mr Salinger warning him of their impending visit (but leaving the date of their visit vague so that he would not know when to expect them). I read a version of their letter-an imploring manifesto asking for more of the stories that had already affected their lives so deeply.

I found this trip to be a bad idea, and I told my friend so. I recall having a spiteful little thought: that I would have preferred it if these artists had chosen some other writer, perhaps any other writer, and gone to his house to urge him never to publish anything ever again. That is a manifesto I would have enjoyed.  read more »

I admit it. I subscribe to US Weekly. I’ll even confess that nothing seems to lull me into such a relaxed a state of bliss as those cheap, glossy pages. I feel a little guilty that I take such joy in reading about the trials and tribulations of people more glamorous and wealthy than me. But really, it is a fundamental part of our nature to revel in such things. What could be more deliciously, awkwardly visceral than Schadenfreude?

But I have my limits. I prefer intrigue to tragedy; romantic mishaps over illness or death. We often learn from gawking at the misfortunes of others, such as how to behave, when to use a paper shredder and what not to wear. For some, reading about the bad diets and cruel divorces of the rich and famous inspires better choices in one's own life. This public-service element was surely the motivation behind "Trial & Heirs: Famous Fortune Fights!", a new book by Danielle and Andrew Mayoras ("legacy expert attorneys"), which "not only chronicles some of the most highly publicised will and estate battles of several recently deceased
celebrities, it also offers expert advice to help anyone, celebs and non-celebs alike, to avoid similar problems with their estate and will planning," according to a press release delivered to the More Intelligent Life desk today.

Naturally, the book offers advice we can all use:

• Make sure you don't set up a trust for your loved ones to keep your affairs private, only to let the plan fail because the trust wasn’t funded... like Michael Jackson.

• Try not to write instructions that promise property worth millions to your cherished godchildren, only to have those wishes completely ignored and kept secret... like Princess Diana.  read more »

It’s becoming difficult to tell Hollywood apart from a man with the words “The End Of The World Is Nigh” painted on his sandwich board. Between “2012”, “Terminator Salvation”, the rash of zombie pandemic movies, and even the latest children’s cartoons (“Wall-E”, “9”), the message that film-makers keep shouting is that humanity’s days are numbered. But it has never carried as much weight as it does in “The Road”, John Hillcoat’s chilling adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel.

The story is set in an America razed by an unspecified cataclysm. A widowed father, played by Viggo Mortensen, trudges through a grey-brown wasteland stripped of life. There’s no hope of salvation. All he can wish for is to keep his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) out of the hands of roving cannibals. Mortensen’s portrayal of a man ground down by hunger and hopelessness is extraordinary, and the film is a sombre yet poetic alternative to the prevailing cinematic treatment of the apocalypse as an exciting opportunity to blow up national monuments. No one who sees it will forget it. But will anyone want to see it twice?

"The Road", in cinemas in America; British release January 8th

~ NICHOLAS BARBER