April 4, 2018 Our Daily Correspondent Bazaar Land, Las Vegas By Joshua Baldwin A fellow bus rider wearing three pairs of eyeglasses reached across the aisle and asked me to touch his phone. “It’s so hot,” he said. “Please. Why is the phone so hot?” I apologized and returned to my reverie of capitalism’s detritus floating against the pale Mojave sky. Over the past two years, I’ve taken around twelve of these rides from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, so this must have been around the thirteenth. I was heading to town for the biannual Affordable Shopping Destination expo of March 2018, a four-day wholesale-merchandise trade show held across all two million square feet of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s exhibit space. I’d heard there would be a lot of stuff at this expo. You know, products. Of the type sold at our nation’s truck stops, car-wash gift shops, airport kiosks, and dollar stores. An estimated forty-five thousand attendees from pretty much every retail and distribution channel would come to interact and strike deals with the twenty-six-hundred-plus importers, vendors, and suppliers—and I, a stranger with a slow-growing penchant for conventions, would join them. Read More
April 4, 2018 On Art The Chimerical Creatures of Unica Zürn By Natalie Haddad Left: Unica Zürn, Untitled, 1965. Right: Unica Zürn. © Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin. In 1970, after over a decade of intermittent hospitalization for mental illness, Unica Zürn committed suicide by jumping out the window of the apartment of her longtime companion, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. Zürn is best known as the author of anagrammatic poetry and the semi-biographical novellas Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine, but she was also a visual artist. She had a preternatural skill for creating phantasmagorical worlds. Her pen-and-ink drawings were exhibited at galleries throughout Paris and Berlin, and she participated in the 1959 International Surrealist Exhibition. Her artistic practice, often eclipsed by that of her husband, confounds her literary legacy. Read More
April 4, 2018 Hue's Hue Jonquil, the Light Yellow of Early Flowers, Mad Painters, and Dust Bowl–Era Pottery By Katy Kelleher John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903. Here are two yellow fables: In the first story, a man sits next to a pool of water. It gleams silver in the moonlight, and the surface is untroubled by leaves or raindrops. He can see his own reflection, and he admires the tender sweep of his brow. He looks for so long that he no longer wants food. Even though he sits near water, he feels no thirst. Eventually, his body, his beloved physicality, withers, and he dies. Where he once sat, a slender-stalked flower appears. The nymph, who had watched the man’s demise from the cover of the trees, names it for him. Every year, in that same spot, a narcissus opens its butter-yellow petals to reveal a diminutive golden trumpet, a floral echo of his lost beauty. Read More