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The Journey of the Dancing Triangle Man, and Other News

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On the Shelf

Minya Diez-Dührkoop, Dance costume for “Technik” (detail), 1924, black-and-white positive on silver gelatin paper.

  • Suspense, mystery, confusion, a certain contemplative je ne sais quoi … you can use ellipses for just about anything these days. Try ending your e-mails with them for a much-needed injection of professional ambiguity. And remember their roots: “Penny dreadful scribblers and yellow journalists adopted the mark wholeheartedly, entwining its brand with high melodrama, cheap commercialism, and camp … Adorno, noting the dots’ prevalence in comic books and trashy romance, argued that a ‘hack … must depend on typography to simulate … an infinitude of thoughts and associations, something [he] does not have’ … Some ellipses feel hammy and overwrought. But others allude to charged material with superlative restraint (as in Fitzgerald or Joyce). They can be gently mysterious … They convey the endless rovings of consciousness.”
  • Today in rediscovered Expressionist dance costumes: there are these, which look to have come from a very forward-thinking children’s sci-fi featurette. Two dancers from Hamburg, Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, designed the costumes in the 1920s. “The dancers created twenty full-body costumes for performances between 1919 and 1924, all accompanied by avant-garde music, often composed by Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt.” In 1924, Schulz shot Holdt and then herself, thus ensuring that their avant-garde costumes were tainted with bad memories and left in storage for many decades.
  • As the notion of the “bookless library” wends its way from cheap joke to reality, James Gleick asks: Whither the library? “The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world, where we still need books, microfilm, diaries and letters, maps and manuscripts, and the experts who know how to find, organize, and share them … A transition to the digital can’t mean shrugging off the worldly embodiments of knowledge, delicate manuscripts and fading photographs and old-fashioned books of paper and glue. To treat those as quaint objects of nostalgia is the technocrats’ folly.”
  • The landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church lived in a mansion called Olana, which doubled as “a 3-D landscape artwork with more than five miles of carriage roads.” But what of its craftsmanship? A tour of Olana leaves one with more questions than answers: “We would learn that what was strange about this window, which appeared to be stained glass, was that its diamond-patterned grille was sagging at the edges; it was made of paper. ‘Church cared more about appearances than authenticity,’ we were informed. From the hall we filed into a narrow private study, where the walls were bordered with a script I thought was Arabic, but when I asked its meaning, I was told that it was nonsense Church invented, because he liked the way it looked … There was an empty easel with a palette; shelves of art supplies; a painting by the artist’s mentor, dim; a case of carved-stone artifacts collected on a trip to South America. ‘Some of those objects are authentic, others made for tourists,’ said the guide. ‘Church didn’t care.’ ”
  • Most people went to Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage to dance. Bill Bernstein went to take pictures. His work stands as a vibrant document of the disco era, which he remembers for its inclusiveness: “On a typical night of shooting, Bernstein would arrive at a club at around eleven p.m. or midnight, never drinking, just wandering the dance floor and lounge areas looking for interesting subjects. ‘I would just sort of try to keep my eyes open, and stay there until I felt like I couldn’t do any more, or I was exhausted,’ he says. ‘The speakers were gigantic and the room would vibrate. Between the room vibrating with the noise and the lighting, which was constantly flickering and moving, after about four hours, I was drained.’ ”