February 6, 2018 Arts & Culture A Walden for the YouTube Age By Marissa Grunes Still from Primitive Technology. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwp. Thwp. Thwack. The sound of stone striking wood. Rustling leaves. A loud crack as a tree falls. A dry whirring of insects. Further off, a monkey shrieks. Shhpt. Shhpt. Water purls over stones in a brook; the heavy pitter-patter of rain taps the forest floor. These are the sounds of primitive technology. Primitive Technology: an oxymoron, perhaps a logical impossibility, a collision of two buzzwords, and one of the most arresting (and unexpectedly popular) channels on YouTube. Primitive Technology was created two years ago by a man in Queensland, Australia, who builds huts, weapons, and tools using only naturally occurring materials. In all of his five- to ten-minute videos, the man wears only navy blue shorts, rarely looks at the camera, and never speaks. It’s a niche concept, to be sure. The channel does not focus on historically accurate building techniques. It does not offer explanatory tutorials. It will not even help you survive in the wilderness: the “fire sticks” with which he ignites tinder require at least twenty-four hours to prepare and look fiendishly hard to use. So why have the videos attracted millions of viewers? And what do viewers like myself seek when we watch the channel on loop? What do we get from it? Read More
February 6, 2018 Arts & Culture The Art of Madness By Cody Delistraty Aloïse Corbaz, Le ricochet solaire. On July 5, 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet set off for Switzerland accompanied by two fellow Frenchmen, the publisher Jean Paulhan and the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. The Swiss tourism board had organized the trip with the hopes that the men would return to Paris with a new view of Switzerland. Paul Baudry, the cultural ambassador of French-Swiss tourism, had organized for them to eat at the top restaurants, take in the rolling hills and meadows, and go to the Matterhorn. But Dubuffet had little interest in all that. “He ran around the asylums,” Paulhan later wrote, collecting “different drawings and gouaches.” In Paris, Dubuffet had already begun purchasing art made by people who had been deemed mentally ill, but it was in Switzerland, across roughly half a dozen institutions, where he gathered the bulk of what would become his collection. Read More
February 5, 2018 Arts & Culture “What the Foucault?” and Other After-Dinner Musings By Marshall Sahlins Michel Foucault Twenty-five years ago, Marshall Sahlins, professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Chicago, devised some bons mots to deliver after a dinner at the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain. They were soon collected and published in a book called What the Foucault?, now out in its updated fifth edition. A selection of entries appears below: Some Laws of Civilization First law of civilization: all airports are under construction. Second law of civilization: I’m in the wrong line. Third law of civilization: snacks sealed in plastic bags cannot be opened, even using your teeth. Fourth law of civilization: the human gene whose discovery is announced in the New York Times—there’s one every day, a gene du jour—is for some bad trait, like schizophrenia, kleptomania, or pneumonia. We have no good genes. Fifth law of civilization: failing corporate executives and politicians always resign to spend more time with their families. Read More
February 5, 2018 Arts & Culture A DACA Poet Speaks Out By Tara Wanda Merrigan Marcello Hernandez Castillo On any given day, the county jail in Marysville, California, holds about 170 immigrant detainees awaiting hearings. Because Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have an office nearby, the inmates will be shown via Televideo to one of the three judges of San Francisco’s immigration court. After their hearings, 90 percent of those inmates will be put on a green bus and taken to an ICE detention center for deportation. The Marysville jail is just one of the nearly two hundred jails where ICE held contracts last year. It also happens to be just a few blocks away from the home of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, a DACA recipient and poet who recently moved back to Marysville to be near his mother. Castillo’s debut poetry collection, Cenzontle, will be published in April. It has been nearly four years since Castillo became a legal resident, after marrying his longtime girlfriend. But when the Department of Homeland Security bus rolls up to the jail on Friday mornings, Castillo feels a familiar paranoia. “Some people think the border just exists along the southern part of the United States, but it’s like a panopticon,” Castillo says. “Their omnipresence—that ICE can be anywhere—is what most attacks the psyche of undocumented people.” Read More
February 5, 2018 Arts & Culture Death and Feminism in a Nutshell By Nicole Cooley Frances Lee Glessner, Kitchen (room from afar). From The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Photo by Corinne May Botz. (Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery and Monacelli Press.) Homicide. Suicide by hanging. A great deal of drinking, mainly of whiskey, mainly by men. Blood pooled on the floor. Chairs overturned. Many weapons: guns and knives and ropes. Burned Cabin, where a burned skeleton is barely visible, Dark Bathroom, which contains a dead woman in a bathtub beside an empty liquor bottle, and Unpapered Bedroom, in a boarding house where an unknown woman has been found dead. In Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas, the world is harsh and dark and dangerous to women. “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” her series of nineteen models from the fifties, are all crime scenes. Glessner Lee built the dioramas, she said, “to convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.” Read More
February 1, 2018 Arts & Culture The Art of Unpacking a Library By Alberto Manguel The home library of William Randolph Hearst. I would argue that public libraries, holding both virtual and material texts, are an essential instrument to counter loneliness. I would defend their place as society’s memory and experience. I would say that without public libraries, and without a conscious understanding of their role, a society of the written word is doomed to oblivion. I realize how petty, how egotistical it seems, this longing to own the books I borrow. I believe that theft is reprehensible, and yet countless times I’ve had to dredge up all the moral stamina I could find not to pocket a desired volume. Polonius echoed my thoughts precisely when he told his son, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” My own library carried this reminder clearly posted. I love public libraries, and they are the first places I visit whenever I’m in a city I don’t know. But I can work happily only in my own private library, with my own books—or, rather, with the books I know to be mine. Maybe there’s a certain ancient fidelity in this, a sort of curmudgeonly domesticity, a more conservative trait in my nature than my anarchic youth would have ever admitted. My library was my tortoise shell. Read More