November 2, 2017 Arts & Culture The Unchanging, Ever-Changing Earth Room By Kyle Chayka Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: John Cliett On SoHo’s cobblestoned Wooster Street, tucked above North Face and Lululemon boutiques stocked with neon athleisure, there is an otherwise empty, white, second-floor thirty-six-hundred-square-foot loft filled with 140 tons of dirt. It’s open to visitors from Wednesday through Sunday, noon to six P.M. The surreal aspect of its very existence is undercut somewhat by the normalcy of public access and consistent hours, as if it were a store selling nothing. Walking up the stairs and into the space on a recent late morning, I was first struck by the sensation of hush. It was not just the quieting of the sounds from the street but an enveloping cocoon of warmth and musty scent, like a field after summer rain. Around the corner, a raked expanse of soil two feet deep filled the loft from edge to edge, occupying what might otherwise be a bedroom and rising up to meet wide exterior windows. This is The New York Earth Room, an installation by the New York–based artist and musician Walter De Maria, who died in 2013. De Maria was part of the 1970s Land Art movement that included such compatriots as Robert Smithson, of Spiral Jetty fame, and Michael Heizer, whose City is an enormous monument complex in the Nevada desert still under construction. Their work deals with massive scales, both in time and space. In October 1977, the German art dealer Heiner Friedrich hosted The Earth Room as an exhibition at his gallery, which then occupied the Wooster Street space, where the dealer also lived in a front apartment. The installation was meant to last for three months, but it never left, and in 1980, Friedrich helped found the Dia Foundation, an art organization that has pledged to preserve De Maria’s work in (more or less) perpetuity. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of The Earth Room’s quiet persistence, which Dia is marking with commemorative events and ongoing exhibitions of De Maria’s work. Read More
November 1, 2017 Arts & Culture The Podcasting Way of Death By Sylvie McNamara The futuristic Aeternal hearse, designed by Abhishek Roy. I discovered funeral-industry trade podcasts during a dark night of the soul. I’m allergic to wine, but I’d been drinking it anyway, and as I lay in bed feeling my heart thrash and my sinuses cloud, I contemplated the fact that I now have a circulatory system but someday won’t. This is a fixation of mine that arises with inexplicable and alarming frequency—I’m twenty-five and healthy; I haven’t experienced tremendous loss. My abstract anxieties about death tend to coalesce around my most concrete repulsion: embalming. That night, in a desperate ploy to overwhelm the circuitry of my fear, I searched for a podcast that would explain the process with clinical precision. That’s how I stumbled across the embalming episode of Deathcast, in which the former body remover Kelsey Eriksson describes draining the body of blood and pumping it full of preservatives. Her voice was lilting and reedy, the sugary pitch of Kristen Bell narrating Gossip Girl, which did not make her description of my grisliest nightmares easier to swallow. In fact, as I learned about “eye caps”—thick, barbed contacts that close eyelids and lend shape to postmortem shrunken eyeballs—my dread clotted into a neurotic fixation. I downloaded podcast after podcast of “death professionals” trading industry tips, promoting hair-raising products and telling one another stories of the trade that are as startling and macabre as urban legends. Read More
October 31, 2017 Arts & Culture Hillbilly Horror: B Movies of the Undead South By Chantel Tattoli Still from Two Thousand Maniacs! Years ago, my boyfriend and I drove from New York City, where he was from, to Orlando, where I was from and where we were both attending an old liberal-arts college rich in bats and mossy oaks. South, past the Mason–Dixon Line and into the Carolinas, we went. We were speeding on a forsaken stretch of I-95 late one night when the rearview mirror glinted blue and red. I would have pulled over immediately. But I was not behind the wheel. Nick did not want to stop until there were witnesses. I didn’t grasp his fear: we were a couple of law-abiding white kids en route to school at the end of summer. What did he imagine was going to happen to us? But he drove for more than five minutes—ignoring my advice (so that I pondered whether to phone my dad or his when we went to jail)—before halting in a semi-bright parking lot, switching the radio to country music, and dropping the window. Nick recalls the state trooper as a seven-footer with a gravelly voice and leathery face. What is indisputable is that Nick—a full-blooded Manhattanite—addressed this officer with a syrupy accent and managed to get away with a mere stern warning. Nick looked at me afterward. “This is why I put Florida license plates on the Xterra,” he said. “If that cop knew I was from New York, who knows!” I thought he was nuts then; and I still think he is nuts. But Nick continues to protest: “You didn’t get it. That was the stuff of horror films.” Recently, I have seen his point. There is a robust subgenre of horror that mistrusts the custom of Southern hospitality. It turns on the premise that the American South is a danger zone for Northerners, who remain persona non grata and venture into Dixie at the risk of life and limb. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)—by the director Tobe Hooper, dead of natural causes this August—is the marquee example. Deliverance (1972), Motel Hell (1980, tagged, “It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent Fritters”), and House of 1000 Corpses (2003) are some others. In this category, known as “hillbilly horror,” one film stands out at the get: a low-budget, semi-professional 1964 splatter flick titled Two Thousand Maniacs! Read More
October 30, 2017 Arts & Culture The Inventions of Witches By Kathryn Nuernberger On witches, Derrida, and the impossibility of ever being truly known. John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886. The inquisitors wanted something old from each witch they tortured—a Sabbath orgy or blood oath or cat demon or wolf-faced baby or some other verification of the stories they already believed. They also wanted something new, so they could feel, with each trial and execution, as if they were getting somewhere: With what instruments do you fly? What did the toad in the pot say? Which direction do you turn the horseshoe over the door to summon your demon? According to Joseph Glanvill’s 1681 volume Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions in two parts: the first treating of their possibility, the second of their real existence, the convicted witch Elizabeth Styles’s offering to the investigators in 1664 was that her demon sucked blood. He came to her often. Even when she was tied up in a dungeon, still he came to her pole in the form of a butterfly, to suck her blood as he always did. Though it may seem strange to us now, that the devil came as an apparition of a butterfly was very old news in 1664. Only the bloodsucking was new. Even the great botanist and first ecologist Maria Sibylla Merian, who discovered and documented insect metamorphosis in the same century, had to be careful about her reputation and keep her room of silkworms and caterpillars secret, because there were many who still believed in witches and their power to take the form of butterflies and spoil the milk. Read More
October 27, 2017 Arts & Culture What’s Scarier: Library Fines or Turning into a Scarecrow? By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi Last Thursday, at the New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen branch, in Harlem, city officials gathered to announce the forgiveness of all fines on cards held by borrowers aged seventeen and younger. It was a recognition that even the best of us can incur these basic civic penalties—in 2010 George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon replaced a book, checked out to “President,” which had started accruing fines at the New York Society Library 221 years earlier. It was also a recognition that library fines may unduly burden the most vulnerable. Across New York’s three library systems—NYPL, Brooklyn, and Queens—161,000 of 927,000 youth cards had been blocked due to fines of at least fifteen dollars. The average blocked card, at the time of the amnesty, owed about fifty-five dollars. Countee Cullen tied for the highest rate of blocked youth cards in the NYPL system, at 28 percent, and in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, rates exceeded 40 percent. All three library presidents spoke of young patrons who, already barred from borrowing books, may, for fear or for shame, stop visiting the library entirely. “I don’t want to live in that kind of society,” NYPL president Anthony Marx said, after the announcement, which took place on the building’s bright, open-plan teen floor, with the tops of trees and the cornices of town houses peeking through the windows. Marx pointed out that public-school students who enjoy fine-free borrowing privileges through a current pilot program are ultimately no likelier to fail to return books than are those who face fines. The NYPL is considering eliminating fines entirely, though this would require a significant endowment to offset the revenue loss. (To fund-raise during the Great Depression, some public-library systems encouraged their patrons to keep books late and intentionally incur fines.) For now, at least, youth fines began accruing again at the moment of the amnesty. The libraries hope that educational initiatives will improve renewals and timely returns. Read More
October 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Theodore Dreiser’s New York By Mike Wallace Teddy Dreiser tries to make it. Theodore Dreiser, 1917. In late November 1894, in the depths of the 1890s depression, Theodore Dreiser arrived in New York. He soon headed for City Hall Park, where he bulled his way into the World building, successfully evading the hired muscle who barred the doors of most Park Row newspapers, keeping desperate job seekers at bay. Once inside, he managed to land an unsalaried position as a space-rate reporter, paid by the column inch, on the strength of having served a lengthy journalistic apprenticeship in various midwestern cities. Dreiser liked newsmen. He appreciated their cynical dissent from prevailing pieties. “One can always talk to a newspaper man,” Dreiser would write, “with the full confidence that one is talking to a man who is at least free of moralistic mush.” His own life had rubbed him free of Victorian illusions. His family was grit-poor, his father a beaten man. The Dreisers were always on the move—being evicted or chasing cheaper rents—and ostracized as trash by “respectable” people. The slums of Terre Haute and Chicago taught him that life was hard, amoral, and indifferent to the individual—ideas reinforced by his readings of Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin. Read More