September 26, 2017 Arts & Culture John H. Johnson and the Black Magazine By Dick Gregory Let me tell you a story about Jet magazine. In the late 1970s, I went to the African country Uganda, which was falling apart under Idi Amin. His rule was over, and he had left a mess. I wanted to see about helping sick and hungry folks over there. I got on a plane, and then onto a bus. Things were crazy, with people fighting for control of the country. A group of men made everybody get off the bus I was on. And the saddest thing was: suddenly I was looking at a nine-year-old African child with a gun, who walked up to me and said, “Get up on the sidewalk.” A man on a bicycle jumped off and said, “Dick Gregory! Dick Gregory!” He looked at that little punk packing the gun and said, “Get outta here. You know who this man is?” Read More
September 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Travel Snapshots from an Odyssey By Daniel Mendelsohn Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, begins when his eighty-one-year-old father, Jay Mendelsohn, enrolls in Daniel’s undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey. From those risky beginnings, the two embark on an intellectual journey that becomes an emotional one, and then a literal one, when they take a cruise designed to retrace Odysseus’s steps through the Mediterranean. Below, Mendelsohn shares photos from that cruise. He described them to us over the phone, from Canada, as he shuffled from one book-tour event to another. —Ed. June 19, 2011: the day we embarked on the cruise. This photo is from the day we arrived in Athens to embark on the cruise. One of the things that amused me the most about my dad was his indefatigable attachment to both his camera and his iPad, without which he never traveled. It’s funny because the opening of the Odyssey emphasizes two things about Odysseus: that he traveled far and wide, and his intellectual capacity. Odysseus wanted to know the minds of men. In a certain sense, he’s the first anthropologist in Western literature. He goes places partly because he has to, but while he’s there, he’s very interested in “the natives,” so to speak. I found my father’s indefatigable recording of everything endearing. I’m very lazy in that way when I travel—I just sort of let things wash over me—but he was constantly taking notes and taking pictures. I thought it was really funny, when we got there, that he was taking pictures and making notes about the ship. I said, Really, Dad? And he replied, Everything is part of this experience. Which was a very Odysseus-like attitude, actually. So I took a picture of him taking a picture of the boat. We hadn’t even boarded yet. Read More
September 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Neil the Horse Rides Again By Trina Robbins The 1980s was the decade of the black-and-white comic boom—and the inevitable bust. The boom was started in part by three successful self-published comics: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest, and Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark. A comic-reading public that wanted something besides the same tired superhero formula or the sex-and-drugs heavy (and often misogynist) underground comics snapped them up. The black-and-white pages were cheaper to print than color, and soon new publishers with new titles were springing up like toadstools after a rainstorm. At first it seemed as though any black-and-white comic book would sell (and at first they did), and there were some pretty bizarre but briefly successful books with titles, like Cold Blooded Chameleon Commandos or The Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos, riding on the armored coattails of Ninja Turtles, but along with the silliness came some good comics that are still with us, like Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, Max Collins and Terry Beatty’s Ms. Tree, and Joshua Quagmire’s Cutey Bunny, and some good comics that unfortunately didn’t last, like Bill Messner-Loebs’s Journey, and the subject of this essay. In the midst of the hysteria of the black-and-white boom, along came Neil the Horse, tap dancing his way into the hearts of America. (Well, mine, anyway, and enough others to keep the comic going for fifteen issues.) Five parts Donald Duck artist Carl Barks, five parts Fred Astaire, and a hundred percent Arn Saba, the banana-chomping, rubber-legged equine’s comics were a refreshing change from the dark, grim and gritty, ultraviolent mainstream comics that seemed almost de rigueur during the eighties. His Art Deco–looking characters sang and danced their way through some pretty wacky adventures: inspired by the manic adventures of Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck, along with a healthy dose of surrealism à la Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, Neil got caught in a photocopier, producing hundreds of Neil clones; he met Mr. Coffee Nerves and consumed a gallon of the stuff, with expected rubber-legged results, and he and his cigar-chomping pal, Soapy the Cat, went to Hell (not as a result of drinking all that coffee!). Read More
September 20, 2017 Arts & Culture The Surprising History (and Future) of Paperweights By Chantel Tattoli Illustration by Ellis Rosen On a Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery, in Bushwick. Some awfully cool looking folks were packed into the small white space. The table was laid with 117 new examples of paperweights. Almost none of them resembled the office accoutrement of last century, when open windows and fans sent paper sailing through reeking cigarette fog. These were objet d’art. They ranged from the purely ironic (a furry outgrowth) to the purely beautiful (chain links encrusted in sherbet crystals). Many were ineffable abstracts, and a few were just satisfying (animal figurines drilled into each other). “My life doesn’t justify a paperweight,” a girlfriend remarked. “My life isn’t settled enough. You don’t buy one until you think you’re not going to move.” Paperweights had never struck me as markers of stability. But a month later, when I was laid off from the legacy media company where I worked for a print magazine, I surveyed my desk, picked up a stack of our branded notepads and a handle of whiskey and thought, At least I don’t have to lug no paperweight. Then Saturday came without Saturday’s feel. In a vintage shop, I drifted from taxidermy pheasants to a shelf staged with dusted curio, and there was a Murano blown-glass paperweight. At its center, the softball-size bubble had a clear tubular ring, inside of which was a clear finial shape from which streaks of red sprayed in arches at 360 degrees. The thing was maybe five pounds? My fiancé found me cradling it to my heart. “You’re going to bring that home, aren’t you,” he said, meaning: Did my foolhardy troth to paper in the age of new media know no bounds? The paperweight seemed to englobe our opposed perspectives: he thought it looked like a nasty vortex; I thought it looked like a wine fountain. In 1495, a historian from Venice remarked, “But consider to whom did it occur to include in a little ball all the sorts of flowers which clothe the meadow in Spring.” He was referring to the glasswork techniques the Romans had picked up from the Egyptians. The results were not paperweights, not least because the bottoms had not yet been shaved flat to prevent rolling. That was an evolution Paul Hollister, the late authority on paperweights, likened to “turn[ing] the Venetian pumpkin into Cinderella’s golden coach.” (As a bonus, grounding the base removed the pontil mark, the scar from a glassblower’s iron rod, and without a belly button, the orb seemed to come into the world by magic.) Read More
September 14, 2017 Arts & Culture John Gardner’s Tricksy Death and Tangled Legacy By Ben Pfeiffer From the cover of John Gardner’s Grendel. I think it has given a few readers pleasure. And I suppose it may have depressed a few. I hope it does more good than harm. —John Gardner, when asked what effect he thinks his writing has had on people, in conversation in The Paris Review, issue no. 75 (Spring 1979). Two weeks before his third wedding, John Gardner, novelist and writing teacher, was drifting in a small boat on a lake in the middle of the night, despairing. He’d lost control of his personal life, his health, and his finances. Once made rich by his best sellers, he now owed five hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. Once a literary darling, he’d made himself an outcast. That night on the lake, he told his friend he was afraid he was going to die. And days later—thirty-five years ago to the day—he did. John Gardner was only forty-nine when his motorcycle crashed along the Susquehanna River in New York. Read More
September 7, 2017 Arts & Culture Five Hundred Glass Negatives By Mary Jo Bang On the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy (1894–1989), who inspired Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection, A Doll for Throwing. Next year, Germany will celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus, a school that stressed the unity of industrial design and all other arts. The celebration will include Moholy’s work. Lucia Moholy, Self-portrait, 1930. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. In 1915, twenty-one-year-old Lucia Schulz wrote in her journal that she could imagine herself using photography as “a passive artist,” recording everything from the best perspective, putting the film through the chemical processes she’d learned, and adding to the image her sense of “how the objects act on me.” On her twenty-seventh birthday, at the Registry Office in Charlottenburg, a borough of Berlin, she married the Hungarian Constructivist painter Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and became, in the blink of a bureaucratic instant, Lucia Moholy. A few years later, when Moholy-Nagy was recruited to teach as a master at the Bauhaus school, Lucia went with him—she, her camera, her technical skills, and her knowledge of the darkroom. The Bauhaus, a school established in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, would eventually become an influential international design movement. The clean sculptural lines of its buildings, the bent steel and leather Bauer chairs, Marianne Brandt’s elegant globe-and-square tea sets would come to represent a break with the preindustrial past. The look itself would become a signifier of urban modernity and of modern life. When Lucia arrived at the Bauhaus, she became, at Gropius’s invitation, the de facto Bauhaus photographer, albeit unpaid. The glass negatives would remain hers, however, presumably to do with as she wished. Read More