January 31, 2013 Arts & Culture Is Scotch Tape Scottish? By Sadie Stein Although it is hotly debated, some claim that on this day, in 1930, Scotch Tape was born. But what, you might ask, is particularly Caledonian about pressure-adhesive transparent tape? As About.com explains it, it was rooted in old-fashioned racism! The brand name Scotch came about while Richard Drew was testing his first masking tape to determine how much adhesive he needed to add. The body shop painter became frustrated with the sample masking tape and exclaimed, “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” The name was soon applied to the entire line of 3M tapes. Indeed, the brand so embraced the notion of being cheapskates that until 1944 their mascot was one Scotty McTape, a kilted boy with an enthusiasm for tape. And in case you were wondering to which clan the tape belongs, it appears to be unaffiliated.
January 31, 2013 Arts & Culture Hear That Lonesome Gasket Blow: Part 3 By Evan James Read part 1 here and part 2 here. I had only just started stepping to and fro under the shifting blush of light-emitting diodes, and with only the most pitiable amount of rhythm or flair, when a strawberry blond officer of the Wellington Police crossed the dance floor, tapped my shoulder, and asked me to come outside. My first thought was that, at last, I was getting hit on by someone who had their own car. Then I prayed, “Please, please be arresting me for writing about my impressions of the South Island.” Since arriving, I had not suffered so much as one evil eye in the world’s southernmost capital city (the closest being when I somewhat brusquely thrust a five-dollar note, the front of which shows the grinning profile of explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, at a middle-aged Chinese fruiterer at the Vivian Street open-air green market; she glared at me and my bag of ripe apricots). A peachy, pacific place. What could I have done to attract this sun-damaged arm of the law, aside from describing the kea parrot as a “bastard”? Being a bastard myself, I have nothing but affection for the kea. Had my two-step been so criminal? “Slow night?” I said. He asked how much I had been drinking. I managed a modest guess, adding, as he copied the details of my driver’s license onto a clipboard, that I worked for the university. “And how long have you been here?” The officer pointed his pen at the indefatigably thumping club. “About two minutes.” He sighed, embarrassed by his task (a random check, I would later learn), and wrote my two minutes down on his official paperwork. “All right. You wanna head back in?” Read More
January 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Brother Sun By Michael Signorelli I credit the singer-songwriter Donovan with introducing me to Saint Francis of Assisi. I credit also Franco Zeffirelli, director of the Donovan-scored Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972), and Paolo Belardo, my tenth-grade Italian teacher, who suspended all learning for a week to screen the film. But my low-heat fervor for the saint developed mainly as a result of my response to Donovan’s soundtrack, a gentle, hippie sing-along that became the most durable joke of my sophomore year. In lyrics like “Fish are in love with the water / Birds are in love with the air,” my friends and I had encountered a record amount of sappy earnestness, to which the only appropriate teenage response was ridicule. To make each other laugh, we would assume dreamy looks, loll our heads to one side, and warble about birds, butterflies, and flowers, about personified celestial bodies, while swaying our arms and hips. Were we popular? Not always. But in my barely hidden self, I actually had no problem loving flowers, and the basic facts of Saint Francis’s life held immense appeal. A good-looking party boy, a prince of the popolo, renounces his possessions and societal privilege; embraces nature, poverty, and charity; walks the Umbrian countryside barefoot; clothes himself in a coarse habit bound by a cord; builds quaint churches; preaches penance; does mercy unto lepers—and amazes everyone. What more could a teenager ask than to stun the world with his previously hidden quality of being? Read More
January 29, 2013 Arts & Culture Back on the Shelf: At the Seminary Co-op By James Santel Brian Koprowski, Chicago Theological Seminary, University of Chicago. Nostalgia is a dangerous feeling to indulge. It transforms other people, including old versions of one’s self, into figures whose lone purpose is to lend texture and credence to a diorama of the past. And just as an elementary-school diorama of, say, a Roman frontier fortress, no matter how meticulously researched and constructed, can never convey the totality of what it would have been like to stand sentry in Germania circa 70 A.D., so the version of the past constructed by nostalgia is a distortion, albeit one that relies upon memory (itself a kind of distortion, as neuroscience tells us) and experience to weave what is in essence a fairy tale. Nostalgia’s refractions aren’t limited to people, of course. Its influence extends to places, too, refusing to acknowledge that places have presents and futures—presents and futures that often don’t involve one’s self, hence the willingness to ignore them—but only pasts: your pasts. Whenever I visit the University of Chicago, for instance, Hutch Courtyard is never Hutch Courtyard, a pleasant flagstone enclave that’s served as a favored warm-weather gathering spot for generations of undergraduates, but instead the place where I sat reading Moby-Dick when I learned that my grandmother had died. That’s it. All of the hopes and dreams, joys and fears toted through that spot by millions of human beings for more than a century, brushed aside by my solipsistic longing for a past that wasn’t nearly as honey colored in the living as it is in the remembering. I recall seeing a picture of Prince Charles passing through Hutch Courtyard during a 1977 visit and thinking, There’s Prince Charles walking right by the spot where I was when I heard that Grandma died. Nostalgia, which presents the past as a meadow of boundless possibility, is actually quite constricting. Read More
January 28, 2013 Arts & Culture When You Need Ten Feet of Books… By Sadie Stein I once knew a man who bought antique books by the foot to fill the majestic library of a new house. He was completely unembarrassed by this fact, which is, I guess, the only way to be, and there was something very eighteenth century about the whole thing. (On close inspection, a lot of them proved to be bound sermons, in many volumes.) The idea of insufficient books to fill shelves is a novel idea to most apartment dwellers, certainly in New York. I was, therefore, fascinated to read about the Strand Bookstore’s Books by the Foot program, in which the New York institution furnishes volumes for films, magazine shoots, private buyers, and, presumably, decorators. Read More
January 24, 2013 Arts & Culture Edith Wharton by Design By Jason Diamond The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts. View from Edith Wharton’s bedroom. Photograph: Magicpiano. People who live in New York might agree that there is very little reason to find yourself between Fourteenth and Forty-Second Streets unless you absolutely have to. Go past Union Square, and you’re liable to bump into everything from confused tourists to people selling knockoff Louis Vuitton and Fendi bags worse than the ones you can purchase on Canal Street in Chinatown. The twenties into the thirties can look like a never-ending row of scaffolding at certain stretches, with C-grade delis and fast food chains hidden beneath, leading you finally to the terrifyingly bright lights of Times Square. For the better part of the decade in which I’ve lived in New York, this experience is probably what has kept me from the middle of the city. But when I moved from Brooklyn into Manhattan, and started taking daily walks up the various avenues from the West Village to an office on Twenty-Eighth, I began to learn the history of certain buildings I passed along my way: admiring the townhouse at 28 E. Twentieth Street where President Theodore Roosevelt was born; the splendor and history of Gramercy Park; the row of buildings in the Flower District that seems unremarkable, until you realize that this block of Twenty-Eighth between Fifth and Sixth was once known as Tin Pan Alley, and filled the American Songbook. With each block, the twenties became more and more magical, especially on the days when I managed to avoid the crowds scuttling down the sidewalks—those less hectic New York days when I could look up and admire the various gargoyles and the golden dome of the Sohmer Piano Building. The architecture of the twenties distracted me from my daily grind, but it was on an evening trip to the grocery store that the area I once shunned suddenly took on an entirely new meaning. That night I noticed the red plaque on a doorway next to a Starbucks at 14 W. Twenty-Third Street that read, “This was the childhood home of Edith Jones Wharton, one of America’s most important authors.” Read More