June 1, 2012 Windows on the World Francisco Goldman, Mexico City By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. My desk is snugly ensconced in a front corner of the living room, facing wall and bookshelves, a wide window overlooking a park in Colonia Roma to the right and, on my left, the narrow side window drawn by Matteo. I’m sharing the apartment with my friend Jon Lee, who is almost always traveling, but he needed a Latin American base for his work. We only moved in a month ago. It’s the biggest apartment I’ve ever lived in. The living room is so immense that I bought a football (not a futbol) just to prove you can play catch in it, and now I am looking for a wiffleball batting machine, which I think would be a great way to manage the persistent physical restlessness that often makes it so hard for me to sit still at a desk. In the mornings I go down to a café facing the park for breakfast. They have terrific coffee. I usually have the waitress tell me about the chilaquiles, the enfrijoladas, molletes, and omelettes just so that I can savor her descriptions, and then I order the fruit and granola, and she makes fun of me for that. I work in the café for two or three hours and then go back to the desk in my apartment. Apart from a break for lunch, I try to work until seven in the evening, and then usually head to the gym. We’re right around the corner from one of Mexico City’s greatest cantinas, one I’d been coming to for years from more distant neighborhoods. They have a funny ritual there. A waiter will ring a bell to catch everyone’s attention, shout out a name, and then the cavernous room will resound with raucous shouts of ¡Pendejo! (it means, more or less, “asshole!”). You have to pay the waiter to do that. Once a good friend, a writer from Ireland, was visiting, and he paid the waiter to shout out the name of another Irish writer who’d given him a nasty review, and the waiter, though he could barely pronounce the name, shouted it out, and everyone in the cantina, the old men playing dominoes, the Mexican and foreign hipsters, and literary types who also hang out there, et cetera, joyously shouted “¡Pendejo!” —Francisco Goldman
May 31, 2012 Arts & Culture The Supremes By Joshua J. Friedman Here’s how I fell in love with the Supreme Court: riding a Boston city bus, earbuds in, listening to the justices’ voices. As the court debated a Chicago loitering law—a law that allowed the police to arrest not only gang members but anyone with them for lingering with “no apparent purpose” in a public place—I stared out the window at the people passing on the street. It felt provocative to overlay a high-minded argument about society on top of society as it actually existed, and I wondered whether I would hear any of my world reflected back at me from the court. Then Justice David Souter spoke, forcefully. “I’m still bothered by the seemingly open-ended possibilities of determining what is or is not an apparent purpose,” he said. “Some people, for example, with nothing better to do like to sit and watch, or stand and watch, the cars go by. That’s a purpose.” I was hooked. Here’s how you might fall in love with the Supreme Court: sitting in a dark theater, watching two actors facing one another in desk chairs on a minimally dressed stage, reenacting an oral argument. This is Arguendo, a new play from Elevator Repair Service, still being developed in workshop but presented in four early performances on May 17 and 18 at a sixty-seat black-box theater in Brooklyn. Elevator Repair Service is best known for Gatz, a theatrical endurance test in which F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is performed in its entirety over the course of six hours. Arguendo, only forty minutes long in its present incarnation, rewards a different kind of persistence. It challenges its audience to enter in the middle of a conversation—after written briefs are filed but before an opinion has been issued—ignorant of the law, of legal language, and of the justices. We are asked to ride out that ignorance with the promise that it will yield to wisdom and delight. Read More
May 30, 2012 Arts & Culture Mad Man By Lary Wallace Dick DeBartolo’s first piece for Mad was published in 1962, when he was still in high school, and his work has appeared in every single issue since June 1966. He has written for sections throughout the magazine, but his greatest claim is as a satirist of movies and TV shows—that is, as a writer of the kind of elaborate pop-culture parodies that have, arguably, been the magazine’s signature brand of humor ever since they began running them regularly, about a dozen issues into their existence. The influence of these satires—as written by DeBartolo as well as Harvey Kurtzman, Larry Siegel, Frank Jacobs, Arnie Kogen, Stan Hart, Lou Silverstone, Desmond Devlin, and others—has ranged well beyond the realm of illustrated humor, or even comedy generally; it’s entered the cultural water supply, enriching the work of filmmakers, politicians, authors, actors, and advertisers. Once you’ve acknowledged this, you’re only one short step away from acknowledging DeBartolo’s particular influence on culture at large. Read More
May 23, 2012 Arts & Culture Finding Francesca Woodman By Jillian Steinhauer Francesca Woodman, Caryatid, 1980, diazotype, 7' 5 in. x 3'. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman © 2012 George and Betty Woodman We’re fascinated by artists who die young. Something about the unnaturalness of an early death gives us a kind of morbid thrill. We hail their genius, attracted by the mystery of the unknown (and unknowable). Maybe we’re envious—at least, the parts of us that seek fame and approval. For the dead, everything is fixed and frozen; there’s no more work and no more pressure to perform. Pore as we will over their output, what they’ve left behind in the world will never change. Francesca Woodman was an artist who died young. She committed suicide, jumping from a window when she was twenty-two. I was thinking of waiting to tell you that, of trying to withhold the information until later in this essay, but the effort seemed futile: if you’re in art school, or read the New York Times, or have looked at the Guggenheim’s Web site lately, or even if you get the Skint, a daily New York events e-mail, you already know. The Skint mention is particularly curious. Somehow, in a newsletter composed of brief, one-line descriptions of featured events, Woodman’s suicide merited inclusion: “Thru 6/13: 120 works of photographer francesca woodman (nsfw), who committed suicide at age 22 in 1981, go on display at the Guggenheim.” The implication seems to be that her suicide either makes her more interesting or more worthy of an exhibition. Read More
May 22, 2012 Arts & Culture Among the Automata By Jenny Hendrix By now, the entire Internet is aware that last month A/V technicians at Coachella resurrected Tupac for a performance with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. Though a little phosphorescent, the rapper seems lifelike enough in the videos, with his Timberlands and rather nice abs. Cumulatively, though, the effect, especially when (living) Snoop is in the frame, is, above all else, weird. Watching the virtual Pac unintentionally moonwalk across the stage, we might think of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Sandman”: “Aha! Pretty doll! Spin round, lovely doll!” Not as odd a juxtaposition as it may seem: as Gizmodo reports, the effect was produced by means of a nineteenth-century trick called “Pepper’s Ghost.” The nineteenth century represents the tail end of humanity’s fascination with the mechanical replication of itself. Much effort had been expended in that direction the century prior, in the Marais neighborhood of Paris, where the automata builders lived and worked. That the word automata comes from an economical Greek verb for “acting of one’s own will” points somewhat toward the source of the period’s fascination with them; miming organic processes, these machines seemed to be animated by something beyond gears and wires. Actually, they were operated by clockwork: linkages or rods in the body connected to a set of cams, irregular wheels concealed in the object’s base or body. The cams served as the object’s “memory” turning in circular motion—a winding key, for instance—into linear, transposing mechanics into something resembling life. Automata were, as Freud put it, in his essay on the uncanny, unlike us enough to be at once familiar and strange, or at least “secretly familiar.” It was uncertain whether they were really doing what they appeared to be, whether they lived, whether they had something resembling a soul. But like Tupac, automata were reproducible, replaceable, and performed the same actions again and again. There were also many copies, quite a few of which still survive. Read More
May 17, 2012 Arts & Culture Live on Air By Jessica Gross Radio journalism is having some trouble with self-definition right now. Every art form always is, of course, but radio’s growing pains are under particular public scrutiny. In January, This American Life broadcast part of a monologue by Mike Daisey, who had visited factories in China that make Apple products; it turned out he’d invented pieces of the narrative based on reports he’d heard, not seen, about labor conditions in other factories. This American Life retracted the episode, and a thousand questions bloomed. What does this mean for the industry as a whole? Is journalism even about facts anymore? Are larger truths ever more important, or is that a false dichotomy? Is storytelling different from journalism? Where do documentary-style shows like This American Life fall on the spectrum, and to what standards must they adhere? Good questions, all, and vital ones. May I sidestep them? If the spotlight is on fact versus fiction, the refracted light falls somewhere else: on the reason this episode matters so much to us. The original Mike Daisey program was the most popular in This American Life’s sixteen-year history. Listeners cared about Daisey’s character and about the ones he described: his translator; a thirteen-year-old laborer; a man with a mangled hand. All, save for Daisey, were invented, in the pure sense of the word, but visceral. This is the point: we can’t care about information until we can feel, and we can’t feel until we know people. We can’t learn until we empathize. This American Life may be the go-to example of character-driven radio journalism, but it’s a pervasive practice right now. Radiolab, StoryCorps, The Moth, Radio Diaries—name a radio program and I will show you its protagonists. It’s impossible to say, for certain, where a form of expression begins. But I offer that this concept—that we need characters in order to understand pretty much anything—was first put into practice in radio by Edward R. Murrow, during World War II. Read More