April 26, 2012 Arts & Culture Literary Paint Chips: Gallery 1 By Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott Paint Samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature. As seen in our two-hundredth issue. City Fingers Delta Khaki Navy Rayon Limpopo Mapp’s Silence Nightclub Lycra Alleline’s Pink Gin Lydia Montdore Mink Rothko’s Forearm Moth Mrs. Jones Green Elephant Hills Camel Cashmere Glimpse Gray Samsa Juice Anne’s Shoes Mossy Trout Lipstick Smack Ocean Heart Mediterranean Cock Rebecca’s Smalls Dock Green Fair Fuzz Gosling Random Dandelion Violet Hour Golightly
April 26, 2012 Arts & Culture Black and White and Red All Over By Sadie Stein Last year, Benjamin Marra released a series of zines based on the 2000 American Psycho film adaptation. Now, the artist, along with Portland’s Floating World Comics store, is reproducing American Psycho as a limited-edition broadsheet. From paper to celluloid to paper and now newsprint! (To say nothing of the remake.) And given protagonist Patrick Bateman’s seemingly routine existence, a newspaper feels especially apropos. (To say nothing of Christian Bale’s work in Newsies.) It’s all especially striking given the novel’s initial reception: as Bret Easton Ellis says in his recent Paris Review interview, Read More
April 25, 2012 Arts & Culture The Pilgrim Trail By Sadie Stein Literary tourism is as old as time (or at least as old as the Lake District), but, due to a combination of new technology and easy travel, we seem to be living in its Golden Age. Last year, Wendy McClure reported from the Little House pilgrim trail, and Oxford, Mississippi, has drawn fans of Southern Gothic since Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel. On this site, you’ll recall Margaret Eby’s paeon to Eudora Welty’s Jackson garden. If you want to reenact The Canterbury Tales, well, you can. In recent years, readers have flocked to the Pacific Northwest to get a taste of Twilight; lovers of The Help have tried to get a taste of the 1960s in Greenwood, MS; and now, you can even experience the survivalist thrill of The Hunger Games in North Carolina. Over the weekend, the FT reported live from Germany’s “Fairy Tale Road,” on which one can walk in the steps of Pied Pipers (Hamlin), the Musicians of Bremen, and the sites where Grimm scholars believe Sleeping Beauty might have actually pricked her finger and Rapunzel let down her hair. (More easily verifiable are locales that figured in the brothers’ lives.) Of course, in real life, all is not fairy-tale perfect. Explains Günther Koseck, the German noble who inhabits Dornröschenschloss (“Sleeping Beauty’s castle”) during the castle’s weekly Sleeping Beauty reenactments, his enchanted princesses “have to always be young and beautiful, and that means they have to be replaced occasionally.”
April 24, 2012 Arts & Culture Mapping Markson By Sadie Stein When modernist novelist David Markson died in 2010, the West Villager’s personal library ended up, by his request, at his old haunt, the Strand bookstore. Word quickly spread, and bibliophiles and readers tried to snatch up as many of the annotated books—many of which figured in Markson’s own work—as possible. (Alex Abramovich describes buying up three shopping bags’ worth of classics, complete with notes and marginalia.) The books were, typically, signed: either Markson, David M. Markson, Markson NYC, or Markson London. It’s an archive worthy of a university but preserved, instead, in bits and pieces on bookshelves all over New York and beyond. Now, a tumblr, Reading Markson Reading, has dedicated itself to, as the author puts it, “Exploring the mind, method and masterpieces of David Markson through the marginalia found on the pages of the books in his personal library.” An intimate glimpse into the writer’s thoughts, for all readers to share. Watch Markson reminisce at the Strand in 2007.
April 23, 2012 Arts & Culture How to Sharpen Pencils: A Demonstration By Sadie Stein If you’ve yet to hear about David Rees’s manifesto How to Sharpen Pencils, perhaps you’d enjoy a demonstration? Here, the author exhibits proper technique. (Pencil snobs will surely rejoice.)
April 23, 2012 Studio Visit “The Rat Is a Hero”: In the Studio with Emily Mayer By Daisy Atterbury Children are posing near Damien Hirst’s large intestine. A young couple is engaged in a shoulder rub, the recipient with a bracing hand on what may be the sigmoid colon. Upstairs, caterers put flowers on round tables, and cameramen survey Tate-goers ignoring For the Love of God encased below in a black box. In the gift shop, The Incomplete Truth anamorphic cup and saucer is on sale for £2.50. Between the Tate and Emily Mayer’s Norfolk studio is a gap of British countryside that from a train car feels like an hour-and-a-half stretch of live cows. I sit down and immediately hear that Emily hates instant coffee and loves rats. The Norfolk Wildlife Trust celebrates the area’s presence of weasels and more unusual species, but Emily prefers dogs to Chinese water deer. She has several dogs, some animate, some either frozen or cast in resin. “The electricity board are coming at 8 A.M. tomorrow to cut trees,” she had written in an e-mail the night before, “and our power will be off all day. I do have a generator in our woodland cabin, so maybe I could drag that in.” It turns out that the water is out with the power, and the phones don’t work. We still manage to have coffee. Read More