July 15, 2024 Dispatch At the Five Hundred Ponies Sale By Alyse Burnside Photograph by Alyse Burnside. I arrived in New Holland, Pennsylvania early, around 7 A .M., and drove down the main street, taking in the produce stands, machine repair shops, and country stores that bear Mennonite names: Yoder, Yoacum, Yost. Cattle graze in unpeopled fields, and in one, three Staffordshire Draft horses stood obediently, harnessed to a plow, as though posing for a painting. Lancaster County is home to many auctions, but the New Holland Sales Stables have been a mainstay of the Amish and Mennonite communities since 1920, and boast the largest horse auction this side of the Mississippi. The sale barn auctions more than 150 horses, ponies, mules, and donkeys beginning at 10 A.M. sharp every Monday, rain or shine, regardless of season, and even on holidays. The barn opened at 8 A.M., so I made my way across the patchwork of Lancaster County’s small towns, through East Earl Township, Blue Ball, and Goodville, past a Christian playground manufacturer with replicas of Noah’s ark, a taxidermy shoppe called Nature’s Accent, Shaker furniture showrooms, saddleries, dozens of churches, and hand-painted signs advertising asparagus, tulips, watermelon, raw milk, whole milk, lemonade, onions, potatoes, homemade berry pies, salvation. Read More
June 26, 2024 Dispatch 37-08 Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s House By Eliza Barry Callahan Screenshot from Google Street View. Captured in April 2023. I said, What does it feel like in there? What do you mean, she said. I said, For example, is it light or is it dark? She said, It’s light by the windows. And then she said, It’s airy if the windows are open. Is that all? She said it was a bad time. She would rather I not come inside the house. Boxes were everywhere. Everything was in the boxes. She said that her brother had died on New Year’s Day. More boxes. And that it was fine. She said she really didn’t have anything to offer me. She said she knew nothing about the previous resident Joseph Cornell, other than that he’d existed—and that a different man had lived in the house in between them. That it had been remodeled in the nineties. She had moved there for the street’s flatness—she appreciated flatness in a street. Utopia Parkway. The artist Joseph Cornell lived a lot of his life at her home at 37-08 Utopia Parkway. Age twenty-six onward. The house is still small and gray. Gambrel roof. Clerestory windows. Sash windows. Tin door. Shingles and clapboard. Familiar, symmetrical face. Like the current resident, Cornell had a brother who died first, who lived there with him, in addition to his mother. Cornell, too, had had boxes everywhere. Read More
June 12, 2024 Dispatch Those That Are Fools: At Clownchella By Rob Goyanes Photograph by Sarah Shtern. “Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.” —Feste the Clown, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare Walking up to the Elysian Theater, a small club off the 5 at the foot of Elysian Heights in Los Angeles, I thought I was hallucinating when I saw a dozen goats under the bright white light of the marquee, and for every goat a clown. Everyone was fawning over the short-haired creatures. Some had two little bald spots on their heads instead of horns, which, I later learned, is where the hot irons get applied for disbudding. The Elysian was hosting Clownchella, an event happening the week before Coachella. Maybe it goes without saying: these events bear virtually no relation to each other. Coachella is a sprawling music and art festival of spoon-fed nostalgia, snakeskin pants, and sensorially shattering spectacle held on the grounds of a polo club, brought to you by sponsors like American Express, Coca-Cola, BMW, et cetera, and which costs (at least) $510 plus accommodations. Clownchella was a one-night clown festival with five acts that cost sixteen bucks. At Clownchella, I expected circus-variety clowns, red noses and big shoes. I had figured that the history of clowning had reached its terminus; from ancient Greek mimes to commedia dell’arte, Charlie Chaplin to Bozo to Krusty (my personal favorite). The clowns most relevant to our times seem to be the old-fashioned scary ones, the Jokers and the Pennywises. But I’d heard that Los Angeles has a diverse and burgeoning clown scene that’s innovating the form. Independent teachers are developing their own clown pedagogy, nurturing a new generation of performers and borrowing from European clowns, who, apparently, are way ahead of the curve. This summer, Hannah Levin, the host of Clownchella, and some other LA clowns are traveling to Étampes, France, to study with the French clown and pedagogue Philippe Gaulier, who for the past fifty years has taught clowning using methods like mask play, Greek tragedy, and the study of Chekhov, all with the goal of finding the clown within. The clowns here take silliness very seriously. Standing outside the Elysian, I watched as the goats jumped around and let out cute little bleats. Read More
June 11, 2024 Dispatch Pokémon Is All About Reading By Joseph Earl Thomas Image by Sara Goetter. The game is played with great feeling. Pikachu, perhaps the most successful soft power symbol of the twenty-first century’s new media enterprise, looms gigantic over Nintendo as a concept and cuteness as aesthetic dominance, despite staying mostly benchside on the battlefield. Though, for some of us, these pocket monsters are just ciphers for the competitive video game circuit: 4D chess pieces; some amalgamation of straights, flushes, or full houses; the kings, queens, and rooks of RNG; what Dungeons & Dragons would be with rounded edges and big-lipped fish splish-splashing their way toward evolution. Next to my black-and-white Nintendo Switch sits the corduroy Bulbasaur my son got me for Father’s Day. I’m playing around with weather, one of four core environmental hazards in the extended Pokémon video universe: Rain, Sun, Snow, and Sand. Enjoying the filth I am, of a team whose prospects are slim but whose aesthetics please me, listenin to Beans and Freeway on my headphones. And even though what we do is wrong I play Tyranitar to start, a darkly rock type dinosaur with SAND STREAM, brewing up a storm when she enters the battlefield. Despite a soft-chinned weakness to FIGHTING types, Tyranitar is a respectable individual; she earned a slot on my team of six through grit and survivability, clapping back after absorbing heavy damage historically, just without the heroism of hindsight. Read More
June 6, 2024 Dispatch Chasing It Down the Elevator Shaft to the Subconscious: Or, Getting Hypnotized By Jeremy Butman Flashes of light pulsing through the nebula surrounding the protostellar object LRLL 54361. Image from NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope, public domain. A little more than two years ago, an image appeared in my thoughts, which I took to be a memory. It first struck me randomly, while making lunch at home, but immediately the image felt familiar and well-worn, though I couldn’t concretely remember thinking about it in the past. It was a short clip of myself in bed, at my family’s home in Maine, when I was about seven or eight, peering out the window in the middle of the night and seeing an ambient white light coming from an uncertain origin above, flooding down like a curtain onto the field. The image was almost certainly a false memory—perhaps derived from a dream—or some kind of psychological projection. But I’d been wrong in this assumption before: I once began to suspect that a story I’d told for decades, about being a baby model for a diaper company, was an odd fantasy that I’d inserted into my biography, but when I asked my mother, she confirmed that it was true. If only as an anomalous psychological object, one of uncertain provenance and meaning, the memory-image seemed worthy of investigation. But how do you investigate the origin of an image in your mind’s eye? It occurred to me that perhaps I’d found a reason to finally call on the services of my friend Louise Mittelman, a hypnotherapist. Hypnotism may have the mustiness of nineteenth-century spiritualism hanging over it, as well as associations both sinister (like the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control program) and cartoonish (think Rocky and Bullwinkle, spiraling eyeballs), but this all felt appropriate to the irreality of my investigation (and, for that matter, the irreality of our postpandemic moment). I texted her to make an appointment. Read More
May 31, 2024 Dispatch Dorm Room Art?: At the Biennale By Camille Jacobson Walton Ford, Culpabilis, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York. Photograph by Charlie Rubin. I touch down at Marco Polo on Wednesday afternoon, one among the many who have come for the preopening days of the Venice Biennale. The airport—with its series of moving walkways shepherding passengers toward the dock—will turn out to be the only place in the city where I manage not to get lost. The line for the water-bus into the city is easy to spot, and as we wait for the next boat to arrive I count fifteen Rimowas, five pairs of Tabis, and several head-to-toe outfits of Issey Miyake. The boat ride, unaccountably, takes an hour. I alternate between fending off seasickness and watching the Instagram Story of a microinfluencer who’d been on my flight and is already flying down the Grand Canal in a private water taxi. Read More