February 25, 2014 Look Sketches from the elBulli Kitchen By Lilly Lampe Pause Play Play Prev | Next Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity, on view at the Drawing Center in New York through this week, seeks to claim the status of artist for one of the most innovative chefs working today. Adrià gained fame at the now-shuttered Spanish restaurant elBulli, where he sustained a three-star Michelin rating for fourteen years and garnered comparisons to another famous Catalan, Salvador Dali. To call a chef an artist can smack of hyperbole, but the new vanguard in contemporary cuisine, led in no small part by Adrià, is defying previous definitions of gastronomy. But despite the surge in technique—and for that matter, cost—food’s ephemeral, basic-need status inclines art purists to consider it a flash in the pan. Notes on Creativity resolves these tensions with sketches and notes that indicate the complex, restless work of Adrià’s kitchen, to say nothing of his mind. The objects on display—ledgers, notebooks, scrap paper—illuminate the extent to which cooking is a creative process, as impassioned and compulsory as any. While he ran elBulli, Adrià kept detailed records, filling stray pieces of paper with plating ideas, loose concepts, and flavor profiles. In these ephemera we see the evolution of Adrià’s style over decades, and his determination to articulate his designs. The sketches are a window into the expanse of Adrià’s imagination, in particular the plasticity of his process. As it turns out, he is just as likely to start with a visual impression of a dish, figuring out the flavor components later, as he is to begin with an ingredient—an approach that seems like the culinary equivalent of Ginger Rogers doing Fred Astaire’s moves backward and in heels. Read More
February 21, 2014 Look An Urgent Message By Ann Beattie Pause Play Play Prev | Next Bob Adelman’s amazing photographs—the majority of them black-and-white prints—fill the second floor of the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, where they will be on display until May 17. He photographed what came to be significant moments in the civil rights movement as they were happening. As a photographer for CORE, SNCC, Life magazine, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he was on the scene for moments both momentous and not, to photograph Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and also never-to-be-famous individuals, families, children—people we wouldn’t have seen again, had Adelman not been there to show them on the sidelines as well as in the forefront, their eyes their own camera lenses, looking back; exiting “White Men Only” bathrooms at the courthouse in Clinton, Louisiana; and then kids who climbed up in a tree to view the memorial service of Dr. King, attended by Robert Kennedy (what a portrait of grief), who’d be dead himself only months later. As a documentary photographer, nothing stopped Bob. It was dangerous work, as was pointed out by one of the speakers at the January 19 museum opening, but Bob found inequality inexplicable and insupportable. In his college years, he studied philosophy to try to figure out the point of being alive. In the civil rights movement, he found his answer. Don’t miss (not that you could) the enormous enlargement of the contact sheet from when Bob was first focusing on the police’s attempt to blast away protestors in Birmingham by aiming fire hoses at them. It gives you a chance to see the photographer’s mind at work, frame after frame, and is unforgettable as an image, the people holding hands, some with their hats not yet knocked off, in Kelly Ingram Park, struggling to remain upright in the blast, a fierce, watery tornado that obliterates the sky as it seems to become a simultaneously beautiful and malicious backdrop that obliterates the world. The large photograph in the museum took two days to print. Dr. King, upon first seeing Bob’s photograph: “I am startled that out of so much pain some beauty came.” Ann Beattie’s story “Janus” was included in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
February 19, 2014 Look It’s All Lustful to Me By Dan Piepenbring Georgia’s obscene novels. From a foreign edition of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre Sixty-one years ago today, on February 19, 1953, the State of Georgia approved the formation of the first-ever literature censorship board in the United States. It went by the misleading name of the Georgia Literature Commission, and its humble charge was to stamp out obscenity in all of the myriad and insidious forms it took in our nation’s periodicals and publications. The Washington Post has an excellent gloss on the commission, which persevered for some twenty years, despite having been mired in controversy from its inception. James P. Wesberry, the committee’s chairman—and not coincidentally a Baptist preacher—found himself ridiculed by the national press when, soon after the committee’s formation, he said, “I don’t discriminate between nude women, whether they are art or not. It’s all lustful to me.” Thus, with God and a pure, unyielding ignorance on his side, Wesberry developed an eight-question checklist with which to gauge literature for obscenity: 1. What is the general and dominant theme?2. What degree of sincerity of purpose is evident?3. What is the literary or scientific worth?4. What channels of distribution are employed?5. What are contemporary attitudes of reasonable men toward such matters?6. What types of readers may reasonably be expected to peruse the publication?7. Is there evidence of pornographic intent?8. What impression will be created in the mind of the reader, upon reading the work as a whole? (One imagines that question seven did most of the heavy lifting—the committee probably skipped ahead to that one, much as a wayward youth would skip ahead to the prurient bits in a girlie mag.) Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre was the first book to be suggested for censorship, in 1957; The Catcher in the Rye and The Naked and the Dead were also deemed obscene. For the most part, though, the commission went after dime-store sleaze like Alan Marshall’s Sin Whisper—when they banned that title, the battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the decision. By 1971, the whole commission seemed kind of silly. When Jimmy Carter, he who had lusted after women in his heart, was governor, he slashed the commission’s funding, and by 1973 it was no more. Still, when you see the lurid covers of these novels, you’ll understand why they were believed to corrupt and deprave. Here are some of the books the committee found too debauched for the public consumption: Read More
February 4, 2014 Look Five Down: O-O-H Y-E-A-H! By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Martin Huber There are many yardsticks for fame and influence, but by my lights, you haven’t really “made it” until you’ve appeared in a clue for the Times Sunday crossword. In which case, we’ve made it. The Times may direct its complimentary jeroboam of Dom Perignon to 544 West 27th Street, New York, NY, 10001. The clue is “Contributors to The Paris Review, e.g.” The answer is eight letters. Take your best guess.
January 23, 2014 Look From the Margins By Dan Piepenbring A rainbow-colored beast from the margins of a fifteenth-century text. Image via the Public Domain Review. In college, I was excited to discover a student-produced, fly-by-night zine called “From the Margins.” I don’t know what’s more embarrassing: that I assumed it was devoted to marginalia or that I was seriously juiced about the idea. When I opened its creased, xeroxed pages, though, I found it was devoted not to literal margins but to my school’s “disenfranchised peoples,” most of whom struck me as too well-heeled to feel put out. In any case, this month has granted my wish: it’s seen some great attention paid to margins, the kind on paper. Open Culture featured Dostoevsky’s manuscript doodles, which demonstrate not just his remarkable penmanship but also an affinity for faces and architecture. (The former, to no one’s surprise, are deeply melancholy.) The Public Domain Review resurfaced some rainbow-colored beasts “found in a book of hours attributed to an artist of the Ghent-Bruges school and dating from the late fifteenth century,” and Brain Pickings resurfaced a piece about Edgar Allan Poe, “history’s greatest champion of marginalia.” Poe is indeed unreserved in his praise; he also suggests, “If you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.” Oh, that Poe! He’s a regular Mark Twain. Last, Sam Anderson and David Rees have defaced, or, uh, annotated, a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno, much to its benefit. There’s a lot of comfort in seeing—next to such atrocious lines of dialogue as “Don’t let her beauty fool you, she is a dangerous foe”—the red, hateful tendrils of a handwritten EAT SHIT. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped to find in “From the Margins.”
January 21, 2014 Look Welcome to Wellcome By Dan Piepenbring Thomas Burke after Philipp Reinagle, Cupid inspiring plants with Love, in a tropical landscape, 1805, via Wellcome Images. Enjoy viscera? Of course you do! And you’re in luck: as of yesterday, London’s Wellcome Library, whose specialty is medical history, has opened up more than 100,000 images in its capacious digital archive for free download. Whether your tastes run to the macabre or the beautiful—not to say, of course, that such things are mutually exclusive—the Wellcome galleries have something for you. Conjoined twins wearing swimsuits? They’re here. A man being hit on the head by a falling flowerpot in Rome, circa 1890? Coming right up. Or perhaps—the keystone of any collection—a surgeon letting blood from Thomas Thurlow, Bishop of Durham, but leaving his patient in order to attend to a sick horse. And it’s not all grisly; above, for instance, you’ll see Cupid, slinging arrows so that the flora of the tropics will be inclined to reproduce. (You know, sexually.) Click in good health.