March 7, 2017 On the Shelf Coercive Silkscreening, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The cover of the Amache Camp brochure, made by the silkscreen shop. Photo: Amache Preservation Society, via Atlas Obscura Colorado’s Camp Amache was one of many hastily constructed internment camps that opened in the early forties, built by American armed forces to house thousands of Japanese Americans. Its detainees were dragooned into all kinds of labor—including, in an unlikely turn, printmaking and silk-screening. As Cara Giaimo writes, those at the camp became de facto artists, producing posters and pamphlets for the U.S. military—the same military that had sent them to the camps in the first place, and that kept snipers posted at all hours of the day: “In the spring of 1943, Maida Campbell, a Red Cross nurse with an artistic background, was sent to Camp Amache to see whether it would be feasible to open a printing operation there. Campbell set up the shop in a recreation hall and began advertising in the Pioneer for employees. A month into their work, the Pioneer reported that the shop’s 25 artists had printed ‘some 185 large posters, 250 stickers, and 100 cards’ … Over the course of 1943, the shop printed at least 120,000 posters in dozens of designs, depicting everything from signal flags to principles of seamanship. Employees took on the entire process, from design and stenciling through color selection and printing … The pay topped out at 19 dollars per month, about half of what one could expect to receive for similar work outside. Despite Campbell’s evident respect for her employees, she, like other administrators, wrote frequently about how the shop provided ‘vocational training’ for them—never mind the fact that their detainment at the camp was preventing them from pursuing their actual vocations, hobbies, and lives.” Fashion, part 1: a few words on hair and baseball. Clint Frazier, a prospective outfielder for the Yankees, has a set of luscious, curly red locks vivid enough to catch eyes in the nosebleedingest reaches of the ballpark. But will the Yankees and their crypto-fascist grooming standards let this man shine? Beneath this cosmetic dispute, writes Billy Witz, lies a matter of philosophy: “In short, the Yankees do not do big hair (or beards), under a policy set years ago by George Steinbrenner and vigorously policed by his daughter Jennifer. Now there is a guessing game over whether the team will send Frazier to the barber before sending him to the plate. ‘I think people are making my hair bigger than my game,’ Frazier said. ‘I’m here to play baseball.’ He said he was getting so irritated by persistent questions about his locks that he might just get them sheared off … ‘It’s a balancing act,’ said Allen Adamson, the founder of Brand Simple consulting. ‘The Yankees have to balance their respect and embrace of tradition with accepting what’s new. What’s new is, the individuality of players is important in making a sports event engaging and interesting.’ ” Read More
March 6, 2017 On the Shelf Reading in the Buff, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Illustration: Anthony Gross, 1940. Let’s cut to the chase: I’m talking exposed peen. I’m talking gender-queering the Victorian classics. I’m talking nude men, reciting Jane Eyre, on stage, for you. It happens. Lara Williams, who attended a in London performance of Naked Boys Reading, writes, “Watching Naked Boys Reading is an experience akin to a hen do hijacked by a spoken word event: a unexpectedly cerebral night of nude performance art. ‘This is a male voice reading a female text written under a male name,’ says collective co-founder and self-styled ‘drag know-it-all’ Sharon Husbands, after his reading of the closing passages of Wuthering Heights. ‘It’s problematic.’ Husbands has a Ph.D. in gender and sexuality, and speaking with him before he gets on stage it becomes clear very quickly that Naked Boys Reading is an intellectually considered affair; not least when Husbands solemnly says things like: ‘The nudity provides two things: a new lens and modality for the texts, and the care-giving experience of being read to … We want to infantilize men in the same way women are infantilized,’ Husbands tells me. ‘We have to critique these structures.’ ” On the other end of the performance spectrum, there’s Sam Gold, the director mounting a revival of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, who aims for a remarkably unremarkable theatrical experience. Sasha Weiss writes, “At thirty-eight, Gold is one of the most celebrated theater directors in New York, a master at gently stripping both audience and actors of their expectations and creating a sense of collective interdependence. He does this by dispensing with theatrical conventions—showy sets and costumes, a clear separation between stage and audience, acting that titillates or entertains—so that the focus stays fixed on the bodies of the actors and their words. ‘I’m not very interested in pretend,’ Gold told me. ‘I’m interested in putting people onstage. I want people. And I want a world that reflects the real world.’ His pared-down worlds are, paradoxically, inviting: They corral everyone in the theater toward maximum receptivity. Once you learn the rules and submit to them, it’s as if you’ve been initiated into a family.” Read More
March 3, 2017 On the Shelf Now It’s Your Turn to Live Here, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from Grey Gardens. “I can’t stand being in this house,” Little Edie says in Grey Gardens. “In the first place, it makes me terribly nervous. I’m scared to death of doors, locks, people roaming around in the background, under the trees, in the bushes, I’m absolutely terrified.” And now, reader, you can own that house—for just twenty million dollars! Sally Quinn, the D.C. doyenne who restored the East Hampton home and threw many a lavish party there, is putting it on the market, with a glass menagerie of Little Edie’s kitten figurines still intact. Katie Rogers writes, “The home was long ago restored to its old Hamptons charm, and cleared of all cat smells—unless, Ms. Quinn said, you happen to stick your nose into a particular corner of the foyer after a rainstorm that lasts days. The house is decorated in soft blues and floral wallpaper and is dotted with plenty of fat-leaf potted plants. It is vibrant even in winter … Whoever buys Grey Gardens will be taking on a home with a nearly mythic history. Completed in 1897, the home became infamous under the care (or lack thereof) of Little Edie and her mother, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, the first cousin and aunt of Mrs. Onassis. Their plight generated headlines when the Suffolk County health department raided the house in 1971; the authorities cited every known housing code violation … ‘This home will not be attractive to a Russian oligarch,’ Ms. Quinn said dryly.” Writing about other people is torture—not for the writer, but for the written. Emmanuel Carrère says to Wyatt Mason, “To write about others is an enormous problem. The sincerity that you can exhibit with yourself, you have no right to inflict on anyone else … It makes me think of a sentence, something absolutely horrible … It was fifteen or twenty years ago, in an interview with General Massu of the French Army, who had been accused of torturing men in Algeria … In the interview, Massu said, of la gégène—torture with electric prods from a generator—‘Listen. Don’t exaggerate. The prods? I tried them on myself. It hurts, but not worse than that.’ The nonsense of that statement! … I have used the generator on people other than myself. And that bothers me. I don’t like that idea. I’m not a good man, unfortunately. I would like to be a good man. I admire goodness and virtue most. But I am not very good.” Read More
March 2, 2017 On the Shelf The Mystery of Garfield’s Gender, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The ungendered, unreal feline. Photo: Antomoro In the third century B.C., Alexandria had one hell of a library—the finest center of learning in the ancient world, an iconic metaphor for humanity’s quest for knowledge, et cetera. Then it was burned. After that, the city lacked a decent library for, oh, several centuries … then several more … then a few more after that … until, in 2002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened, restoring the promise of antiquity. That library sprung from the efforts of Mostafa A. H. el-Abbadi, an Egyptian historian who died last month at eighty-eight. Jonathan Guyer writes, “Professor Abbadi’s dream of a new library—a modern version of the magnificent center of learning of ancient times—could be traced to 1972 … ‘If we want to justify our claim to be connected spiritually with the ancient tradition, we must follow the ancient example by starting a great universal library’ … When Nixon visited Egypt in 1974, he and President Anwar el-Sadat rode by train to Alexandria’s ancient ruins to observe their faded grandeur. When Nixon asked about the ancient library’s location and history, no one in the Egyptian entourage had an answer. [Professor Abbadi realized] how deeply the ancient library resonated, not only with Egyptians but also with many around the world who shared his scholarly thirst.” But who needs libraries when we’ve got Wikipedia, right? Yes, the future of knowledge is radically decentralized, completely free … and, now, engaged in a knockdown, drag-out war over the gender identity of a lasagna-loving cartoon cat. Avi Selk and Michael Cavna explain, “Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week after a sixty-hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat: male one minute; not the next. ‘He may have been a boy in 1981, but he’s not now,’ one editor argued … ‘Every character (including Garfield himself!) constantly refers to Garfield unambiguously as male, and always using male pronouns,’ one editor wrote—listing nearly three dozen comic strips across nearly four decades … Garfield’s gender swapped twenty times over two-and-a-half days (during which his religion was briefly listed as Shiite Muslim for some reason) before an administrator was forced to step in.” Read More
March 1, 2017 On the Shelf Bunny Ears in Saigon, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The Playboy Club, Chu Lai, Vietnam, 1969. Photo: The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, via the New York Times Remember when the magazine industry had real cultural currency? Me either—by the time I turned eighteen the Internet was “a thing” and you couldn’t even find Reader’s Digest stacked beside the toilet anymore. But Amber Batura has a story from magazines’ heyday that’s no mere nostalgia exercise: looking at how Playboy came like manna from heaven to the soldiers in the Vietnam War, she’s found one of those rare historical moments where the media really did broaden readers’ horizons. And no, I’m not just winking about soft-core porn here. Batura writes, “The Washington Post reported that American prisoners of war were ‘taken aback’ by the nudity in a smuggled Playboy found on their flight home in 1973. The nudity, sexuality and diversity portrayed in the pictorials represented more permissive attitudes about sex and beauty that the soldiers had missed during their years in captivity. Playboy’s appeal to the G.I. in Vietnam extended beyond the centerfold. The men really did read it for the articles. The magazine provided regular features, editorials, columns and ads that focused on men’s lifestyle and entertainment, including high fashion, foreign travel, modern architecture, the latest technology and luxury cars. The publication set itself up as a how-to guide for those men hoping to achieve Mr. Hefner’s vision of the good life, regardless of whether they were in San Diego or Saigon … Service in Vietnam put many soldiers in direct contact with diverse races and cultures, and Playboy presented them new ideas and arguments regarding those social and cultural issues.” I just want to say: hooray, vans. Hooray Econoline; hooray Sprinter; hooray Ford Transit. Justine Kurland sings a love song to vans everywhere, with their distinct claim to the open road: “The enclosure of a van is security to some and a threat to others. It’s a space that seems to exist outside law and convention. I took pride in its wildness, in how feral I became when I traveled in my van. I didn’t need anybody or anything; in my van, I was self-sufficient. If I stayed with a friend, my van was my bed. I could leave at any time of the night without waking anybody up … When I drew up the plans for my van and outfitted it with the things I would need, I felt complete in a way that’s hard to quantify. Yes, I do happen to have a Phillips-head screwdriver, a pee jar, a cast-iron pan, a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, tampons, the Rand McNally road atlas, peanut butter, and a memory-foam mattress pad. But it’s more than that, more like the love a turtle has for the color, rather than the usefulness, of her shell.” Read More
February 28, 2017 On the Shelf America Needs Lunar Cocktails, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An artist’s rendering of the Lunar Hilton lounge. Image via the Outline. The future looks so shitty now. Sure, maybe in fifteen, twenty years we’ll be able to get through airport security without taking our shoes off, or we could watch streaming high-definition video while we get an MRI. But we’ve lost sight of the one advance that would really help us: building a luxury hotel on the moon. In 1967, Barron Hilton, of those Hiltons, had his eye on the prize: at a conference for the American Astronautical Society, he shared his vision. Daniel Oberhaus explains, “The crown jewel of the Lunar Hilton would, of course, be its Galaxy Lounge. ‘If you think we are not going to have a cocktail lounge, you don’t know Hilton—or travelers,’ Hilton quipped. In the Galaxy Lounge, lunar tourists would be able to ‘enjoy a martini and see the stars!’ Although the lounge would be underground, the guests would enjoy a view of Earth and outer space through ‘thermopane windows.’ All cocktails would be prepared by a robotic wait staff, which would only need to drop a tablet into a glass of pure ethyl alcohol and water and voila: an instant martini, Manhattan, or gin … He was, by all accounts, very serious about trying to make them a reality. ‘I firmly believe that we are going to have Hiltons in outer space.’ ” Writing cultural criticism, Jo Livingstone is determined to avoid the Trump trap—is there really no way, she wonders, to look at art now without thinking of the executive branch? “Painting, music, television, the visual culture of the internet, poetry: These art forms and their consumers and critics represent an aesthetic space whose boundaries are not defined by the president. Unless we believe in and nurture this space, the critic is stuck forever explaining how this or that book is crucial reading ‘in Trump’s America.’ But this type of reviewing hobbles thought, because it reduces all art to the structure of satire. It is as if Trump is a spider in the middle of a web, and every review that tethers the meaning of a pop song to his regime strengthens it. I am guilty of this type of criticism, in very recent weeks. But I know that I write such things as an emotional defense of my own place in the culture. Nobody wants to feel useless.” Read More