July 7, 2016 On the Shelf The Museum of Broken Relationships, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring I hear you’re moving to Buffalo to pursue a more affordable, creative, authentic life in the smoldering remains of the Rust Belt. That’s neat. But what are you buying into, really? In cities like Pittsburgh and Troy, David A. Banks argues, “a ‘cool’ lifestyle is still the bait, only its terms have shifted toward more regional flavors. Cities that no longer produce physical goods can instead produce their own image as a kind of marketed product. If once they smelted steel or manufactured textiles, now they trade on the unique cultural history that is the legacy of those lost industries. The relatively cheap standard of living in places like Buffalo or Pittsburgh offer a more ‘authentic’ urban experience in terms of sampling gritty make-do entrepreneurial creativity, while also letting new residents dismiss those in more expensive cities as unimaginative dupes taken in by luxury branding … To attract new residents, cities must understand how their character can be conveyed through a smartphone.” In 2010, the brokenhearted and salty-cheeked could find solace only in Croatia, where a melancholy place called the Museum of Broken Relationships held the keepsakes of sundered romance. Now the Museum is coming to Los Angeles: “More than 100 exhibits range from everyday artifacts (a spare key never given to its intended recipient, a mirror that didn’t go with an ex’s decorating scheme) to signifiers of deeply troubled unions (a pair of silicone breast implants a woman got at her boyfriend’s urging). Some radiate sorrow, like the blue chiffon blouse a wife wore the day her husband told her he was moving out. All objects are submitted anonymously and come with stories explaining their significance.” T-shirt idea: “I majored in English because my university didn’t offer comp lit.” Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues that there’s a critical (in every sense of the word) difference between the two disciplines: “The reason that comparative literature as a discipline, and comparatists as an ad hoc community, somehow escape the intellectual trap of confusing redundant, self-congratulatory polemic with genuinely advancing thought is that, in having to build its own comparative apparatus, the discipline is forced to balance breadth against depth. It can’t escape either geographical reach or philosophical literacy. This is, at its outer reaches, a recipe for something like multicultural dignity, the kind that is achieved rather than avowed, at least in one’s reading and writing.” Thorsten Schütte’s documentary Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words looks at one of the few genuine iconoclasts in rock music: the man who hated both the squares and the hippies, the man who preferred to chain-smoke as he cranked out musique concrète. “Schütte’s film is a fluid mosaic of concert footage, TV appearances, and interview clips, much of them never seen before: Zappa on the Steve Allen Show in 1963 ‘playing’ the bicycle; hunched over staff paper notating music in his Laurel Canyon studio in the seventies; stalking through airports with a Mephistophelian leer; leading staggeringly well rehearsed bands … Zappa’s antidrug stance made him an oddity in the rock world, defying the idea, foisted on him by journalists and TV commentators, that someone of such profligate imagination must be on drugs. ‘They write about me like I’m a maniac,’ he says at one point. ‘I’m not … I’m forty years old, I’ve got four kids, a house, and a mortgage.’ ” Public service announcement: be around trees. I say this not as some kind of granola-crunching hiker-guru type but as someone with a body of hard data to back it up. A new study by Marc Berman, a University of Chicago psychology professor, “compares two large data sets from the city of Toronto, both gathered on a block-by-block level; the first measures the distribution of green space … and the second measures health, as assessed by a detailed survey of ninety-four thousand respondents. After controlling for income, education, and age, Berman and his colleagues showed that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt. ‘To get an equivalent increase with money, you’d have to give each household in that neighborhood ten thousand dollars—or make people seven years younger.’ ”
July 6, 2016 On the Shelf The Fine Art of American Small Talk, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring George Ameal Wilson, Friendly Conversation. Today in poetry as panhandling: Rowan McCabe pitches himself as “the world’s first door-to-door poet.” (An insult to the many lyrically inclined encyclopedia salesmen who once roamed this earth.) McCabe is based in the UK and will likely never make it to the U.S., where poets are routinely shot. But maybe you’d like to pay him a visit: “McCabe is more usually found on the streets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, writing bespoke verse for whoever happens to answer the buzzer when he calls. He’s penned poems about birds and love and parenting; one to remember a couple’s first date, another for someone’s dog. He composed the piece ‘To Amy, Sitting Her Final Policing Exam’ for a future constable and Gospel for a woman he nicknamed ‘Agnostic Ana.’ ” The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is host to one of the biggest races in America, which means that its parking lot is, at least one day a year, a very good place to sell shit. And what shit it is, as John Paul Rollert discovered on his trip to the Indy 500: “Among the more ingenious entrepreneurs were Kyle and Scott, two men I discovered lugging enormous duffle-bags stuffed with homemade t-shirts. Kyle wore one featuring the disembodied heads of Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and an uninspired pun involving suck. Scott, however, wore the shirt that elicited endless commentary from all who passed. It read simply: DONALD FUCKIN’ TRUMP. With its ambiguous modifier—does it mark enthusiasm, amazement, horror?—the shirt was a hot item among race fans, which was a good thing for the itinerant salesman, as between the two shirts, they had 2,700 to sell. While Kyle attended a car-full of boys trying to resolve whether to buy one shirt for $20 or take the two-fer deal at $35, I asked Scott why he thought people were so drawn to the shirts. He shrugged. ‘They like cuss words,’ he said.” In which The New Yorker’s present editor boasts of his predecessor’s predecessor’s predecessor, some guy named William Shawn: “Shawn sent a memo to Matthew Josephson telling him that his profile of William Knudsen, a leader of the automobile industry, was ‘a stunning piece of historical reporting.’ Then he wrote that he was appending ‘a few questions.’ There were 178 … J. D. Salinger called him ‘the most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors.’ Beneath the modesty, however, was a steely tactical will. Harold Brodkey suggested that Shawn combined the qualities of Napoléon Bonaparte and Saint Francis of Assisi.” In which Karan Mahajan comes to America and learns that we all pretend to be bosom buddies for no apparent reason: “American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won’t violate one another’s privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. Two people greet each other happily, with friendliness, but might know each other for years before venturing basic questions about each other’s backgrounds. The opposite is true of Indians. At least three people I’ve sat next to on planes to and from India have asked me, within minutes, how much I earn as a writer (only to turn away in disappointment when I tell them). In the East, I’ve heard it said, there’s intimacy without friendship; in the West, there’s friendship without intimacy.” Twitter deletes inactive accounts after a certain period of time, which means that Prince, David Bowie, and other recently deceased celebrity users will have their tweets vanished forever. Sonia Weiser asks: “Should famous artists’ social-media profiles be saved? Archiving their digital materials would follow the tradition of old-school paper archives, the ones that are responsible for maintaining collections like hundreds of Emily Dickinson’s letters, notes from Mary Shelley that show her succumbing to a brain tumor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s working drafts and photographs. If journals, sketchbooks, letters, and scribbled-on napkins are venerated and kept for insights into great minds, there seems to be a case that tweets should be held onto, too … Archivists now have the challenge of working through the kinks of determining digital material’s place among artists’ greater estates and settling on a feed’s value.”
July 5, 2016 On the Shelf How to Look at White Squares, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Ryman, Arrow, 1996, oil on Plexiglas with steel, 13 1/2″ x 12″. Image via Dia. Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian director who made Taste of Cherry, Certified Copy, and a host of other poetic films, has died at seventy-six. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of Kiarostami’s contemporaries, told the Guardian, “Kiarostami gave the Iranian cinema the international credibility that it has today … But his films were unfortunately not seen as much in Iran. He changed the world’s cinema; he freshened it and humanized it in contrast with Hollywood’s rough version. He was a man of life, who enjoyed living and made films in praise of life—that’s why it’s so difficult to come to terms with his death.” It wouldn’t be a lie to say that Robert Ryman paints white squares—exactly the kind of concept that makes the uninitiated roll their eyes and say, My kid could do that. But your kid could not do this, not even your honor student. As silly as it sounds, Ryman’s canvases force you to reevaluate the whole, like, concept of white: “If you take a close look at the current exhibition at Dia: Chelsea, you quickly realize just how much can be contained within them. With smears and flecks and whorls of paint, built up in some places, washed out in others, the works catch the light in a singular way … The works are best seen when lit by the sun, as filtered down through the Dia skylights. And the light can activate the paint differently during the day, often calling up blue or green undertones.” The web in the nineties was a simpler, uglier place, where color schemes grated, links broke, and a MIDI version of your favorite Third Eye Blind song was always just a click away. What explains our nostalgia for all this? Charles Thaxton writes, “It’s now well established that most Internet users experience the web through a handful of large, enclosed platforms and apps … Was the Early Web any better? The pre-platform, pre-mobile Internet was a web of pages and links and counters. The most essential thing about it is the notion that it looked bad. But the bad-looking web is making a comeback. All of a sudden you’re on that clunky-looking webpage again … Nostalgia for the way the web looked is really a sublimated nostalgia for how it felt, for a time in almost everyone’s life when discovery and openness and joy were all more operable. As much as we want to preserve the early Internet in amber, we want to hold on to the feeling of the early Internet even more.” Boethius was executed in the year 524, but don’t let that deter you: his De consolatione philosophiae, written as he awaited execution, remains a vital read in troubling times. “Boethius’s task was both personal and communal, for in stoically embracing the decisions of the goddess Fortuna he admitted that death would soon come, but as he was also a refugee from a world that was dying, his manuscript served as an ars moriendi for culture, too. And in subsequent centuries his accomplishment was steadfastly maintained by fellow humanists, laboring in monasteries and libraries dotting Europe, making The Consolations of Philosophy one of the most copied texts of late antiquity, a capsule from one culture’s final moments through the eclipse of the next centuries … It’s an interesting question how much someone like Boethius could anticipate that their world was coming to an end; it’s an important question to ask if we are adequately anticipating it right now.” In which John Berger visits a small coastal village in Italy and rhapsodizes about eels: “The women and men of Comacchio are recognizably different from their neighbors. Stocky, broad-shouldered, weather-tanned, big-handed, used to bending down, used to pulling on ropes and bailing out, accustomed to waiting, patient. Instead of calling them down-to-earth, we could invent the term down-to-water. Every year in the first week of October they celebrate a fete known as the Sagra dell’Anguilla (the festival of the eel). The cobbled town center is crammed with stalls of street vendors, come from elsewhere, selling trinkets, rings, seashells, cheeses, madonnas, salamis, dolls at low prices, small pleasures. The inhabitants wander slowly past, fingering the knickknacks, reckoning the small pleasures, and from time to time paying out a few coins. There are also benches and trestle tables where one can drink and eat. There is the smell of food being grilled. Onions, aubergines, peppers, and, of course, eels.”
July 1, 2016 On the Shelf Clouds Are the New Fireworks, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Marketing materials for Khmer Cloud Making Service. The poet Geoffrey Hill has died at eighty-four, “suddenly, and without pain or dread,” according to his wife. “The word accessible is fine in its place,” he told the Guardian in 2002. “That is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word. In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honor of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools.” Scotty Moore, who played guitar in Elvis’s original band, died this week, too. Alex Abramovich writes: “He started out a country guitarist, a finger-picker in the mode of Chet Atkins. But slathered in echo, that country style translated remarkably well to a rockabilly/rock and roll context, while the context brought something extra—something ecstatic—to the style … Scotty Moore brought something different to the table. Not quite diffidence, but a perfectly worked out sense of proportion. Moore didn’t wail, or break from the pack: understated on stage and in person, he played to frame the frontman.” A certain founding editor of ours would have me fired for writing this, but: fuck fireworks. They’re loud, they’re volatile, they do violence to the sky. If you’d prefer a more peaceful Fourth, you should ditch America, catch a flight to Phnom Penh, and send some clouds into the sky instead: “This isn’t Bubble Machine BGSP #5 by the early Filipino conceptual artist David Medalla, it’s Khmer Cloud Making Service, a Phnom Penh business offering customizable foam-printing services for events … The company offers ephemeral works for events and corporate programs. They are most frequently hired to deploy cloud art at the openings of new businesses … Khmer Cloud Making Service currently employs four people, working near Boeung Keng Kang Market. You can rent out their services for $500 an afternoon.” Hilton Als tells the long, harrowing, ecstatic story behind Nan Goldin’s The Ballad: “The Ballad was Goldin’s first book and remains her best known, a benchmark for photographers who believe, as she does, in the narrative of the self, the private and public exhibition we call ‘being.’ In the hundred and twenty-seven images that make up the volume proper, we watch as relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, and women and themselves play out in bedrooms, bars, pensiones, bordellos, automobiles, and beaches in Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin, and Mexico—the places where Goldin, who left home at fourteen, lived as she recorded her life and the lives of her friends. The images are not explorations of the world in black-and-white, like Arbus’s, or artfully composed shots, like Mann’s. What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups—the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to The Ballad’s operatic sweep.” From the makers of dirty realism, infrarealism, surrealism, and hyperrealism, it’s ultra-unrealism, China’s newest school of cultural thought: “The first thing I should do, of course, is explain what I mean by chaohuan, which we are rendering in English as ‘ultra-unreal.’ The literal meaning of chaohuan is ‘surpassing the unreal’ or ‘surpassing the imaginary.’ It is a word that a friend and I made up about a year ago during a conversation about contemporary Chinese reality … The word ‘ultra-unreal’ is young; it’s a newborn baby. I confidently submit, however, that it is going to live a long, healthy life. China’s been pregnant with the word for at least 30 years. Maybe 50 years. Maybe even 100 years.”
June 30, 2016 On the Shelf We’re Both Dippy Over Him, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Gee whiz! If you’ve been listening to pop music your whole life, you might think that love is a many-splendored thing, subject to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the human condition. You would be wrong. Love has exactly seven stages—no more, no less. Stendhal said so: “In 1818, Stendhal—then an unsuccessful writer in his midthirties named Henri Beyle—met one of the loves of his life, Méthilde … But Méthilde kept Stendhal at arm’s length, and even limited their interactions, only allowing him to visit her once every two weeks, which, in turn, gave Stendhal time to develop and nurture his fantasy of her, to exaggerate his love and admiration to truly grandiose proportions. ‘This is a love that lives only through the imagination,’ Stendhal recorded in his journal … Stendhal kept track of his emotions, and began to think about love with an almost scientific scrutiny. The result of this project was called De l’Amour, in which he described his famous concept of the stages of love. There are seven stages in all—which could conceivably follow like episodes on a season of The Bachelor—evolving in a form of crystallization: ‘a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.’ ” While we’re talking love—David Rees found his grandma’s diaries, and they are full of it. Mainly the object of her affection is ice cream; sometimes boys, too. “My teenage grandmother’s great genius was flirting,” he writes: “Those amazing boys! The peachy, dandy, charming boys of Gloversville, anointed with adjectives now reserved for Yelp reviews of bed-and-breakfasts. I can barely keep up with her crushes, or their fluctuations in status: ‘But what do you suppose [Peggy] told me? That Bill was mad at me because he thought I was mad at him because he talked to Velma Thorne! And there I didn’t even know he’d been talking to her! Wasn’t it funny. … So I told [Ralph] to tell [Bill] I wasn’t mad and it didn’t bother me how much he talked to Velma!’ It turns out poor Bill, being ‘stout’ and a cigarette-bummer (‘I hate to see a fellow smoke when he’s with a girl on the street, don’t you?’) was no match for Grant. Or Jonsey. Or the mysterious ‘Sunshine,’ who, if my grandmother is to be believed, was, for one summer in 1911, the most alluring young man in the universe: ‘one grand rower, fisher and sportsman. Really I never saw anybody like him. Emma & I are both dippy over him!’ ” So like imagine you’re a young Karl Ove Knausgaard and you get on the elevator in a fancy midtown building and hey now, it’s some hotshot publisher and you’ve got about thirty seconds to pitch My Struggle: “Ah, hello. Yes, going up. I haven’t chosen a floor yet. You may know me. I’m a writer. Imagine: A young man boards the bus to his grandparents’ flat in Elvegaten. He usually sits on the left side of the aisle, a few rows from the back, by the window, if the seat is available. It is: He sits there. He—there’s more to it, actually, but—yes, have a nice day.” Marianne Moore revised her poems restlessly, constantly—and sometimes publicly. In her willingness to let her readers see a poem in different iterations, she anticipated the Internet, Ali Pechman writes: “Particularly with respect to the way she changed her work, Moore has always struck me as more of a digital-age artist than any of her contemporaries. Her poems were as malleable as something written online … Her process gives a hint of how a poetic mind might use the Internet. In poems such as ‘An Octopus,’ she collages together text from newspapers, guidebooks, and overheard remarks at the circus in a shimmering representation of Mount Rainier. ‘Marriage’ contains roughly thirty sources from Francis Bacon to Ezra Pound to the inscription on a statue in Central Park. Such poems are a reflection of the hours she spent scouring countless books at the library and attending lectures. Her democratic sphere of influence apes the Internet—and, to follow, her aggressive self-editing reads like a symptom of that kind of capacity. One wonders what she would have written if she had had references at her fingertips.” Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, an Oulipo project, tells a love story without ever referring to gender—a feat that’s all the more impressive in French, which has gender baked into its grammatical constructs. “To get around these rules, Garréta digs deep into the French language. Instead of the passé composé she uses the literary form of the past tense, the passé simple, which does not employ participles that require agreement, and relies heavily on the imparfait, which describes continuously-occurring past actions. Sometimes Garréta uses sentence fragments to avoid the verb altogether. She describes A***’s body indirectly, taking advantage of the fact that, in French, an arm (un bras) is masculine even if it belongs to a female and a leg (une jambe) is feminine even when it belongs to a male. No primary or secondary sex characteristics are ever mentioned, of course: in the sex scenes thighs and crotches end up doing the erotic and narrative heavy lifting. And in one important instance a genderless English noun stands in for its gendered French equivalent.”
June 29, 2016 On the Shelf We’re All on Location, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the set of Intolerance. D. W. Griffith’s film Intolerance is a hundred years old. Its lavish sets—replete with plaster elephants, ornate ten-story walls, and all manner of Babylonian spectacle—testify to a creepy brand of movie magic that has long since leaped from the screen: “Intolerance is where fake movie architecture began its complicated dance with the real thing, affecting how audiences perceive the past, reconfigure their present, and anticipate the future … Even though it’s largely vanished from movies, the attraction of a reality that is recognizably phony and yet honest-to-gosh exists has hardly vanished from our culture … Increasingly, shopping malls, hotels, and the like do their best to emulate the same effect. We’re all on location, baby, even when we’re just shopping or hunting for a bite to eat. Intolerance anticipated many things, and one of them was Disneyland. In turn, Disneyland anticipated a lot of the modern environment we live in—not just at the multiplex or while on vacation, but full time.” The journalist Suki Kim went undercover as a teacher in North Korea and wrote a book about what she witnessed there—but her publishers decided to call it a memoir, thus exposing one of the industry’s many fault lines. She writes, “As the only journalist to live undercover in North Korea, I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of international importance by the only means possible. By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best. It was a subtle shift, but one familiar to professional women from all walks of life. I was being moved from a position of authority—What do you know?—to the realm of emotion: How did you feel?” In which Geoff Dyer reflects on the condition of the secular pilgrim: “I’m always up for a bit of pilgrimage, really. But I’m so aware of the capacity of the secular pilgrimage to disappoint, whereby you go to the place the great writer lived, and it doesn’t work for you. That’s something I talk about in the Lawrence book [Out of Sheer Rage]. You can’t fake it. You might try to summon up the feeling, but quite often you can’t. So although the pilgrimage itself might be disappointing, quite often there’ll be all sorts of incidentals that render the pilgrimage worthwhile. So in the case of that chapter on Gauguin, you know, it pretty well all sucked, all the Gauguin stuff in Tahiti that I encountered, but there were other incidental things that made it very worthwhile.” Stephen Orgel’s The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces reminds us that “the history of any particular book does not conclude with its publication.” As Dustin Illingworth writes: “Over five in-depth studies, including an investigation of a school boy’s 500-year-old Latin grammar book and a deep dive into a bold countess’s library and letters, [Orgel] conducts a kind of archaeology of margins, gleaning sociological insight and human depth from the calcified life at the edge of the text … This historical understanding of books as locations, as readerly edifices within which one might store practical information, binding legal documentation, jokes, and ownership lists, alongside more traditional textual engagement, challenges our contemporary perception of a book’s materiality, one which often equates pristine margins with the value of the new.” Let’s check in on the ever-widening field of self-help, shall we? Treatments today—especially, one imagines, in the Greater Los Angeles area—increasingly resemble a kind of conceptual-art experience: “Dream Reality Cinema (DRC) comes from Budapest … According to the company’s upbeat, Kickstarter-ish video, the practice gives you the ability to ‘hack the firewall between the subconscious and conscious minds’ using lucid dreaming … The first half-hour was gentle, screen-saver-y, repetitive — in two distinct sections (with a hypnotic interlude in between), a pulsing orb moved around the screen against changing backgrounds. My soothing female voice instructed me in the ways of the life force, the ways in which knowledge is connected, whole systems can be comprehended, all awareness is attainable. At one point, I saw faces in the background grid.”