June 8, 2017 On the Shelf Heavy Objects Are Lighter When You’re Drunk, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring I’ve worked candy-ass office jobs my whole life, and so have never known true pain. That I still manage to complain constantly is a testament to my indefatigably sunny worldview and all the privilege backing it up. Finn Murphy, by contrast, made a career as a long-haul truck driver, as his new book explains, and he hardly ever complains. He got his start in an even less glamorous career: moving. He was one of the guys who picked up your heavy shit and put it somewhere else. This is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds. If you’ve ever wondered how teams of broad-backed movers persist, day after day, no matter how many four-hundred-pound filing cabinets they have to carry down the stairs, the answer might be simpler than you think: they drink. Recalling his moving days, Murphy writes, “Moving companies like Callahan’s perform four categories of moving work: local, commercial, long-distance, and international. Callahan’s work was mostly local moving, which entails loading up someone’s house in the morning and then unloading in the afternoon at the new house. It takes the greatest toll on the body because you are handling stuff every working day. Long-haul drivers get plenty of days when they’re just sitting and driving; international moves are almost never time-sensitive, so the pace is easier; and commercial jobs—moving offices around—are mostly done with dollies and elevators. It’s the local stuff that eventually kills you or drives you to drink; more commonly, both … On particularly tough jobs, John Callahan himself was known to show up late in the day with a case of beer for the crew. On road trips, it was the job of the guy in the shotgun seat to prepare a thermos of cocktails for the driver. At the end of a move, the shipper always offered us beer. Often our work would take us into New York City, which required a seven A.M. start. At seven twenty we’d get off I-95 in Pelham and stop at Arthur’s Bar and drink a couple or three screwdrivers before heading into Manhattan. As far as I could tell, the moving business floated on an ocean of alcohol.” Now let’s depart the world of work and men—actually, let’s depart reality entirely—here’s Fredric Jameson, wondering why One Hundred Years of Solitude has so captured the literary imagination all these years: “What is it, then, that García Márquez did to the readers and writers of a still relatively conventional postwar world? … Not ‘magic,’ then, but something else must be evoked to account for the undeniable singularity of García Márquez’s narrative invention and the form that allows it to come into being. I think it is his uncanny, rapt concentration on his immediate narrative object … it isn’t really appropriate to credit some exceptional storytelling genius to a fictive entity called García Márquez’s ‘imagination.’ Rather, it is an equally indescribable or unformulatable intensity of concentration which produces the successive materials of each chapter, which then, in their accumulation, result in the appearance of unforeseeable loops and repetitions, ‘themes’ (to name another literary-critical fiction), finally exhausting their momentum and beginning to reproduce themselves in static numerical patterns … We have no ready-made literary-technical terms with which to approach the strange mode of active contemplation that lies at the heart of this compositional process (and of reading too).” Read More
June 7, 2017 On the Shelf Show a Little Respect for Milk, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Dairy Queen ad from the fifties. The dairy is the locus of the sublime. Whatever it is you want from this world, whatever unnamable thing beyond the stratum of rational thought, you will find it in milk. Imagine water, but with more emotion—that’s milk. Beer for the soul—it’s milk! A liquid that’s also a medium and a metaphor—milk. Should you doubt its sway over human affairs, ask yourself this: If the land of milk and honey were merely the land of honey, would you still regard it as paradise? Embarking on what they call a “journey of lactic abstraction,” Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie have written a penetrating meditation on all things milky in the new issue of Cabinet. The news isn’t all good; humans have not been good to milk of late. Part of it goes like this: “The McFlurry, Mr. Whippy, Dairy Queen Blizzard, Cheese String, Dreaming Cow, Laughing Cow, Skinny Cow, Happy Cow, Crusha, Marvel—these dairy icons perform health and the abuse of health; an array of high-calorie, high-fat, low-calorie, low-fat, high-sugar, sugar-free, highly processed glimmer, with techno-scientific, multicolor, hedonistic, and eroticized appeal. These are the products of aggressive marketing, of low-margin, highly complex modes of manufacture. Dairy turns airy in ice creams that swell up with nothingness injected … Milk’s propensity for animation, for shape-shifting and transformation, teams it commercially with a bestiary of cartoon avatars and a dazzling spectrum of synthetic colors. Milk is frozen into colorful crystals with personality for a teeming frozen-treats market whose products bear ever less tangible relations to milk. In this format, milk adopts any and every shape, that of superheroes or cartoon villains, baroque architectonics or body parts. The cow, used frequently as a metaphor for the passive, dumb, and exploited, is replaced by wily, smart-talking animals and apocryphal consumers of its milk—cats, rabbits, mice—leaving only a vestigial hint of the originating animality.” Vauhini Vara has spent some quality time at spelling bees and wonders about the increasing prominence of Indian Americans as brilliant spellers: “For the past decade, Indian Americans have dominated the Scripps National Spelling Bee—among last year’s top ten were seven Indian spellers … Even the most well-meaning attempts to understand the dominance of Indian-American spellers can be reductive. Shalini Shankar, an anthropologist at Northwestern University who is writing a book about spelling culture, told me that people ask her all the time if there is something inherent in the Indian brain that makes it well suited to this sort of competition—maybe a spelling gene? It’s legitimate, of course, to wonder why kids of Indian origin keep conquering Scripps, despite making up a relatively small proportion of the population. When I put this question to Paige Kimble, the director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, she said, ‘It seems to me that more and more South Asians have integrated, and as they do so, they do what immigrant populations do, and that is to work very hard to be successful in their new country. I think that’s absolutely the dynamic in place that impacts the Bee.’ ” Read More
June 6, 2017 On the Shelf How to Commune with a Filmmaker, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jerry Lewis and Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, 1983. Let’s get this straight: many books are good. Movies? Also good. Is the best movie inherently less valuable than the best book, just because it’s a motion picture forcing its images down your gullet? No. Film has been around for a century now, but its loftiest critics still sometimes regard it as literature’s kid brother: a nascent medium doing its best to shrug off the demotic appeal that marked it as, you know, dumb. Martin Scorsese thought that Adam Mars-Jones’s review of his new film, Silence, made a few undue assumptions about the nature of movies compared to literature—the hoarier and oftentimes more boring art form, and thus the more important one. So Scorsese has mounted a defense of filmmaking: “I’ve grown used to seeing the cinema dismissed as an art form for a whole range of reasons: it’s tainted by commercial considerations; it can’t possibly be an art because there are too many people involved in its creation; it’s inferior to other art forms because it ‘leaves nothing to the imagination’ and simply casts a temporary spell over the viewer (the same is never said of theatre or dance or opera, each of which require the viewer to experience the work within a given span of time). Oddly enough, I’ve found myself in many situations where these beliefs are taken for granted, and where it’s assumed that even I, in my heart of hearts, must agree … The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer. They’re not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but, I think, to engage with them on as intimate a level as possible. The viewer also ‘collaborates’ with the filmmaker, or the painter.” Anthony Burgess once tried to write a book of slang—he proceeded alphabetically and only through the letter c before he decided it was a waste of time. Now, Dalya Alberge reports, his abortive efforts have been discovered: “Entries include abdabs (‘fit of nerves, attack of delirium tremens, or other uncontrollable emotional crisis’) and abortion (‘anything ugly, ill-shapen, or generally detestable’) … The [Burgess] Foundation is working with the slang lexicographer Jonathon Green, who said even in its limited state, Burgess’s dictionary is ‘fascinating both for his many fans and for specialist lexicographers … Slang is a very slippery customer … I get the feeling that Burgess thought it was much easier than it actually is … Smart as he was, with an understanding of linguistics and language, I don’t think he could have allowed himself to do a second-rate [dictionary]. If he didn’t stop everything else, that’s what he would have turned out with … Terms like writer’s block are not slang. Proper names like the Beatles are not slang. Meanwhile, one cannot, as in arse, begin a definition with the statement I need not define. Nor throw in personal assessments (“Arse is a noble word; ass is a vulgarism”).’ ” Read More
June 5, 2017 On the Shelf Paging Dr. Videovich, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from a Jaime Davidovich “show.” Once upon a time, it was hard to be on TV. Believe me, I tried. You couldn’t just mouth off in an ill-fitting suit and expect to get your own reality show, no, sir. You couldn’t upload a video of yourself saying wacky shit while the anesthesia wore off after your wisdom-tooth operation. You had to be clever. Jaime Davidovich, who died last August, was a pioneering television artist—as his friend Rebecca Cleman writes, he recognized that “it was more radical to put art in the context of television than to bring popular culture into the museum.” By arranging to display his art in public places—most notably a Midtown bar, which agreed to show his video of floorboards instead of live sports—Davidovich used the demotic medium of his time to proselytize for art. (And for the benefits of being a weirdo.) Cleman writes, “After living in New York for most of the sixties, part of it working as a designer for Alfred A. Knopf on Madison Avenue, Jaime settled in Ohio for a while, enjoying what he considered to be a relatively typical suburban life with a two-car garage. It was there that he began experimenting with video, introduced not via a gallerist or a Sony sponsorship (as was the case for some artists), but by way of an Argentine surgeon at a Cleveland hospital. A technician gave Jaime access to the hospital’s video equipment after hours, making the operating room his de facto television laboratory. At this time, some public broadcast stations like WNET were sponsoring artistic experimentation with their high-end video equipment, a situation that tended to showcase the visual effects of gadgetry. In the setting of the hospital, Jaime’s use of video was more clearly distinct from such aesthetics, in keeping with his use, already, of non-art materials like adhesive tape to create spatial interventions … His alter ego, ‘Dr. Videovich,’ the Argentine psychoanalyst turned TV host, emerged as a satirical counterpoint to the art world’s move toward commercialization and professionalism in the 1980s.” Edwin Heathcote has been spending a lot of time in luxury show homes, where everything is gray and visitors can live out an elaborate simulation of a meaningful life. Just try to look at the books, for instance: “Just as the kitchens in these super-luxury show homes are for people who don’t really cook, the books on display are for people who don’t really read. There is an entire branch of the publishing industry devoted to the kinds of books that you see in show homes. They are the big arty books on a few specific subjects: travel, New York, cooking, watches, classic cars, fashion and so on. They are slightly too heavy to lift, so cannot actually be read … You see these same books in hotel lobbies and in their odd ‘libraries’ that are a hybrid space between hotel, club and home, a room designed around books no one is ever expected to read … The show-home library is a hint at the top-end man cave, the clubby, comfortable image of a cultivated space without the effort of needing to go through actual cultivation. Its pretense to culture stops it being objectionable to the spouse. The books are a sign; a symbol of, if not exactly culture, then at least the aspiration to culture. Their presence is plenty, they do not demand to be opened.” Read More
June 2, 2017 On the Shelf When Mascots Go Mad, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sebastian the Ibis in a fit of pique. Listen well: to be a sports mascot is to wear a hair shirt. These people are flagellating themselves. After a while, donning the costume comes with mental consequences. Trapped within the padded, poorly ventilated headpiece of every mascot is a madman waiting to come alive. The mascot’s dream is to shed his sweaty cocoon and “be himself,” as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. We saw this most recently in the case of Mr. Met, who this week offered a lewd gesture to a fan. (It wasn’t the “middle finger,” apparently; Mr. Met, having an even number of digits, is anatomically incapable of that motion.) But this was hardly the first time a mascot has gone rogue. Victor Mather has assembled a guide to “mascots behaving badly.” My favorite entry belongs to Sebastian the Ibis, who reps the Miami Hurricanes. In attempting a good-natured prank, Sebastian ran afoul of the police, themselves mascots of the state: “The Miami mascot thought it would be funny to wear a firefighter’s outfit and carry a fire extinguisher to a Florida State game in 1989. The plan was to make it look as if he was going to put out the flaming spear carried by the Seminoles’ Chief Osceola, though he never planned to actually do it. The Tallahassee police found it less funny and grabbed him on his way in. Less funny still, the extinguisher went off and hit an officer. ‘At that moment, I realized, uh oh, something is wrong here,’ Sebastian told USA Today years later. ‘Within two seconds, there were five of them slamming me up against the fence. One wing was out to one side, the other wing held behind my back. Another guy is pulling my beak and trying to yank my head off, and I had a chin strap underneath so it felt like he was trying to choke me to death.’ ” Jill Lepore reminds us that dystopia, a very popular word at present, doesn’t just refer to some terrible future civilization—it must be an inversion of utopia: “The word dystopia, meaning ‘an unhappy country,’ was coined in the seventeen-forties, as the historian Gregory Claeys points out in a shrewd new study, Dystopia: A Natural History. In its modern definition, a dystopia can be apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, or neither, but it has to be anti-utopian, a utopia turned upside down, a world in which people tried to build a republic of perfection only to find that they had created a republic of misery … The dystopian novel emerged in response to the first utopian novels, like Edward Bellamy’s best-selling 1888 fantasy, Looking Backward, about a socialist utopia in the year 2000. Looking Backward was so successful that it produced a dozen anti-socialist, anti-utopian replies, including Looking Further Backward (in which China invades the United States, which has been weakened by its embrace of socialism) and Looking Further Forward (in which socialism is so unquestionable that a history professor who refutes it is demoted to the rank of janitor).” Read More
June 1, 2017 On the Shelf Behind the Decadence, There’s Dust, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Gustav Wunderwald, Brücke über die Ackerstraße, 1927. Image via Public Domain Review. We associate Weimar Berlin with Dionysian excess, unfettered lust, and quality drugs, all of which put it at the top of the list of places I’d like to time travel to. But even at its most liberated, city life can’t be all orgies and amphetamines. Someone has to take the garbage out. The painter Gustav Wunderwald, who roamed the streets of Berlin in the 1920s, had a soft spot for its less frenetic corners. His work, with its parade of smokestacks and tenements, has garnered more attention in recent years for its depiction of the city’s sooty splendor. Mark Hobbs writes, “Wunderwald’s oeuvre consists chiefly of landscapes, many of which depict Berlin and its surroundings. The gray streets of the city’s working-class areas, to the north of the city center, are just as often depicted as the cleaner, airier streets of the city’s affluent west end. Rural landscapes also figure, including views of Berlin’s lakes and the countryside around the Havel River. Despite the variety of scenes, it is for his depictions of Berlin’s working-class areas that Wunderwald is best known … Amidst the tenement blocks, factories, smokestacks, and advertising hoardings, Wunderwald found no shortage of subjects to paint. In a letter to a friend, written in the winter of 1926, he wrote: ‘Sometimes I stagger back as if drunk from my wandering through Berlin; there are so many impressions that I have no idea which way to go.’ ” Jim Guida is reading the novels of José Maria de Eça de Queirós, whom you may have heard of from Lorin Stein in our staff picks. Eça, a nineteenth-century Portuguese writer, depicts his nation’s wealthiest milieu with care, acuity, and more than a little cynicism. Guida writes, “What does Eça’s Portugal feel like? It is dominated by hot sunny days, white trousers, dust, theater tickets and evening strolls in Sintra, roses in buttonholes and glimpses of gowned women getting in and out of coaches, gorgeous landscapes and trees and flowers, hale farmers and country maids, long conversations, cats and singing birds and orchards, pumpkins drying on a station roof, baked sweet rice, and cheese pastries. Furthermore plenty of cognac, white wine, iced champagne, rolled cigarettes, and good cigars. Late in The Maias, a dish of cold pineapple served with Madeira and orange juice gets sustained attention. In another novel, someone says, ‘It’s an absolute disgrace, you know. I’ve never once eaten a decent melon here.’ ” Read More