May 22, 2017 On the Shelf Laura Palmer Is So Metatextual, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Well, Twin Peaks is back, and that means it’s time for you to have An Opinion™ about it. Are you ready? I’m not. I don’t have Showtime and I haven’t watched the original series in years—it’s all I can do to skate by with a few knowing jokes about the Log Lady. To buy myself some time, I’m trying to develop An Opinion™ about The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a strange 1990 tie-in novel written by David Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer. As Lara Williams writes, the book foregrounded the show’s dark depiction of child abuse, which would be fine if it weren’t marketed toward teen girls: “The novel is surprisingly profound. It is unflinching in how it depicts a teenager’s powerlessness in the face of adult male sexuality, and how abuse shapes her burgeoning sexuality. It also contains a complex depiction of how the abuse shapes Laura’s life: her burgeoning addiction to cocaine, which she funds with sex work, the self-loathing she feels as she imagines she invited the attacks … For [professor Kirsty] Fairclough, one of the most unsettling things about the book is how it was marketed to and read primarily by teenage girls. ‘I was a kid when I read this,’ she says. ‘It was a status symbol, a sort of rebellion. I totally connected with Laura Palmer’ … Published before the second season had aired, the book came out just as Palmer’s diary was also being written into the narrative of the show—pre-empting the metatextual conceits of post-internet shows, such as Game of Thrones and Lost.” Cynthia Zarin considers Enda Walsh, an Irish playwright whose work is a study in fragility: “In almost all of Walsh’s dreamlike, darkly hilarious plays, the central character has been sent to his—or her—room. His work explores the liminal space between interior and exterior worlds by stringing up a cat’s cradle of language in which his characters swing between memories, dreams, and reflections—an act in which the audience colludes. It’s unclear exactly how this happens. Some of this may be due to Walsh’s exceptional ability to forge immediate connections, on and off the stage … Walsh says, ‘In my plays, each character reaches a point where something happened that led them to where they’ve ended up. As a child, I was obsessed with running away! I would get about four doors down and then be sent back by the neighbor.’ ” Read More
May 19, 2017 On the Shelf Your Car Will Look Cooler in Forty Years, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Langdon Clay, via Hyperallergic I have car in New York now. The alternate-side parking, the potholes, the increasingly dimpled bumpers: it’s all worth it, because my car could be a celebrity in this town. It’s a 2003 Camry, so the odds are against it, I know, but if I could show you how I beam with pride, seeing it sit there on the street, all covered in bird shit and pollen—it just seems like a place where a car is meant to be. And even as it depreciates, its value as an aesthetic object will only rise with age. In the seventies, the photographer Langdon Clay roamed the city by night, taking photos of cars all by their lonesome. Today, his photographs seem like evidence of some lost civilization. “It was photography of the street itself. One car. One background. So simple. Night became its own color,” Clay writes in an essay introducing a new collection of the pictures, Cars: New York City, 1974–1976. Luc Sante adds, “They rule the night, those Pintos and Chargers and Gremlins and Checkers and Galaxie 500s and Fairlanes and Sables and Rivieras and LeSabres and Eldorados … They unashamedly flaunt their dents, their rust spots, their mismatched doors, their liberal applications of Bondo, their repairs effected with masking tape—but then some of them revel in Butch Wax jobs like you don’t see anymore, gleaming like the twilight’s last sigh.” Jason Horowitz is on the scene in Naples, where a frantic casting call for children in underway. The potential gig: HBO’s adaptation of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend: “Producers are looking for amateur child actors—two sets of girls in eight- and fifteen-year-old iterations, and then a large Annie-esque supporting cast of hard-knock lifers. The result is an open casting call that has already drawn five thousand children, the vast majority of whom have never heard of Elena Ferrante, and injected a mix of hysteria and hope into parts of Naples that are poor in resources but rich in real characters. Enzo Valinotti—a fifty-seven-year-old shoemaker who reminisced about the days, nearly a century ago, when Totò, one of Italy’s most iconic actors, lived in the neighborhood—leaned out his ground-floor window and said of the children flooding the street, ‘They are all so happy.’ … ‘Look at my son. He is so beautiful,’ said Anna Arrivolo, forty-three, who grabbed her child’s pudgy face and stroked his gelled hair. ‘He didn’t want to do it. I wanted him to.’ ” Read More
May 18, 2017 On the Shelf Visit Me in My Fake Tree, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Artificial tree-trunk, open,” from Richard Kearton’s Wild Life at Home, 1898. Image via Public Domain Review On a sunny spring weekend, I like to go to the park and hide in a false tree trunk I’ve built. There I stand, whiling away the hours and waiting for the birds to come around. I didn’t invent this hobby. Don’t give me that look. There are thousands of people like me. The whole thing started with Richard and Cherry Kearton, turn-of-the-century British nature photographers who went to ingenious lengths to capture their subjects up close. Artifice was their greatest ally, and they weren’t afraid to waste many hours hoping for something to happen. John Bevis writes, “It might stretch credulity for Richard Kearton, a benign man in a benign profession, to be labeled ‘the Machiavelli of bird photography.’ But the fact is that he and his brother, Cherry, adapted a number of the tactics of dell’arte della guerra in their search for ways of going undercover into ‘Birdland’ to secure untainted images of wildlife at home. Between the years 1897 and 1903, their experiments included variations on such quasi-military techniques as the smoke screen, in which surprise through deception is achieved by camouflage; the feigned retreat, when a false sense of security leads the foe into ambush; the Trojan horse, famously gaining admittance to a restricted area under false pretenses; and further ploys under the catch-all heading of misinformation … In 1898 came the ‘Artificial tree-trunk,’ anticipating by nearly twenty years the observation trees, made of angle-iron and camouflaged with bark, that were used by the British and French on the Western Front. The Kearton tree was a pantomime prop-like contraption whose wigwam frame of bamboo uprights was dressed with mesh, and covered with fabric camouflaged with paint, moss, and lichen. The photographer stood to attention inside, pressed against his camera, whose tripod legs could be only partially spread. It may have lacked versatility, but when it came to photographing a bird perched six feet above ground level, in woodland, the dummy tree trunk was hard to beat.” The Jewish Museum has dedicated an exhibition to Florine Stettheimer, a Jazz Age painter who remains, in Christopher Benfey’s view, far too often unsung: “Through her closely observant work, we are granted entrée to exclusive birthday celebrations (with her pals Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz recognizably in attendance), Fourth of July fireworks over Manhattan, and a frenzied spring sale at Bendel’s, though it might as well be Bruegel’s. Her signature filigrees of paint, especially red (associated at the time with the Ballets-Russes, for which Stettheimer dreamed of designing costumes, as well as with the Russian Revolution) and layer-cake-icing white, add a frothy dynamism to the festivities. Despite the apparent frivolity of her subjects, Stettheimer … was an ambitious, deadly serious artist who has never gotten the attention she deserves. Her varied, probing self-portraits—palette in hand and red shoes on her feet, accompanied by a Nijinsky-ish faun; or floating in space on a magical red cape, like some exotic deity; or reclining in the nude, à la Olympia—convey a sophisticated self-awareness of the confining assumptions facing a hardworking woman artist between the wars.” Read More
May 17, 2017 On the Shelf It’s Your New Moving House, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Just relax and take a nap while your house moves. So you’re moving. That’s nice. I bet you’re packing up all your stuff and stowing it in some U-Haul. I bet you’re tissue wrapping your glassware and purging your bookshelves. I bet you’re actually moving to an entirely different home in another place. Which makes you just another sucker. Did it ever occur to you to just move your entire home—just put the whole thing on wheels and have some guy drag it along the road while you remain inside, comfortable, with all of your belongings where you want them? This was all the rage in the nineteenth century. Jeannie Vanasco writes, “Early movers, such as Chester Tupper, Chicago’s first professional house mover, shied from shanties, log cabins, and brick or stone buildings, but balloon frame structures could be lifted and rolled down streets relatively easily. Born in Missouri in the eighteenth century yet called ‘Chicago construction’ in the nineteenth, balloon framing required lumber, nails, and basic carpentry skills. Lightweight, sturdy, and flexible, a balloon frame structure could be built within a week. Tupper moved thousands of them on rollers. In his memoir, A Pioneer in Northwest America, 1841–1858, the pioneer and priest Gustaf Unonius wrote about seeing Chicago houses moved: ‘I have seen houses on the move while the families living in them continued with their daily tasks, keeping fire in the stove, eating their meals as usual, and at night quietly going to bed to wake up the next morning on some other street. Once a house passed my window while a tavern business housed in it went on as usual. Even churches have been transported in this fashion, but as far as I know, never with services going on.’ ” The “desktop” has become the reigning metaphor of personal computing—why? Oliver Wainwright explains that most of our ideas about the aesthetics of computers come from LSD: “Organizing your files might not seem like a psychedelic experience now, but in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated a futuristic world of windows, hypertext links, and video conferencing to a rapt audience in San Francisco, they must have thought they were tripping. Especially because he was summoning this dark magic onto a big screen using a strange rounded controller on the end of a wire, which he called his ‘mouse.’ Like many California tech visionaries of the time, Engelbart was an enthusiastic advocate for the mind-expanding benefits of LSD … His own technological epiphanies while tripping seem to have been limited: in one session, after staring at a blank wall in fascination for hours, he came up with the ‘tinkle toy,’ a potty-training aid in the form of a miniature water wheel that would spin and tinkle when peed on. But he remained convinced that the drug opened doors to alternative realities, including one where people could control computers through screens.” Read More
May 16, 2017 On the Shelf The More Ink, the Better, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A 2010 illustration by Karl Lagerfeld celebrating Gerhard Steidl. If I had me a printing press, here’s what I’d do: I’d stand by the machines all day as they spat out inky paper, and I’d close my eyes and huff the paper, fanning the wet air toward me with a flowery gesture. And from the scent alone I would render a verdict on the quality of the print job. “No, no, this smells all wrong. Do it over.” Or: “This … is my masterpiece.” There lives among us one man, Gerhard Steidl, who does something like this for a living—his printing is an art form, his fastidiousness is renowned, and he takes enormous pride in mastering every minute detail of the bookmaking process. Profiling the legendary Steidl for The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes, “Among photographers and photography aficionados, Steidl’s name recognition equals that of Johannes Gutenberg: he is widely regarded as the best printer in the world. His name appears on the spine of more than two hundred photography books a year, and he oversees the production of all of them personally. Steidl, who is sixty-six, is known for fanatical attention to detail, for superlative craftsmanship, and for embracing the best that technology has to offer … Steidl seeks out the best inks, and pioneers new techniques for achieving exquisite reproductions. ‘He is so much better than anyone,’ William Eggleston, the American color photographer, told me, when I met him recently in New York. Steidl has published Eggleston for a decade; two years ago, he produced an expanded, ten-volume, boxed edition of The Democratic Forest, the artist’s monumental 1989 work. Eggleston passed his hand through the air, in a stroking gesture. ‘Feel the pages of the books,’ he said. ‘The ink is in relief. It is that thick.’ ” Yesterday in this space, I linked to an essay by Samuel R. Delany about his experiences at a gay sex party for older men. In an interview with Junot Díaz, Delany explains that he later saw a documentary about that same sex party (it happens once a month) and that it furthered his concept of sexual radicalism: “I went to the party first … The documentary was made three months before I went to the party. But that just made it seem I was involved in the same process. And I had had sex with maybe half a dozen of the guys I subsequently saw on the screen. That was certainly a first for me … Sitting in a movie theater and looking at the screen and thinking, Yes, I’ve actually had sex with him, as you are watching him have sex with someone else (or pretend to), has got to be an experience pretty limited to the community of movie actors—perhaps the community of porn film actors. But when those communities shift radically, it means something—and not just approaching mortality. Not all explicit sex is pornographic. It can be educational, and I expect that a room full of forty- to eighty-year-olds having sex and discussing their lives would be just that: educational.” Read More
May 15, 2017 On the Shelf Speak, Prairie Dog, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sup, dog. People think they’re so special, with their tools and their language and their consciousness. “There’s nothing like us in the universe,” people say. “We’re people!” It’s enough to make you sick. How grand, then, to see the pillars of anthropocentrism begin to fall. Con Slobodchikoff, a biology professor, has been studying the sounds of prairie dogs for three decades, and it’s his belief that they have a distinct language. They know what’s up. Whenever intruders approach their little prairie-dog towns, they can sound very precise alarms. Slobodchikoff told Ferris Jabr that he prefers the term language to communication: “Calling it communication sets up that us-versus-them divide … I don’t think there is a gap. I think it all integrates in there. You can go to Barnes & Noble and pick up book after book that says humans are the only ones with language. That cheats our understanding of animal abilities and inhibits the breadth of our investigation. I would like to see people give animals more credence, and I think it’s happening now, slowly. But I would like to push it along a little faster.” Masha Gessen with a quick reminder that the best words are the most precise words, for in them we know where we stand: “A Russian poet named Sergei Gandlevsky once said that in the late Soviet period he became obsessed with hardware-store nomenclature. He loved the word secateurs, for example. Garden shears, that is. Secateurs is a great word. It has a shape. It has weight. It has a function. It is not ambiguous. It is also not a hammer, a rake, or a plow. It is not even scissors. In a world where words were constantly used to mean their opposite, being able to call secateurs secateurs—and nothing else—was freedom.” Read More