May 4, 2017 On the Shelf You Lost Your Glove, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring I took the photo above outside The Paris Review’s offices in December 2014. I still think about it sometimes, mainly when I’m listening to Prince’s Batman soundtrack or zip-lining between New York rooftops in my vulcanized rubber Batman costume, but also in lonelier, more solemn moments. It turns out there’s a whole subculture devoted to photos of lost gloves. Genevieve Walker, a kind of lost-glove pioneer, has given plenty of thought to the preponderance of these gloves, and of those who pause to photograph them. She writes, “I collect single, lost gloves. Photos of them—taken by me, and exceedingly by friends and strangers. Lost gloves have been found to grow proportionally with the local human population, in all climates—it is a symbiotic relationship, like with pigeons, stray cats, or certain viruses. Ubiquitous as they are, once one makes a habit of cataloging lost gloves in their natural habitat, one’s eye becomes keener, and even the most peculiar, unknown subspecies reveal themselves … What I’m interested in is the way gloves are like birds, having migratory paths, genus and family; how they carry identifying marks like a butterfly’s wing. I am interested in the gloves’ situational patterns, their socioeconomic indicators bright as labels. But most of all, I marvel that you, now, continue to send them to me, snapshots of the lost gloves of your life … ” While we’re in this innocent, childlike frame of mind, here’s Hattie Crisell on Eleanor Macnair, who reinterprets classic photographs entirely in Play-Doh: “Macnair’s colorful, three-dimensional homages are a labor of love: building one takes up to seven hours. The human figures are modeled as nudes first, then covered with clothes to give them a lifelike shape. ‘It’s a bit like when you’re a child and you have the cutout dressing-up dolls,’ Macnair says. She creates the Play-Doh image late at night, then leaves it under a cloth while she sleeps. With the morning light, she begins to photograph. ‘I’m totally working against the clock. The edges start to crack and dry, even within three or four hours, and the colors start to fade.’ Once she has what she needs, she immediately dismantles it, saving as much clay as possible to be used again. The project, she says, is partly about making art feel less rarefied and more democratic.” Read More
May 3, 2017 On the Shelf Could I Please Steal Your Movie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Satyajit Ray. As is by now well known, Hollywood—real, old-timey, cigar-chomping, tush-squeezing, cocktails-in-the-back-of-the-limousine Hollywood—was and is a loathsome place. Imagine an elaborate machine designed to suck the marrow out of an art form and turn it into money—you got it, buddy! And if you were a talented, eagle-eyed filmmaker from the subcontinent, well, forget about it, they’d eat your soul. Or try to, anyway. In 1967, Satyajit Ray, who’d directed the Apu trilogy in India, visited Hollywood in hopes of realizing his latest film, The Alien, which Columbia Pictures had agreed to bankroll. Roy expected a degree of autonomy; instead he confronted “the hum of machinery in my ears” as he was chauffeured around Los Angeles and asked to sign away the rights to his own screenplay. The movie was never made—but later, after Ray’s screenplay had been circulating in California for decades, traces of it showed up in films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty writes, “Where Ray wrote his own screenplays, preferred to operate the camera as often as possible, composed his own music, designed publicity posters and fonts, the studios of the West Coast were known for the scale of their operations and compartmentalized efficiency, so that by the time a film went to the floors its appeal for different audiences would have been sorted out, and everyone in the cast and crew—from the director to the actors to the set workers and sound technicians, all protected by their respective unions—everyone worked in fixed roles to advance that appeal. What has worked once will work again, the Hollywood credo went; prior success was desirable because it could be endlessly replicated. Hollywood, like every longstanding establishment, had a house-style guide.” You’d think the culture wars were over, given that the Christian right united behind a presidential candidate who bragged about sexually assaulting women. You are wrong, though. We live in a time when enterprising Jesus-smooching types are still trying to launch Christian magazines for teen girls. Witness Brio, whose cover lines include “Do You Love Stuff More Than God?” and “Is It OK to Pray for a Boyfriend?” Liam Stack writes: “While Teen Vogue recently published a guide to gifts you can buy a friend after an abortion, Brio has featured reader testimonials on how to avoid the temptations of premarital sex (‘I began struggling to keep my thoughts godly when Satan tried to draw me out of my purity,’ wrote Leah, age sixteen, in 2009.) Sorcha Brophy, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who grew up reading Brio, said the magazine aims to ‘normalize being a Christian teen’ by telling readers it can be cool to go to church and shun drugs and partying. But she said its emphasis on moral uprightness can also create a lot of pressure. As an example, Ms. Brophy pointed to a feature she encountered during her research: a pop culture quiz that deducted points from a reader’s score for correctly answered questions about mainstream music videos and celebrity gossip.” Read More
May 2, 2017 On the Shelf I See You in Your Car, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Mike Mandel, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. What’s your most embarrassing hobby? Me, I like to take tens of thousands of dollars of photography equipment to a nice, busy intersection—Times Square at rush hour, say—and take intimate close-ups of people in their cars. I know it sounds creepy now, but it didn’t used to be, I promise. The photographer Mike Mandel, for instance, used to do it all the time. But he was nineteen, and he grew up in simpler times, when not everyone with a camera was presumed to be a pervert. In the Los Angeles of the seventies, as he explained to Hattie Crisell, people were more inclined to mug for the camera, though some of them were spooked by it, too: “He saw the automobile as an American icon and a home in itself, where people would spend hours of their time. Walking to an intersection half a block from his house, he began to take candid photographs of drivers. He used a wide-angle lens, which required him to stand close to the cars. ‘It wasn’t like I was looking at them from a distance—I wanted them to respond to me in some way,’ he explains. And respond they did: the images show couples grinning at him, children scowling, and one lady flipping a manicured finger. ‘I think today there might have been a lot more paranoia about being surveilled or something, but in those days it was maybe a more naïve time. For the most part, people thought it was kind of funny, and responded in a jovial way, and I had a lot of fun doing it.’ ” Quick, name one thing that Louise Erdrich will never, ever write about. I bet you said Long Range Acoustic Devices, as any sane person would. But wouldn’t you know it—sign of the times—that’s exactly the topic she’s chosen for a new essay: “The LRAD, or Long Range Acoustic Device, was first used in 2009 to control protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. Since then, it has been purchased by more than sixty countries to disperse demonstrators. Originally developed to deter pirates at sea, it has been notoriously used by Japanese whaling fleets against Sea Shepherd Conservation boats and helicopters. The military-grade device can project voice messages and eardrum rupturing ‘alarm tones’ over a distance of two miles or more via a thirty- to sixty-degree beam … LRAD’s effect on people is devastating. But in a moving act of cultural transformation, the art collective Postcommodity is using LRAD in a radically different manner. The innocuous-looking gray LRAD speakers are installed in Athens, Greece, and the more softly pitched acoustical beam is directed at the archeological site of Aristotle’s Lyceum. Here, LRAD is used to speak to the origins of Western civilization, not in weaponized tones, but in the language of the human spirit … People who have been subjected to LRAD report its haunting effect. Sounds traveling via the directed beam create phantom speakers. A voice, for instance, seems to emerge from an invisible person right in front of you. The LRAD sound beam ‘gets in your head.’ For one hundred days in Aristotle’s Lyceum, ghosts are speaking to ghosts. Restless contemporary spirits are interrogating the dead. Instead of broadcasting military orders, the art installation’s LRAD broadcasts questions.” Read More
May 1, 2017 On the Shelf Fiction Without Emotion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Leslie Caron reads—coolly. As those who’ve taken my expensive, profoundly eye-opening advanced writers’ seminar know, fiction is all about feelings. (I write this on the chalkboard at the start of every lesson—it’s my trademark.) If your short story lacks a rich, gooey emotional center, if it doesn’t ooze verisimilitude and nuance, why, it’s no more effective than the copy on the side of the orange-juice carton, says I. Your professors would like you to believe that this is self-evident, that it’s always been so. But fiction has a secret: it’s only a Johnny-come-lately to the world of emotional depth. A few hundred years ago, literature was a far less psychological enterprise, and people still liked it well enough. No one is quite sure why the medium reoriented itself. Julie Sedivy explains the evolution: “As noted by literary scholar Monika Fludernik, medieval authors represented characters’ mental states mainly through their direct speech and gestures, which were used to convey intense emotions in a stereotypical way—lots of hand-wringing and tearing of hair, but few subtle gestures … This changed dramatically between 1500 and 1700, when it became common for characters to pause in the middle of the action, launching into monologues as they struggled with conflicting desires, contemplated the motives of others, or lost themselves in fantasy—as is familiar to anyone who’s studied the psychologically rich soliloquies of Shakespeare’s plays. Hart suggests that these innovations were spurred by the advent of print, and with it, an explosion in literacy across classes and genders. People could now read in private and at their own pace, rereading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts.” We all text dead people sometimes. It’s easier than texting living people, and it’s the only way our smartphones can help us grieve—a kind of virtual grave-site visitation. It’s probably more effective than anyone cares to admit, except when, as Amelia Tait writes, the dead seem to come back to life: “Using technology to talk to the dead is a behavior we rarely—if ever—hear anything about. If the words ‘texting the dead’ make it into the media, they are usually followed by a far more sensationalist ‘and then they text back!!!!’ Yet although messaging the deceased is popularly seen as the stuff of horror movies and trashy headlines, in reality it is simply a new, modern way to grieve … Quite frequently, however, this reply does come. After a few months—but sometimes in as little as thirty days—phone companies will reallocate a deceased person’s phone number. If someone is texting this number to ‘talk’ to their dead loved one, this can be difficult for everyone involved … Behind the sensationalist tabloid headlines of ‘texting back’ is a more mundane—and cruel—reality of pranksters pretending to be the dead relatives come back to life.” Read More
April 28, 2017 On the Shelf Same Ol’ Shit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A sample of Basquiat’s work with the tag SAMO©. I’ve been thinking of getting a tattoo, but all the good ones are taken. Part of the genome sequence of a polar bear? Taken. Abraham Lincoln holding a boom box over his head like John Cusack in Say Anything? Taken. Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on the Chevy logo? Taken. And now the poet Morgan Parker, whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, has just claimed the mother of all tats. Amanda Petrusich went with her to get it: “Parker had saved a photo on her phone of the tattoo she wanted to get, a graffiti tag that read ‘samo.’ In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the tag was ubiquitous on the walls and in the stairwells of downtown New York City, often painted by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his collaborator, Al Diaz. The word is a phonetic shortening of the phrase ‘same ol’ shit’ and thus implies a certain kind of psychic exhaustion … It took about fifteen minutes before the tattoo artist wiped the last streaks of blood from Parker’s skin. She admired his work. ‘It’s me reminding myself that I’ve always been this person,’ she said later, looking at it. ‘It becomes this kind of affirmation, and I like the idea of taking something that’s in the vernacular, and yet it’s hard to define. It’s a word that’s written on the soul. It’s a thing that we know deeply.’ ” Yo Zushi on Leonora Carrington, the artist and novelist who left behind a privileged life in England to pursue the creative life—and, oh, while she was at it, she eluded the grasp of the Nazis, too: “Her life was an extended refutation of convention … In this centenary year of her birth, Carrington, who died in 2011, is at last receiving the attention she deserves. Her shorter fiction, compiled in The Debutante and Other Stories, reveals an imagination that could transfigure horror into enchantment, and the human into the bestial. Yet her most significant achievement is her paintings. In Self-Portrait (1937–38), a wild-haired Carrington sits on a chair in front of a rocking horse, communing with a hyena. We see in the window behind her a real white horse, running free; our eyes are drawn to it by the room’s outlines. Surrealism prided itself in defying logic, but there is a logic here—one of emotional sense, if not literal meaning. Her life was made of multiple escapes. With that galloping horse, how vividly she evokes a longing for freedom.” Read More
April 27, 2017 On the Shelf The Ancient Mariner of the Future, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration by Gustave Doré for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Ask anyone: poets are time travelers. They’ve got that thousand-yard stare; that glimmer of psychosis in the face; those penetrating, gnomic utterances. It’s because they’re literally living in the future. Literally—the future. Don’t believe me? The critic Malcolm Guite has marshaled an impressive array of evidence to claim that Samuel Coleridge wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as an “involucrum”: a howling vision of his future self in all its psychic anguish. Kelly Grovier explains: “Guite contends that the true source for the Mariner’s arduous odyssey—from degradation to redemption after committing the cosmic crime of killing the albatross that had guided his imperiled ship through the Antarctic mist and ice—was, in fact, the physical, spiritual and psychological torments that Coleridge himself would suffer in the years and decades after he wrote the poem when he was just twenty-five years old. It is Guite’s belief, not that the poet lived his poem after composing it between the autumn of 1797 and spring of 1798; rather, that Coleridge’s work is based on mysterious foreknowledge of his future self. Line by line, symbol by symbol, Guite painstakingly traces the ghostly congruities between the Mariner’s ordeals and its author’s own subsequent travails.” At the Japan Society, an exhibition of Edo-era woodblock prints captures the phenomenon of the wakashu, a kind of male adolescent whose extreme youth and beauty constituted a third gender. Claire Voon writes, “Wakashu referred specifically to males who had yet to go through the traditional Japanese coming-of-age ceremony known as genpuku. Although they did not carry the social responsibilities of adults, they were considered sexually mature. Their most discerning feature is their hairstyle: a slightly shaven crown flanked by side locks. (To signify having reached adulthood, a man would shave his entire crown, leaving a bald area with side locks intact.) This is best observed in a print on view by Hosoda Eisui of a wakashu holding an ornate shoulder drum. Hairstyles may seem, today, like a trivial way to understand gender, but they comprised an essential visual code in traditional woodblock prints. Combs and hairpins were shown to identify young women, and females, in general, had very elaborate hairdos … Interior views of brothels and private parlors, as seen in erotic prints known as shunga, illustrate how these relationships adhered to established societal attitudes: While same-sex relations between two adult men or two wakashu were not condoned, adult men and wakashu were allowed to be together due to their age difference, which bred a particular sex and gender regime.” Read More