March 25, 2015 Big, Bent Ears Big, Bent Ears, Chapter 2: Borderline Religious By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Kate Joyce “Every now and then, when I’m tuning, I can make myself cry,” he said at one point. How can a piano tuner make himself cry? I thought to myself. What in the act of tuning would cause someone to do that? When I reviewed this footage months later, I could hear how dumbstruck I was. “When do you make yourself cry?” I asked, baffled. Tim came back with an explanation that, in one fell swoop, answered the question, created a bigger mystery, and effectively ended that part of the conversation. “This is getting sort of borderline religious here,” he said, “kind of with the f-word mixed in with it … When you say, God, I’m here—I’ll do the motions, you do the work.” The second chapter of Big, Bent Ears, Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” is available now. We launched the series earlier this month; it’s a combination of video, audio, photography, and writing in various arrangements and states of completion. This week, Sam and Ivan talk to Tim Kirkland, a piano tuner in Knoxville, and to the members of Nazoranai, an improvisational noise band. Read the piece here, and stay tuned for the next chapter, which comes next Monday, March 30.
March 25, 2015 On the Shelf Your Art Will Last Forever, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An ancient bison painting in Spain’s Cave of Altamira. Image via Nautilus So you’re making a work of art—congratulations! If you want it to endure physically for eons to come, thus imbuing you with a kind of immortality, you should look to the past: marble, granite, wood, rabbit-skin glue, oil paint, and other biological materials are still the most durable ones around. “Conservators still don’t know how some new art materials—like dibond, used previously in outdoor signage, or acrylic paints—will hold up over decades and centuries, but they seem promising.” Susan Howe and R. H. Quaytman—poet and painter, mother and daughter—are reluctant to foreground their relationship, but they’ve collaborated on a book together and given their first joint interview. “During the afternoon I spent with them, they happily talked over each other: about archives; about Mark von Schlegell, whom they both adore; about television; about Victorian novels; about vitrines.” A thirteenth-century cartographer drew a map of the Mediterranean so accurate that ships today could still navigate with it. “The mystery is how he managed to reconcile all this contradictory, incomplete information into one brilliantly precise chart of the Mediterranean that allowed mariners to visualize, for the first time, the sea on which they’d spent their lives sailing.” “Clive James made his name as a television critic, essayist and wit. But he began as a poet, and four years on from being handed a death sentence (with leukemia, emphysema and kidney failure—‘the lot’), he is ending as a poet.” Charlie Victor Romeo, a film and play, “features six episodes of real-life airline disasters as experienced from the point of view of the crew in the cockpit.” “There’s no romanticism in a crash. There’s regionalism,” one of its writers, Robert Berger, said. “Every other moment is intense technical troubleshooting about ‘mach-speed trim’ … As you watch it, you can see it as an opera in a language you don’t speak. You get love, hate, anger, struggle, and the battle of man and machines, and the energy of those things.”
March 24, 2015 Look Too Complicated for Human Brains By Sarah Cowan Gary Indiana’s art “recasts voyeurism as wonder.” Untitled, 1976, collage, 10″ x 8″. Gary Indiana does not have a Web site. If you Google him, you might find his writing scattered among street views and crime reports from the destitute and dangerous place he chose to name himself after. When I asked friends if they knew his art, they told me, Only that LOVE sculpture—the one by Robert Indiana—or, worse, they began to sing that song from The Music Man. Those who do know him, though, rank him among the great American novelists, even if most of his books are out of print. When I looked, all had been checked out of the public library. Maybe someone like me—curious, researching—had found them first, because at sixty-five Gary Indiana is having what you might call “a moment.” The third solo show of his visual art opened on Sunday night, and when I spoke to him on the phone the following day he told me three more exhibitions are scheduled this year. His books are being reissued, and a “kind of memoir, though we’re not calling it that,” is due in September. Read More
March 24, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Strife in the Fast Lane By Sadie Stein Photo: Daniel Ramirez The other day, I was riding down a Tucson highway with my mother. We had been to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and now it was rush hour. Suddenly, a man in a white pickup accelerated, passed us on the right, and screamed, “GET OUT OF THE FAST LANE, DUMBASS!” After a moment of stunned silence, we both started to snicker. Read More
March 24, 2015 On Film Houellebecq’s Been Kidnapped—Good for Him! By Dan Piepenbring From The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. In 2011, when Michel Houellebecq failed to show up for a book tour in the Netherlands, his three-day absence fueled ridiculous rumors: Had he disappeared? Was this an act of international terrorism? In fact, Houellebecq says, he’d just sort of forgotten that he had stuff to do. Guillaume Nicloux’s The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, which opens tomorrow at Film Forum, riffs on this hysteria and the cult of personality around the author, imagining a scenario in which Houellebecq—who plays, of course, himself—really is abducted: he’s ambushed in his home and taken to an undisclosed location outside Paris, where his kidnappers await a healthy ransom. But this is not the stony, philosophical world of, say, Mao II; there are no connections drawn between art and terrorism, no meditations on the dangerousness of writers as a class. That’s because there’s no danger, period. Houellebecq’s capture is a perfect non sequitur. Read More
March 24, 2015 On the Shelf Patron Saint of Inveighing Against Stuff, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Pray to G. K. Chesterton. Congratulations to Akhil Sharma, whose novel Family Life has won the Folio Prize. Writing the book, Sharma said, was “like chewing stones”: “I’m glad the book exists, I just wish I hadn’t been the guy who wrote it.” “The traditional complaint about teenagers—that they treat the place like a hotel—has no purchase on me. In fact, I quite like the idea. A hotel is a place where you can come and go autonomously and with dignity; a place where you will not be subjected to criticism, blame or guilt; a place where you can drop your towel on the floor without fear of reprisal, but where, hopefully, over time, you become aware of the person whose job it is to pick it up and instead leave it folded neatly on a chair.” Rachel Cusk on raising teenagers. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 to lukewarm reviews and sluggish sales—how did it become a classic? Salute (or blame) the GIs: “As a part of a revolutionary scheme of donating more than 22 million books to World War II troops abroad, a publisher threw in a random book from its backlist: The Great Gatsby … Gatsby and others entered the consciousness of millions of men who returned from war with an appreciation for paperback books and reading.” A group of Catholics have proposed G. K. Chesterton for sainthood. “Chesterton, in his jolly way, was a militant. A blaster of the superstitions of modernity, a toppler of the idols of materialism. He inveighed ceaselessly, at great length, and without ever once repeating himself, against ‘the thought-destroying forces of our time’: pessimism and determinism and pragmatism and impressionism.” A brief history of gayness on television: “By the fall of 1974, three years after the first gay cameo on popular American television (the vehicle was the liberal lodestar All in the Family), there were a handful of gay characters on prime time … ‘All were rapists, child molesters, or murderers.’ Activists lobbied networks to stop depicting gays as criminals and, within a few years, moved on to more subtle forms of otherness.”