August 12, 2014 On the Shelf Throw the Book at Him, Ernie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Manhood not pictured. Hemingway once slapped a critic in the face with a book. Here’s what that critic wrote: “Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man … ” One of many bizarre real Victorian novel titles: The Egg, Or The Memoirs Of Gregory Giddy, Esq: With The Lucubrations Of Messrs. Francis Flimsy, Frederick Florid, And Ben Bombast. To Which Are Added, The Private Opinions Of Patty Pout, Lucy Luscious, And Priscilla Positive. Also The Memoirs Of A Right Honourable Puppy. Conceived By A Celebrated Hen, And Laid Before The Public By A Famous Cock-Feeder. “What no one wants to accept—and no doubt there is an element of class prejudice at work here, too—is that there are many ways to live a full, responsible, and even wise life that do not pass through reading literary fiction. And that consequently those of us who do pursue this habit, who feel that it enriches and illuminates us, are not in possession of an essential tool for self-realization or the key to protecting civilization from decadence and collapse. We are just a bunch of folks who for reasons of history and social conditioning have been blessed with a wonderful pursuit.” As Hollywood continues to reboot every franchise in sight instead of developing new concepts, one cultural critic has some strong advice: Keep up the good work! “Our cultural mythologies exist not to be venerated and preserved in amber, but to be played with, reconstituted, reconsidered, dismantled, dissected, and stripped for parts.” Remembering Idris Muhammad, one of the greatest drummers in jazz, who died last week.
August 11, 2014 In Memoriam Taste It! By Dan Piepenbring Menahem Golan, the B-Movie auteur, is dead at eighty-five, the Times reports. In the course of his prolific career, Golan—who directed more than forty films and produced more than two hundred—worked with Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Vanessa Redgrave; though he had a hand in several distinguished productions, he and his cohort trafficked in unabashedly debased material. The Golan milieu is one of superabundant corn-starch blood and suspenseful synthesizer sound tracks. As the Times has it, they “churned out movies about ninjas, cyborgs, chain saws, and the likes of Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde (1993).” A bit of YouTube spelunking has led me to The Apple, a 1980 musical written, directed, and produced by Golan—perhaps one of the most gloriously catastrophic concepts ever committed to celluloid. “A young couple enters the world of the music industry, but also the world of drugs,” the IMDB description reads, as if those worlds have ever been separate—and to that synopsis, allow me to add that the movie takes place in a dystopian future that’s very, very, very far away: it’s set in 1994. (“Life is nothing but show business / in 1994,” one song tells us, helpfully.) In The Apple, Boogaloo International Music (BIM) controls the world—in the movie’s one prescient plot point, the citizenry is addicted to “the Worldvision Song Contest,” a talent show almost identical to American Idol or Eurovision. Any similarities to the actual future end there. BIM, headed by the nefarious Mr. Boogaloo, judges the success of its performers by counting the number of heartbeats in the crowd; when a sweet young couple threatens to overtake BIM’s pre-selected stars in the heartbeat rankings, Boogaloo throws the contest, invites the innocent couple to his swanky corporate HQ, and has his henchman drug the young woman. Things get progressively worse from there. Above is a clip of the musical’s title track, “The Apple,” in which the entire cast is transported to Hell and the classic forbidden fruit is dangled before our unsuspecting heroes. “Juju Apple / Voodoo Apple,” sings a mildly hunky shirtless guy. “Take a little bite / Spend a splendid night / In our garden of delights.” 1994, man—it was wild! If Menahem Golan is, as I write, in transit to some kind of afterlife, I hope it’s infinitely more pleasant than the one depicted in The Apple.
August 11, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Common Misconception By Sadie Stein Peter Paul Rubens, Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism, 1618-20 I’m sorry to Godwin out on you, gang, but I have learned something that I need to share with you immediately: despite years of slanderous rumors to the contrary … Hitler was not a vegetarian. At any rate, so argues the “vegetarian historian” Rynn Berry in his highly persuasive book Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover. To hear Berry tell it, the myth of Hitler’s herbivore proclivities are not mere exaggeration, but flat out blood libel! (Sorry.) Because in actual fact, says the book, the Führer chowed down, at least every now and again, on roast squab and liver dumplings. His vegetarianism? “One of the great myths of history.” In an article for “VegSource,” Rynn quotes Dione Lucas, a chef “who was an eyewitness to Hitler’s meat-eating.” “I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab,” she wrote in 1964, “but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel often. Let us not hold that against a fine recipe, though.” Clearly, Berry is invested in this cause, but he’s something of an authority on celebrity vegetarianism; he is, after all, also the author of Famous Vegetarians and Food of the Gods: Vegetarianism and the World’s Religions. (On the other hand, Hitler’s late life is said to have derived from Wagner’s philosophy, and no one is questioning his commitment as a Wagnerite.)
August 11, 2014 First Person They Put Him in the Freezer By Joe Kloc Last call at the Blarney Cove. Photo: Gabriel Herrera For a long time, when I came to the end of something—a walk across the bridge, an absence from the city—I would find myself inside the Blarney Cove, a hallway-sized Irish bar on Fourteenth Street between Avenues A and B. The place’s gravity came from its total disregard for the passage of time. Its drywall ceiling was never finished. Its walls, wood paneled with patches of green-and-white striped wallpaper, likely hadn’t been redone since the seventies. Outside, four or five customers perpetually gathered for a cigarette, tending to the drunken chain-smoker’s belief that tomorrow will never arrive. Among this crowd, you could always spot a straggler with a folded dollar between his fingers. “Can I buy a cigarette?” he’d ask the group, waving the bill he couldn’t afford to give away. “You can just have one,” someone would say. (As the straggler knew, at the Blarney Cove, no one ever took the dollar.) Once, I asked a regular from Harlem what it was about this odd and dreary bar that made him take the trip more than one hundred blocks downtown just for a drink. He paused, as if it had never before occurred to him to consider his commute, and then said, “It feels like home.” There was no more lonesome jukebox in the five boroughs than that of the Blarney Cove. Over the years, I watched all sorts of people haunt the bar’s four square feet of danceable floor—a grizzly man in a cowboy hat, a college girl with big hoop earrings—each gyrating in solitary defiance of the sleepy night. Some nights, after the loafers took their positions along the bar, an older woman named Kiko would walk in and ask each of the men to dance with her, one by one; slumped over in thought and beer, they’d always decline. I watched her once as she swayed her hips to Lucinda Williams’s “Drunken Angel,” alone. Read More
August 11, 2014 Department of Tomfoolery The Mystery of the Plaster Plimpton By Dan Piepenbring Hailey Gates holding our plaster Plimpton, a donation from Duncan Sahner and Rodney Cook. By the largesse of Duncan Sahner and Rodney Cook, The Paris Review has come to possess a handsome bust of our late founding editor, George Plimpton. Specifically, this is a plaster maquette—the sculptural equivalent of a draft or sketch—by George M. Kelly, a sculptor of some renown. When Sahner and Cook heard that Kelly was soon to be evicted from his studio in Astoria, they “put together a team of Monuments Men” to rescue some of his work. This maquette was among their bounty. And yet so much of the story remains untold. For starters, how did Kelly and Plimpton know each other, and who prevailed on whom to have Plimpton sit as a subject? Furthermore, if our bust is only a preliminary model, then where’s the final version? The Times offers tantalizing evidence of its existence. Back in 2003, on the occasion of Plimpton’s death, the paper reported that Elaine’s—the restaurant and New York City institution, shuttered in 2011 after more than forty-five years in business—had “a plaster bust of Mr. Plimpton … on a shelf in the back room.” There’s even a photo of him standing beneath it. Elaine Kaufman, the proprietor, told the Times, A couple of years ago a guy named Kelly did a bust of George in brass … The guy wanted a lot of money, $35,000. I don’t have that kind of—BLEEP!—money. So we ended up with the plaster cast. That cast remained on display until the restaurant closed. Photographs suggest that it’s not the same cast presently in our office. Ours has a visible seam just behind the Plimp’s ear; the model in Elaine’s is a more polished affair. And if there are already two of these plaster Georges, might not there be others, too? If you or your loved ones have any clues as to the whereabouts of the bronze Plimpton, or of any further plaster Plimptons, or perhaps even of a marble or Plasticine Plimpton, please let us know. In the meantime, we’re delighted to show off our plaster Plimp, who is, as you can see, eminently photogenic: Read More
August 11, 2014 On the Shelf Levity in the Trenches, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Got a man in the trenches? Show him you care—with roller skates. An early manuscript of The Sun Also Rises finds Hemingway getting all metafictional: “Hemingway breaks into the narrative to address the reader directly, and, in so doing, calls out the artifice implicit in the writing and reading of fiction. It is a wink at the marketplace—readers want lively, lighthearted tales from abroad—and alludes to the novel’s central dark, repeated joke: that everything awful in life, in all of its sadness and melancholy, is better laughed at.” That’s so po-mo! It took E. M. Forster eleven years to write A Passage to India—why? Even his diary is cagey. A wealthy Brazilian businessman wants to own and catalog every vinyl record in the world. (Don’t worry. He has interns.) “During the First World War, advertisers seemed to be responding to people’s needs relatively quickly … In Country Life, one of the things I noticed, being a woman, was that there were a lot of ads for guard dogs. It’s things like that that start appearing throughout the war—obvious and terribly poignant things, such as identity bracelets—that start to be advertised very widely, as casualty lists mounted … Many of the manufacturers who produced the most eye-catching ads are still in business today. The ads worked.” Seduce and Destroy: dissecting Tom Cruise’s potent performance in Magnolia, fifteen years later.