June 10, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Sacred Rites By Sadie Stein William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Crown of Flowers (detail), 1884. The food takes awhile which gave us time to watch a waitress deliver a Dutch Baby and envelop us with its fragrant, perhaps sacred, steam. A tray of ruby grapefuit [sic] juice in large glasses made me think of luxurious jewels. Obviously we had traveled back to a past time. —A review of the Original Pancake House When I was about twenty-six, a friend sent me a listing for a job at an online review site, which, at the time, had not yet gone public. It seemed to me a good idea to apply to lots of things, so I sent in a letter. “We’re looking for someone hip and quirky for this job,” said the woman, Tyler, who interviewed me from San Francisco; she’d mentioned an improbably high salary and a host of benefits and perks. “You seem hip and quirky. But we need someone more integrated into the Web site’s community. I notice you have no reviews, no profile, and no ‘friends.’ We’ll need to see more of a commitment.” I attacked my new assignment with determination. I set myself a quota of ten reviews a day and implored everyone I knew to join my network. In my capacity as manager of the lingerie store where I worked weekends, I commandeered the computer, knocking out reviews of the coffee at the bodega on the corner (“too subtle for the common palate”), the new artisanal pizzeria (“a horseman of the gentrification apocalypse”), and the local nail salon (“The nail technician was slovenly and surly; her coat was soiled; she started cutting my cuticles without asking”). While I placed a premium on quantity, I began to take my task seriously: I was appalled by the cavalier manner in which fellow reviewers dismissed small businesses after a single visit or graded spots where they hadn’t bothered to wait for a table. I took special care in rebutting what I felt to be thoughtless and uninformed reviews. My tone became hectoring. Read More
June 10, 2014 Arts & Culture The National Writer By Ted Trautman Chinghiz Aitmatov and the literature of Kyrgyzstan. “Chyngyz Aitmatov and his arts,” a series of Kyrgyz postage stamps. Six years ago today, when pneumonia claimed the life of the Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov, I learned about it the old-fashioned way: from a man weeping in the streets. I don’t mean to imply that all of Kyrgyzstan had thrown its hands up in despair at the loss of its best writer and most famous native son, though I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had. I just happened to come across an old man—an ak cakal, or “white beard,” as the elderly there are known—sitting next to a small radio on a park bench, letting tears run down his face as he listened to the news. I’d been living in Kyrgyzstan for a year at that point, halfway through a tour in the Peace Corps; my Kyrgyz was not so sharp that I could clearly understand the radio, but it was more than good enough to ask the man if everything was all right. In response, he lifted a tattered copy of Aitmatov’s novel Jamila toward me and whispered, “He’s gone.” It’s hard to overstate Aitmatov’s importance to Kyrgyzstan’s national identity. In my time there, new acquaintances regularly quizzed me on the country’s national this and national that. Kyrgyzstan’s national food? A fried rice dish called plov. The national music? Anything played on the ukulele-like komuz. The national writer? Chinghiz Aitmatov, obviously. (My younger English students had a hard time understanding why I couldn’t as quickly recite the United States’ national writer, et al.) December 12, the author’s birthday, is celebrated nationwide as Chinghiz Aitmatov Day. After Kyrgyzstan gained independence, Aitmatov represented the young country as an ambassador to the European Union, NATO, and elsewhere. “One of the great charms of Aitmatov’s life,” Scott Horton wrote for Harper’s shortly after the writer died, “was that he charted first the decline of the Central Asian life and identity, and then participated in its resurrection as the Soviet Union collapsed and as the Central Asian states regained, quite unexpectedly, their autonomy and footing on the world stage.” Read More
June 10, 2014 Studio Visit Signs and Wonders: In the Studio with Hayal Pozanti By Joseph Akel My first encounter with artist Hayal Pozanti was the lucky happenstance of a predetermined seating arrangement: she was placed across the table from me at a dinner celebrating Jessica Silverman Gallery, which represents Pozanti on the West Coast. We spent the evening in deep discussion on the finer points of photographic theory and discovered a shared interest in the writings of Friedrich Kittler. Agreeing to stay in touch, I found myself in New York for Frieze Art Fair and decided to pay a visit to Pozanti’s studio in Queens. She was born in Istanbul in 1983, and moved to New York in 2009. In a small, partitioned space with views looking over the East River toward Midtown Manhattan, we talked about her current body of work, which will be exhibited later this year at the Prospect New Orleans biennial and at the Parisian iteration of the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain. With my recent paintings, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ken Price, Philip Guston, and Allan McCollum. And, of course, I always come back to Giorgio Morandi—I think about him regularly. I find that a common ground for all of these artists was the ability to create, through figurative abstraction, a world parallel to the one we live in. As a Turkish immigrant who has moved from place to place, who speaks several languages, I’m intrigued by the possibility of creating a universal language to unite my cross-cultural experiences. When I think back to my childhood in Istanbul—even to my time as a young professional there—I was always concerned with the question of acceptance and with the idea of unifying people. Read More
June 10, 2014 On the Shelf Butlers for Everyone, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Danish cartoon from 1901. Spurred by Downton Abbey, fabulously wealthy people around the world have decided they must have butlers, and they must have them now. Jeeves must be rolling in his grave—even if he was technically a valet, and a fictional one at that. “The 1920s and 1930s in France were a moment when extreme ideological currents swept unstable, marginal, even criminal figures out of their ordinary recesses into positions of remarkable prominence.” Sounds awfully familiar… A helpful (or at least mildly diverting) graph shows us how often a given letter occurs at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Y is nearly always at the end, never the start. Poor Y. In the forties, a woman named Frances Glessner Lee revolutionized crime-scene investigation with one simple innovation: dioramas. “After months of cleaning and painstaking scientific investigation, art specialists in Britain have apparently concluded a decades-long debate over the authenticity of a self-portrait by Rembrandt, saying on Tuesday that it was genuine.” Your next home: a decommissioned Boeing 727.
June 9, 2014 Weird Book Room Relativistic Finesse By Dan Piepenbring Above is an advertisement from our seventieth issue—published in the summer of 1977—for Deep Foot and its sequel, Deeper Foot, two apparently seminal avant-garde novels. Click the photo to see the ad in full; it merits scrutiny. Anyone seriously seeking Truth, Love, and a real and true ALTERNATIVE to the deadness and shallowness of the American Dream, rather than merely seeking people or trips to become dependent upon: THESE BOOKS ARE FOR YOU! “This generation may hide these masterpieces under their beds,” the ad goes on, “but the next generation will more likely use them like a Bible!” I’m of that next generation, and I can tell you: we most certainly would, if we only knew where to find them. Information on the whereabouts of Richard M. Vixen has been hard to come by—we appreciate any tips you can offer. We do know that Avant-Garde Creations, of Eugene, Oregon, was in existence as recently as 1981, when the company took out an ad in Yoga Journal—a questionnaire, in fact, whose first prompt is “Are you conscious of a deep desire to be in an environment in which you could choose to be with any of 20 (or so) people, all of whom you love and who love you?” Evidence indicates that Mr. Vixen wrote, in addition to the series advertised here, The Game of Orgy (with a foreword by Robert Rimmer) and The Magic Carpet and the Cement Wall, for Kids from 8 to 92. A rhapsodic Amazon review of Deep Foot describes it thus: A triumphant, voluptuous novel about a woman’s enlightenment. A mercilessly erotic, tenderly passionate journey into love and awareness. When Lotta escaped from her prison of beliefs (about what she thought her life was supposed to be about) she found a whole new world of love and beauty awaiting her, and she fell in love with … Everyone! A dissenting critic writes, “Reading it felt a bit like watching a non-lethal crash between two clown cars happen in slow motion.”
June 9, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent The Saddest Sound in the World By Sadie Stein Gustave Caillebotte, Jeune homme au piano, 1876. Not long ago, I happened to pop into a candy store to buy a bag of Dutch licorice shaped like wooden shoes. “That’s a big bag,” said the girl who works there, indicating my burdens. “What’s in it?” “Oh,” I said, “some antidepressants and a Snuggie.” I think it was the saddest sentence I’ve ever uttered. The Snuggie was for my dad, but even so. The next weekend, I went home to visit my parents. We went to some concert they wanted me to see. It was a rainy, blustery day, and I was dressed in my favorite pair of high-waisted windowpane-check wool trousers, which I got at a thrift store about five years ago. My dad met me at the train station. “What interesting pants, Sade,” he said. “They look like something from a nineteenth-century minstrel show.” The concert in question was part of a free series at a local mansion, endowed by an elderly eccentric. My parents are regulars, but this was my first time. The mansion was liberally sprinkled with oil landscapes and filled with old people. The loner who’s always shooting hoops at the local playground was there. The pianist, who was quite the consummate entertainer, entered in white tie and tails and played some very bravura Liszt. Then he exited and returned in a red velveteen jacket—he played popular tunes, Liberace fashion, in a variety of jazzy styles. He cracked wise and delighted the assembled company. Read More