January 8, 2014 Look Ice—It’s More Than Just Frozen Water! By Dan Piepenbring Lower Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres, 1865, an illustration from Ice-caves of France and Switzerland. If ice has lost all its wonder and the world feels to you like little more than a refrigerated truck, spend a few minutes with Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland: A Narrative of Subterranean Exploration, George Forrest Browne’s 1865 account of his journeys into the glacières of Chappet-sur-Villaz, La Genollière, and other such exotic Continental locales. The book’s tone is, as its title might suggest, implacably British, and Browne makes for an almost risibly agreeable narrator. The man simply loves to describe ice. It did not separate under the axe into misshapen pieces, with faces of every possible variation from regularity, that is, with what is called vitreous fracture, but rather separated into a number of nuts of limpid ice, each being of a prismatic form, and of much regularity in shape and size. A contemporary reader might expect some harrowing brush with fate, but this is not Into Thin Air. Browne is largely content to stay out of harm’s way: It would be very imprudent to go straight into an ice-cave after a long walk on a hot summer’s day, so we prepared to dine under the shade of the trees at the edge of the pit, and I went down into the cave for a few moments to get a piece of ice for our wine. And lest you tire of his meticulous accounts of ice formations, you’ll find relief in the more mundane details of his travelogue: A counter-irritant appeared in the shape of a fellow-traveller, whose luggage consisted of a stick and an old pair of boots. The man was not pleasant to be near in any way, and he was evidently not at all satisfied with the amount of room I allowed him. He kept discontentedly and doggedly pushing his spare pair of boots farther and farther into my two-thirds of the seat, and once or twice was on the point of a protest, in which case I was prepared to tell him that as he filled the whole banquette with his smell, he ought in reason to be satisfied with less room for himself.
January 8, 2014 On the Shelf Because, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The American Dialect Society—how do we join?—has voted because the word of the year. They chose because because because “exploded with new grammatical possibilities in informal online use.” In the Midwest, towns are living without Borders. (The defunct bookstore chain, not the metaphorical limitation.) Some independent bookstores have even cropped up in its place. How did Reddit’s brilliant AMA series go from geeky to mainstream? (Did you know The Paris Review did one last year?) “Of course, my definition of evil is not everybody else’s. Evil is being involved in the glamour and charm of material existence, glamour in its old Gaelic sense meaning enchantment with the look of things, rather than the soul of things.” An expansive interview with the singular Kenneth Anger.
January 7, 2014 On Music Swamp Thing By Dan Piepenbring Cover of Bobby Charles’s 1972 album Bobby Charles. When it gets cold, profanely cold, anesthetically cold, I like to put on humid music. It doesn’t cut the wind chill, but it helps. In a pinch, one could depend on Dick Dale or calypso; in dire straits, even a Key West bromide like Jimmy Buffett’s “Boat Drinks” gives off enough balm to suffice. But while such songs have heat, they lack humidity. At the risk of sounding like a sleazy bandleader: if you really want to thaw out, you’ve got to sweat. Bobby Charles’s eponymous album, soon to be reissued on vinyl for possibly the first time since its 1972 release, is perfect for the job: it has the languor and stickiness of an August day in New Orleans. Battered but amiable, Charles, a Louisiana native who died in 2010, sings with the slightest of rasps through ten tracks of rhythm and blues, alternately bustling and lumbering. He strikes me as a man who knew how to take his time. His is the sort of music people like to describe as “homegrown” or “country-fried,” though both adjectives feel too tinged with condescension to apply here. In deepest winter, the mere sight of Bobby Charles’s cover is a salve. It has a brown-and-green palette both earthy and eye-popping. What felonies wouldn’t you commit to be that man, or that dog, reclining in such tauntingly verdant swampland? Read More
January 7, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Makeovers By Sadie Stein “There is a new hotspot for heavy petting on the Upper West Side,” declared the West Side Rag, awesomely, some months ago. Widely considered the dirtiest, crummiest, saddest, and generally worst movie theater in Manhattan, the Loews Eighty-Fourth Street transformed itself in 2013 into an amorous teenager’s paradise, instituting luxurious, fully reclining seats and removable armrests. Reported the New York Post, The new loveseats are a huge hit with teens. Upper West Sider Richard Velazquez, forty, was seated in the same row as an enthusiastic teen couple at a World War Z showing last month. “Even before the previews started, they were going at it,” says Velazquez. “She was not entirely on top of him, but a quarter of the way there. When the movie ended, they were still at it. I was thinking, ‘Get a room already,’ but the theater was their room!” I don’t know if this gamble—or whatever it is—has paid off. Did anyone want an unsanitary multiplex with business-class seats? Who knows? All I know is that the Love Theater is my local, a mere five-minute walk from door to door. They don’t often show films I want to see—I guess the lineup is more geared toward the tastes of the heavy-petting demographic—but yesterday I crossed Broadway to see The Wolf of Wall Street, my thinking being that a comfy seat might come in handy in watching a three-hour film. Read More
January 7, 2014 Studio Visit Anthony Cudahy By Justin Alvarez Cudahy in front of his painting Untitled (Vanessa). I was first introduced to artist Anthony Cudahy in 2011, when I interviewed him for Guernica. I was moved by his fleeting scenes of silence—a woman pinning a boutonniere on an unseen man’s tuxedo jacket, two girls hugging in a bedroom while one stares at herself in the mirror—and amazed by the wide range of work from an artist so young (he was only twenty-two). When Adrian West pitched his translations of Josef Winkler’s novel Graveyard of Bitter Oranges for the Daily, I immediately knew Cudahy’s work would best accompany Winkler’s tales of death and phantoms in an unfamiliar country. Both invoke the Flemish hells of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder—lively, complex, symbolic, the best kind of fever dream. I met with Anthony at his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he is an artist-in-residence for the Artha Project. Amid the stacks of wood planks from the neighboring furniture studio and the incessant clanking of pipes, we discussed the benefits of the Internet for the art world, growing up in Florida, and his hatred of the color yellow. Read More
January 7, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Try New Things By Dan Piepenbring Variety, it’s said, is the spice of life, and too often our lives are sparingly seasoned—not with fennel seed or ancho chile powder, but with a few grains of table salt, iodized if we’re lucky. On a water cracker. But a new year is upon us, and we intend to try new things: like duck larb, or sweetbreads in mole, or Alsatian choucroute garnie. Sure, The Paris Review is reliable: with the best in fiction, interviews, poetry, and art, plus three National Magazine Awards in the last five years, we prefer to think of ourselves as sturdy, not stodgy. But in terms of variety, it’s hard to beat McSweeney’s, whose every issue is a veritable jack-in-the-box of unpredictability. Where we hew to the tried and true—same trim size, same typeface—at McSweeney’s these things are subject to change without notice. 2005’s “Made to Look Like It Came in Your Mailbox” issue was just that; winter 2010 came in a large box illustrated with a very rubicund head; and their most recent offering, “Multiples,” features up to six different versions of twelve stories. Clearly, then, the most variety of all would come from reading both our magazines. That’s why, through January, we’re offering a subscription deal: you can get McSweeney’s and The Paris Review for just $75, a 20 percent savings. That’s more than a lot of new things—it’s a flavor explosion. (Caveat emptor: though we can’t speak for McSweeney’s, we feel comfortable saying our publication will never be literally edible.)