December 18, 2012 Arts & Culture Digital Silence By Alex Carp Eli Horowitz is not particularly tech savvy, but he’s spent a lot of time thinking about what consumer technology can do. Until a few months ago, long after most of his friends and colleagues had bought iPhones, the former McSweeney’s editor and publisher was still taking their calls (and text messages) on a frayed LG flip-phone that was too worn down to snap closed completely; he had started to think of it as “more like a flap-phone.” By the time he upgraded, however, he’d already been long at work on The Silent History, a digital, serialized novel containing stories that, with the help of GPS, can only be read at the physical locations where they are set. “We came up with the very clunky shorthand description of a serialized exploratory novel for iPhone. Which just rolls off the tongue,” said Matt Derby, one of the novel’s authors, on a recent weekend on the Lower East Side. Read More
December 18, 2012 On the Shelf GoT Beer, and Other News By Sadie Stein British children’s magazine Puffin Post is folding after forty years. “#bromance goes sour when 2 friends, Prince Harry and Falstaff, are all #yolo #rkoi #dom until Harry inherits the crown and a conscience.” Yup, Twitter Shakespeare. The (inevitable?) Game of Thrones beer. An inventory of Emily Dickinson’s family artifacts. Indiana Jones journal mystery solved!
December 17, 2012 Studio Visit David Opdyke By Yevgeniya Traps David Opdyke’s studio is, at the moment, mostly emptied of his intricate, deceptively beautiful sculptures, though it is filled with neatly organized boxes, helpfully labeled with the names of the particular bit of flotsam (“Sand,” “Seaweed”) each contains. The artworks are on display at Bryce Walkowitz Gallery in Chelsea, where Opdyke’s PVC-pipes-cum-cherry-blossom-trees (the petals are tiny pink toilets!) bloom in the gallery’s picture window. The piece is part of Opdyke’s first solo show at the gallery, which is entitled Accumulated Afterthoughts. I met Opdyke at the gallery on a May afternoon, so he could describe the making of his intricate pieces, painstakingly assembled in a process at once “zen” and “after a point, frustrating.” Later that afternoon, I visited his studio. Part of the loft where he currently lives with his wife and two children, it is located right by the Williamsburg Bridge. (When I asked whether the noise of bridge traffic ever bothers him, Opdyke observed that the late-night drunken cell-phone conversations of nearby restaurant patrons are the far greater menace.) Read More
December 17, 2012 On Music Freedom and Light By Brian Cullman I saw Ravi Shankar at Carnegie Hall in 1966 or 1967. Because of the Beatles, of course. And I learned so much about music from that one concert. Not that the lesson stayed with me; it wasn’t like that. But it set me up for hearing music in a different way than I was used to (that is, as pop songs on the radio, as 45s on my record player, as the songs we sang at camp about the cat coming back or your heart going where the wild goose goes, or, worse, much worse, as the moth-eaten songs from musicals on Broadway). The first half of the concert was endless and dull, nothing but a couple of notes played over and over, like a foreign cuckoo clock gone mad. And then, an hour in, it all changed. And time stopped. The notes began to form a pattern, and the pattern grew more and more beautiful, like a house materializing from thin air, rising out of nothing into the most glorious vista, a home and a garden and hope and love and time, spread out before me. Read More
December 17, 2012 Arts & Culture How to Get into College, Indiana Jones Edition By Sadie Stein When the University of Chicago admissions committee received a package addressed to “Henry Walton Jones, Jr.,” they were confused; there is no one by that name on the faculty. Then the penny dropped: the package was for fictional alum Indiana Jones, often said to be based on one of two U of C professors, Robert Braidwood and James Henry Breasted. The package was revealed to contain a detailed replica of Professor Abner Ravenwood’s journal, as seen in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The admissions committee has put out a call for the identity of the sender. “If you’re an applicant and sent this to us: Why? How? Did you make it?” And, most importantly, “Why so awesome?”
December 17, 2012 On the Shelf Apocalyptic Reads, and Other News By Sadie Stein If the end of the world is nigh, here’s a reading list. The scholarship of paperwork. Brick Pollitt, Ben-Hur, Pussy Galore: Gay characters who were turned straight in the film version. Smuggling braille across the border. The library book bed bug scare: overblown?