June 5, 2012 Arts & Culture Hiding in Plain Sight By Alex Carp Hanna Shell in camo. Why do so many American soldiers look, as one Brooklynite at the office of Cabinet magazine put it on a recent Friday, like they are trying to blend in to computer screens? The question was directed at Hanna Rose Shell, a historian, filmmaker, and professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, who had come to New York to talk about Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. Cabinet had arranged to host a reading and sound performance, which promised “camouflage paraphernalia galore.” We soon found out the answer. It seems the pixelated, “digitized” designs have been standard issue across the branches for a decade, while the iconic, splotchy pattern of green, brown, olive, and black seen in episodes of G.I. Joe and the military-themed action movies of the 1980s is no longer predominant. Officially known as the Woodland pattern of the Army’s M81 battle dress uniform, the older, iconic camo was initially designed, Shell found, to mimic the environment of a region in the Soviet Union where military researchers thought the Cold War would turn hot. Though no longer used to hide soldiers, close approximations of this earlier version can be found today on cargo shorts and Louis Vuitton luggage. It’s been replaced with a series of tiny squares and “micropatterns” that mimic a digital photograph with poor resolution, with the idea that the new uniforms would be more difficult to detect in images produced by contemporary digital surveillance. Also, as a military camouflage expert admitted, “the boys think it looks cool.” Read More
June 5, 2012 Bulletin Four Ties, and Counting By Lorin Stein A few months ago our friend Kirk Miller, of Miller’s Oath, made a small batch of Paris Review ties–twenty-four, to be exact. I bought one. Several members of our board did the same. We have four ties left—one of each! So, as you see, this is a true limited edition. Give one of them to your dad for Father’s Day. Each comes with a free subscription to The Paris Review. Buy one today! While supplies last.
June 5, 2012 On Film Sad Young Literary Men: The Pleasures of Oslo, August 31st By Elisabeth Donnelly The best films scramble your brain, changing you slightly. You emerge from the dark with new, blinking eyes, adjusting to a different world. It’s why for many of us a good movie is a small miracle, worthy of devotion. So far, Norwegian director Joachim Trier has made two such small miracles, Reprise and Oslo, August 31st. Two sharp films that, when I saw them, settled down into some small part of me, changing the way I thought about youth, ambition, and the meaning of life, if only for a night. I suspect the films of Trier speak particularly to anyone with literary ambitions, anyone who knows what it’s like to be besotted by a work of art and anyone who wants to create something strong and beautiful and true. The director has an uncanny eye for the worries of sad young men afflicted with dreaminess about art and ideas, the same sort of disease written about in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer or Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. His exuberant, French New Wave–influenced debut, Reprise, is the story of two boyish twenty-something writers wrestling with literary ambitions and madness. Reprise is charming, formally daring, and focused on youthful folly; in Oslo, August 31st, the folly is over, and it’s time for the morning after. Read More
June 5, 2012 On the Shelf Dr. Seuss, Tintin, and a Really Late Library Book By The Paris Review A 1932 original Tintin in America cover sells for a record-breaking 1.3 million euros at auction. American Pastoral, coming to a multiplex near you. (Okay, maybe an art house.) Definitely coming to the multiplex, Guy Richie’s Treasure Island. The name really says it all: Haruki Murakami Bingo. Dr. Seuss’s politically charged World War II cartoons. An honorable patron returns a book to an Irish library … eighty years past its due date.
June 4, 2012 Listen Flannery O’Connor Reads, 1959 By Sadie Stein It wasn’t until Open Culture shared this 1959 recording of Flannery O’Connor reading the title story of A Good Man Is Hard to Find that we realized we didn’t know what her voice sounded like. The thirty-four-year-old author’s Georgia accent is pronounced, and she puts over the story with a deadpan panache that brings out its full humor and horror. Truly a treat for a gray day.
June 4, 2012 On the Shelf Thefts, Maps, and the Return of Oprah By The Paris Review A rare, first-edition Book of Mormon has been stolen from an Arizona store. The Atlantic presents a slideshow of images from the “graphic canon,” in which artists take on the classics. Will 2012 be the biggest Book Expo ever? An interactive map of the UK’s literary destinations. The return of Oprah’s Book Club.