April 18, 2012 Arts & Culture Period Piece: Rammellzee and the End By Dave Tompkins Gash-o-lear, 1989–98, mixed-media sculpture with wireless sound system, keyboard gun, pyrotechnic jawbreaker, and missile launcher, approx. 7'. Courtesy The Suzanne Geiss Company, New York In January 1940, a German double agent warned the FBI, “Watch out for the dots! Lots and lots of little dots.” During World War II, German Abwehr agents used microphotography to reduce classified military documents down to a dot, entrusting the period with sensitive intelligence such as tank specs and bomb sites, as well as meeting coordinates, a time and a place. Administered to the page by syringe, the dot traveled under the guise of punctuation and was then enlarged by its recipient—blown up in a world that would ultimately be reduced to rubble. The end of the line harbored secrets. To an aerosol artist like Rammellzee, this would be the last stop on the A train in Far Rockaway, Queens, where he sprayed his first tag back in the late seventies. The letters—EG—stood for “Evolution Griller.” I once shared the dot’s steganographic past with this Queens-born rapper/letter engineer, a man once described as “micro” for his detailing of subway cars and history. Rammellzee had no time for punctuation, but all night for talking military engineering, tanks, dentistry, deep-sea bends, gangster ducks, and loaded symbols. Hunched over a beer inside the Battle Station, his Tribeca loft, he asked if I was with the Defense Department and grumbled, “Too much information in the room is not good policy.” Under his baleful watch, the only time a sentence called for a period was when declaring the end of an era. With Rammellzee, a single thought—often concerning the welfare of the alphabet—might span centuries: from Visigoth invasions to Panzer battalions to a subway tunnel beneath an African slave cemetery to a band from Buffalo called Robot Has Werewolf Hand. All between a burp and a nod, from a polymath who referred to himself as an equation. Read More
April 18, 2012 First Person Underground Colonies By Will Hunt We are pupils of the animals in the most important things: the spider for spinning and mending, the swallow for building, and the songsters, swan and nightingale, for singing, by way of imitation. —Democritus, Fragment 154 I decided to go to Cappadocia after seeing an old illustration of one of the underground cities. The drawing, just a rough sketch, showed tiny people moving through a honeycomb of underground caverns, passageways, and winding staircases. The honeycombed cities, I read, had been hollowed from the region’s soft volcanic soil during the early Bronze Age. Cappadocia had been cobwebbed by trade routes in those days and was constantly under attack; the underground cities served as fortification from invaders. There were hundreds of them, one beneath nearly every modern settlement in the region, and some were as deep as ten levels, with space for thousands of people. What made me curious was that the ancient inhabitants were believed to have lived underground for months at a time. Read More
April 18, 2012 On the Shelf Sylvia Plath, Robot Librarians, and Lickable Wallpaper By Sadie Stein How to write a best seller? “If you are like me, you must always have something to read in the bathroom. Anything will do.” Meet identical-twin writers. Amazon to reissue James Bond. “Is it taboo to write about baking and Sylvia Plath?” Paper and Salt proves that whatever else, the results can be delicious. In a Roald Dahl image come to life, meet the world’s first lickable wallpaper. Building a library of jokes, hoaxes, and literary frauds. Libraries jump through hoops (and hire book robots) to stay alive. Dwight MacDonald and the art of the essay.
April 17, 2012 On Film White Noir By Jane Yager A man with a briefcase arrives in a place called City-A looking like a double agent from 1973: mustachioed and trenchcoated, forever ducking into phone booths for cryptic conversations. The man, Mr. Holz, is a geophysicist of unknown origin. He has come here to work for the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. City-A is mesmerizingly bleak, a grid of concrete high-rises set between a brackish sea and a wintry industrial wasteland, all of it reeking of environmental contamination and failed utopia. Many things, Holz notices, are amiss here. Clocks don’t run sixty seconds to the minute in City-A. The drinking water is spiked with lithium, a shadowy entity has confiscated his passport, language is rationed, and what exactly is this New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, anyway? As the bewildered-looking Holz moves through the city, is he piecing together clues to solve these mysteries or just being shuttled around by a powerful unseen force? This, roughly, is the storyline of whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, the new film by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation. But because this noir is, as the title promises, algorithmic, the film has no beginning, middle, or end. Read More
April 17, 2012 First Person On Gruck By Sadie Stein Stout toby jugs are gruckimish. So are the giant baby-head sculptures on the lawn of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Lollipop Guild, Hogarth cartoons, Captain Beefheart, and many parts of Petronius’s Satyricon, especially the verse about the insipid eunuch. Gruckimish is a word my best friend Elaine and I invented when we were approximately four years old, and one we’ve used ever since. To our minds, then and now, it fills a gaping void in the lexicon. Gruckimish lies somewhere between funny, grotesque, and cute. There is no exact equivalent in English; if there’s one in another language, I would like to know it. Gruckimish things are often anthropomorphic, but by no means exclusively. The main thing about something gruckimish is that gruck (the noun form) is always the unintended byproduct of the creator’s intention. Things that are supposed to be funny are rarely gruckimish. On the other hand, to call something gruckimish is never a value judgment: it is a simple statement of fact. Read More
April 17, 2012 On the Shelf Pulitzers, Saints, and Camera Obscura! By Sadie Stein Pulitzer winners are announced. For the first time since 1977, fiction is snubbed. HuffPo wins its first in its seven-year history. Speaking of winners, Matilda sweeps the Oliviers. Picador’s list of Lit Deep Cuts is actually a pretty good workday sound track! The British Library has acquired St. Cuthbert’s Gospel, the oldest known complete European book, discovered more than nine hundred years ago in a saint’s coffin. Seventy-seven years of (amazing) Romanian comics. Rupert Murdoch versus Harry Evans: The Movie. Today’s question: Wharton or Girls?