March 5, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: The Phantom Gambler By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s new monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. On September 24th, 1980, a man wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline. This meant he was betting against the woman rolling the dice. If she lost, he’d double his money. If she won, he’d lose everything. Scarcely aware of the amount riding on her dice, the woman rolled three times: 6, 9, 7. “Pay the backline,” said the dealer. And just like that, the man won over $1.5 million. He calmly filled the empty suitcase with his winnings, exited Binion’s into the desert afternoon, and drove off. It was the largest amount ever bet on a dice roll in America. “Mystery Man Wins Fortune,” the Los Angeles Times reported. No one knew the identity of the fair-haired young Texan who’d just made history, and so he became known as the “Phantom Gambler.” “He was cool,” said Jack Binion, president of the Horseshoe. “He really had a lot of gamble in him.” But it would be years before the phantom would be seen in Vegas again. Read More
March 4, 2019 One Word One Word: Dipshit By Halle Butler In our column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. I was on an airplane last year, and the woman sitting in front of me was a real piece of work. She had two young kids who were totally fine, totally quiet, really low energy—but she kept trying to engage them and turn everything into a teachable moment. She had a very loud, affected voice. I shit you not, this is a direct quote: “Asher, if you wish it, you may have one of your Laffy Taffys now, but then only two Laffy Taffys will remain.” How elegant! The kid didn’t respond, didn’t care either way, but she kept pushing them on him as if it were some kind of Stanford marshmallow experiment. Every time she said something, she repeated it (once more for the balcony!). Of course, she read to them, at top volume, from some Amelia Bedelia–style chapter book the whole flight, overarticulating like it was fucking Chaucer, nervously glancing from side to side to see if we noticed how good she was at this. Meanwhile, the kids tuned her out to play video games and eat wads of candy. When the plane was descending, she was like, “The flight to Manhattan is not all that long, if you recall the flight to London. Do you recall when we flew to London? That was a much longer flight than this, the flight into Heathrow. You may have another Laffy Taffy if you wish.” At that point, the guy across the aisle closed his eyes, exhaled, and said, very softly, “Jesus fucking Christ.” That woman was a dipshit. Read More
March 4, 2019 On Music What We Saw When We First Saw the Wu-Tang By Will Ashon The cover of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). It starts with the picture, back in the time when the picture comes first. Before we’ve slipped out the white paper inner, before we’ve pulled out the black disc inside—three fingers on the label, the meat of the thumb resting along its edge. Before we’ve lifted the lid of the turntable, placed the record over the spindle, before we’ve set the whole thing running. Before the needle comes down, before that bump and crackle as it rides the run-in grooves. Before the music. A creation myth. The very first time. A big room, hard to make out, curtains and a gilt mirror at the back, half of a reflective, misshapen globe, a sun sinking (or rising?) through clouds and smog. The floor wooden, or etched with double lines to make it look wooden, the pinstripe on the suit of a god. A ring of votive candles, seven or eight in the shot, each set on a thin stick stuck into a blob of gold, the flames running horizontal—quite a distance—in such a way as to suggest an open door, or fan, or a complete lack of walls, as if the shot were taken on a platform high up in the sky, levitating above a city. But not a gust, nothing variable, utterly under control. Each flame uniform, part of a set, so that the candles seem to be pointing at something or someone just beyond the frame. There are six figures. It’s possible, if we squint, to see a seventh, distorted by the light from the sun at the back. But what we can interpret as a head and shoulders blocking the light is in fact a cutaway, and what we’ve seen as a circle—that rising sun—is a huge, stylized W, their emblem. Legs bent, shoulders hunched, arms out in front of them. Gun fingers toward the back, thumbs cocked. The hand of the second figure distorted, so that the thumb seems to grow over the top of its index finger. The front-most figure making signs, right hand pointing downward, left hand the kind of shape you form to throw the shadows of a duck or an alligator onto a wall. Fingernails very white, overexposed, long and thin and graceful. Maybe we know how to interpret these hand signals, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. Read More
March 4, 2019 Objects of Despair Objects of Despair: Mirrors By Meghan O’Gieblyn Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column, Objects of Despair, examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them. Rolf Armstrong “I was the guy who, with a viral Tumblr called Selfies at Funerals, made ‘funeral selfie’ one of the most noxious phrases of 2013.” —Jason Feifer, The Guardian No common object has inspired as much dread, confusion, and morbid anxiety as the mirror. Superstitions exist in practically every culture: sickroom mirrors are covered in many countries, lest they lure the soul from the ailing body, and are cloaked after a death in others to prevent the spirit from lingering. A Chinese myth once held that images in the mirror were actually demonic beings who were pretending to be our reflections, while silently plotting our deaths. When I was a child, the popular folklore held that if you stood before a darkened mirror and chanted “Bloody Mary” three times, it would conjure a witch who would, if you failed to pass her tests, murder you. I never took the dare, but the story spooked me enough that I spent years avoiding my image in darkened mirrors, afraid that merely thinking the incantation could invoke her. Narcissus was the first to die from looking at his reflection—though the gnostics perfected the myth by reattributing it to Adam, who lost his divine nature, they said, by gazing at himself in a pool of water. I have always preferred this version of the Fall. The mirror, after all, is an apt metaphor—far more so than the apple—for what the Genesis story is meant to dramatize: the moment when humans evolved to self-awareness and understood, for the first time, that they would die. This primal epiphany persists in the dual meanings of “vanity,” which lock self-love and futility in an etymological death-brace. (That hevel, the Hebrew word for vanity preferred by Solomon, can also be translated as “mere breath,” only underscores the morbid undertones.) Anthropologists have long suspected that reflections inspired the first conception of the soul: early man saw his face in a pond and believed it was an alternate self who would persist after his death. But if having a double gave you immortality, it also presented a new anxiety: your likeness could detach itself and take on a life of its own, or fall into the hands of your enemy. Many primitive taboos about reflections, shadows, and effigies stem from the conviction that you could harm a person by damaging their likeness. Witchcraft and voodoo introduced into our collective memory a nagging fear that we might one day become the slave to our shadows. I think of the scene in the 1944 musical Cover Girl, where Gene Kelly’s reflection in a store window comes to life and entrances Kelly into aping his erratic dance, as if puppeteering his marionette. The same choreography can be found in the countless Romantic-era fables where the hero trades his image to the devil for the love of a woman or the promise of eternal youth. The bargain never ends well. The reflection, once brought to life, acts out all of the hero’s repressed desires—an id made flesh—and ruins his reputation, inevitably driving him to suicide. As the psychoanalyst Otto Rank pointed out in his study of doubles, all these stories contain a moral: no matter how miraculous a reflection may seem, it is always a harbinger of death. Read More
March 1, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Hauntings, Hollywood, and Home By The Paris Review María Gainza. Photo: Rosana Schoijett. My favorite genre of novel is one I like to call “women interacting with art.” Membership is somewhat limited but disproportionately loved. On this shelf sits works such as A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Ali Smith’s Artful, and now María Gainza’s Optic Nerve. Although each book is unique, they employ a similar philosophy: a belief that life becomes entangled with the art we touch. Gainza’s novel, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, follows an Argentine woman alongside her beloved works of art, contrasting her memories with the history of her favorite paintings. Falling somewhere between essay and close personal narrative, Optic Nerve reads like a museum. It encompasses countless styles, eras, and characters, offering new stories and ideas for our narrator to follow down winding hallways. Considering artist legacies, Argentine culture, and the accuracy of perception, Gainza paints life and art as adjacent forces; fabricated images and stories become real, casting their shadows onto memory. At one point, Gainza describes the narrator’s childhood home filled with antique furniture, and the bathroom with “a pile of Sotheby’s catalogues dating back to 1972, the shelves bowed under their weight.” The image serves as an unlikely metaphor for Gainza’s book: built around everyday life but haunted by a history of art stacked high in the corner, quietly shaping the space where it sits. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
March 1, 2019 Look Tolkien’s Watercolors By The Paris Review Those in need of J. R. R. Tolkien–inspired imagery have a wealth of options at their fingertips. There are Tove Jansson’s illustrations for the Swedish translation of The Hobbit, adorably round, perfectly storybook, and vaguely Moomin-esque; Peter Jackson’s award-winning film trilogies, unapologetically epic and meticulously shot; and lo, in the darkest depths of the Mordor-like internet, enough Lord of the Rings–My Little Pony fan art to fill at least one wing of the Louvre. In the face of this hoard, indecision threatens. Perhaps it’s best to pare down and turn back to the source: Tolkien himself, who depicted a few key Middle-earth locales in lush watercolor. These illustrations are currently on display at the Morgan Library and Museum for “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” (on view through May 12), the most complete exhibition of Tolkien artifacts in decades; Bodleian Library Publishing has produced a book, Tolkien: Treasures, to accompany the show, which is sure to help us reengage with the fantasy master’s vision for a fully realized world: pure, unmediated, and enchanting as ever. J. R. R. Tolkien, Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-Elves, 1937. Shelfmark: Bodleian Library, MS. Tolkien Drawings 29. Credit: © The Tolkien Estate Limited 1937. Read More