February 7, 2018 On Food Dinner at the End of America By Laura Bannister The interior of Planet Hollywood Times Square. Of all the wretched places to visit in New York, Planet Hollywood is king. The moldering eatery’s main entryway—beneath a colossal, glitzy sign that jostles for attention with Times Square’s other lurid neons—leads you to one of two elevators, their doors designed to mimic a subway car’s (as though the real and grimy thing were not a block or two away). One need not feast at a Planet Hollywood to know that the experience will be underwhelming and too expensive, that the earsplitting soundtrack will consist only of pop anthems and Disney theme songs, that there will be a weekly changing burger named the OMG! Burger, and that a visit to the gift shop will make you want to cry. A cursory search of online reviews confirms Planet Hollywood’s status as a dwindling brasserie chain attached to a substandard museum—a place that should no longer exist and yet seems to defy market logic. To quote a recent note on TripAdvisor, “The threat from dust falling from the above decorations was enough to put you off.” But shortly after moving to America, and for reasons that now evade me, I began dining regularly—and with near-evangelical enthusiasm—at Planet Hollywood Times Square. (This is the city’s only branch, and it has lived here since 2000, after relocating from its original 1991 location on West 57th Street.) I have noshed on spinach dip served in a cocktail glass, and on a pizza whose pepperoni is glistening and wet. I have stopped in for drinks—some of the cocktails, by the way, involve bacon, some chocolate milk, and most have vaguely clever names like Eternal Sunshine, Hawaii Five Ohhh, There’s Something About Mary and Pineapple Express. A couple of titles are less divinely inspired, such as the Red Carpet Margarita. (Also available, for forty-two dollars a bottle, is Vanderpump Rosé, one of Lisa Vanderpump’s wines. If you actually want to get drunk, I recommend that—or a beer.) Just before Halloween, when dollar-store cobwebs were draped across cases of faded memorabilia, my friends and I paid fifteen dollars for a printout of ourselves clutching pumpkin props. Our fellow patrons, an ambiguous mix of sad-looking young couples and tourist families with teenage kids in tow, stared silently at the ceiling or the floor or their mobile phones, anywhere but each other’s faces, as a dance remix of Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” shook the walls. On Valentine’s Day, a cluster of half-deflated fabric lights emblazoned with HUG ME, KISS ME, and BE MINE were arranged beneath a tawdry button-up shirt that Charlie Sheen, a disgraced misogynist, wore on an episode of Two and a Half Men, a production not so much “Hollywood” as unending, asinine sitcom. Elsewhere, teddy bears were propped clumsily against display cabinets. My favorite bear, splay-legged and smiling, sat atop a see-through box protecting a pair of pink Converse. These had been autographed by former Playboy bunny Holly Madison. Read More
February 7, 2018 Arts & Culture The Women Writers You’ve Been Overlooking By Zan Romanoff The Young Adult section at Parnassus Books In December, it seemed like all anyone did was go to the movies and cry. My friends sobbed over Call Me by Your Name, with its dizzyingly lush depictions of queer desire; over the women leading Star Wars’ resistance; and over a girl who called herself Lady Bird. At most of these, I cried, too, but the outpouring of feeling around Lady Bird made me feel sad, and a little isolated. Lady Bird is Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut; it follows the titular Lady (née Christine)’s struggles over the course of her senior year of high school. In the weeks after its release, my Twitter timeline overflowed with women who related to its particulars: who had grown up in stifling suburbs or spent their teen years singing along to cast recordings in overstuffed minivans. We had all, it seemed, written boys’ names onto our notebooks and sneaker rubber and wrists. We had all fought bitterly, epically, endlessly, with our moms. Every time I saw a woman opine that Lady Bird was the future of film, an unprecedented and astonishing event, I wished we were somewhere other than on Twitter, where everything sounds like shouting. I wanted to be able to say, gently, There is actually a very rich tradition of this kind of writing available to you. You just have to know that you want it. And then you have to know where to find it. Read More
February 6, 2018 Redux Redux: Frank O’Hara, Joy Williams, Roberto Bolaño By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Frank O’Hara’s poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” Joy Williams’s short story “Making Friends,” and Roberto Bolaño’s poem “When Lisa Told Me.” Read More
February 6, 2018 Arts & Culture A Walden for the YouTube Age By Marissa Grunes Still from Primitive Technology. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwp. Thwp. Thwack. The sound of stone striking wood. Rustling leaves. A loud crack as a tree falls. A dry whirring of insects. Further off, a monkey shrieks. Shhpt. Shhpt. Water purls over stones in a brook; the heavy pitter-patter of rain taps the forest floor. These are the sounds of primitive technology. Primitive Technology: an oxymoron, perhaps a logical impossibility, a collision of two buzzwords, and one of the most arresting (and unexpectedly popular) channels on YouTube. Primitive Technology was created two years ago by a man in Queensland, Australia, who builds huts, weapons, and tools using only naturally occurring materials. In all of his five- to ten-minute videos, the man wears only navy blue shorts, rarely looks at the camera, and never speaks. It’s a niche concept, to be sure. The channel does not focus on historically accurate building techniques. It does not offer explanatory tutorials. It will not even help you survive in the wilderness: the “fire sticks” with which he ignites tinder require at least twenty-four hours to prepare and look fiendishly hard to use. So why have the videos attracted millions of viewers? And what do viewers like myself seek when we watch the channel on loop? What do we get from it? Read More
February 6, 2018 Arts & Culture The Art of Madness By Cody Delistraty Aloïse Corbaz, Le ricochet solaire. On July 5, 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet set off for Switzerland accompanied by two fellow Frenchmen, the publisher Jean Paulhan and the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. The Swiss tourism board had organized the trip with the hopes that the men would return to Paris with a new view of Switzerland. Paul Baudry, the cultural ambassador of French-Swiss tourism, had organized for them to eat at the top restaurants, take in the rolling hills and meadows, and go to the Matterhorn. But Dubuffet had little interest in all that. “He ran around the asylums,” Paulhan later wrote, collecting “different drawings and gouaches.” In Paris, Dubuffet had already begun purchasing art made by people who had been deemed mentally ill, but it was in Switzerland, across roughly half a dozen institutions, where he gathered the bulk of what would become his collection. Read More
February 5, 2018 Arts & Culture “What the Foucault?” and Other After-Dinner Musings By Marshall Sahlins Michel Foucault Twenty-five years ago, Marshall Sahlins, professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Chicago, devised some bons mots to deliver after a dinner at the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain. They were soon collected and published in a book called What the Foucault?, now out in its updated fifth edition. A selection of entries appears below: Some Laws of Civilization First law of civilization: all airports are under construction. Second law of civilization: I’m in the wrong line. Third law of civilization: snacks sealed in plastic bags cannot be opened, even using your teeth. Fourth law of civilization: the human gene whose discovery is announced in the New York Times—there’s one every day, a gene du jour—is for some bad trait, like schizophrenia, kleptomania, or pneumonia. We have no good genes. Fifth law of civilization: failing corporate executives and politicians always resign to spend more time with their families. Read More