September 14, 2017 On Design The Art of Space Art By Kastalia Medrano Tim Pyle’s conception of the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Between 1952 and 1954, the Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun ran a popular series in Collier’s Weekly called “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!”, outlining a manifest-destiny approach to space, the moon, and Mars. The articles were prescient in their analysis of how we might colonize the stars, but what really brought the possibility of human spaceflight to life in the public consciousness were the illustrations: planets, rockets, human settlements. These were rendered by a trio of artists that included Chesley Bonestell, widely considered the father of what we’ve come to call space art. The genre soon bubbled over with breathless visual predictions of our ascent into outer space, wrought with glamor and a childlike wonder, like pulp-fiction covers for what the future was going to be. People have been painting celestial bodies for thousands of years, but only after World War II, as space programs flourished, did the field evolve into a thriving subgenre, and an occupation in its own right; with new technology came a new lust for imagery. NASA, founded in 1958, has commissioned space art since its inception, and along with the European Space Agency it’s sponsored artists’ residencies over the years. “It could be argued that NASA owes its very existence to space artists,” Jon Ramer, president of the International Association of Astronomical Artists, told me in an email. The IAAA currently stands at 120 members worldwide, and serves as a sort of hub connecting the community. Read More
September 14, 2017 Legends of the Fall Sex in the Garden By Stephen Greenblatt Over the centuries, there have been innumerable interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. This week on the Daily, Stephen Greenblatt, the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, retells some of these legends in modern idiom, and invents a few of his own. William Blake, Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (detail), 1808. The serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field, had observed with interest the humans’ sexual intercourse in Paradise. He saw that Adam calmly willed his penis to stiffen and then gently inserted it into Eve’s vulva. The act caught his attention in part because he thought that Eve was extraordinarily beautiful and in part because he had already noted a certain resemblance between Adam’s penis and his own body, which he could also harden or soften at will. One day, he approached Eve—Adam was away surveying a different part of the garden—and proposed that he stiffen his body and enter her, as Adam did. Lacking any knowledge of good or evil, Eve gladly consented. The snake made himself hard and penetrated the woman, moving his head this way and that to see what might be of interest. But it was dark inside and, after a while, concluding that Eve was more beautiful without than within, he withdrew. Eve, however, had experienced something intensely pleasurable, and she determined that when Adam returned she would teach him how to imitate what the snake had done. (Williams 57–58; Slavonic Enoch) Read More
September 13, 2017 In Memoriam A List of the Columns Michael Friedman Never Wrote By Robert P. Baird Courtesy of New York City Center. In their post this Monday about the death of the composer and librettist Michael Friedman, Lorin and Sadie Stein mentioned their surprise that Michael had published just a single piece on the Daily. “Over the years we’d talked about his doing so many different things, on so many different subjects,” they recalled, “from a column on new music at Le Poisson Rouge to an online version of an informal seminar he held known as Michael Friedman’s Drunk Music Appreciation Class.” The reminiscence brought to mind another near miss, from just last summer. Though I’d known Michael for several years, our editorial dealings were infrequent, and always ad hoc. An early note I wrote myself reads, in its entirety, “Ask Michael Friedman for his porn-lawyer contact.” (Dated six years ago yesterday, it seems only partially explicable by the fact that Michael was then writing songs for Pretty Filthy, a musical about the porn industry.) It never seemed quite fair to ask him to confine himself to something so limiting as silent pixels in two dimensions, especially when he was having such obvious fun—and such evident success—with a piano and a stage. Still, in June of last year, not knowing much about his previous dealings with the magazine, I asked him, “What would it take to get you to write/sing/dance for The Paris Review?” A few days later he sent me a list of column ideas, which I reprint here verbatim: Read More
September 13, 2017 Look Karl Wirsum’s Casting Call By Nicole Rudick Karl Wirsum, Mr. Dry Iced “T”, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 38 1/2″ x 56 1/2″. In the margin of the drawing Study for Looking at a Curve Ball in Cuernavaca are notes written by the artist, Karl Wirsum: Batter up 9 at Bats Last Bats Lost Summer Robert Catcher Umbrella Umpiro Manic Sword Fight Thrust Position He seems to be trying out titles, and given Wirsum’s other titling efforts (for instance, the superlative Study for Drop a Lozenge Ferret Attitude on the Way to the Letter Drop), I wonder if he wasn’t considering something along the lines of “Umbrella Umpiro Manic Sword Fight Thrust Position.” Wirsum’s titles don’t give many hints, if any, about what’s going on in the paintings, but in their agglomerations of words and punning (Shower Girl Taking a Curtain Call), they, like the works they represent, suggest the potential for ample and adventurous meaning. Read More
September 13, 2017 On Film How the Unflappable Fred Astaire Survived the Fifties By Henry Giardina Still from The Band Wagon (1953). The first half of the fifties were a pivotal moment for Hollywood musicals. The genteel tux-and-tie choreography of the thirties had given way to Gene Kelly’s scrappier, more athletic brand of drawn-out (and often pretentious) modern ballets. Kelly’s vision, in the form of musicals like Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris, and On the Town, was bubbly, bright, and middle-class. And it left Fred Astaire, the movie musical’s first bona fide superstar, out in the cold. Astaire had tried to adapt himself to the new style with varying success (see Ziegfeld Follies and Yolanda and the Thief.) But Astaire’s fate in the early fifties was something one suspects he’d never accounted for: his age was beginning to show. Of course, this was a time when elderly men still courted young women on-screen with stunning regularity, and had Astaire been a normal romantic lead, this might not have been a problem. But he was a dancer. Read More
September 13, 2017 Legends of the Fall The Tree of Knowledge, Good, and Evil By Stephen Greenblatt Over the centuries, there have been innumerable interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. This week on the Daily, Stephen Greenblatt, the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, retells some of these legends in modern idiom, and invents a few of his own. William Blake, Raphael Warns Adam and Eve (detail), 1808. The newly created humans were not only physically beautiful but also supremely wise. They understood, without being told explicitly, that the tree whose fruit God had forbidden them to eat was in itself neither particularly beneficial nor particularly harmful. There are no magical trees, except in fairy tales, and God did not place poisonous fruits in the Garden that He himself had planted. No, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from which Adam and Eve were commanded to abstain, was indistinguishable from the other trees in Paradise in all respects save one. That one respect was the prohibition itself, as a sign of human obedience. If God had chosen some other object in the Garden on which to establish this sign, then the fruit would have been perfectly fine to eat. Why then was it called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Not to refer to any inherent quality in the fruit but only to refer to the result of transgression: the knowledge of the good that would have followed from obedience and the knowledge of the evil that resulted from the failure to obey. (Augustine) * There were many trees in the garden, each lovely to look at and good for food, but two trees at its midst were particularly notable: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, good, and evil. God told the human that he could eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, but He commanded him not to eat of the tree of knowledge, good, and evil: “For on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die.” The human listened and grasped that something very important was being told to him, but it was only after the divine words had faded away that he realized he had no idea what the words “doomed to die” meant. He told himself to ask God for a proper explanation the next time he saw Him. Read More