June 23, 2017 First Person One Way Out By Jonathan Wilson In the refulgent early seventies, I owned, but was never fully occupied by, the Allman Brothers Band’s double album Eat a Peach. More than the hit “Melissa,” it was that soon-to-be-iconic cover, featuring a truck with a giant peach (Roald Dahl eat your heart out) that made the greatest inroads into my admittedly wobbly consciousness. I bought into the myth circulating at the time: that Duane Allman, who had died on his motorcycle, had been struck by a flatbed truck transporting Georgia peaches through Macon on their way to some orchard in the sky. The grisly truth regarding the crash was less inspiring, and a less-interesting conversation starter for visitors to my off-campus cottage, where the album held pride of place on the mantelpiece above my fireplace. Later I learned that the elegiac cover took off either from Duane’s admiration for T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or his euphemistic turn of phrase “Every time I’m in Georgia I eat a peach for peace,” which apparently referred to his on-and-off-the-road activities with local women who were hotter than Georgia asphalt. Years—no, decades—passed. Sometime in the summer of 1996 my fourteen-year-old son acquired two tickets to an Allman Brothers concert at Great Woods in Mansfield, Massachusetts, a forty-minute drive from our home. He’d arranged to bring along a friend, a girl but not a girlfriend, and for some reason everyone involved, i.e., both sets of parents, were cool with letting them attend without a full-time chaperone. I would drive them to the concert, wait in the lot, and pick them up on their way out, the sounds of the last stupendous encore still ringing in their juvenile ears. Read More
June 23, 2017 On the Shelf Corporations Can Teach You How to Fail, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A bad idea. What can we learn from Crystal Pepsi? What does green ketchup teach us? That corporations, our gods, are as fallible as we are; that no amount of market research can prepare you for the brutal realities of the marketplace; that it’s okay to fail sometimes, as long as you can explain it to your shareholders. Above all, every expensive, high-stakes commercial failure carries in it the germ of our collective death, of whatever defect in our society will lead to our undoing. In Sweden, Dr. Samuel West, a clinical psychologist, has opened a museum of failure, where visitors can worship at the altar of every dumb letdown that’s ever graced the shelves of Walmart. It’s not about laughing, he says. It’s about reckoning with disaster. Alexander Smith reports, “They saw marvels such as the Rejuvenique Electric Facial Mask, a harrowing Jason Voorhees–style invention that promises in just ninety days to make you as beautiful as Linda Evans from Dynasty, who features on the box. The Harley-Davidson eau de toilette was rejected by bikers who felt it damaged the brand, the female-branded Bic pens crashed and burned for obvious reasons, and while the plastic bike didn’t rust, it also wobbled alarmingly while in motion … Other exhibits include potato chips made with the fat substitute olestra, which has the benefit of helping weight loss but unfortunate side effect of diarrhea … Tech giant Apple features in the museum with its 1993 personal assistant, the Newton MessagePad, whose poor handwriting recognition has earned it almost mythical status among the history of bad gadgets … ‘The media like to cover the museum because they get to show some funny stuff and write a clickbait headline,’ [Dr. West] said. ‘But the underlying message is definitely not a gimmick.’ ” Poor Mikhail Bulgakov. He worked and worked and got nothing for it. Boris Dralyuk writes, “A central tragedy of Bulgakov’s life: almost all his efforts to win official acceptance, if not approval, were stymied by his inability to produce—and at times even deduce—what was asked of him … We get a keen sense of this ambition from Bulgakov’s letter to his cousin, sent in 1921 from Vladikavkaz, where he first began to regard himself as a professional writer: ‘At night I sometimes read over the stories I’ve published previously (in newspapers! in newspapers!), and I think: where is my volume of collected works? Where is my reputation? Where are the wasted years?’ It is painful to consider how little he would be able to boast of after another nineteen years of back-breaking literary labor: one volume of fiction; journal clippings of feuilletons, short stories, novellas, and part of his novel White Guard (1925); as well as a handful of staged plays—many of which were quickly banned … Toward the end of his life he knew that his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, was doomed to ‘the darkness of a drawer.’ ” Read More
June 22, 2017 On Games When Lore Bores By Oliver Lee Bateman Video-game developers continue to search for the golden ratio of game play to storytelling. Still from Day of the Tentacle Remastered, an updated version of the 1993 game. My first video-gaming memories are clouded by Amnesia. That game, which comprised nothing more than white text on a black background, haunted me for years. My father bought it for the PC because he saw it on sale at Sears, brought it home, installed it via the command prompt, and then abandoned it. My brother had no use for it, either. They both played Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 3.0, for which we had purchased a joystick, and Tetris, which appeared on the home computer long before its popularity exploded on Nintendo’s handheld Game Boy. Tetris and Flight Simulator were “real” games, you see. Push the buttons in a skillful way and you would win. You could trump your high score or perfect your landing at Meigs Field. But Amnesia was just a story, a playable story, and from a game-play standpoint it wasn’t even a particularly good one. Like most text-based games, it relied on commands like “eat pizza” (always a favorite of mine) to advance the plot, and like most poor text-based games, it didn’t recognize many of the commands that the player typed. Read More
June 22, 2017 Arts & Culture The Bookness of Not-Books By Albert Mobilio Kiki (Kiki O.K.) Kogelnik, Orange Naked Woman, page from the book 1¢ Life by Walasse Ting. (Bern: E.W. Kornfeld, 1964). The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Ryda Hecht Levi Collection of Illustrated Books, Bequest of Ryda H. Levi, Baltimore, BMA 2009.42.21 © Kiki Kogelnik Foundation and © 2017 Estate of Walasse Ting/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. I once owned a hardback edition of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence that had served time at the top of a bedside pile; its cover and spine had acquired several islands of melted wax from the candle it helped support. Running my fingers from the smooth dollops to the grainy fabric—an illegible but sensual braille—always afforded a small pleasure, even if the reading itself offered much less. That long-ago volume came to mind recently while holding a copy of an artist’s book by Deborah Dancy titled Winter Morning in the rare-book room of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Dancy’s slim book is made from wax-impregnated paper into which snippets of found text have been pressed. Light as wafer, the book almost hovered in my hands, and turning its stiff, deeply yellowed pages felt like exploring a precious archaeological artifact. I was fortunate to handle this rare and fragile objet at the invitation of Rena Hoisington, a curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she mounted the current show “Off the Shelf: Modern and Contemporary Artists’ Books.” The extensive range of artists and writers includes, among many others, Grace Hartigan, Picasso, Frank O’Hara, Ed Ruscha, Kandinsky, Susan Howe, Mayakovsky, Barbara Kruger, Robert Creeley, Kiki Smith, and, of course, the master of the artists’ book, the Swiss Conceptualist Dieter Roth. Equally wide is the breadth of approach: from Ruscha, there is an edition of Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, the photos printed on an accordion-folded sheet in the order they appeared on Route 66, going west to east; from Barbara Kruger and Stephen King, a large-format volume with a stainless-steel cover and an embedded digital clock; from three authors—Pasolini, Luisa Famos, Andri Peer—and the artist Not Vital, a series of poems written in Rhaeto-Romansh (the national language of Switzerland) and printed on pages custom made from cedar bark that sport attached objects, such as a saw blade. The rich variety of constructions and materials, as well as the methods of representing text—thickly rendered in paint, printed in chaotic typefaces, scrawled across images—beckons the viewer to reach out and touch. Read More
June 22, 2017 On the Shelf Your Art’s Not Instagrammable Enough, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Yayoi Kusama, The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Aspiring artists should judge their work by one criterion and one criterion only: Do people want to take selfies in front of this thing? If the answer is no, then it’s back to the drawing board, friend. You’d do well to make something immersive, something participatory, something that’s such an experience that it acts as a magnet on the surrounding population, much as a Six Flags or a new Shake Shack might. To make anything quieter or less immediately spectacular is to risk irrelevance. When Sarah Boxer went to see Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” exhibition, she realized that she’d found the quintessential art show of our time—one whose value is directly correlated to its Instagramability. Boxer writes, “The fact that some folks have managed to make the scene while others get left out in the cold is integral to the excitement of participatory art. The thrill is akin to exotic travel, or getting to see Hamilton. Because not everyone who wants the experience actually gets the experience, these works, even if their intentions and messages are democratic, tend to become exclusive affairs … Why has the apprehension of art become so like theater? And why is Kusama, who never received as much attention in the 1960s as many of her contemporaries did, finally in the spotlight now? I was given a one-word answer to that question—Instagram!—and surely that is right. The Kusama show has just about everything the Happenings once had—the chance to see something extraordinary, the chance to participate, and the chance to photograph (or be photographed). But the ‘Infinity Mirrors’ exhibition has added one key ingredient to the mix—the chance to capture the lonely existential experience of infinity and send it to others in the form of a selfie.” Speaking of spectacle: in the eighties, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) put a glam, femme spin on WrestleMania, creating a show that fused daredevil feats of strength to campy dance routines. Now Netflix is resurrecting the show—but as a sitcom, and with little input from the original cast. Gendy Alimurung caught up with that cast and found that their lives are equally tragic and exhilarating, shaped in every way by their years as wrestlers: “If the women feel proprietary about GLOW, it’s only because they gave so much of themselves to it. It was brutal work. The pay was measly, the material was campy and racist. For many, however, it was the best job they ever had … Professional wrestling is fake. But the pain was real. Virtually none of them started out as trained wrestlers. They were actors, dancers and models who answered casting calls for ‘a new sports entertainment show.’ Dee Booher, who played German villainess Matilda the Hun, recalls that after a match, ‘these girls sometimes came out with handfuls of hair.’ At her apartment in Seal Beach, Calif., in Orange County, she flips through an old photo album while sitting in a motorized wheelchair—the result of wrestling-related spinal deterioration. ‘I’d beat ’em up. Eat ’em up! It was beautiful!’ she says. ‘Here’s Spanish Red. Look at this girl. Look at how she moves. She was a dancer. Here’s Ashley. Look at those ta-tas on her’ … ‘I hope you’re getting paid enough for this,’ she recalls one of the medics telling her … The women made between $300 and $700 a week. No dental. No medical.” Read More
June 21, 2017 From the Archive Who But the Sun? By Dan Piepenbring Ladies and gentlemen, the sun. You may have heard: today is the summer solstice. That big ole sun out there is going nowhere fast. It’ll be hanging in the sky for hours yet. You want nightfall? Fuck your nightfall! Put a blanket over your head and leave the sun alone! As for the rest of you: if you’re looking for something to kick off your pagan celebrations, I dug through our archives in search of some verse to suit today‘s heliophilia vibes. Here’s what I’ve got: Baudelaire. In our Winter 1981 issue we ran nineteen poems by him—translated by Richard Howard, who won our Hadada Award this year. One of these, “The Sun,” is as moving a tribute to that fiery ball of gas as has ever been written. A quick sample: Who but the sun persuades the lame to dance as if their canes were maypoles, governing the resurrection of the harrowed fields, and for the secret harvest of the heart commands immortal wheat to grow again! When, with a poet’s will, the sun descends into the cities like a king incognito, impartially visiting palace and hospital, the fate of all things vile is glorified. Subscribers can read the full poem here. Nonsubscribers should subscribe now, at which time they, too, can read the whole poem, or recite it to the sun itself, or print it out and use a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays on it until it bursts into flames—a fitting way to celebrate the solstice.