June 5, 2017 On Politics A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately By David Sedaris One. It’s early September of 2015 and I’m on the island of Santorini for a literary festival. After the short reading, which takes place outdoors on a patio, the Greek audience asks questions, the first of which is, “What do you think of Donald Trump?” Since announcing his candidacy, the reality-show star has been all over the news. Every outrageous thing he says is repeated and analyzed—like he’s a real politician. I answer that I first became aware of Donald Trump in the late 1980s. That was when Alma, a Lithuanian woman I was working for, bought his book The Art of the Deal and decided he was wonderful. Shortly afterward, I saw him on Oprah, and ever since then he’s always been in the background, this ridiculous blowhard, part showman and part cartoon character. I see his presidential bid as just another commercial for himself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he were to name the Hamburglar as his running mate. So I say that on stage and then have to explain who the Hamburglar is. Read More
June 5, 2017 On the Shelf Paging Dr. Videovich, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from a Jaime Davidovich “show.” Once upon a time, it was hard to be on TV. Believe me, I tried. You couldn’t just mouth off in an ill-fitting suit and expect to get your own reality show, no, sir. You couldn’t upload a video of yourself saying wacky shit while the anesthesia wore off after your wisdom-tooth operation. You had to be clever. Jaime Davidovich, who died last August, was a pioneering television artist—as his friend Rebecca Cleman writes, he recognized that “it was more radical to put art in the context of television than to bring popular culture into the museum.” By arranging to display his art in public places—most notably a Midtown bar, which agreed to show his video of floorboards instead of live sports—Davidovich used the demotic medium of his time to proselytize for art. (And for the benefits of being a weirdo.) Cleman writes, “After living in New York for most of the sixties, part of it working as a designer for Alfred A. Knopf on Madison Avenue, Jaime settled in Ohio for a while, enjoying what he considered to be a relatively typical suburban life with a two-car garage. It was there that he began experimenting with video, introduced not via a gallerist or a Sony sponsorship (as was the case for some artists), but by way of an Argentine surgeon at a Cleveland hospital. A technician gave Jaime access to the hospital’s video equipment after hours, making the operating room his de facto television laboratory. At this time, some public broadcast stations like WNET were sponsoring artistic experimentation with their high-end video equipment, a situation that tended to showcase the visual effects of gadgetry. In the setting of the hospital, Jaime’s use of video was more clearly distinct from such aesthetics, in keeping with his use, already, of non-art materials like adhesive tape to create spatial interventions … His alter ego, ‘Dr. Videovich,’ the Argentine psychoanalyst turned TV host, emerged as a satirical counterpoint to the art world’s move toward commercialization and professionalism in the 1980s.” Edwin Heathcote has been spending a lot of time in luxury show homes, where everything is gray and visitors can live out an elaborate simulation of a meaningful life. Just try to look at the books, for instance: “Just as the kitchens in these super-luxury show homes are for people who don’t really cook, the books on display are for people who don’t really read. There is an entire branch of the publishing industry devoted to the kinds of books that you see in show homes. They are the big arty books on a few specific subjects: travel, New York, cooking, watches, classic cars, fashion and so on. They are slightly too heavy to lift, so cannot actually be read … You see these same books in hotel lobbies and in their odd ‘libraries’ that are a hybrid space between hotel, club and home, a room designed around books no one is ever expected to read … The show-home library is a hint at the top-end man cave, the clubby, comfortable image of a cultivated space without the effort of needing to go through actual cultivation. Its pretense to culture stops it being objectionable to the spouse. The books are a sign; a symbol of, if not exactly culture, then at least the aspiration to culture. Their presence is plenty, they do not demand to be opened.” Read More
June 2, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Twang, Texture, Truck Drivers By The Paris Review Robert Rauschenberg. If you, like me, are a fan of Harry Chapin’s “Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas,” you’ll love Finn Murphy’s The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road. Murphy, a truck driver since 1980, lets us ride along as he crisscrosses the U.S. ad infinitum. We journey down Colorado’s deadly Loveland Pass, where he sweats his air brakes’ ability to hold; bomb straight through 199 miles of South Carolina swampland in a nine-truck convoy; and get lost out in America’s lonely “couple of thousand miles of corn.” The Long Haul delivers because it is a survey of a culture fused to a working man’s memoir—and Murphy, smartly, avoids sentiment and lazy comparisons: “I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom of any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.” There’s a theory that the secret engine of American literature is movement—Melville sent Ishmael to sea, Kerouac hit the road, Don DeLillo forced the Gladneys out of their home—and if it’s true, it’s amazing we haven’t yet seen the Great American Truck-Driving Novel. Once a viable career, the job is threatened by cost-cutting corporate structures and the inevitable adoption of driverless cars; soon truckers may go the way of whalers and typesetters. Maybe, as America’s reliance on the profession fades into the rearview mirror, we’ll see that novel yet: I predict, and hope, that The Long Haul marks the beginning of a new set of American road tales. —Jeffery Gleaves MoMA’s huge Rauschenberg show—“Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends”—has opened, and, as Dan has already pointed out, opinions of his work will abound. Mine was formed long ago; Rauschenberg’s was among the first art that appealed to foundational elements in my own aesthetic: texture, materiality, color, unruliness. I caught his massive traveling retrospective when it came to Houston in 1998 and so have seen a good deal of the work in this new show, but I wasn’t aware of the extent to which collaboration, which this exhibition aims to highlight, was central to his practice. I knew, for instance, of the sets and costumes he made for Merce Cunningham and for Trisha Brown, but not that he’d shared studio space with a young Cy Twombly and that Twombly contributed to his friend’s early Combines; that he staged the process-based program Hommage à David Tudor in 1961 with Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, and Jean Tinguely; that he was friends with Öyvind Fahlström and the two traded work (on view is Fahlström’s translation of Rauschenberg’s name into Birdo, Fahlström’s invented language based on bird sounds). He and Johns shared a studio in the late fifties, and Rauschenberg recalled, “Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, ‘I’ve got a terrific idea for you,’ and then I’d have to find one for him.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
June 2, 2017 The Lives of Others A Girl Full of Smartness By Edward White As an entrepreneur, civil-rights activist, and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush–era San Francisco, shattering racial taboos. Pleasant in her later years Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. They did things differently in the Old West. On the morning of August 14, 1889, Stephen J. Field, a justice of the Supreme Court, was eating breakfast at a café in Lathrop, California, when David S. Terry, a former bench colleague, stopped by Field’s table and slapped him twice across the face. This was not unprecedented behavior. Despite having risen to the rank of chief justice of the Supreme Court of California, Terry was described by one contemporary as an “evil genius” with an “irrepressible temper,” who once stabbed a man for being an abolitionist and killed a Congressman wedded to the Free Soil movement. His gripe with Stephen Field, however, had nothing to do with slavery. In 1883, Terry’s wife had filed a lawsuit (Sharon vs. Sharon) against the multimillionaire U.S. Senator William Sharon, claiming she had been married to him in secret some years ago and that, having been callously discarded by the womanizing senator, she was owed a divorce settlement. After five years the case ended up at a federal circuit court, where Field found in favor of William Sharon; there would be no divorce settlement. Terry was livid and promised to exact revenge. Read More
June 2, 2017 On the Shelf When Mascots Go Mad, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sebastian the Ibis in a fit of pique. Listen well: to be a sports mascot is to wear a hair shirt. These people are flagellating themselves. After a while, donning the costume comes with mental consequences. Trapped within the padded, poorly ventilated headpiece of every mascot is a madman waiting to come alive. The mascot’s dream is to shed his sweaty cocoon and “be himself,” as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. We saw this most recently in the case of Mr. Met, who this week offered a lewd gesture to a fan. (It wasn’t the “middle finger,” apparently; Mr. Met, having an even number of digits, is anatomically incapable of that motion.) But this was hardly the first time a mascot has gone rogue. Victor Mather has assembled a guide to “mascots behaving badly.” My favorite entry belongs to Sebastian the Ibis, who reps the Miami Hurricanes. In attempting a good-natured prank, Sebastian ran afoul of the police, themselves mascots of the state: “The Miami mascot thought it would be funny to wear a firefighter’s outfit and carry a fire extinguisher to a Florida State game in 1989. The plan was to make it look as if he was going to put out the flaming spear carried by the Seminoles’ Chief Osceola, though he never planned to actually do it. The Tallahassee police found it less funny and grabbed him on his way in. Less funny still, the extinguisher went off and hit an officer. ‘At that moment, I realized, uh oh, something is wrong here,’ Sebastian told USA Today years later. ‘Within two seconds, there were five of them slamming me up against the fence. One wing was out to one side, the other wing held behind my back. Another guy is pulling my beak and trying to yank my head off, and I had a chin strap underneath so it felt like he was trying to choke me to death.’ ” Jill Lepore reminds us that dystopia, a very popular word at present, doesn’t just refer to some terrible future civilization—it must be an inversion of utopia: “The word dystopia, meaning ‘an unhappy country,’ was coined in the seventeen-forties, as the historian Gregory Claeys points out in a shrewd new study, Dystopia: A Natural History. In its modern definition, a dystopia can be apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, or neither, but it has to be anti-utopian, a utopia turned upside down, a world in which people tried to build a republic of perfection only to find that they had created a republic of misery … The dystopian novel emerged in response to the first utopian novels, like Edward Bellamy’s best-selling 1888 fantasy, Looking Backward, about a socialist utopia in the year 2000. Looking Backward was so successful that it produced a dozen anti-socialist, anti-utopian replies, including Looking Further Backward (in which China invades the United States, which has been weakened by its embrace of socialism) and Looking Further Forward (in which socialism is so unquestionable that a history professor who refutes it is demoted to the rank of janitor).” Read More
June 1, 2017 Our Correspondents Roadside Memorials By Jane Stern Photo: Chenin Gilles Today I’m in Paris—Paris, Texas. It’s a sweet little town heading toward the Arkansas border. Some people would say it’s in the middle of nowhere, but Parisians regard it as very cosmopolitan. To prove their kinship to Paris, France, the Texas Parisians have erected a sixty-five-foot Eiffel Tower replica, but this one is crowned with a giant red metal cowboy hat. Other than the Eiffel Tower, there’s not much sightseeing to be done in Paris. I know because I drove around the town, which took ten minutes, and nothing caught my eye. That is, except the graves. Not cemetery graves, but roadside grave markers. No bodies are buried here, but homemade wooden crosses and bouquets of faded plastic flowers mark the places where a loved one died along the lonesome highway. Read More