June 1, 2017 Look Brechtman By Joe Frank & Jason Novak I grew up a latchkey kid in a rough, working-class California suburb. My mom worked long hours in the city, so I usually found myself alone in the apartment on weekday evenings, with an antenna TV that picked up three or four fuzzy stations and a radio receiver with seventies-era wood-panel speakers. I can’t remember how old I was when I first heard Joe Frank’s voice on the radio. It has a low, gravelly tone. It bears resemblance to a traditional broadcasting voice, but it’s more hushed, as if the announcer has finished reading the news, turned off the microphone, poured himself a drink, and begun to confess to a stranger in the production booth Frank’s shows often begin with gentle, pulsing music, followed by a monologue in which he pretends to be anyone from a third-world dictator to a preening narcissist to a regular person trapped in a nightmare. He enlists voice actors to participate in disturbing dramas in which ex-lovers leave desperate phone messages, argue with strangers, or laugh mechanically for uncomfortable lengths of time. There’s no way to do his programs justice by describing them here. You have to hear them. One thing Joe Frank pioneered with his shows is the use of background noises to achieve a documentary effect—something that’s now become almost ubiquitous in nonfiction radio. Frank’s programs turned radio into literature. In recent years, Frank has been writing brief vignettes meant to be read, rather than performed. Having grown up memorizing his unforgettable voice, it’s impossible for me to read what he writes without hearing him. I’m taken back to my childhood apartment, lying face up on the shag carpet, the lights out, and the whispering anticipation and fear that came in the first moments of his shows. Being a cartoonist, albeit a rather colicky one, I thought perhaps I might be able to grab onto some of the mood of what his program does without the advantage of sound. So with Joe Frank’s blessing, I’ve turned one of his written vignettes into a cartoon. —Jason Novak Read More
June 1, 2017 On the Shelf Behind the Decadence, There’s Dust, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Gustav Wunderwald, Brücke über die Ackerstraße, 1927. Image via Public Domain Review. We associate Weimar Berlin with Dionysian excess, unfettered lust, and quality drugs, all of which put it at the top of the list of places I’d like to time travel to. But even at its most liberated, city life can’t be all orgies and amphetamines. Someone has to take the garbage out. The painter Gustav Wunderwald, who roamed the streets of Berlin in the 1920s, had a soft spot for its less frenetic corners. His work, with its parade of smokestacks and tenements, has garnered more attention in recent years for its depiction of the city’s sooty splendor. Mark Hobbs writes, “Wunderwald’s oeuvre consists chiefly of landscapes, many of which depict Berlin and its surroundings. The gray streets of the city’s working-class areas, to the north of the city center, are just as often depicted as the cleaner, airier streets of the city’s affluent west end. Rural landscapes also figure, including views of Berlin’s lakes and the countryside around the Havel River. Despite the variety of scenes, it is for his depictions of Berlin’s working-class areas that Wunderwald is best known … Amidst the tenement blocks, factories, smokestacks, and advertising hoardings, Wunderwald found no shortage of subjects to paint. In a letter to a friend, written in the winter of 1926, he wrote: ‘Sometimes I stagger back as if drunk from my wandering through Berlin; there are so many impressions that I have no idea which way to go.’ ” Jim Guida is reading the novels of José Maria de Eça de Queirós, whom you may have heard of from Lorin Stein in our staff picks. Eça, a nineteenth-century Portuguese writer, depicts his nation’s wealthiest milieu with care, acuity, and more than a little cynicism. Guida writes, “What does Eça’s Portugal feel like? It is dominated by hot sunny days, white trousers, dust, theater tickets and evening strolls in Sintra, roses in buttonholes and glimpses of gowned women getting in and out of coaches, gorgeous landscapes and trees and flowers, hale farmers and country maids, long conversations, cats and singing birds and orchards, pumpkins drying on a station roof, baked sweet rice, and cheese pastries. Furthermore plenty of cognac, white wine, iced champagne, rolled cigarettes, and good cigars. Late in The Maias, a dish of cold pineapple served with Madeira and orange juice gets sustained attention. In another novel, someone says, ‘It’s an absolute disgrace, you know. I’ve never once eaten a decent melon here.’ ” Read More
May 31, 2017 Look Where I Live By Dan Piepenbring “Where I Live,” an exhibition of photos by Tom Arndt, is at Howard Greenberg Gallery through July 7. Arndt, born in Minneapolis in 1944, took these pictures in 2015 and 2016, as he roamed the Twin Cities and their environs, plus North Dakota and Montana. “I am like the people that I photograph,” he has said. “I am not traveling through.” Tom Arndt, Beauty Shop, St. Paul, Minnesota, September 23, 2016, gelatin silver print, 16″ x 20″. Read More
May 31, 2017 Our Correspondents Five Complaints By Anthony Madrid (Containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie.) 1. Suppose you want to know whether a given Czesław Miłosz poem rhymes in the original. Or you want to know if it’s in meter. If you don’t speak Polish, friend, you have some serious fuss ahead of you. Tell you one thing. You won’t find out by reading the introduction to any English translation of Miłosz I’ve ever looked at. Questions of this sort are regarded as matters of absolutely no interest. Why would you want to know anything about a poet’s prosody. Read More
May 31, 2017 On the Shelf We’re All Molded by the Pizza Gods, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a seventies-era ad for Straw Hat Pizza. You may want pizza. I grant you that. But it may be that pizza wants you. It may be that the pizza gods have shaped the very essence of your desire, pulling you aside at every possible moment to whisper pizza, pizza, pizza. You want pizza because you can order pizza from a pull-down menu full of fun customizable pizza options. David Rudin argues that our computers and phones, with their machine logic, are an ideal vehicle for pizza, which is widely understood and easy to assemble. After all, he explains, Domino’s “now offers a series of apps, chatbots, and even the option of tweeting an order using the pizza emoji. Some of these ordering options may exist primarily as marketing gimmicks, but their aggregate effect remains notable: any interface to which you have access can likely be used to order pizza. This in part stems from pizza’s popularity, but taste is only a small part of the story: the delivery pizza is highly adaptable to the logic and formatted language of communication interfaces. The typical consumer’s mental model of a pizza—dough with sauce, cheese, and toppings baked in an oven—is quite similar to a machine’s conception of pizza, which is quite similar to how a pizza is actually made. The algorithm for pizza is not complex … All parties in the transaction are imagining the same simple process and speaking from the same restricted phrase book.” Toni Morrison remembers a childhood job cleaning another woman’s house and the lessons it taught her about separating work and identity: “A larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike … I suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet … ” Read More
May 30, 2017 In Memoriam David Lewiston, 1929–2017 By Brian Cullman From the cover of Nonesuch’s reissue of Music from the Morning of the World. Sometimes by bus; sometimes by jeep or truck or caravanserai; sometimes by donkey, though not if he could help it; and almost always on foot, across rickety bridges and footpaths, up the sides of mountains, through valleys and hills rife with goats and wayward sheep, over rocks and fences, across streams and rivers swollen by rain or dry from drought; carrying a small (but not that small) portable tape recorder, twenty or thirty reels of quarter-inch tape, a couple of microphones, cables, a week’s supply of batteries, a few packs of Fortnum & Mason tea, and a few spare shirts. The shirts have been lost to time and forgotten laundries—but the tapes, the recordings from those travels, still circulate fifty years on, filling listeners with pleasure and astonishment. David Lewiston was born in London in 1929 and graduated from Trinity College of Music in 1953. Already interested in the spiritual teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Lewiston moved to New York City to study piano and composition with Thomas DeHartmann, Gurdjieff’s aide-de-camp and musical collaborator, and an esteemed composer in his own right. From the Gurdjieff work, Lewiston learned about the many uses of solitude; from his studies with DeHartmann, who had helped Gurdjieff transcribe and notate Eastern hymns and dervish melodies, he learned to hear and appreciate music outside of the Western canon. These proved useful as Lewiston began traveling, but neither talent helped him support himself as a young musician in New York, and he reinvented himself as a financial journalist, working on staff for Forbes and then for an in-house journal of the American Bankers Association, a magazine so dull it practically walked to the trash bin and threw itself away. Read More