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
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