May 25, 2017 Fashion & Style Lolita Fashion By An Nguyen and Jane Mai Drawing by Jane Mai, from the cover of So Pretty/Very Rotten. Have you ever seen the Japanese movie Kamikaze Girls (aka Shimotsuma Monogatari)? It came out back in 2004 (released in the United States in 2006) and was based on the 2002 novel by Japanese author Novala Takemoto. The story is about an unlikely friendship between two high school girls—Ichigo, who is a member of a Yanki girl biker gang, and Momoko, who wears a niche fashion style called Lolita fashion. In Shimotsuma, a rural town in Ibaraki prefecture, Momoko stands out in her Rococo-inspired Sweet Lolita outfits with lots of lace, frills, ribbons, and colors like pink, red, and sax blue from her favorite brand Baby, the Stars Shine Bright (BTSSB). On the weekends and holidays, she makes a two-and-a-half-hour train trip to Tokyo so she can go clothes shopping in the Harajuku and Daikanyama neighborhoods. Being a high school student, she does not have a job, so she swindles money from her dad by telling fake sob stories about friends in distress or trying to sell bootleg “Versach” merchandise, through which she meets Ichigo. It’s been a long time since I last watched the movie in its entirety, but one of the scenes has stuck with me through the years. At the end of Momoko’s monologue about her life up to that point, she floats slowly into the sky as she says, “So what if I was deceitful? My happiness was at stake. It’s not wrong to feel good. That’s what Rococo taught me. But actually my soul is rotten.” Momoko talks about how Lolita fashion is connected to the romantic, decadent, and aristocratic parts of the Rococo era and tries to find happiness through material things. She has decided to devote her life to clothing, but her connection to other people is lacking. Even though she wears pretty clothes, she feels that deep down there is a part of her that is rotten. Read More
May 25, 2017 On the Shelf The Robots Are Color-Blind, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robots hate these. Colors: you may not like them, but they’re all we’ve got. Chartreuse, cerise, burnt sienna, ultramarine … our ability to detect and name these things is all that’s keeping us from melting back into the primordial soup. It makes sense, then, that artificial intelligences would mock us for our rainbow. Robots can’t stand color. This is a known fact. They apprehend the vivid reds and blues of the world as mere data, and they hold humans in contempt for finding the beauty in such things. If you need proof, consider the case of Janelle Shane, who attempted to design a neural network that could name new paint colors. And what did the machine do? It spat out new colors full of derision and mockery: Bank Butt. Turdly. Burf Pink. Stoner Blue. Clardic Fug. Caring Tan. Testing. Stanky Bean. Dorkwood. Sand Dan. Dense Blats. Sindis Poop. It was as if the robot was wandering the aisles of Sherwin-Williams and laughing, laughing, laughing, taking all that we hold dear and spitting on it with ersatz robot saliva. Claire Voon has more on Janelle Shane’s experiment, and more of the horrors it wrought: “She fed a learning algorithm a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint color names and their RGB values, and watched as it formed its own rules and generated different sets of data. ‘Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?’ she posited, giving examples of existing ones—Tuscan sunrise, Blushing pear, Tradewind. It would be neat if AI could alleviate a bit of stress from individuals chewing on pencils as they conceive of the next great paint name. But Shane’s results, for the most part, suggest that companies may want to leave AI out of the christening process for now.” In happier, more human news, here’s Danuta Kean on a pair of newly discovered Sylvia Plath poems, which two academics found on a piece of carbon paper at the back of one of her notebooks: “Using Photoshop, [they] deciphered the typing on the paper, which is watermarked with an image that might have appeared in a Plath poem—a woman gazing at her own reflection in a pool of water. First revealed was ‘To a Refractory Santa Claus,’ a poem about Spain and fairer weather—a subject that Plath returned to later in ‘Fiesta Melons’ and ‘Alicante Lullaby.’ Written after Plath and Hughes’s honeymoon in Benidorm, it consists of two eleven-line verses and pleads for escape from the cruelties of an English winter to the fresh fruit and sunshine of warmer climes … The second poem proved harder to decipher. Titled ‘Megrims,’ it is a monologue addressed to a doctor by a paranoid speaker about a series of ‘irregular incidents’ that range from the discovery of a spider in a coffee cup to an owl about to strike.” Read More
May 24, 2017 Look The Art of Whipped Cream By Dan Piepenbring “The Art of Whipped Cream,” an exhibition of drawings, sketches and paintings by Mark Ryden, is at Paul Kasmin Gallery through July 21. Ryden created this work for the American Ballet Theatre’s production of Whipped Cream, an adaptation of a 1924 Richard Strauss ballet about a boy who eats too much candy and, in the delirium of a world-class sugar high, dreams that his dessert has come to life. Ryden designed props, costumes, and backdrops for the production, combining sugary pinks and pastels with a darker palette of grays and neutrals. The result: a candy land that threatens to become sickeningly sweet. Mark Ryden, Princess Praline and Her Entourage, 2017, oil on canvas, 15″ x 52″. Read More
May 24, 2017 First Person My Albania By Brian Cullman A postcard of Albania, ca. 1910. Some people wake up at four in the morning wondering if they’ve left the light on in the kitchen. I wake up in a cold sweat wondering if there’s some country that I’ve forgotten, some place on Earth that’s slipped through my fingers. For many years now, I’ve collected music from the farthest reaches of the planet. I’ve found tapes of music from islands in Indonesia where drummers build their own instruments and eat them after each performance; records of Eskimos who sing into each others’ mouths; forty-fives of South African bands that sound just like the Sir Douglas Quintet; and records of Mongolian houmi singers who can hit three notes simultaneously. When I can’t sleep, I go wading through my collection like Scrooge McDuck swims in his money bin. And so I panicked when I awoke one night—this was now more than thirty years ago—and realized that I had no Albanian records. Not a one. And I didn’t even know where to look. Read More
May 24, 2017 On the Shelf I Can Name Your Disease, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s right on the tip of my tongue … I’ve always thought I would be good at naming diseases. The problem with most disease names is that they have all these scary words in them: flu, disorder, virus. That’s bad for business. If I were in charge, I’d name them after deodorants (Aqua Reef, Cool Burst, Sport) or Yankee Candles (Bahama Breeze, Vanilla Cupcake, Clean Cotton). But get this: It’s not just one person naming all the world’s diseases. It’s a whole committee of international bureaucracies, which explains why so many of our world’s most dangerous illnesses have such lousy titles. Laura Spinney writes on the winding, often fraught course through which a disease gets its name: “The Spanish flu stands as a monument to the ugly history of disease naming. The world was at war in 1918, and the belligerent nations censored their press, not wanting to damage their populations’ morale … The world came to see the disease as pulsing out from Spain, a belief that was encouraged by propagandists in other countries whom it suited to shift the blame. The naming of diseases has always been as much about politics and the human need to identify a scapegoat as it has been about accurately labeling a new threat to life. Periodic attempts have been made to remove the subjective from the process. Three United Nations agencies—the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health—play a particularly important role when it comes to infectious diseases, which don’t respect borders. WHO hosts the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which has long assigned the final name to any human disease. And in 2015, WHO came up with an updated set of guidelines for labeling infectious diseases, which account for the vast majority of threats to human life.” Thought experiment: Say a kind of distant friend of yours gives you a big statue of Karl Marx. Do you accept it? Should you be happy about it? What if Karl Marx is kind of a contentious figure for you because half your nation embraced Communism not long ago, with disastrous results? Didi Kirsten Tatlow writes on a minor controversy unfolding between China and Germany: “For weeks, Chinese have been debating the meaning of a superhero-size statue of Karl Marx headed to Trier, the German town where the political philosopher was born. An attempt to spread Communist revolution back to democratic Germany? A joke? The eighteen-foot work by the sculptor Wu Weishan is a gift from the Chinese government and is to be unveiled next May as part of wider commemorations for the two hundredth anniversary of Marx’s birth … This noble-looking Marx gazing into the future expresses ‘the confidence of today’s China in its own theories, path, system and culture,’ Mr. Wu wrote in People’s Daily, the party newspaper … Historians and politicians asked whether it was appropriate to honor so uncritically a man whose ideas led to dictatorship, including in the former East Germany. In April, Trier’s City Council gave final approval to the gift but whittled down its size by more than two feet.” Read More
May 23, 2017 On Technology Salvation Mode By Zack Hatfield The forgotten joys of the screen saver. When I first encountered Jorge Luis Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” a short story whose narrator runs with madness through an endless labyrinth, a remote feeling of déjà vu eased into one of bizarre, welcome recognition. The house’s infinite doors, its emptiness, the dizzy futility—Borges seemed to be describing a popular screen saver from the nineties. Surely you know the one, the Windows maze, that redbrick warren of untold pivots summoned by the computer monitor when no one was around. The ending of Borges’s story, wherein the narrator is revealed as the slain minotaur of Greek mythology, only reinforced the connection; to me, screen savers have always afforded some tenuous connection to the afterlife. The first one I can remember, on my family’s household desktop, featured a crimson psychedelia that overtook the screen’s blackness, a kaleidoscope of paisleys and helixes forever in a state of irresolution. Late at night, I’d prepare an unhealthy snack and sit patiently in front of the monitor to watch it, a child beseeching death. How fitting would it be, I thought then, if we all ended up trapped behind a pane of glass roiling with pixels? My instinct was only reaffirmed by a childhood friend’s widowed grandmother, who held onto the conviction that her husband was trying to communicate to her through her Dell’s wispy screen saver. She spent her evenings careful not to disturb the cursor, basking in her lover’s strange séance. If screen savers still have an eschatological tinge for me, it’s also because of their own demise. We no longer need them now, when our phones nudge us at all hours, our inboxes bloat, and dystopian headlines scorch themselves onto our consciousnesses. Our laptops, when we look away from them, have optimized screen protection with a bland and dreamless sleep mode. What we abandoned with the death of screen savers—themselves testifiers of disuse—was a culture that could accept walking away from life onscreen. Read More