May 19, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Hipster Stewardesses, Swedish Paper Mills, Soil By The Paris Review From the cover of Afterland “In American Apparel I feel old. Especially when I ask one of the hotties for help.” So begins one of the dozens of prose poems in Jeremy Sigler’s new book, My Vibe. Another one: “I want to be watched so bad. I want a voyeur to be here so bad. A secret admirer.” Some of Sigler’s lines read like poetry (“Words like flat barges trace slowly past the jagged architecture. Buildings punch the sky like staple guns.”), but by and large, the poems are nimbly unpoetic. They’re conversational, and Sigler’s persona is like that weird, boozy guy who corners you at parties and won’t stop talking and one subject leads seamlessly into another and you keep looking over his shoulder for escape but he doesn’t notice and sentences keep spilling out of his mouth. Except that in this instance, I don’t want to escape. I find the poems incredibly charming because they are observant, indulgent, and funny: from flirting with a hipster stewardess to get an aisle seat on a plane by admitting bladder-control issues, to awkwardly complimenting a woman on her Yayoi Kusama hoodie and then discoursing briefly to the reader on Kusama’s art. “Being a Freudian,” Sigler writes in another poem, “my research is, um, dreaming. So I’ll have no choice but to drop my pen and take a nap.” —Nicole Rudick I already mentioned it this week, but I haven’t been able to shake Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker profile of Gerhard Steidl. I’d heard that Steidl, who runs the world’s most meticulous photography press, was an eccentric, but Mead brings the intensity of his commitment into sharp relief. He is, somehow, a technician aesthete, consumed equally by specificity and beauty. (Maybe only Germany could produce such a person.) His fastidiousness flirts with the ridiculous: even the notecards for his dinner table were custom-made at a Swedish paper mill dating to the nineteenth-century. But there’s no denying the almost monastic clarity of his vision. Steidl lives onsite at his factory in Göttingen, and he leaves as rarely as possible. His advice on this point flies in the face of contemporary wisdom about work/life balance, but I find it difficult to ignore. “It makes a huge difference,” he says, “when you are not isolated from your work, when working and living is a symbiosis. Normally, when you have a business and you produce something industrial, you have the plant somewhere and it makes a lot of dirt, and poison, and noise, and destroys the environment. You are working there all day, and then in the evening you drive home and you have your pleasant place to stay, with clean air, while poor people have to live with the dirt you are producing. I control my noise, because I am sleeping there, with an open window, every night.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
May 19, 2017 Arts & Culture Drumset = You By John Colpitts In seemingly bland method books, drummers become writers—and their eccentricities shine through in remarkable ways. Greg Gandy, Brett’s Drums, 2015, oil on canvas. I’m a mostly untrained drummer. I’ve taken lessons for brief periods, but until recently I’d missed out on that most essential component of drum pedagogy: the method book. In my efforts to improve, I’ve been drawn to the introductions of these books, which feature efficient, often dull language—and in which, occasionally, the eccentricities of the authors shine through in remarkable ways. In the last few months, I’ve become obsessed with gleaning hints about drummers’ personalities from these books, far too many of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been written by men. Lost in the hinterland between art and technique, their introductions tend to exhibit grouchiness, pretension, narcissism, penury, New Age quirkiness, and sometimes even wisdom. What follows is a survey of some of the more striking entries. Method books, intended to help you master a specific aspect of your musical craft, are usually flimsy pamphlets filled with exercises in musical notation. They’re aspirational texts, meant to be worried at and wrestled with, written in and dog-eared. Many are so frustratingly abstruse that they seem as though they weren’t made to be used at all. And like infomercials, some of them make outrageous claims; their titles alone can be a source of amusement. On my shelf I have Advanced Funk Studies, Drummer on Parade with Street Beats, The Hardest Drum Book Ever Written (by the inimitable Joel Rothman, the author of more than a hundred drum method books), The New Breed II, and Inner Drumming. Often the titles contain the word modern, which traditionally distinguishes between military-style parade drumming and contemporary rock and jazz playing. This distinction has been in place for almost a century, so it makes for an odd juxtaposition. At the same time, the term cozies up to a vision of the drummer’s future: some crowning moment after thousands of hours of dogged practice, in which, at last, the exercises are mastered and the drummer becomes truly “modern.” Read More
May 19, 2017 On the Shelf Your Car Will Look Cooler in Forty Years, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Langdon Clay, via Hyperallergic I have car in New York now. The alternate-side parking, the potholes, the increasingly dimpled bumpers: it’s all worth it, because my car could be a celebrity in this town. It’s a 2003 Camry, so the odds are against it, I know, but if I could show you how I beam with pride, seeing it sit there on the street, all covered in bird shit and pollen—it just seems like a place where a car is meant to be. And even as it depreciates, its value as an aesthetic object will only rise with age. In the seventies, the photographer Langdon Clay roamed the city by night, taking photos of cars all by their lonesome. Today, his photographs seem like evidence of some lost civilization. “It was photography of the street itself. One car. One background. So simple. Night became its own color,” Clay writes in an essay introducing a new collection of the pictures, Cars: New York City, 1974–1976. Luc Sante adds, “They rule the night, those Pintos and Chargers and Gremlins and Checkers and Galaxie 500s and Fairlanes and Sables and Rivieras and LeSabres and Eldorados … They unashamedly flaunt their dents, their rust spots, their mismatched doors, their liberal applications of Bondo, their repairs effected with masking tape—but then some of them revel in Butch Wax jobs like you don’t see anymore, gleaming like the twilight’s last sigh.” Jason Horowitz is on the scene in Naples, where a frantic casting call for children in underway. The potential gig: HBO’s adaptation of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend: “Producers are looking for amateur child actors—two sets of girls in eight- and fifteen-year-old iterations, and then a large Annie-esque supporting cast of hard-knock lifers. The result is an open casting call that has already drawn five thousand children, the vast majority of whom have never heard of Elena Ferrante, and injected a mix of hysteria and hope into parts of Naples that are poor in resources but rich in real characters. Enzo Valinotti—a fifty-seven-year-old shoemaker who reminisced about the days, nearly a century ago, when Totò, one of Italy’s most iconic actors, lived in the neighborhood—leaned out his ground-floor window and said of the children flooding the street, ‘They are all so happy.’ … ‘Look at my son. He is so beautiful,’ said Anna Arrivolo, forty-three, who grabbed her child’s pudgy face and stroked his gelled hair. ‘He didn’t want to do it. I wanted him to.’ ” Read More
May 18, 2017 Arts & Culture The Library of Books and Bombs By Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Andrew Moore, County Archive, 2012. © Andrew Moore, Courtesy of the Artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery Last summer, I moved into a flat on the edge of London’s Bethnal Green and Whitechapel. I chose it only because it was where my significant human made his home. It was my first time moving in with someone. As I clattered up from the Tube, I found myself in a swell of schoolchildren on Jack the Ripper tours, Bangladeshi immigrant families, and men with tortoiseshell glasses and Scandinavian backpacks. The local cafe offers beetroot lattes and vegan croissants. The local supermarket has an aisle devoted to halal food. This was a beautiful place to live, but I was a mess. My first novel was about to come out, and I jittered and jangled around the flat, failing to read or write. Finally, I did what I’ve always done when nervous. I looked for a library. My father told me once that he always has to know the location of the door of any room he’s in. I need to know the nearest bookshop and library. The theory is the same: we need an escape. Read More
May 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Mary McCarthy at the 92nd Street Y By Chris Kraus Mary McCarthy “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Chris Kraus reflects on Mary McCarthy’s reading, in November 1963, from her novel The Group. Mary McCarthy took the stage of the 92nd Street Y to thunderous applause on a brisk Sunday in November 1963. She was fifty-one and wearing an elegant white dress. “One thing that gave me the courage to go on with this book, which I was working on since 1952, was reading the first chapter of it out loud here,” she said before she began. “And the audience liked it. And I took it up again after this reading I gave that night, for good or ill. So. Uh … I’m assuming that, uh, most people here have read this book, and I don’t have to explain who the characters are, or what happened before. Is that true? No?” The audience laughs. “Is somebody kidding?” Read More
May 18, 2017 On the Shelf Visit Me in My Fake Tree, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Artificial tree-trunk, open,” from Richard Kearton’s Wild Life at Home, 1898. Image via Public Domain Review On a sunny spring weekend, I like to go to the park and hide in a false tree trunk I’ve built. There I stand, whiling away the hours and waiting for the birds to come around. I didn’t invent this hobby. Don’t give me that look. There are thousands of people like me. The whole thing started with Richard and Cherry Kearton, turn-of-the-century British nature photographers who went to ingenious lengths to capture their subjects up close. Artifice was their greatest ally, and they weren’t afraid to waste many hours hoping for something to happen. John Bevis writes, “It might stretch credulity for Richard Kearton, a benign man in a benign profession, to be labeled ‘the Machiavelli of bird photography.’ But the fact is that he and his brother, Cherry, adapted a number of the tactics of dell’arte della guerra in their search for ways of going undercover into ‘Birdland’ to secure untainted images of wildlife at home. Between the years 1897 and 1903, their experiments included variations on such quasi-military techniques as the smoke screen, in which surprise through deception is achieved by camouflage; the feigned retreat, when a false sense of security leads the foe into ambush; the Trojan horse, famously gaining admittance to a restricted area under false pretenses; and further ploys under the catch-all heading of misinformation … In 1898 came the ‘Artificial tree-trunk,’ anticipating by nearly twenty years the observation trees, made of angle-iron and camouflaged with bark, that were used by the British and French on the Western Front. The Kearton tree was a pantomime prop-like contraption whose wigwam frame of bamboo uprights was dressed with mesh, and covered with fabric camouflaged with paint, moss, and lichen. The photographer stood to attention inside, pressed against his camera, whose tripod legs could be only partially spread. It may have lacked versatility, but when it came to photographing a bird perched six feet above ground level, in woodland, the dummy tree trunk was hard to beat.” The Jewish Museum has dedicated an exhibition to Florine Stettheimer, a Jazz Age painter who remains, in Christopher Benfey’s view, far too often unsung: “Through her closely observant work, we are granted entrée to exclusive birthday celebrations (with her pals Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz recognizably in attendance), Fourth of July fireworks over Manhattan, and a frenzied spring sale at Bendel’s, though it might as well be Bruegel’s. Her signature filigrees of paint, especially red (associated at the time with the Ballets-Russes, for which Stettheimer dreamed of designing costumes, as well as with the Russian Revolution) and layer-cake-icing white, add a frothy dynamism to the festivities. Despite the apparent frivolity of her subjects, Stettheimer … was an ambitious, deadly serious artist who has never gotten the attention she deserves. Her varied, probing self-portraits—palette in hand and red shoes on her feet, accompanied by a Nijinsky-ish faun; or floating in space on a magical red cape, like some exotic deity; or reclining in the nude, à la Olympia—convey a sophisticated self-awareness of the confining assumptions facing a hardworking woman artist between the wars.” Read More