May 22, 2017 Look Subway Drawings By Dan Piepenbring In the 1940s, before he found acclaim as a painter, Alex Katz, now eighty-nine, was a student at Cooper Union. Uninterested in the models his teachers asked him to draw, Katz rode the subway for hours, often into the early hours of the morning, sketching the passengers who caught his eye. Through June 30, Timothy Taylor Gallery is hosting an exhibition of his subway drawings. Alex Katz, Crowd on Subway, ca. 1940s, pen, 4 7/8″ x 7 7/8″. Read More
May 22, 2017 On the Shelf Laura Palmer Is So Metatextual, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Well, Twin Peaks is back, and that means it’s time for you to have An Opinion™ about it. Are you ready? I’m not. I don’t have Showtime and I haven’t watched the original series in years—it’s all I can do to skate by with a few knowing jokes about the Log Lady. To buy myself some time, I’m trying to develop An Opinion™ about The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a strange 1990 tie-in novel written by David Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer. As Lara Williams writes, the book foregrounded the show’s dark depiction of child abuse, which would be fine if it weren’t marketed toward teen girls: “The novel is surprisingly profound. It is unflinching in how it depicts a teenager’s powerlessness in the face of adult male sexuality, and how abuse shapes her burgeoning sexuality. It also contains a complex depiction of how the abuse shapes Laura’s life: her burgeoning addiction to cocaine, which she funds with sex work, the self-loathing she feels as she imagines she invited the attacks … For [professor Kirsty] Fairclough, one of the most unsettling things about the book is how it was marketed to and read primarily by teenage girls. ‘I was a kid when I read this,’ she says. ‘It was a status symbol, a sort of rebellion. I totally connected with Laura Palmer’ … Published before the second season had aired, the book came out just as Palmer’s diary was also being written into the narrative of the show—pre-empting the metatextual conceits of post-internet shows, such as Game of Thrones and Lost.” Cynthia Zarin considers Enda Walsh, an Irish playwright whose work is a study in fragility: “In almost all of Walsh’s dreamlike, darkly hilarious plays, the central character has been sent to his—or her—room. His work explores the liminal space between interior and exterior worlds by stringing up a cat’s cradle of language in which his characters swing between memories, dreams, and reflections—an act in which the audience colludes. It’s unclear exactly how this happens. Some of this may be due to Walsh’s exceptional ability to forge immediate connections, on and off the stage … Walsh says, ‘In my plays, each character reaches a point where something happened that led them to where they’ve ended up. As a child, I was obsessed with running away! I would get about four doors down and then be sent back by the neighbor.’ ” Read More
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