May 12, 2017 Arts & Culture The Kaleidoscopic Flicker By Paula Mejia On Jean Stein’s greatest legacy, the narrative oral history. From the first-edition jacket of Edie. Edie Sedgwick was home for the holidays in California, behind the wheel of a fast car, when she barreled through a flashing red light on New Year’s Eve, 1964. G. J. Barker-Benfield, a friend, was sitting in the passenger seat; his head went through the windshield. He remembers the dumbfounded TV reports of the wreck that totaled Edie’s car: “How did two people step out of this car alive?” Others weren’t so lucky. Eerily, Edie’s brother Bobby had crashed his motorcycle around the same time that night, and he died twelve days later. Barker-Benfield had to get twenty-two stitches, while Edie emerged from the crash with only a broken knee. Not long afterward, Geoffrey Gates ran into Edie at the former midtown Manhattan nightclub Ondine. It was early January. Edie flitted through the party, doing the twist and wearing a cast stretching from her hip to her toe. “The smile was wild … manic,” Gates remembered. “She kept getting up and dancing; one leg sheer white with only a couple of signatures on it just rooted to one spot on the floor, and the rest of her body spinning around the cast as if she were an acrobat. She still had a girl’s finishing-school appearance, but her face and actions showed that something else was coming up very fast.” Read More
May 12, 2017 On Architecture Makers’ Markers By Henry H. Kuehn Graceland Cemetery, in Chicago. Toward the north end of Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, around Lake Willowmere, lies a cluster of graves belonging to the city’s most famous architects, among them Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Fazlur Khan. Henry Kuehn discovered this so-called cemetery of architects while serving as director of the Graceland Cemetery tour, and it sparked a quest to research and catalogue architects’ gravesites all around the country. At the heart of his pursuit was a desire to understand how these monument builders are remembered in death. The results, recorded in Kuehn’s new book, Architects’ Gravesites: A Serendipitous Guide, are as varied as the built structures those men and women left behind. Below is a selection, together with an excerpt from Paul Goldberger’s afterword. —Nicole Rudick To come to the end of this book is to conclude a journey across the United States, across architectural history, and into human character. I am not sure that the final resting places of celebrated and accomplished architects tell us all that much about their work—after all, few of them designed their own burial sites or grave markers, and the graves that most closely resemble the architecture of their occupants were quite often designed by others, sometimes many years later, and some have the forced quality of all-too-earnest homage. But if the design of architects’ gravesites sheds only minimal light on their work, their graves do tell us rather more than we might have expected about these architects as people. Some of them are grand and imposing, others so modest as to be no more than small stone plaques set flat upon the ground. Many architects chose to be buried with their families, and their grave markers confer equal billing to spouses and sometimes other family members. Of course, what most of us want—what most of us turn the pages of Architects’ Gravesites hoping to find—is some kind of echo of the architect’s voice, however many of the architects themselves shied away from expressing it. Clearly the instinct toward modesty arises more often for architects in death than it does in life, since it is hard not to be surprised at how many of these final resting places are small and understated. A successful architect, after all, need not fear that he or she leaves nothing behind: the smallest building is usually larger than the most elaborate grave, and most of these architects have left plenty of buildings, most of which are not at all small, for us to remember them by. —Paul Goldberger Read More
May 12, 2017 On the Shelf You, Too, Can Be T. S. Eliot’s Child, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “She said she was what now?” Things would be easier if you were the descendant of a famous writer. Doors would open. Carpets would be laid at your feet. I know what you’re thinking: you’re not born of literary royalty, and nothing will ever change that. Except: Did you ever consider lying about it? This is a more effective practice than you might expect. Take Alison Reynolds, for example. Until recently, she was claiming to be T. S. Eliot’s twin daughters, at the same time—even though Eliot had no children. For her troubles, she was rewarded with a few cushy theater gigs and a handsome tax break. And sure, she’s on her way to jail, but maybe it was worth it. Robert Mendick reports, “Alison Reynolds pretended to be both Claire and Chess Eliot, who she claimed were the twin daughters of the poet. In fact, Eliot never had any children. Reynolds, who is remanded in custody and facing a jail sentence, used wigs, stage makeup and a variety of costumes to portray herself as at least eleven different aliases over the course of a decade. Using the fake identities, she posed as a theatre producer and director and falsely claimed VAT credits in the name of bogus dramatic companies. In 2003, she moved to Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire … setting up the Journeyman Theatre Company and writing a play, Desperately Seeking Jake Roverton, to make her scam more compelling … The ruse was rumbled after theatre staff became suspicious that they had never seen Claire and Chess in the same room.” Book clubs are a great way to foster friendships. If you’d prefer to make enemies, they’re good for that, too. Judith Newman has stories of readers’ flaring tempers: “Elizabeth St. Clair, a lawyer … had her Waterloo in a previous club over Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. The group consisted of several couples, including Ms. St. Clair and her boyfriend at the time. In one scene, she explains, ‘the main character is staying in a bunkhouse, and over the course of several nights a gorgeous strange woman comes to his bed and has sex with him. The men in the group thought this was the most romantic thing ever—dark, anonymous sex with no consequences. The women, on the other hand, were guffawing. When they pointed out that this was entirely a male fantasy, that few women would relish the prospect of anonymous sex with a possibly unattractive stranger in a bunk bed, the men felt insulted. Tensions were already high and everything kind of escalated … People walked out.’ ” Read More
May 11, 2017 Look Very Special Gladnesses By Dan Piepenbring Endre Tót is one of thirty artists whose work appears in “With the Eyes of Others: Hungarian Artists of the Sixties and Seventies,” a group exhibition devoted to the Hungarian avant-garde, showing at Elizabeth Dee Gallery through August 12. Tót, born in 1937, was loosely affiliated with the Fluxus movement and is known especially for his pioneering mail art: postcards, stamps, and typographical oddities that he used to correspond with other conceptual artists. His work is characterized by its focus on nothingness—in 1970, he abandoned painting, having declared “a state of zero”—through which, in his perspective, one can reach pure joy; in one postcard he writes, “I am glad if I can type zer0s.” Read More
May 11, 2017 At Work Fantasy Life: An Interview with Tabitha Soren By Louisa Thomas Tabitha Soren, Modesto Nuts bull pen, California, 2014. In 2003, Tabitha Soren went to the Oakland A’s spring training in Phoenix with her husband, Michael Lewis, who had just finished writing a book about the Oakland A’s front office, Moneyball, which would be published later that year. Soren brought her camera; she wasn’t a baseball fan, and she thought she would be bored. “I thought it was going to be a pretty place to shoot,” she told me when we spoke over the phone. She didn’t expect that project she began there would take her fourteen years. Back then, Soren had only just begun her career as a fine-arts photographer. She first made her name on the other side of the camera, as the face of MTV News’s politics coverage in the 1990s, then as a reporter at ABC and NBC News. Since she left journalism to become a fine-arts photographer, her photographs have been widely collected and shown. Her latest project, Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream, chronicles the trajectories of twenty-one baseball players who began their professional careers at that spring training in 2003. Ten of them are featured in the book, which also includes a series of linked short stories by Dave Eggers; the larger show will be up at San Francisco’s City Hall from July 20 to January 6. Read More
May 11, 2017 On the Shelf Make Something Up About Agatha Christie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of A Talent for Murder. In 1926, Agatha Christie went missing—she turned up at a hotel ten days later with a case of amnesia. Her disappearance has never been properly explained, and you know how people are about explanations: they’ve gotta have ’em. In the absence of facts, they’ll just as soon make something up. And so it went with Christie—as Andrew Wilson writes, all sorts of wacky theories about her were aired as “news,” and even today people continue to postulate: “Newspapers were fascinated by the idea that her husband Archie Christie might have killed the author so he could marry his mistress, Nancy Neele. But those ten days in 1926 were in effect a news vacuum. Despite an extensive search of the Surrey Downs and the dredging of nearby pools, the police discovered precious few clues, let alone a body—so journalists began to manufacture news of their own. The Daily Sketch claimed that it had employed the services of a medium, whose spirit guide was Maisie, a ‘twelve-year-old African girl, tribe unknown.’ ‘As soon as the medium went into a trance Maisie took command,’ the paper reported. ‘Sensational claims were made by the medium, who afterwards described Mrs Christie’s fate as a tragedy almost too terrible to speak about.’ ” Christian Lorentzen weighs in on “Formentera Storyline,” the photo-novella in our Spring issue: “Journals like The Paris Review and NOON have risked their pages on unlisted unknowns (who prove that publicity isn’t the oxygen that keeps fiction alive). It was in one of those magazines that, to my mind, the knockout discovery of 2017 appeared: ‘Formentera Storyline,’ by Jean-René Étienne and Lola Raban-Oliva, a ‘photo-novella’ in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, about a Spanish-island group vacation that devolves across 150 pages—most of which feature a banal photo from a Mediterranean villa (e.g., the washing machine) and a deadpan sentence or two—from Pilates and talk therapy into druggy chaos and bad Instagram behavior. All told, a party where everybody stays too long. It’s funny, sly, and very much of the Fyre Festival moment.” Read More