April 20, 2017 On the Shelf Smells like Teen Spirit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring That way lies madness—and great innovations in odor-concealing technology. There are great things happening along the I-95 corridor. The rest stops, for one—if you’ve stopped at the Walt Whitman Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, you know what paradise is. But what if I told you that there’s something in the vicinity even better than the rest stops? And what if, to sweeten the deal, I added that it concerns antiperspirant technology? Adam Davidson has the facts: “You smell better now—and will smell even better in the future—because of the advances that are occurring along Interstate 95 between Philadelphia and Newark. You could call that stretch of road ‘the stink highway.’ This revolution began in 1990, when George Preti, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, isolated the specific molecule (3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid) that produces the distinct odor of underarm sweat. Before Preti’s discovery, you had to, in his words, ‘carpet bomb’ smells by applying a perfume strong enough to overwhelm and erase all odors. Once Preti cracked the code, scientists could create scents that adhere only to the nasal sensors that are most sensitive to 3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid. Deodorant designers are now able to create precisely the scent they want, which could be no discernible scent at all.” A literary collector is parting with some of his most impressive acquisitions—pony up and you could take home, say, a letter from Proust bemoaning the sex he’s been forced to overhear. Danuta Kean writes, “The most amusing letter in the collection … was from Proust to the son of his landlord … Proust complains about being able to hear his neighbors’ loud sex. The noise was not the problem, the letter reveals: ‘Beyond the partition, the neighbors make love every two days with a frenzy of which I am jealous.’ ” Read More
April 19, 2017 Look Booze in the USSR By Dan Piepenbring P. Letunov, text reads: “Either, or,” with the bottle labeled “vodka,” 1983. In the American imagination, the Russians are a vodka-loving people, every last one of them. They gargle with it. They water their plants with it. Their cars run on it. Is any of this true? Who cares? It feeds a treasured stereotype—the plump, stoical Russian, in some kind of furry ushanka, swilling that sweet, sweet fermented potato distillate until the first glimmer of dawn sweeps across the desolate, frozen Soviet horizon. But get this: not all Russians drink. It’s true! Even Tolstoy himself, one of the few Russians that Americans pretend to know and care about, eschewed the bottle. After his wild, drunken youth, he founded a temperance society, the Union Against Drunkenness, and he hoped to affix a label to all vodka bottles marking them as poison—with a skull and crossbones, the whole works. In an 1890 essay called “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” he comes off as a total killjoy: Read More
April 19, 2017 Look Bayou Fever By Caitlin Love “Bayou Fever and Related Works,” an exhibition of twenty-one vibrant collages by the late artist Romare Bearden, is on view at DC Moore Gallery through April 29. Made in 1979, the works were originally conceived of as blueprints for a ballet, the titular Bayou Fever—a performance Bearden hoped would be choreographed by Alvin Ailey but was never produced. The ballet’s storyline involves a confrontation between the “Conjur Woman” and the “Swamp Witch,” who twist in a dramatic struggle for the soul of a sick child deep in the bayou. The collages are exhibited alongside artworks from other years, an effect that accents Bearden’s motifs: powerful women, elders, musicians, rural landscapes, domestic interiors, and religion. Romare Bearden, The Bayou, 1979, collage, ink, pencil, and acrylic on fiberboard, 6″ x 9″. Read More
April 19, 2017 On the Shelf Go on and Drive Your Van Right Off a Cliff, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Dead to me. The Volkswagen Westfalia Camper used to be a mark of distinction: passing one on the road ten years ago, you could be fairly certain its passengers were unwashed eccentrics, conspiracy theorists, petty criminals, or all of the above. But today the van has lost its luster. Like everything decent and weird in this world, it’s been co-opted by rich white people who yearn to cultivate a sense of ersatz rebellion and get more likes on Instagram. They buy these vans by the hundreds, presumably to take boring drug-free road trips and have lots of vanilla sex in the back. This is called #vanlife, and you should denounce it whenever you see it. Rachel Monroe writes of the trend, “Like the best marketing terms, ‘vanlife’ is both highly specific and expansive. It’s a one-word life-style signifier that has come to evoke a number of contemporary trends: a renewed interest in the American road trip, a culture of hippie-inflected outdoorsiness, and a life free from the tyranny of a nine-to-five office job … ‘It’s men in their thirties with huge beards, and they’re pretty much all stay-at-home dads,’ [Harley Sitner] said. ‘Their wives work office jobs and they work on the vans so the family can go out and vanlife on the weekend’ … ‘There are now professional vanlifers,’ [Foster] Huntington told me, sounding slightly scandalized. Vanlifers have a tendency to call their journeys ‘projects,’ and to describe them in the elevator-pitch terms that make sense to potential sponsors.” In an interview by Paul Devlin, David Murray reflects on the legacy of Albert Murray’s jazz writing: “People get tired of reading good stuff when reading about jazz. They don’t want to think too hard. A lot of people got frustrated with Albert Murray on that too—people just want a few sentences—they don’t know about the sustenance of the blues. But he broke it down … The fact that he even thought [the blues] was sophisticated turned some people off. Europeans love Africans when they don’t comb their hair. See, in Europe, they’ll see a light-skinned black, and they’ll say, ‘He’s black, but he’s not really black.’ Here, politically, we’ve defined who we are as African Americans. In Europe, they use their definition of us rather than our definition of us. We have to say these things to continue to define who we are as people. That’s what Albert Murray was saying when he described the afro hairstyle as ‘Afro-Brillo,’ rather than describing ‘the natural.’ He says that because he knows exactly what he means. He’s very specific. There are white people who resent those distinctions because it destroys their idea of the nigger serving coffee. Or those lawn jockeys. Sometimes I would go to a restaurant in Portugal that had one. I’d always throw some shit at it. The owner says, ‘Man, why you always messing with my jockey?’ I say it makes me not want to come in here!” Read More
April 18, 2017 Our Correspondents Sing, Together, as Long as We’re Alive By Alison Kinney and Mechi Annaís Estévez Cruz A conversation about ¡Figaro! 90210 and immigrants’ rights at the opera. Mozart’s 1786 opera Le nozze di Figaro has been set in a Trump Tower penthouse and at a Jewish wedding in contemporary Germany. Now, for a week in New York City, Vid Guerrerio’s adaptation, ¡Figaro! 90210, sets Mozart’s music to an English/Spanish libretto—and puts Conti in a red baseball cap. Of course, the plot still features two spirited, ingenious working people trying to free themselves from the abuses of the powerful, but now Figaro and Susana are undocumented Mexican household workers singing their opening duet in Spanish, on the grounds of the Beverly Hills mansion of their pussy-grabbing employer, Mr. Conti. Susana explains that the boss has given them a pool-house apartment to facilitate his assaults on her: “I see this coming when he tell me he help me get my visa … ‘Good girls, they get green cards. Girls who don’t obey their boss get deported.’ ” Le nozze di Figaro lends itself well to this kind of reworking; rebellion is in its DNA. Its eighteenth-century premiere came only a few years before the French and Haitian Revolutions. The opera derived from a play by Beaumarchais (who was also an arms dealer for the American Revolution) of which Louis XVI said, “For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first”; Napoleon, for his part, called it “the Revolution in action.” The opera’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, lightened the play’s political radicalism to bypass Austrian censors, earning Joseph II’s approval and a special palace performance commission. Yet the plot remains subtly subversive, addressing both the vulnerability and moral superiority of women and workers, and the violence of the ruling classes and their henchmen. After the marvelously entertaining opening night, the two of us compared notes to figure out what kind of audience ¡Figaro! 90210 was for. Not everybody, we observed, was happy with the adaptation. Read More
April 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Jungle Love By Darrell Hartman Why we keep looking for lost jungle cities. An illustration of Colonel Percy Fawcett doing battle with a giant anaconda, from the cover of Exploration Fawcett. Dry, desolate landscapes tend to preserve any evidence of human passage—they cling to artifacts like precious memories. A Tyrolean glacier hugged the 5,300-year-old iceman to its breast. The desert helped the ancient Egyptians launch their earthly vessels into eternity. More recently, Antarctica has joined in. The frozen continent recently coughed up a 104-year-old biscuit left by an expedition of Ernest Shackleton’s—in pristine, “perfectly nutritious” state. The jungle, though, does not take naturally to cultural preservation. The obscuring overgrowth never stops; the landscape digests all. Excavating a 5-year-old site, let alone a 500-year-old one, can be like sifting through a well-advanced compost pile in search of something edible. And yet, we try—especially when inspired by a figure as captivating as Colonel Percy Fawcett. Fawcett was an intrepid British explorer who disappeared in the Brazilian Amazon in 1925, presumably killed by Indians. He’s the subject of a new biopic, The Lost City of Z, an adaptation of David Grann’s 2009 book of the same name. The Amazon’s greatest cover-up, Fawcett believed, was an utterly forgotten civilization named Z. He aimed, in his quasi-invincible, slightly nutty way, to find it. Read More