April 5, 2017 On the Shelf Don’t Lick the Wallpaper, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Bitten By Witch Fever, a new book on poisonous wallpaper. Is the present better than the past? No. Progress is a sham. Suffering is endemic, resources are dwindling, exploitation is the norm. Still, we should all pat ourselves on the back, because there’s no more arsenic in our wallpaper. We figured it out. We fixed it. In Victorian England, on the other hand, people had no clue. They were totally surrounded by bright, poisonous wallpaper, letting it eat away at them, staring at death on every wall and not even knowing it. Like common fools! Kat Eschner explains how it all came to light: “The root of the problem was the color green … After a Swedish chemist named Carl Sheele used copper arsenite to create a bright green, ‘Scheele’s Green’ became the in color, particularly popular with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and with home decorators catering to everyone from the emerging middle class upwards. Copper arsenite, of course, contains the element arsenic. One prominent doctor named Thomas Orton nursed a family through a mysterious sickness that ultimately killed all four of their children. In desperation, one of the things he started to do was make notes about their home and its continents. He found nothing wrong with the water supply or the home’s cleanliness. The one thing he worried about: the Turners’ bedroom had green wallpaper.” The American experiment has culminated in this: we can binge-watch television about superheroes. Sam Kriss tried out Marvel Studios’ latest, Iron Fist, and he is duly afraid: “Netflix creates its plotlines and pacing by observing the aggregated metadata for all the other programs on its site; it knows when people take toilet breaks in the less interesting sequences, it knows when they get bored and decide to go outside. This thing, Iron Fist, a dopey man with a doughball for a head wandering around and punching people, is what viewers want; for all the negative reviews, it’s Netflix’s most binge-watched show to date. In some sense, it’s the deep ideological truth of our society. Stories about superheroes have, in the last decade or so, become inescapable; they’re our primary cultural substratum, our equivalent of Church dogma or mythic cosmogony. In the same way that the Homeric epics encoded the social and psychological structure of antique Greece, telling us through stories about gods and wars and monsters how the ancients imagined their world, Marvel comic-book narratives encode the word of postmodernity. When the Iron Fist punches a ninja for the fiftieth time, he’s not fighting some fictional ancient order but hammering through the contradictions of capitalism.” Read More
April 4, 2017 Revisited Ruins in Advance By Kyle Chayka Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Kyle Chayka revisits Anselm Kiefer’s Velimir Chlebnikov. Anselm Kiefer, Velimir Chlebnikov, 2004 (detail), thirty paintings: oil, emulsion, acrylic, lead, and mixed media on canvas; eighteen paintings: 75″ x 130″ each; twelve paintings: 75″ x 110″ each. Photo: Arthur Evans, courtesy Hall Art Foundation, © Anselm Kiefer The summer before I went to college, in 2006, I worked as a guard at the Aldrich Museum, a contemporary-art museum an hour from where I grew up in the Connecticut woods. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I’m fairly certain it always will be. For ten dollars an hour—a royal sum for a teenager whose only other gig had been making cider donuts at an apple orchard—I and five or six other guards, some retirees and others fellow students, stationed ourselves in the airy galleries to make sure none of the guests touched or collided with the art on display. Mainly, our responsibility was to have conversations with visitors reassuring them of the validity of the curatorial decisions: Yes, this is art. When there was no one around to question contemporary aesthetics, we sat on foldout stools and read, drew, or knitted. (In this way, I made my way through most of Haruki Murakami’s oeuvre.) That summer, one of the galleries on rotation—we switched locations on the hour, so over the course of a day every guard got a full tour—was a two-story-tall corrugated-steel pavilion built on a cement plinth outside on the museum’s grounds. The pavilion was a work by the German artist Anselm Kiefer, a painter and sculptor known for the gnarled surface of his huge canvases as well as for his gothic sensibility: an atmosphere of fallen historical grandeur pervades his work. Inside the rectangular pavilion’s towering metal doors, the two side walls were hung with thirty paintings arranged in grids, covering every inch. Read More
April 4, 2017 First Person Pizza Complex Las Vegas By Joshua Baldwin At the International Pizza Expo. Stepping onto the marinara-red carpet of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s north hall, I inhaled a whiff of baking dough and followed the call of a gentle legato tune. Past a towering display of insulated delivery bags, I found the music’s source: at the Stanislaus Food Products stall (“Home of the Real Italian Tomato Since 1942”), a guitar duo plucked and strummed a Neapolitan jingle by a low white fence. As the players painted the coda, I took a few steps backward. A woman from Tyson Foods patted my arm and said she wanted to show me how they are so much more than chicken. “Would you like to try our Hillshire Farm all-natural pepperoni?” The International Pizza Expo, now in its thirty-third year, bills itself as the largest gathering of pizza professionals in the world. From Tuesday, March 28, to Thursday, March 30, twelve thousand attendees filled the vast, brightly lit convention-center floor. More than five hundred companies descend on the expo, bringing independent- and chain-pizzeria managers together with the manufacturers and service providers who populate an industry with an estimated forty-four billion dollars in American sales and 128 billion worldwide. I’m not a pizza professional, but I grew up in New York City, so the cheese slice is one of the foundational realities of my life. I’ve always been drawn to pizza, I probably worship it, and these days I’m often drawn to Las Vegas, almost like a pilgrim. So when pizza and Vegas collided for this year’s expo, I heeded the signal, and off I went to wander the aisles and consider the wares. Perhaps I would be led to the portal of the pie’s sorcery, and finally look straight into the metaphysical nucleus of the food’s mighty allure. Maybe I’d meet some hooded parmesan master and he’d disclose to me his secrets, or have my mind blown by the perfect grease-to-crunch ratio. Read More
April 4, 2017 On the Shelf I Go Nowhere Without My Boa Constrictor, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Today’s heiresses are boring: their idea of adventure is trying to sip a green juice while their lips are still numb from cosmetic surgery. (Oops—dribbled a bit on that Balmain dress!) Aimée Crocker, a San Francisco railroad heiress born in 1864, used her wealth to scandalize prudes and scald the bourgeois palate. Her 1934 memoir, And I’d Do It Again, describes her saturnalian adventures around the globe. Now it’s been reissued, and Libby Purves read it with relish: “When Aimée Crocker took up with a feudal Chinese warlord or a ‘Wild Man Of Borneo’ in the 1890s, it shocked everyone but her. When, back in New York, she invited the cream of society to a dinner and appeared, heavily decolletée and wrapped in a sixty-pound boa constrictor whose muscular form she found erotic, there were faints and shrieking … She falls for a ‘repulsively ugly’ hypnotist in Honolulu, dumps him after an incident at a leper colony, and reports not un-gleefully that two years later he put himself into a ‘hystero-cataleptic’ trance, was presumed dead and was autopsied while still alive. But by this point she’s only just getting going … to China, where she ransoms a girl from a cathouse and becomes the prisoner of a warlord, who makes her watch an execution by a thousand cuts and informs her, ‘I am the master of all that is beautiful in this house. I may keep those things, give them away or break them if it pleases me.’ ” For Andrew Blevins, “the central question of chess” is one of paranoia: “How are they trying to get me?” Revisiting Garry Kasparov’s famous loss to Deep Blue, he sees a silver lining: it’s taught humans to lose, and to move on without getting caught up in the existential angst of it all. Of course, for Kasparov himself, the angst is never-ending. As Blevins writes: “There’s a famous moment in Deep Blue vs. Kasparov that I find revealing. After staying up all night with his team trying to figure out a particular Deep Blue move, an exhausted Kasparov accused IBM of cheating. He didn’t say this flat out but instead declared that the move reminded him of Diego Maradona’s infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal in the 1986 World Cup. The move was genius, incredibly farsighted, far above any move that Deep Blue had played so far, so much so that Kasparov believed it must have been illegal … Deep Blue had selected the move at random, something it was programmed to do in the event of a certain malfunction. But experts also believe that the move in question wasn’t as brilliant as Kasparov thought it was either. Instead, it was weird and unexpected, which can be, in certain cases, even more devastating.” Read More
April 3, 2017 Our Correspondents Hardware Store Doppelgänger By Jane Stern May contain duplicates. There’s a mom-and-pop hardware store half a mile from my house. It’s the kind of place that if you need two nails, or a small screwdriver, or some bug spray, you might choose it over Home Depot. I really like this store, but I’ve had some weird experiences there—specifically, I’ve been mistaken for someone else on multiple occasions. This doesn’t happen to me a lot outside the hardware store. I have a unique look. I don’t mean that as a boast or a knock; I just don’t resemble many other people. The hardware-store doppelgänger business started about two years ago, when I went in to buy a pint of paint. I noticed a man staring at me, and then sidling up to me, and then changing his mind and walking away. I am not a big fan of sidling, so I made hard eye contact with him, flashing my fiercest what-do-you-want look. Read More
April 3, 2017 On Film Search for the New Land By Adam Shatz Kasper Collin’s new documentary celebrates the vibrant, turbulent life of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan. Photo: Kasper Collin Produktion AB. Courtesy of the Afro-American Newspaper Archives and Research Center. “Every listener to jazz has had a few experiences so startling that they are literally unforgettable,” Nat Hentoff wrote in 1960: One of mine took place during an engagement the Dizzy Gillespie big band had at Birdland in 1957. My back was to the bandstand as the band started playing “Night in Tunisia.” Suddenly, a trumpet soared out of the band into a break that was so vividly brilliant and electrifying that all conversation in the room stopped and those of us who were gesturing were frozen with hands outstretched. After the first thunderclap impact, I turned and saw that the trumpeter was the very young sideman from Philadelphia, Lee Morgan. Lee Morgan, who was nineteen when Hentoff heard him, had this effect on many people. His sound was bright, brash, and sassy: like James Brown’s early work, it had the seductively strutting arrogance of youth. Morgan was a funky, down-home player, with a penchant for “smeared,” dirty notes, but he was also a subtle and calculating musical thinker who constructed his solos as if they were stories. That synergy of soulfulness and hipster cool defined the so-called Blue Note sound in the fifties and sixties, and Morgan was one of the label’s most celebrated artists. As David H. Rosenthal wrote in his classic study Hard Bop, he was the “quintessential hard-bopper.” Read More