March 31, 2017 On the Shelf Dogs Don’t Talk in Times New Roman, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A screen grab from Microsoft Bob. Prediction: Comic Sans MS is due for a comeback. Ostracized and maligned for decades, the world’s most controversial typeface is about to come in from the cold. Books will be printed in Comic Sans. Official memoranda will be typed in it. Highway signs will use it; fashion labels will use it; we will put it on the moon. Vincent Connare, a typographer for Microsoft in the nineties who designed Comic Sans, has begun to campaign for its rehabilitation. He maintains that the font is a perfect marriage of form and content, especially given Microsoft’s ambitions at the time: “One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make computers more accessible to children. I booted it up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense … Type should do exactly what it’s intended to do. That’s why I’m proud of Comic Sans. It was for novice computer users and it succeeded with that market. People use it inappropriately: if they don’t understand how type works, it won’t have any power or meaning to them. I once heard a guy at a Rothko show say: ‘I could have done that.’ He clearly doesn’t know anything about art. He’ll probably use Comic Sans without realizing it’s wrong in certain circumstances.” Oh, I forgot about baseball! Baseball uniforms will use Comic Sans. Bet your life on it. The MLB’s new commissioner, Rob Manfred, is pitching all sorts of wild ideas for the game. Why not a typeface change? After all, Jay Caspian Kang, looking into baseball’s past, reminds us that the game has seen plenty of upgrades since the nineteenth century, when warring New York and Massachusetts factions vied for primacy: “The Massachusetts game featured one-out innings and overhand pitching, and batters could be called out by being hit by a thrown ball while between bases. Typically, the first team to score 100 runs won. The New York game was a bit more genteel and pragmatic: Games were played to 21, not 100; pitchers had to throw underhand; no players had balls intentionally thrown at them; and games concluded before dark. The debates over which version was better centered on manliness, decorum and the pace of play. The Massachusetts crowd argued that it was manlier for outs to require some measure of physical pain, while the New Yorkers said that manliness could never be extricated from gentlemanly manners and that only savages ran around fields pegging balls at one another.” Read More
March 30, 2017 From the Archive Joanne Kyger in the Review By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Elsa Dorfman. We were sad to learn that Joanne Kyger, whom the San Francisco Gate calls “a leading poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and a rare female voice of the male-dominated Beat generation,” died last week at eighty-two. In an illuminating 2014 interview with The Conversant, Kyger discussed her process and, memorably, the role of psychedelics in her work: I participated in several peyote ceremonies and in February of 1959, while taking it with some friends, I had a quite unpleasant experience of massed black energy intercut with animal faces. The fact that I was unwisely taking this trip in my apartment, which was over a bar in North Beach, and was not feeling well, added to a very unstable sense of “reality.” This “black energy” resembled an animal, which I later named, hoping to focus it. A wild animal, which I paid attention to whenever I saw it or saw mention of it. For years I was afraid of stepping over some edge into a loss of self or schizophrenic duality. Living in Japan and seeing the guardian warriors outside the temple doors with their fierce animal-like expressions, I finally realized they were protectors. Fear creates a wall one can be afraid to pass by. If they scared you off, you didn’t have enough courage or knowledge to enter further. I think I was fearful of the energy of the animal self, whatever I thought that was. The Review published Kyger’s poems in the late sixties and early seventies; digital subscribers should check out her work in our Spring 1966, Summer 1970, and Spring 1973 issues. Below is my favorite, “June 7 … ” Read More
March 30, 2017 On Poetry The Poetry of Pop By Adam Bradley Some poets pick some song lyrics worth reading. Farrah Karapetian, Soundscape 36, 2015, unique chromogenic photogram, metallic, 40″ x 45″. Courtesy the artist and Danziger Gallery. Most of us don’t need a small group of learned Swedes to tell us that Bob Dylan is a poet. We likely forged our opinion on the matter long ago, somewhere between “Talkin’ New York” (1962) and “Thunder on the Mountain” (2006). But let’s not stop at Dylan. Why not call all Bobs poets? Bob Marley, Bob Seger, Bob Weir. Add in the Bobbys and Bobbies, too, for that matter: “Blue” Bland, Brown, Gentry. It’s an eclectic group. But if we relinquish the idea that the term “poet” is a kind of coronation, we’re free to understand it as a descriptive term for someone who works with words in concentrate, which all of these Bobs and Bobbies do. Perhaps Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature can be a beginning—of closer attention to lyric craft; of richer conversations among songwriters, poets, and the rest of us. The poetry in pop songs can be masterful or careless, disposable or timeless. It can be in the service of well-crafted narratives (like Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”) or more abstract tone pieces (like Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead’s “Jack Straw”). It can result in works that endure (like Bobby “Blue” Bland’s signature song “Turn On Your Love Light,” covered dozens of times including, famously, by Bob Weir’s Grateful Dead) or works that capture a moment and then recede into nostalgia (like Bobby Brown’s chart-topping 1989 hit “My Prerogative”). Read More
March 30, 2017 At Work Making Theater: An Interview with Elizabeth LeCompte By Hilton Als Photo: Zbigniew Bzymek I met with the director Elizabeth LeCompte over a number of months in her loft, two blocks from the Performing Garage, where her actors and technical team, the Wooster Group, rehearse on an almost daily basis when they’re in town. Liz, as everyone calls her, lives in a dimly lit space, eclectically furnished. The front part of the loft—you step directly into it, off the lift—contains a bed and screen for guests; several paintings Liz made early in her career are stacked on the floor. Liz’s own bedroom is in the back, off a tidy screened-off bathroom. The main feature in the space is the kitchen; it runs the width of the loft, and even though Liz doesn’t really cook much and eats relatively little—for our meetings I’d bring some Italian takeout, easy to heat up; one saw a number of frozen pizzas in the fridge—it is a homey area, with a wide countertop and high chairs and a television nearby: the director is an avid baseball fan. The Wooster Group’s latest production, The Town Hall Affair, is at REDCAT in Los Angeles through April 1, then at Z Space in San Francisco from April 6 to April 16. Read More
March 30, 2017 On the Shelf This Is the Concourse to Hell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Train to eternal damnation, now boarding at gate four. Photo: Kevin Harber If someone published an anthology called Hellscape: Thirty Writers on Why Penn Station Sucks, I would buy that thing in hardcover and pay list price for it. I would buy a whole carton and stand at Penn Station’s Amtrak gates, forcing them on beleaguered travelers. Because: everyone hates Penn Station—I’m talking about the New York one—but good writing on the hatred of Penn Station is hard to find. One must be diligent. Julian Rose, in his review of Wendy Lesser’s new book, You Say to Brick, has made a great discovery: hidden among the pages of this biography of Louis Kahn is an evisceration of Penn. “In a tour de force of architectural criticism, Lesser excoriates this building as ‘something like a living hell,’ using an extended comparison to another major East Coast transit hub, Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station, to underscore Penn Station’s many failures: urban (the elegant approach to Thirtieth Street along one of Philadelphia’s main arteries versus the ignominious midblock descent into the chasm yawning below Madison Square Garden that constitutes Penn’s main entrance); environmental (the flood of warm natural light that fills Thirtieth Street versus the harsh fluorescent glare of Penn’s underground expanse); spatial (the high ceilings and symmetrical plan of Thirtieth Street, so helpful for visitors to orient themselves, versus Penn’s befuddling catacombs); and even social (the implicit democracy of the benches that limn Thirtieth Street’s main concourse versus the explicit hierarchy of Penn’s isolated waiting rooms, which are reserved for ticket holders and divided by class).” Some books have indexes, indices, whatever. No one knows why. But there they are, long lists of words with page numbers after them. In my book, the index will be a single page with the words “Just fucking Google it.” But I’m being churlish. Sam Leith argues, convincingly, that indexers—who somehow write indexes for a living—are doing the Lord’s work: “It would be a cliché to say that indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. But unsung they generally are: no indexer usually expects or receives credit by name in books where everyone from the font designer to the snapper of the author photograph tends to get a solemn shout-out. And heroes they are, too: the index is, in any nonfiction book, more useful than almost anything else in the apparatus. It is a map of the text; a cunningly devised series of magical shortcuts that can in the good case save a scholar many hours of work, and in the bad one save a bookshop-browsing cabinet minister from having to buy a former colleague’s memoirs. A good index is, as Harold Macmillan wrote when inaugurating the society sixty years ago, ‘much more than a guide to the contents of a book. It can often give a far clearer glimpse of its spirit than the blurb-writers or critics are able to do.’ ” Read More
March 29, 2017 In Memoriam Bob Silvers’s Vision By Adam Thirlwell Bob Silvers made his writers want to be equal to a possible image he had of a possible you. Robert B. Silvers I was thirty when Bob Silvers first sent me a book for review—a collection of Nabokov’s translations of Russian poetry into English. This was toward the end of 2008. I revered The New York Review of Books; it was an ideal supranational habitat. The unexpected FedEx package, with its accompanying modest note making the proposal, as if continuing a permanent—if ineffable—conversation, made me dazzlingly anxious. A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed—on New Year’s Eve, which was also, I would discover, his birthday—to say that while reading “with admiration” a book I had written, he had noticed an error in it that might be corrected in a paperback edition. I had quoted the duc de Saint-Simon’s portrait of “Madame” from his Memoirs and glossed this as a portrait of Madame de Maintenon. “Saint-Simon was referring not to Madame de Maintenon,” wrote Bob—or, as I was to find out, dictated Bob, “but to ‘Madame,’ i.e. Elizabeth Charlotte, Palatine of Bavaria, second wife of ‘Monsieur,’ duc d’Orleans. She was in fact German.” I felt a rush of total love. Read More