March 13, 2017 Our Correspondents Daylight Saving Hell By Jane Stern I shouldn’t be obsessed with daylight saving time, but I am. Like a pregnancy due date, a college graduation, or an income-tax payment, I have DST circled in red on my calendar and amplified with exclamation marks. A few years ago, it meant nothing to me. I work at home—I can sleep or rise anytime I want, and I don’t get melancholy when the days get shorter. But here’s what I’ve come to anticipate with dread: changing the time on the clock in my car. It’s nothing fancy: a 2015 Subaru Forester that I bought used. Although I don’t consider myself a dimwit, I absolutely cannot figure out how to set the clock. Twice a year, when the time changes, I find myself sitting in the car reading the Forester manual or at my desk watching YouTube videos on this subject and still, setting the clock is unfathomable. Read More
March 13, 2017 On the Shelf Arsenic and Old Austen, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sort of looks like someone who was poisoned by arsenic, doesn’t it? Look, I want to believe it, too; I want to run through the streets shouting it until I’m blue in the face: Jane Austen was poisoned by arsenic! Janey Goddamn Austen, poisoned! Sandra Tuppen, a curator at the British Library, has purported that three pairs of Austen’s eyeglasses—one of which is strong enough to suggest that she suddenly went very nearly blind—could indicate that she suffered from arsenic poisoning, among the symptoms of which is a decline in visual acuity. It would be neat, wouldn’t it? Jane Austen, poisoned. It would spice things up a bit around here. But even though Austen died when she was only forty-one, this arsenic theory doesn’t hold much water, some say: “According to Dr. Cheryl Kinney, a national board member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, many things contained arsenic during the author’s lifetime: ‘Water, the soil, homemade wine (which Jane Austen refers to in her letters), wallpaper, clothing that had green pigment, glue, and medicines … People would often take arsenic on their own as they were convinced that arsenic in controlled quantities could improve energy, make you plumper, and more vital. Pots and jars of skin creams also could contain arsenic … There are many other more likely causes of cataracts than arsenic poisoning.’” In the midsixties, as America and the USSR were locked in a race to the moon, another contender quietly threw his hat in the ring: Edward Makuka Nkoloso, of Zambia. His methods were unorthodox; his students, untested; his uniforms, unprofessional. But the guy had moxie. Namwali Serpell writes, “Nkoloso wore a standard-issue combat helmet, a khaki military uniform, and a flowing cape—multicolored silk or heliotrope velvet, with an embroidered neck and festooned with medals. His astronauts sometimes wore green satin jackets with yellow trousers. (They were quick to explain that these were not space suits: ‘No, we are the Dynamite Rock Music Group when we are not space cadets.’) … He rolled his cadets down a hill in a forty-gallon oil drum to simulate the weightless conditions of the moon. ‘I also make them swing from the end of a long rope,’ he told a reporter. ‘When they reach the highest point, I cut the rope. This produces the feeling of freefall.’ ” Read More
March 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Paradise, Polysemy, Porridge By The Paris Review Marianna Rothen, Fear of Fear from the series “Shadows in Paradise”, 2016, archival pigment print, diptych, 17″ x 17″ each. If Barbara Loden directed a film using Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, it would begin to approximate the photographs in Marianna Rothen’s recent “Shadows in Paradise” series, on view at Steven Kasher Gallery. The images elicit a sixties noir and depict women in various guises in isolated scenes of distress, eroticism, and introspection. The series’s title takes its name from Remarque’s 1971 novel; the book appears in one of the photographs, laid open across the lap of a distracted reader. Rothen’s use of it may reference the woman’s (or, more generally, women’s) feeling of a simultaneous absence and doubling in her life: that her identity and her body—physically and psychologically—are always circumscribed by social and cultural forces, so that she becomes two people, neither one of whom, perhaps, she recognizes. In one of the works, in which two photographs are set side by side, the image on the left shows a woman gazing out a window at an overturned chair, a dress, shoes, and a wig on the lawn; the image on the right shows the same scene, but the woman at the window now inhabits the dress and wig and lies prone on the ground, as though dead. Rothen has said that her photographs reference Persona, Three Women, and Mulholland Drive, and too often she wears those influences on her sleeve, but, to me, these are images that couldn’t have been made by a man. Rothen shows an appreciation for the subtle variations of women’s predicament that can only come from having known it herself. —Nicole Rudick I don’t know whether it’s my favorite movie, but I do know Mulholland Drive is the only film I’ve ever seen twice in two days—as soon as I left the theater, I wanted to go back in. And I don’t know whether it’s my favorite moment in the movie, but I do know that when the mysterious woman in the Teatro Silencio opens her mouth and begins to sing in Spanish, and the song turns out to be “Crying,” and then she proceeds to sing the song in its entirety, I have never felt more satisfied, or more uncannily understood, by a work of art. And now, thanks to Beyond the Beyond: Music From the Films of David Lynch, edited by J. C. Gabel and Jessica Hundley, I know that Lynch has called this his favorite moment in all his films. Others may prefer the Woman in the Radiator from Eraserhead, or Dean Stockwell lip-syncing “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet, or the “Locomotion” scene in Inland Empire—as this lavishly illustrated compendium shows, nearly every film or show Lynch has made uses music to deep and mysterious effect. —Lorin Stein Read More
March 10, 2017 First Person Warp and Woof By David Ramsey Listening to Chances with Wolves’s lonesome, dusty mixtapes during a year of transition, loss, and decline. Christopher Colville, Coyote #6, 2016, from the series “Beyond Reckoning.” Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York. I first listened to my favorite radio program, Chances with Wolves, in the summer of 2015, while cleaning out my parents’ longtime home. The premise, more or less, is that a pair of DJs play strange old records and periodically mix in wolf-howl noises, sound clips, and echo effects. All of their two-hour episodes—now more than 350—are streamable, so I had hundreds of hours of material for the hundreds of hours of labor in the task at hand. Sonic distractions in difficult times always leave an imprint. It was a hard year. My father has Parkinson’s and my mother has multiple sclerosis; my wife, Grace, and I had moved to Nashville to help out. There are good days and bad days, but the prognosis is uncompromising in its bleak narrative: over time, things will get worse. The arc of one’s own mortal universe bends toward decline. If asked how he’s doing, my dad likes to respond, “Better than I’ll be doing the next time you see me.” Read More
March 10, 2017 On the Shelf Ride Your Sky Horse, Peasant, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Fantasy, 1925. Image via New York Review of Books. I’ve written in this space before about my affection for Billy Joel. I think he has catchy tunes. But in the interest of fairness, it must be said: some people think that Billy Joel is an agent of Lucifer, his baritone a cancer metastasizing across radios worldwide to poison all that is gay and true in popular song. Liel Leibovitz is in the latter camp, and that’s her right. Joel, she says, “is so nefarious precisely because [he] was given great gifts—his songs, as Bruce Springsteen correctly noted, are masterworks of musical construction—and yet chose to squander them in the service of nothing but his own lust, vanity, and insecurity. You can tell just by looking at him: While Dylan’s face is still a mask protecting him from having to deal with emotions, and Young’s face is a topographical map of misfortune, Billy Joel, bald and glistening, looks like a big, smooth stone, as if the years and the sorrows, like so much water, simply polished its surface but failed to penetrate its core.” An exhibition at the Royal Academy pays tribute to a famous 1932 Soviet art show, “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic”—the last gasp of the avant-garde before the state tightened its grip and forced its artists to churn out only propaganda. Jenny Uglow writes of the new show, “This is a big, dynamic, disturbing exhibition, a blaze of artistic hope undermined by suffering, death, and despair. It is all about power and its perils … At first painters, composers, and poets thrilled to the Revolution, which seemed to offer untold freedoms, a chance to use bold new forms—Cubism, abstraction, street art, film, jazz, satire, fantasy—and to share in the making of a new nation. The mystical Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall, and the Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Lyubov Popova, responded with equal euphoric intensity … Yet there is a sense of terror, as well as hope, in these blazing, color-filled canvases. As cosmic spheres hurtle forward in spear-like shards of light in Konstantin Yuon’s apocalyptic New Planet (1921), the dwarfed crowds seem to cower as much as to rejoice … Even the distinctive figurative paintings of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin … feel full of a yearning nostalgia. In his huge canvas, Fantasy (1925) the peasant riding the leaping red horse of revolution does not look forward, but back, to a vanished world.” Read More
March 9, 2017 Arts & Culture At the New York Antiquarian Book Fair By Sarah Funke Butler A swatch of midcentury wallpaper inspired by Romeo and Juliet, available at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair (Booth E17: Honey and Wax, New York; $250). The Park Avenue Armory is a vast preserve of space and air on a cramped island. I can imagine no better place for the Fifty-Seventh New York Antiquarian Book Fair of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB). Open tonight and through the weekend, it boasts more than two hundred dealers, tens of thousands of items, and combined hundreds of years of experience and scholarship. More important, it offers oxygen to a reading public choking on alternative facts—among the most insidious of which, often repeated in print, is that print is dead. This year’s fair illuminates a shift toward literary properties that live and breathe—manuscripts, letters, and original material, much of it defined by context. This is the stuff through which authors speak to us as they did to their publics and to one another; today their words sting in much the same way and in many of the same places. Imagine rare-book dealers as hunter-gatherers of primary source material, heading out with spears and sacks, returning with troves that speak to our present political moment as much as they do to the past. Book collecting has grown from a traditional quest for bibliographic completeness—such that one collection could be more or less the same as another—into a hybrid of subjective, curated material contributing to larger questions: What was happening in the life Sylvia Plath while she wrote the Ariel poems? Why did Hemingway answer a call to social justice when he had seemingly sold out to Esquire? How real is Moby-Dick? When Duke Ellington wrote Black, Brown, and Beige, was he making a patriotic statement? Below, some highlights from the fair. Read More