September 29, 2016 On the Shelf The Seedy Splendors of the Love Motel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Capri, from Jur Oster and Vera van de Sandt’s Love Land Stop Time. Image via Hyperallergic. Herman Melville ended his life as a failure, with no inkling of the posthumous glories to come. It sounds so miserable when you put it that way, doesn’t it? And in many ways it was. But his final years had small pleasures of their own. Mark Beauregard writes, “Having failed commercially as a novelist, he had spent the last twenty-five years of his life out of the public eye, and he had written poetry nearly every day. Mostly, his verse was tortured and cramped, and he often drew his themes from unlikely sources: ancient Greece and Rome, the Holy Land, myths, gods, and temple architecture … Six days a week, he walked west from his apartment at 104 East Twenty-Sixth Street, across lower Manhattan, to the docks along the North River (as the Hudson was then known). His job was to check ships’ cargoes against their bills of lading and write reports, for which he earned four dollars a day (a salary that never changed). He walked back home in the evening, an unwavering routine. After dinner, he wrote poems late into the night.” Time was, comic books were seedy, pulpy diversions designed to educate the curious youth about the nightlife and detective folkways and various intricate sorts of lingerie. Now that they’re a dignified art form, Titan Comics is hoping to bring them back to the gutter, launching several sordid new series. Among them is Peepland: “Written by crime authors Gary Phillips and Christa Faust—herself a former peep show employee—with art from rising star Andrea Camerini, the comic lifts the lid on the seedy goings-on at 1980s Times Square peep-show booths … It almost feels as though we’re entering into a fresh golden age of comics doing the job they were intended to—corrupting the innocent minds of young people.” Read More
September 28, 2016 On Film The Scary Peeper By Dan Piepenbring Nothing so appalling … In Canada today, Home Depot announced that it was pulling a Halloween decoration called “Scary Peeper Creeper” from its shelves. Shoppers were deeply perturbed by the Peeper’s pockmarked, rubbery visage, and for good reason—he’s designed to scare the living shit out of people. “Realistic face looks just like a real man is peering through the window at you,” boasted the description on Home Depot’s website; all that’s missing is the labored mouth-breathing. The manufacturer advises sticking him “on the passenger side of a car window, in a bedroom window, basement window, kitchen window, bathroom window, or garage window … We’d love to hear where you’ve gotten good results with your Scary Peeper!” The debacle brought to mind Herschell Gordon Lewis, cinema’s very own Scary Peeper, who got very good results with his pictures. He died yesterday at ninety. (It’s been a bad week for voyeurs.) In his forty-one turns as a director, he did more to popularize gore, splatter, and willful puerility than a Peeper in every window could do. His films range from the out-and-out depraved (Blood Feast, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In) to the merely lascivious (Boin-n-g!, Living Venus, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre), but—per the Peeper Code of Conduct—they were always, always in poor taste. Read More
September 28, 2016 Our Correspondents Autumn Hours, Part 5 By Vanessa Davis Catch up with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of Vanessa Davis’s column. Read More
September 28, 2016 First Person Upon Knowing I Must Soon Depart By Ann Beattie Hummingbird. No, not dying. Not just yet.* But already, still at home, the feeling of jet lag begins. Time seems omnipresent, yet too brief. Birthday presents are opened early. I stare at the bag from the pharmacy. Is this any time to try the antipsychotic? (Prescribed for sleep. All doctors hate Ambien, and respond to hearing the name of the drug the way bushmen respond to the scent of wild boar, unless they’re otherwise occupied by appearing on a reality show.) Required reading has been abandoned; already playing hooky by substituting reading one writer for another. I believe myself to be the only writer now reading John O’Hara instead of Peter Taylor, which says nothing about either man, much about me, and has nothing to do with the antipsychotic, as I have yet to work up the courage to ingest a pill. Fondly, I observe the hummingbirds in the garden: “Greenie” has been feinting during its swirl upward, plotting its faux midair crash into “Blackie” (we aren’t very original in our nicknaming). They sink rapidly, like floaters in opposite eyes, then rise again, in a complex spiral. We’ve been stumped about what to call the almost equally dark hummingbird who has two white spots on its back wings, if you call them wings. This one, we merely call, “the one with white.” (Move over, Wilkie Collins.) Read More
September 28, 2016 On the Shelf There Will Be No More Birthday Celebrations, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The insignia of a master. Mike Davis was an artist, and the irate company-wide memorandum was his canvas. Few in the history of humankind have recognized the savage beauty of this lowliest of media. But Davis—the erstwhile head of Tiger Oil Company, and now dead at eighty-five—shattered the limits of the form with routine ease, showing us just how big an asshole one man could be to his employees. Consider his memos a spin-off of the Theater of Cruelty: “ ‘There will be no more birthday celebrations, birthday cakes, levity or celebrations of any kind within the office,’ the boss wrote on Feb. 8, 1978. ‘This is a business office. If you have to celebrate, do it after office hours on your own time.’ … ‘Do not speak to me when you see me,’ the man had ordered in a memo the month before. ‘If I want to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don’t want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you.’ ” It’s hard enough to get a human being to pay to read your book. Now robots are refusing to pony up, too. Google has just “fed” some eleven thousand books to its artificial intelligence, hoping to teach it how to talk like a real boy. But even though they’re rolling in the dough, Google didn’t pay any of the authors of these books, Richard Lea writes: “After feeding these books into a neural network, the system was able to generate fluent, natural-sounding sentences. According to a Google spokesman—who didn’t want to be named—products such as the Google app will be ‘much more useful if they can capture the nuance of language better’ … ‘The research in question uses these novels for the exact purpose intended by their authors—to be read,’ [Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger] argues. ‘It shouldn’t matter whether it’s a machine or a human doing the copying and reading, especially when behind the machine stands a multibillion dollar corporation which has time and again bent over backwards devising ways to monetize creative content without compensating the creators of that content.’ ” Read More
September 27, 2016 Look Bare Shouldered Beauty By Dan Piepenbring Suellen Rocca’s “Bare Shouldered Beauty: Works from 1965 to 1969” is showing at Matthew Marks Gallery through October 22. In the late sixties, Rocca was part of the Hairy Who, a group of six imagist artists from Chicago; their exhibitions gained renown for their magpie approach, drawing influences from pop culture, magazines, comic books, and “trash treasures,” as Rocca’s collaborator Ray Yoshida called them. Rocca has referred to her work from this period as her “autobiography.” “I was this young mother making these paintings,” she told Hyperallergic last year. “It was a wonderful period. My son would take a nap and I’d rush to my knotty pine studio and work on a painting. Having a toddler and a baby and all these exciting shows, it was wonderful. It was a happy time.” Suellen Rocca, Palm Finger, 1968, oil on canvas, 20 1/2″ x 16 1/2″. Read More