March 3, 2017 Our Correspondents Golden Cicada By Wei Tchou Drinking at Jersey City’s baijiu bar. Photo by Dave Cook, 2011. When my date suggested grabbing a drink Sunday night at the Golden Cicada in Jersey City, I thought that I’d discovered a kindred spirit. But as we scurried from the PATH train down the blowy, open sidewalk, I became less confident. It was only a second date, and when I told him I’d moved to New York City “to follow my dreams,” he asked if my dream was to ride the PATH train to a bar in Jersey City. I laughed. “My dream,” I said, pulling up the hood of my coat against the wind, “was to ride the PATH to a baijiu bar in Jersey City.” We paused at a crosswalk. “Wait, it’s a baijiu bar?” he said. “You didn’t know?” I asked, pulling my hood down to look at his face. “I just Googled the address after you mentioned it the other day,” he admitted. We started walking again. It was too late to make new plans. Read More
March 3, 2017 The Lives of Others Cooking for the Pope By Edward White Bartolomeo Scappi, the Renaissance’s most innovative chef, revolutionized the culinary arts. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus (detail), 1590–1591, oil on panel, 28″ x 23″. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. Daniele da Volterra’s most lasting mark on the world was a commission of dubious honor: retouching—or defacing, depending on one’s point of view—a fresco inside the Sistine Chapel created by his late mentor, Michelangelo. Artists had hailed The Last Judgment on its unveiling in 1541, but its depictions of a beardless Christ and wingless angels, all of them nude, outraged papal officials, who ordered that Biblical modesty be upheld by the addition of loincloths. Daniele was in his late fifties, with an illustrious career behind him; it would surely have pained him to know that four and a half centuries later he would still be known as Il Braghettone—“the trouser-maker”—the man whose job it had been to splodge moralizing graffiti over his friend’s masterpiece. Read More
March 3, 2017 On the Shelf Now It’s Your Turn to Live Here, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from Grey Gardens. “I can’t stand being in this house,” Little Edie says in Grey Gardens. “In the first place, it makes me terribly nervous. I’m scared to death of doors, locks, people roaming around in the background, under the trees, in the bushes, I’m absolutely terrified.” And now, reader, you can own that house—for just twenty million dollars! Sally Quinn, the D.C. doyenne who restored the East Hampton home and threw many a lavish party there, is putting it on the market, with a glass menagerie of Little Edie’s kitten figurines still intact. Katie Rogers writes, “The home was long ago restored to its old Hamptons charm, and cleared of all cat smells—unless, Ms. Quinn said, you happen to stick your nose into a particular corner of the foyer after a rainstorm that lasts days. The house is decorated in soft blues and floral wallpaper and is dotted with plenty of fat-leaf potted plants. It is vibrant even in winter … Whoever buys Grey Gardens will be taking on a home with a nearly mythic history. Completed in 1897, the home became infamous under the care (or lack thereof) of Little Edie and her mother, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, the first cousin and aunt of Mrs. Onassis. Their plight generated headlines when the Suffolk County health department raided the house in 1971; the authorities cited every known housing code violation … ‘This home will not be attractive to a Russian oligarch,’ Ms. Quinn said dryly.” Writing about other people is torture—not for the writer, but for the written. Emmanuel Carrère says to Wyatt Mason, “To write about others is an enormous problem. The sincerity that you can exhibit with yourself, you have no right to inflict on anyone else … It makes me think of a sentence, something absolutely horrible … It was fifteen or twenty years ago, in an interview with General Massu of the French Army, who had been accused of torturing men in Algeria … In the interview, Massu said, of la gégène—torture with electric prods from a generator—‘Listen. Don’t exaggerate. The prods? I tried them on myself. It hurts, but not worse than that.’ The nonsense of that statement! … I have used the generator on people other than myself. And that bothers me. I don’t like that idea. I’m not a good man, unfortunately. I would like to be a good man. I admire goodness and virtue most. But I am not very good.” Read More
March 2, 2017 Our Correspondents Geronimo Takes Flight By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. This week: Geronimo the beaver takes flight. Design by Kristen Radtke. The plane makes a careful approach, ready for the drop. Now into the air and down they swing! Down to the ground near a stream or a lake. The box opens and a most unusual and novel trip ends for Mister Beaver. —from Fur for the Future Poor fellow! He finally became resigned, and as soon as we approached him, would crawl back into his box ready to go aloft again. —Elmo Heter, Idaho Fish and Game Department Name: Geronimo Species: Castor canadensis Years Active: the late 1940s Distinguishing Features: four orange front teeth, impressive work ethic, pungent odor Skills: landscape architecture, family planning, no detectable fear of heights Habitat: The Idaho backcountry Additional Notes: I’ve spent the past week wondering how this country might have turned out differently if, two hundred years ago, we’d made our national symbol the North American beaver. Thomas Jefferson reportedly selected the bald eagle for its visage—that focused, Gregory Peck glower. The beaver face, on the other hand, is much more comically designed: it’s myopic and weak-chinned, with Paul Giamatti cheeks. Though graceful when swimming the depths of the ponds they help dredge and fortify, on land (where most humans observe them) beavers only waddle through the mud, cutting quite the opposite figure than certain iconic birds of prey gliding on canyon updrafts. Read More
March 2, 2017 Look Berlin Living Rooms By Dominique Nabokov & Darryl Pinckney Christian Boros (German advertising maestro) and Karen Lohmann Boros (art historian). Berlin Mitte, 2015. When I lived in West Berlin during the last days of the wall, the historical image of the Berlin apartment had for me two facets, both familiar from literature, film, and art. The working-class apartment was part of the story of suffering in the German capital. “A Berlin apartment can kill,” Heinrich Zille reported in the 1920s. And then there was the apartment of the bourgeoisie, which in art seemed to become immediately a setting, not the subject. But in the divided city, housing was no longer so much a question of whether it was intended for the poor or for the rich as one of whether it was a new building or an old one. We were all young then and wanted romantic spaces—the prewar architecture of the city, a city that in those days still showed blank spaces, areas of the not yet reclaimed. In the time of the Berlin Wall, the city’s medieval remains, its eighteenth-century charms, most of Schinkel’s glorious neoclassicism, and its echoes in Frankfurter Allee were in East Berlin. So, too, were the mistakes, public and domestic, of the Soviet style. West Berlin had its early and late concrete monuments to modernist values. And both sides tried to distract from the wall by constructing city centers some distance from the former center of town. East Berlin had Alexanderplatz; West Berlin had Europa Center—in both cases modernism’s unattractive utilitarian descendants. But the Berlin that the twentieth century would one cold November night come to an end in gave the feeling of being in general a late nineteenth century creation—solid, sturdy, ample. One dominant apartment house-design unified the city. Many addresses were front and rear buildings separated by a cobblestone courtyard. The hinterhof struck me as utterly German. It was what set Berlin apart from the way the British lived in London or the French in their capital. It captured that sense of Berlin as being secretly cozy, in spite of the city’s reputation to the contrary. Read More
March 2, 2017 On the Shelf The Mystery of Garfield’s Gender, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The ungendered, unreal feline. Photo: Antomoro In the third century B.C., Alexandria had one hell of a library—the finest center of learning in the ancient world, an iconic metaphor for humanity’s quest for knowledge, et cetera. Then it was burned. After that, the city lacked a decent library for, oh, several centuries … then several more … then a few more after that … until, in 2002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened, restoring the promise of antiquity. That library sprung from the efforts of Mostafa A. H. el-Abbadi, an Egyptian historian who died last month at eighty-eight. Jonathan Guyer writes, “Professor Abbadi’s dream of a new library—a modern version of the magnificent center of learning of ancient times—could be traced to 1972 … ‘If we want to justify our claim to be connected spiritually with the ancient tradition, we must follow the ancient example by starting a great universal library’ … When Nixon visited Egypt in 1974, he and President Anwar el-Sadat rode by train to Alexandria’s ancient ruins to observe their faded grandeur. When Nixon asked about the ancient library’s location and history, no one in the Egyptian entourage had an answer. [Professor Abbadi realized] how deeply the ancient library resonated, not only with Egyptians but also with many around the world who shared his scholarly thirst.” But who needs libraries when we’ve got Wikipedia, right? Yes, the future of knowledge is radically decentralized, completely free … and, now, engaged in a knockdown, drag-out war over the gender identity of a lasagna-loving cartoon cat. Avi Selk and Michael Cavna explain, “Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week after a sixty-hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat: male one minute; not the next. ‘He may have been a boy in 1981, but he’s not now,’ one editor argued … ‘Every character (including Garfield himself!) constantly refers to Garfield unambiguously as male, and always using male pronouns,’ one editor wrote—listing nearly three dozen comic strips across nearly four decades … Garfield’s gender swapped twenty times over two-and-a-half days (during which his religion was briefly listed as Shiite Muslim for some reason) before an administrator was forced to step in.” Read More