February 28, 2017 On the Shelf America Needs Lunar Cocktails, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An artist’s rendering of the Lunar Hilton lounge. Image via the Outline. The future looks so shitty now. Sure, maybe in fifteen, twenty years we’ll be able to get through airport security without taking our shoes off, or we could watch streaming high-definition video while we get an MRI. But we’ve lost sight of the one advance that would really help us: building a luxury hotel on the moon. In 1967, Barron Hilton, of those Hiltons, had his eye on the prize: at a conference for the American Astronautical Society, he shared his vision. Daniel Oberhaus explains, “The crown jewel of the Lunar Hilton would, of course, be its Galaxy Lounge. ‘If you think we are not going to have a cocktail lounge, you don’t know Hilton—or travelers,’ Hilton quipped. In the Galaxy Lounge, lunar tourists would be able to ‘enjoy a martini and see the stars!’ Although the lounge would be underground, the guests would enjoy a view of Earth and outer space through ‘thermopane windows.’ All cocktails would be prepared by a robotic wait staff, which would only need to drop a tablet into a glass of pure ethyl alcohol and water and voila: an instant martini, Manhattan, or gin … He was, by all accounts, very serious about trying to make them a reality. ‘I firmly believe that we are going to have Hiltons in outer space.’ ” Writing cultural criticism, Jo Livingstone is determined to avoid the Trump trap—is there really no way, she wonders, to look at art now without thinking of the executive branch? “Painting, music, television, the visual culture of the internet, poetry: These art forms and their consumers and critics represent an aesthetic space whose boundaries are not defined by the president. Unless we believe in and nurture this space, the critic is stuck forever explaining how this or that book is crucial reading ‘in Trump’s America.’ But this type of reviewing hobbles thought, because it reduces all art to the structure of satire. It is as if Trump is a spider in the middle of a web, and every review that tethers the meaning of a pop song to his regime strengthens it. I am guilty of this type of criticism, in very recent weeks. But I know that I write such things as an emotional defense of my own place in the culture. Nobody wants to feel useless.” Read More
February 27, 2017 First Person Like Art By Glenn O’Brien Working in advertising gave me the resources to do what I thought was art—with a logo. From the cover of Like Art. Art school is the place you go to learn how to be a creative director, even if you don’t know that yet. You start out wanting to be a painter, a sculptor, an installation artist (an installer?) or performance artist (nonentertaining performer), and so you start out learning to be an artist—drawing, painting, and reading theory—and then one day you find yourself drawing storyboards for a hipster beer. It’s just a temporary thing, or so you tell yourself. You could drive a taxi or wait tables and make art in your spare time, but of course that is exhausting and dispiriting if not demeaning, compared to the big-time artists whose lives you read about. Where’s the loft? Who’s your dealer? Where’s your summerhouse? Somehow, you may find you don’t feel like painting in a room with a bathtub in it after a day sucking carbon monoxide as a bike messenger or taxi driver. Read More
February 27, 2017 Arts & Culture In a Word By Albert Mobilio An exhibition of drawings by Jackson Mac Low surveys his restless reinvention of the line. Jackson Mac Low, Hi, n.d., ink on paper, 9 1/4″ x 12″. At the poetry readings I attended around New York City in the eighties and nineties, a familiar figure often occupied the front row: an elfin gentleman with dramatic eyebrows and a great wave of hair to match. At my very first events, he drew notice because he sat with pen in hand, writing throughout the reading, as if he were taking dictation. I recall wondering if he was a journalist or another poet cribbing lines from his fellows. I soon learned that he was the legendary composer, performer, and poet Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) and that in all likelihood he was culling words and phrases to deploy in the many recombination schemes he used to create his texts. With roots in the Fluxus movement and an early association with John Cage in the fifties, Mac Low emerged as one the most rigorously adventurous American poets in the decades that followed. Not the least part of his unconventional profile was his energetic work across genres and art forms: writing poems and prose in diverse modes, composing and performing music, collaborating with theater and dance companies, and creating a body of visual art that might be said to incorporate something of each of these multifarious pursuits. A sampling of that work—mostly done with pen or crayon on paper—is currently on view at the Drawing Center in a show titled “Lines–Letters–Words.” The title is literally accurate in that it describes the pieces on display, which, indeed, depict lines, letters, and words. But the sequence of the terms makes the title especially apt, as it gets at the heart of Mac Low’s enterprise as a poet and artist: understanding the construction of communication; that is, how mere lines are bent to configure something called letters and these letters are assembled to create that improbable result, a word. The sequence is equally relevant when read backward; for Mac Low, disaggregating meaning from sound, sound from words and letters, and ultimately from the random marks on a page achieved the same end: revealing the relation between meaning and its constitute parts. Read More
February 27, 2017 On the Shelf Walden: The Video Game, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Finally, a chance to experience the magic of Walden firsthand! I like Walden as much as the next guy. My problem with it—my problem with all books—is that it’s just such a passive experience for the reader. Thoreau does all the talking; I’m just supposed to listen. Thoreau does all the fishing; I’m just supposed to watch. Thoreau plants all the beans; he never asks, Hey, reader, would you like to come out here and give me a hand with the beans sometime? But all that’s about to change with Walden, a Game, the new video-game adaptation of Thoreau’s treatise on solitude that puts you in control of your spiritual self-discovery. Its designers, Robin Pogrebin writes, hope to fuse the thrills of gaming to the joys of quiet contemplation: “The new video game, based on Thoreau’s nineteenth-century retreat in Massachusetts, will urge players to collect arrowheads, cast their fishing poles into a tranquil pond, buy penny candies and perhaps even jot notes in a journal—all while listening to music, nature sounds and excerpts from the author’s meditations … Should you not leave sufficient time for contemplation, or work too hard, the game cautions: ‘Your inspiration has become low, but can be regained by reading, attending to sounds of life in the distance, enjoying solitude and interacting with visitors, animal and human’ … The goal is not to win in any competitive sense, but to achieve work-life balance.” Nell Zink, who tends to greet realist novels with a very formidable eye roll, writes in praise of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which gave her “some rigorous realist fiction to love”: “ ‘Realistic’ novels … generally don’t even try. They want to ‘work,’ to be ‘good reads,’ by manipulating emblems of meaning smoothly in a framework of familiar myth. Many work contemptibly, steering sentimental nodules of canned subjectivity into the cheesiest myths imaginable. Authors hope to inhibit readers’ critical urges entirely for as long as a given book lasts; in essays, interviews, and formats like ‘My Writing Day,’ we hint at the tricks we use to facilitate total audience immersion in our shared dream. Where we do intend readers to exercise critical faculties, those should be directed at something other than the work. They want a trance state, and we want to give it to them. But in that transaction, something vital is lost. That could be the reason so many admirable people read nonfiction instead: You can’t communicate with people you’re trying to hypnotize!” Read More
February 24, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gunpowder, Gay Saints, Game Wardens By The Paris Review From Escaped Alone. In the February issue of Harper’s, the gospel historian Anthony Heilbut writes about gays in the black church, past and present: “Even when they haven’t been the preachers—and they sometimes are—they have constituted the pastors’ inner circle and praetorian guard. Music dominates the traditional black church; the minister is as much cantor as village explainer. In particular, a good ‘Mississippi whoop,’ or melodic growl, has been the making of many a preacher. And when the minister growled, the gay organist would accent his every moan, while the gay choir members made their joyous noise, and the gay saints (i.e., members of the flock) jumped to their feet, clapping and dancing in the spirit. The whole experience was orchestrated and annotated by gays and lesbians. This is one reason why many straight men have shunned the church—why, for example, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was ashamed to tell his mother that he had joined a choir.” —Lorin Stein Caryl Churchill’s new play Escaped Alone is at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for one more weekend. Go see it—it’s not even an hour long. Four British women, getting on in years, sit in the backyard and wonder where the time goes. They bicker, they ruminate, they joke about Tesco; in a manic outburst of nostalgia, they break into a skillful rendition of “Da Doo Ron Ron.” But there’s a nameless unease in the air—it might just be the apocalypse! Occasionally the stage goes dark and one of the women steps into a frame of terrifying red LED lights, where she recounts what I can only describe as fun facts about the end of the world. (“Smartphones were distributed by charities when rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking.”) If Pinter had lived to see—and sniff at—Black Mirror, he might’ve fused it to Kitchen Sink Drama like this, but it would’ve wanted for Churchill’s warmth. Not to say she’s a softy: the tension, in the play’s best moments, breaks its neighborliness, and a dark, Beckettian ooze seeps out. One of its many fine monologues goes like this: “Terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
February 24, 2017 Books Lamplight and Shadow By Alice Kaplan Patrick Modiano’s novels gaze through “the glass wall of our consciousness of history.” Patrick Modiano In a French TV show from 1990, the forty-five-year-old Patrick Modiano wanders around a supermarket on the rue de Sèvres in Paris. He speaks to himself and to the cameraman as he moves through the aisles of food, then pauses in front of a dairy case. He’s looking for traces of the Pax movie theater that once stood in the same spot, trying to recall where the screen was. But nothing he remembers is quite right, and his sentences break up in midcourse, leaving only verbal gestures at a past no longer visible. His attempt to locate the screen amounts to a fool’s errand. Like the writer in this video, the characters in Modiano’s fiction fail in their search for a lost past. His heroes are elusive, disappearing into the crowd, more comfortable listening than speaking their mind, and always aware of the futility of the hunt: their prey is forever receding. In The Black Notebook, translated with perfect pitch by Mark Polizzotti, a writer named Jean tries to fathom the life of a former girlfriend, Dannie, a woman with multiple pseudonyms and a mysterious bond with gangsters who lived in the Unic Hôtel, in the shadows of the Montparnasse train station. During their affair, the police question him about the criminal activities of the group, but he has no information to give them. In a quintessential scene, Jean stands on the sidewalk of his imagination and stares at the men through the glass window of their hotel lobby. He gazes into an impenetrable story, not for its decor or its nostalgic atmosphere, but for the pull history exerts on the present: “Perhaps the glass was opaque from inside, like a one-way mirror. Or else, very simply, dozens and dozens of years stood between us; they remained frozen in the past, in the middle of that hotel lobby, and we no longer lived, they and I, in the same space and time.” Modiano’s books are full of moments like this; they transmit something deep and essential we’re forced to reckon with, the glass wall of our consciousness of history. Read More