February 17, 2017 On the Shelf Mick Jagger Forgot He Wrote a Book, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Oops! From the cover of She’s the Boss, 1985. Memoirs are hot right now. “Lost” books are hot right now. So it stands to reason: if you could write a memoir and then somehow “lose” it—maybe, by, say, failing to remember that you ever wrote it at all—you’re gonna be rolling in the dough. But who, you might ask, could ever forget writing his own memoirs? The answer is simple: Mick Jagger, whose whole life lives under the banner of plausible deniability. Jagger, who’s claimed that he’ll never write an autobiography, has apparently forgotten that he already wrote one, of some seventy-thousand words, in the early eighties. Having expunged any memory of the book, he’s done more than any publicity tour could to enhance its salability. John Blake dishes: “Stuck in a secret hiding place right now I have Mick’s 75,000-word manuscript … Mick was reputedly paid an advance of £1 million, an extraordinary figure for the time. A ghost was appointed and publication scheduled. Only it didn’t work out quite like that … [In the book], Mick tells of buying a historic mansion, Stargroves, while high on acid and of trying out the life of horse-riding country squire. Having never ridden a horse before, he leapt on to a stallion, whereupon it reared and roared off ‘like a Ferrari’. Summoning his wits and some half-remembered horse facts, he gave the stallion a thump on the forehead right between the eyes and slowed it down … I was determined that this book needed to be published. Mick’s delightful manager, Joyce Smyth, responded encouragingly to my letter. Mick could not remember any manuscript.” While we’re failing to remember things—more believably and far more tragically, the culture has failed to canonize Freda DeKnight, a prominent black editor, writer, and cook whose midcentury fame has now completely evaporated. Donna Battle Pierce explains, “Born in 1909, DeKnight spent much of her fifty-four years collecting, protecting and celebrating African-American culture and traditions in the years after World War II up to the civil rights movement. Yet her name has been all but forgotten—she doesn’t even have that most basic of 21st century acknowledgements, a Wikipedia page … As the first food editor for Ebony magazine, DeKnight wrote a photo-driven monthly column that offered her home economist’s tips, as well as regional recipes from the “Negro community” of home cooks, professional chefs, caterers, restaurateurs and celebrities … DeKnight presented a more nuanced and often glamorous image of African-American cooking and culture—not just to African-American readers, but to the broader world.” Read More
February 16, 2017 Look Real Polaroids, Fake People By Dan Piepenbring Duane Hanson, Cowboy, 1984. Everyone makes an occasional jaunt to the uncanny valley, a term connoting the profound, atavistic fear we feel in the presence of robots that look and act like people: of objects flitting around in the vicinity of personhood. Though it’s been around since 1970, when it was coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the phrase has seen a noticeable surge in usage since 2000—the natural byproduct of humanity’s deep reckoning with the unstoppable rise of our android overlords. The sculptor Duane Hanson lived deep in the Uncanny Valley. He bought a lot of property there. And he didn’t have to bother with robotics, either; he provoked our disturbed wonderment with earthier stuff: you know, like polyester resin, fiberglass, polychrome, oil paint. Hanson made eerily, maybe even virulently realistic sculptures of American Everymen and Everywomen. When he died, in 1996, he left behind a small army of joggers, tourists, cops, cafeteria-goers, and sunbathers, all seemingly straight out of Disney World in 1985, and daring you to call them fake. Your typical Hanson sculpture is jauntily dressed, with sagging flesh and a pouchy pallor around the eyes not unlike that of our president. As I’ve written before, his blue-collar men and women are often found in repose, loafing or catching their breath, vaguely bruised by the world around them. They’re both delicate and vulgar, walking a fine line between the avuncular and the repellent—tailor-made, it seems, to arouse our deepest class anxieties. Read More
February 16, 2017 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 5: Sky Glow By Mike Powell Mike Powell’s column is about living in Arizona. Chip Simone, Universe, 2005. Courtesy the artist and Jackson Fine Art. Anyone who’s been here will tell you all about the light: its force, its starkness, how shadows seem to cut everything in two. I gather it’s a cowboy thing, the way hard light fosters fantasies of the desert as a place where all existence struggles against an unforgiving sun. Light here doesn’t just light, it judges. A pamphlet from the EPA says roughly 171 Arizonans die of melanoma each year. Only about twice as many go by homicide. But the real remarkable thing about this place isn’t the light, it’s the darkness. In some neighborhoods, you can walk three blocks between streetlights, losing sight of even your hands. Those short on material could build some rudimentary stand-up: I heard Tucson is so dark that … This is, they will tell you, for the benefit of astronomy, something Arizona excels in, but also for us other people, who buy into the idea of being that much closer to the stars in a romantic, chamber-of-commerce way. Read More
February 16, 2017 On the Shelf Hey, Is That Proust? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Quite possibly Proust. Photo via the Guardian. All those years of watching old wedding footage and searching for dead authors has really paid off: they’ve found Proust! In what’s believed to be his only appearance on film, Marcel races down the stairs, celebrating the 1904 nuptials of Élaine Greffulhe. He’s dapper. He’s alone. He’s Proust: “The black-and-white footage of a wedding cortège filmed in 1904 shows a brief glimpse of a man in his thirties with a neat moustache, wearing a bowler hat and pearl-grey formal suit, descending a flight of stairs on his own. Most of the other guests are in couples … ‘Because we know every detail of Proust’s life, we know from several sources that during those years he wore a bowler hat and pearl grey suit … It’s moving to say to ourselves that we are the first to see Proust since his contemporaries … even if it would be better if he was descending the steps a little less quickly! It’ll be fine when we have slowed the film down.’ ” People say late-night TV is improving in the age of Trump. Man, Colbert really brought it last night, they’ll say; or, Seth Meyers is on fire lately; or, Gee whiz, that Saturday Night Live program sure gave the administration what-for! But make no mistake: the late-night variety show is a pale and desiccated husk of what it once was. For a counterexample, Joan Walsh revisited the one-week stand Harry Belafonte had on the Tonight Show, where he filled in for Johnny Carson in February 1968: “The week featured Belafonte’s searing, in-depth interviews with Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., just months before both were assassinated … A few days later, King kibitzed with comedian Nipsey Russell, the blacklisted African-American singer Leon Bibb, and actor Paul Newman, who played his trombone. Another episode featured basketball star Wilt Chamberlain and actor Zero Mostel, who stood on the couch to shake the giant NBA player’s hand. Other guests included singers Buffy Sainte-Marie, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick, and Robert Goulet; comedians Tom and Dick Smothers; actor Sidney Poitier (Belafonte’s close friend); American poet laureate Marianne Moore; water-skier Ken White; and Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. Fifteen of the twenty-five guests that week were African-American. Only Belafonte could have pulled that off, says TV producer Norman Lear almost fifty years later. ‘He was an ambassador in both directions—to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him. It is rare to this day.’ ” Read More
February 15, 2017 Look Rhythmical Lines By Sarah Cowan Working in isolation, Wacław Szpakowski made mazelike drawings from single, continuous lines. Wacław Szpakowski, B9, 1926, ink on tracing paper, 13 3/4″ x 15 3/4″. When he was eighty-five, Wacław Szpakowski wrote a treatise for a lifetime project that no one had known about. Titled “Rhythmical Lines,” it describes a series of labyrinthine geometrical abstractions, each one produced from a single continuous line. He’d begun these drawings around 1900, when he was just seventeen—what started as sketches he then formalized, compiled, and made ever more intricate over the course of his life. His essay is written from the contrived vantage of the third person, betraying an anxiety about his own artistic validity. The drawings, he explains, “were experiments with the straight line conducted not in research laboratories but produced spontaneously at various places and random moments since all that was needed to make them was a piece of paper and a pencil.” Though the kernels of his ideas came from informal notebooks, the imposing virtuosity and opaqueness of Szpakowski’s final drawings are anything but spontaneous or random. His enigmatic process—how he could draw with such supreme evenhandedness, could make his designs so pristine and yet so intricate—is hinted at only in his few visible erasure marks. One drawing reveals two lines bordering the thick final one, a possible clue that Szpakowski may have gone over each design’s path three separate times. These works did not reach an audience until 1978, five years after Szpakowki’s death; today they’re still obscure and easily misunderstood. They’ve crept into exhibitions over the years, but mostly in the artist’s native Poland—there’s a rare opportunity now at New York’s Miguel Abreu Gallery, currently hosting the largest display of Szpakowski’s work ever mounted in the U.S. Read More
February 15, 2017 Our Correspondents I Must Enter Again the Round Zion of the Water Bead By Anthony Madrid An illustration from Struwwelpeter. It is not my habitual practice to go toe-to-toe with Mark Twain. I revere him, have made lengthy extracts from his works, have read aloud many times from Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. I find Twain much funnier than [insert the name of your favorite humorist here]. But. In 1891, stranded in Berlin, Twain set about translating the most famous children’s book ever written in German: Struwwelpeter. It is not a lengthy work. The whole thing is just ten medium-size poems, mostly in rhyming iambic tetrameter couplets. The German is hardly esoteric; it was originally composed (1844) for the benefit of the author’s three-year-old son. Twain, too, had the benefit of a young audience for his translation: his three daughters, Jean, Clara, and Susie (ages eleven, seventeen, and nineteen, respectively) were with him at the time, suffering in Berlin. There are several narratives here, all worth the telling, regarding Twain’s deal with the German language, the Germans’ deal with Struwwelpeter, Twain’s surprising his family by unveiling and performing his translation of the poems on Christmas morning, und so weiter. But we have a great deal of more essential ground to cover. Read More