November 3, 2016 Our Correspondents Taking the Train to Charlottesville By Wei Tchou Amtrak’s Great Dome car. Every year, I take a Northeast Regional southbound to Charlottesville to visit two dear friends and their pair of gorgeous, sweetly neurotic German shepherds. I went once in the spring after moving to New York, but two years in the city had made me susceptible to Virginia pollen, teary-eyed and wheezing every time I went outdoors. So now I visit in autumn when the air is crisp and the leaves have just turned. It’s a seven-hour train ride through the changing colors of the Delaware River and the Shenandoah Valley—just enough time to read the paper and shake myself of my daily accumulations. Last weekend, I sprawled out across two seats, fanning out a collection of fresh magazines and books that might have looked pretty on Instagram had I bothered to pull the cell phone out of my bag. Instead, I let its periodic, muffled pings blend into the low hum of wheels turning. I spent most of my time staring out of the window anyway, watching buildings grow smaller until they were just slight, white homes punctuating long stretches of green. You get dreamy on long train rides—you don’t waste time as much as you drift on it. Read More
November 3, 2016 On the Shelf You Can See Through Windows, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Caspar David Friedrich, Window Looking Over the Park, 1810–11. When I wrote a few days ago about baby boomers who want to spend eternity in concrete caskets at the bottom of the ocean, I thought it was a shoo-in for the biggest funeral innovation of the week. Not so. You could also have your ashes scattered at the Metropolitan Opera—though, be warned, people will get all huffy about it, for some reason. A Dallas man named Roger Kaiser has apologized for sprinkling a “white powdery substance” on the Met’s floors during a performance this week. That powder was all that remained of his friend Terry Turner, and he wanted Turner to stay there for good: “I told Terry that if he would like, I would take some of his ashes to opera houses that I visited in the future,” he wrote in his apology. “Trying to lighten the mood, I jokingly told Terry they would never be able to vacuum all of him up. He would be there forever enjoying all the beautiful music.” Here is a brutal reality about windows: they’re transparent. It’s such an obvious statement, and yet, as Edwin Heathcote writes, fewer and fewer people seem to understand it: “You can have a panoramic window, but there will also be a view back in. It is a condition highlighted in recent complaints by residents in the Neo Bankside apartments that visitors to neighboring Tate Modern’s new viewing gallery were using it to look right into their apartments. There have been letters. Sir Nicholas Serota, the outgoing director of the Tate, probably didn’t help when he suggested the residents put up net curtains. Yet the flippant (and also rather brilliant) comment did highlight a contemporary condition … The difficulty stems from a confusion at the heart of contemporary architecture—that is, the difference between a window and a wall.” Read More
November 2, 2016 Look Pleasures of the Dance By Dan Piepenbring Jesse Mockrin’s exhibition “Pleasures of Dance” opens tonight at New York’s Nathalie Karg Gallery; her work is on display through December 18. Mockrin’s paintings borrow liberally, and often directly, from the late Baroque period; her work is people with androgynes in rococo dress. “I think one of the things that drew me to Rococo is the fluidity of gender,” Mockrin told T Magazine earlier this year. “It’s that slippage.” In an essay accompanying the exhibition, Edward Sterrett writes, “No one has asked with such insistent perspicacity why it is that in the painting of the high rococo, such a convoluted profusion of voluminous taffeta, of patterned damask, of coy, porcelanite thighs, is punctuated with a seemingly endless series of little side tables, shelves, and ottomans, jabbing awkwardly into the geometry of the room, tilting it outward so that the stray ribbon or rose that inevitably spill off their edges, appear as though tumbling off the pages of an open book.” English Tea, 2016, oil on linen, 37″ x 25″ Read More
November 2, 2016 Books The Meaning of the Bones By Michael LaPointe Does Shakespeare really have “universal appeal”? From the U.K. cover of Shakespeare in Swahililand. “People frequently ask me why I devote so much time to seeking out facts about man’s past,” the paleontologist Louis Leakey said in 1964. “The past shows clearly that we all of us have a common origin and that our differences in race and color and creed are only superficial.” Leakey sought to prove that humankind’s earliest ancestors evolved in East Africa’s Rift Valley, and in doing so, to invert the common Western idea that “Africa is always producing something new.” Rather than an endless fount of novelty, Leakey’s Africa held a promise of the immutable. He believed that excavating African earth could speak to the universal essence of humankind. Over the past few years, the literary critic Edward Wilson-Lee went searching in East Africa for his own evidence of a shared humanity. Wilson-Lee, a Kenyan-born son of British descent, sought “the Holy Grail of Shakespeare studies”—the key to the Bard’s “universal appeal.” His new book Shakespeare in Swahililand: In Search of a Global Poet asks whether Shakespeare’s plays, like Leakey’s specimens, can point toward an essential human quality. Read More
November 2, 2016 On the Shelf There’s Our Bernhard, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, 1970. Anne Carson prizes brevity, which means, in the abstract, that she should be perfectly suited to these distracted times of ours. And maybe she is, even if she seems permanently ill at ease. In a new interview to support her collection Float, her answers sometimes suggest—and I mean this as a compliment—that she could find lucrative work as a copywriter for Hot Topic T-shirts: “I feel perfectly at home underwater.” “I do not believe in art as therapy.” “Volcanoes are dead easy to paint.” “I never liked Mona Lisa.” But then, every writer, even the real assholes, must call a truce with the great ugly publicity machine. How else to explain why Thomas Bernhard, king of the assholes, consented to make a documentary about himself back in 1970? His books, as Andrew Katzenstein writes, are teeming with curmudgeons who heap vitriol on “hacks—artists who seem more interested in fame and accolades than in the creation of meaningful work.” But he worked productively (kind of) with the Austrian director Ferry Radax: “After Bernhard began to have doubts about the project and threatened to withdraw his participation, he and Radax eventually compromised on strict terms: over the course of three days, Radax would film Bernhard sitting on a park bench as he discussed how he became a writer and his views on writing … Bernhard offers grim assessments of the writing life, suggesting the fanaticism with which he approached his work. A book is ‘nothing but a malignant ulcer, a cancerous tumor’ that has already metastasized and infected the body before it is removed. Writing only intensifies the isolation that all humans suffer, and authors he admires are ‘opponents, or enemies’ who need to be subdued, not inspirations to be emulated.” Read More