October 6, 2016 Look Circumstantial Pleasures By Dan Piepenbring Since the late seventies, Lewis Klahr has garnered praise for his collage films, whose use of midcentury imagery inspires what the historian Tom Gunning has called “an interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting.” A new exhibition at Zurich’s Grieder Contemporary, in association with London’s Anthony Reynolds Gallery, finds Klahr pursuing collage outside of film for the first time; in addition to a new movie, he’s debuting a set of standalone works. “When I first started doing this, in my late twenties, I was really trying to bring my childhood back,” he told Blouin ArtInfo in 2013. “I wanted the world to look like that again. As I aged, and as I grew as an artist, that became not the concern anymore in the same way. Then it was more about memory. Now it’s just a language; it’s a place I like hanging out. It’s this idea of looking at the world with the openness and wonder of a child, so you’re seeing things fresh.” Lewis Klahr, At Night, 2015, collage on cardboard, 20 1/2″ x 8 7/8″. Read More
October 6, 2016 On Music Leave Alexa Alone By Paul Grimstad Listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho. 1. The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He sounded sort of like Bob Dylan, if Bob had just been defrosted out of a block of carbonite. (I was intensely devoted to The Empire Strikes Back, so carbonite was almost always on my mind.) Other Steely Dan records like Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, The Royal Scam, and Aja opened onto a strange and ominous world: double helixes in the sky, Haitian divorcées, the rise and fall of an LSD chef named Charlemagne, someone who drinks Scotch and then “dies behind the wheel.” The photo on the inside gatefold of the Greatest Hits showed two nasty-looking guys standing in what appeared to be a hotel dining room. Read More
October 6, 2016 On the Shelf Embrace Your Inner Airport, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Bjorn Krogstad, Figure in Airfield, 1983. The airport is more than a place—it’s a state of mind. If you’re still wracked with anxiety and frustration whenever you head to JFK, be advised that the whole world is essentially an airport at this point, and it’s up to you to make peace with the essence of airportness. Christopher Schaberg writes, “Airportness transcends airports themselves. It has to do not so much with surface-level features such as sloping hallways and undulating rooflines but a host of more disparate effects that make air travel something humans can internalize and learn to live with. Airportness is how flight becomes natural to us, expected and accepted: contrails in the sky, layovers between flights … Airportness is all around us, exceeding not only airports but also air travel itself, perhaps even becoming a kind of proxy for what it means to be American. Airportness shifts from the derogatory to the sacrosanct, sliding from protected spaces to abject places.” You might’ve held off on reading Kierkegaard because you assume that, like most philosophical writing, his books are stiff, boring clumps of logical premises shouted at you by a dead white man. But you’re wrong. They’re unlike any other philosophical writing before or since. Will Rees explains, “John Updike famously argued that Kierkegaard’s works owe much to the art of novel-writing. After all, they are written by and about fictional characters whose worldviews they attempt to occupy from within. In a way that would please the contemporary teacher of creative writing, Kierkegaard does not tell—he shows. But we mustn’t get carried away; we do Kierkegaard a disservice if we simply appreciate his books. By departing from the normal philosophical form, they arguably tighten rather than slacken the demand on our attention, because arguments are present, but one must search for them, and often they reside in what Kierkegaard’s characters do not or cannot say—in the implicit gaps in their imperfect world views.” Read More
October 5, 2016 The Lives of Others Rise Up By Edward White Alexander Bedward’s mythical powers of flight. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. It’s impossible to know exactly how many people amassed in August Town, Jamaica, on New Year’s Eve, 1920, to watch Alexander Bedward fly to heaven. Some eyewitnesses claimed thousands: dense clumps of people wading in the shallow waters of the Hope River, crowding the banks or perched in the branches of the surrounding trees. Most of them were unquestioning believers to whom Bedward’s words had the weight of Scripture. For thirty years he had built a vast following by healing, rejuvenating, and baptizing in this very stretch of water, helping ordinary people to know God—and themselves—in ways they’d never imagined possible. Now in his seventies, Bedward sat in a wooden throne, dressed in pristine white robes, awaiting the sweet moment of prophetic fulfillment when he, like Elijah before him, would soar into the unknowable beyond. His ascent, he promised his followers, would hasten the Rapture; before the sun had set, he would be gone and they would be free. Some had their doubts. In fact, a great many Jamaicans dismissed him as either a charlatan or one of the island’s growing number of feebleminded unfortunates. The idea that Jamaica was suffering an epidemic of insanity had first surfaced in the 1890s, when the Gleaner newspaper ran reports about the vast overcrowding of the island’s only asylum: supposed proof that a contagion of madness was spreading out of control, especially among the black population. According to the historian Leonard Smith, in 1863/64 the Jamaican Lunatic Asylum admitted seventy-one black people and two white people; twenty-five years later, the annual white intake had stayed exactly the same, but the number of black patients had increased to 153. Read More
October 5, 2016 Contests This Year’s #ReadEverywhere Contest Winners By The Paris Review This summer we invited you to #ReadEverywhere with The Paris Review and the London Review of Books. And guess what? We did it. We read literally everywhere. Good work, everyone. The time has come to announce our contest winners, so that they may become the envy of their communities. THIRD RUNNER-UP: When he’s not softening the image of a certain multinational entertainment conglomerate, this mouse man beheads himself and settles down with the London Review of Books. For his willingness to do this in public, he’ll receive a bundle of swag from the LRB and The Paris Review. (T-shirts, vintage back issues, fancy office supplies, and the like.) Kudos, mouse man! Read More
October 5, 2016 Revisited Behold the Zenith Z-19 By Virginia Heffernan Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. The Zenith Z-19. The Zenith Z-19 is not a computer. It’s an end point of memory and desire, a vanishing horizon, a terminus, a terminal. It is also certainly not a monitor. In 1979 my family’s Zenith Z-19 sat dull-eyed on a whitewashed, built-in desk in my parents’ L-shaped bedroom in New Hampshire. That year I was ten, and I was never not at that terminal. I beheld my Zenith Z-19 as I never had, and never will, not even close, observe a great painting or statue at Angkor Wat or the Vatican. I will never gaze at the aurora borealis that way—something as wordless, undying and not mine as the night sky? Frankly I find it hard to believe stars hold more than the polite interest of other people. Was it flat? It was, to the touch. You could jab in, past the hard, battleship-hued casing, touching a rectangular screen with pleasing dimensions that drew on the golden mean. Whatever static my fingers lifted, I remember it as minor, but I distinctly remember the uppermost layer of that machine’s complexion to be petal-soft and cool—poreless, scaleless, hairless, but vibrating with life like a mammal. I can see it now, in a cramped image, on my tarty MacBook pixmap, where the old terminal’s recessive palate seems despairingly out of place. On Wikipedia, the screen plays as olive drab—but drab it was not. Read More