August 4, 2016 First Person It Stinks By Kent Russell The corpse flower’s indifferent, cosmic energy. A still from the New York Botanical Garden’s live stream of the corpse flower in bloom. As I strolled through the midmorning dumpster efflorescence of the west Bronx, I thought to myself, Summertime in the city is a contact high. It has less to do with sun and heat; it’s the sweet-sour reek of parboiling garbage that signals the height of the season is here. I breathed in summer as I skipped past wide, still puddles left by Friday’s A.M. showers. North of Fordham’s campus, I joined a long line of people buying tickets at the entrance to the New York Botanical Garden. I’d been waiting for days, watching the YouTube live stream, assiduously refreshing the NYBG Twitter feed when, finally, it happened—on Thursday night, the Garden’s nine-year-old corpse flower, its Amorphophallus titanum, started blooming. It was the first specimen of this famously gorgeous-yet-also-rank-as-hell flower to bloom in the Garden since July 7, 1939. That day, in a “tribute to the salubrious climate of the Bronx,” the Amorphophallus titanum was proclaimed official borough flower, a distinction it held until 2000. Read More
August 4, 2016 Our Correspondents Garbage Connector By Wei Tchou How the Brooklyn Bridge became a living landfill. Photo: Brooklyn Daily Eagle/Mary Frost. I too saw the satin ribbons, the scrunchies, the clothing tags, the fat knots of underwear and panty hose, had my eyes dazzled by the foil of a bag of potato chips, the ripped labels of Poland Spring water bottles, look’d on the clear plastic rosary with a cross, the teak mantra beads strung on red thread, look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of a plastic spoon, and saw how four black locks neatly proselytized in gold marker (JESUS <3’S YOU, BE A CHRISTIAN, KEEP GOD <3 FIRST <3, GOD IS GREAT). Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge one evening last week, I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me when I saw the white diaphanous fluff of tampons—unused, I hope—that had been tied to the railings by the living crowd. Read More
August 4, 2016 On the Shelf Aerosol Dreams, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Mmmm … spray-on food. A lot of things keep me up at night. Lately it’s all the forgotten potential of Cheez Whiz and Reddi-Wip—the beauty we lost when mankind turned away from aerosolized foods. As Nadia Berenstein writes, “Push-button cuisine is one of the great, unrealized dreams of postwar food technology. In the 1950s and 1960s, food manufacturers, along with their allies in the container and chemical industries, imagined a world of effortless convenience, where, in the words of one 1964 newspaper article, ‘entire meals … can be oozed forth by a gentle push on a few cans’ … Starting in the late 1950s, an avalanche of new push-button food products made their way to grocery stores. There was Whisp, a Freon-propelled vermouth spray, for that extra-dry martini. Sizzl-Spray, an aerosol barbecue sauce designed for seasoning burgers and steaks on the backyard grill, itself a 1950s innovation. Tasti-Cup, an aerosol coffee concentrate, for the office worker too busy for instant.” A. S. Hamrah was sitting in a movie theater last month, waiting for The Purge: Election Year to begin, when he heard that the director Abbas Kiarostami had died. “All of a sudden I became aware,” he writes, “that there is a better world somewhere else, that being in this one, where we were waiting for The Purge: Election Year to shock us, was a waste of the time allotted to me in this life and that, if I were going to see a movie, what time I have would be better spent with a form of cinema that acknowledges something other than the bloodshed and mayhem into which the world has fallen … When watching Kiarostami films, one also has a great sense of another kind of freedom not found in Hollywood movies, nor in most European art films: freedom from the creeping realization that a film we are watching was made by a cynical shit or a self-deluded megalomaniac.” Charles Simic knows that the MFAication of poetry has sucked a lot of the life out of it: “it’s hard to believe that a book of poems can be completely original,” he writes, “but despite the great odds, it still happens.” And Jana Prikryl has written such a book: “Reading some of [Prikryl’s] poems is like walking into a movie theater in the middle of a film one knows nothing about, trying to figure out what is happening on the screen, irked at first that the answer is not forthcoming, and gradually growing more and more entranced by the mystery of every face and every action, detached as they are from any context. Unlike poets who are eager to give their readers lengthy and detailed accounts of their private lives, she is discreet. She remains faithful to the ambiguity of our existence, that condition of being aware of the multiple meanings of everything we do or is done to us, and she’s wary of settling for one at the expense of the others and leaving the poetry that went along with them behind.” While we’re on the mechanisms of publishing: a season’s biggest titles will arrive worldwide on nearly the same date; translation is built into the production process. In a new book, Rebecca L. Walkowitz “argues that these new conditions of production have altered the very shape of the contemporary novel. Many literary works today do not appear in translation, she proposes, but are written for translation from the beginning. They are ‘born translated.’ Adapted from ‘born digital,’ the term used to designate artworks produced by and for the computer, ‘born-translated literature approaches translation as medium and origin rather than as afterthought. Translation is not secondary or incidental to these works. It is a condition of their production.’ ” Everyone loves a “lost” book—the thrill of the forgotten, of rediscovery, has fueled some of publishing’s most major events the past few years. The only problem: most of these books aren’t good. Alison Flood writes, “It’s a tricky tightrope to walk. Publish as much as possible of a beloved author’s work, because the fans will lap it up, or exercise a fierce quality control? It’s a question that I was pondering only this week, on reading the forgotten Dr. Seuss stories in Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories to my children. We are regular readers of Horton Hears a Who, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas—and were looking forward to it. And … it just wasn’t as good. The Grinch wasn’t the right color, he wasn’t very funny, and there were only two pages of him. Horton wasn’t as charming.”
August 3, 2016 Our Correspondents American Girl Night By Jeff Seroy Photo: Saratoga Performing Arts Center. No one could miss the magic. Cool alleys of giant pines wind through the park, the entrance by footbridge leads over a creek; far below, you can glimpse striated mounds accreted by live mineral springs. And then: the stately grounds. Even today, in its celebratory fiftieth-anniversary season, with a new plaza built around stadium-size latrines and concessions selling fried dough, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center maintains some of its Nelson-and-Happy Rockefeller–era allure. The center was built to offer New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra permanent summer residencies, and though attendance at dance events and the dance season itself have shrunk considerably over the past thirty years, coming to SPAC still feels eventful. The audience is filled with fans. They dress for the occasion. They know the performers. They roar with recognition when someone introduces the evening’s program. They cheer during curtain calls. They applaud, contrary to City Ballet’s urban custom, when dancers exit, and at the end of each musical section. They even clap for the scenery. Read More
August 3, 2016 Revisited Ulysses S. Grant Repaired My Parents’ Dryer By Bonnie Nadzam Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. He’s always watching. In 1974, when they were honeymooning in Atlanta, my parents bought a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant—not the one pictured above, but something close enough. They spent fifty bucks on it: cash they’d won on a bet with my grandfather, wagering that Nixon would not see out his term. The painting hung above our fireplace in northeast Ohio when I was a girl. It matters only peripherally that Grant was an actual man who lived and died in the nineteenth century; who was the eighteenth president of the United States; and who, as commanding general of the United States Army, led the Union Army to victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War. What matters is how single-minded I found his gaze, his eyes staring down at me—to say nothing of the distinguished crinkle of the eyebrows above them, those bright buttons on his jacket, that thick beard and head of hair, sculpted like cake frosting. Read More
August 3, 2016 Look Visual Anarchy By Dan Piepenbring The artist Michael Kidner died in 2009. In New York, a new exhibition at Flowers Gallery celebrates his works on paper from the 1960s and 2000s, which found him experimenting with moire patterns, pentagons based on Penrose tiling, and the geometrical effects of light. “I was curious about how the brain interpreted objects,” he said in 1996. “It’s a black box and yet we seem to see colors and shapes, and it’s all coming in little chemico-electrical signals along nerves. So, whatever’s happening in there is incredibly abstract, and at one point I was thinking of these patterns more as maybe something that goes on inside the black box.” Stephen Bann described Kidner’s patterns as “constitutionally unstable and liable to take you to the brink of visual anarchy.’’ Michael Kidner, Particle Evolution: The End of the Tunnel at Cern. Stage 1, 2008, colored pencil on paper, 44 ½” x 67 ¾”. Read More