June 23, 2016 First Person One Night Only! By Joshua Baldwin The implosion of the Riviera’s Monaco Tower All photos by Gene Blevins © 2016 Los Angeles Daily News. “Used to be I could get a free pack of Marlboros at the blackjack table when I was nineteen,” said a deep voice behind me, on the bus from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. “Now you can’t even get a hot dog.” “You heading to town for the Riviera implosion tonight? Should be a good fireworks show, a good blast. Careful of that dust, though. Lot of asbestos. Yeah, they don’t give a shit in Vegas.” Read More
June 23, 2016 On the Shelf Art for Art, Blast Furnaces for Truth, and Other News By Robert P. Baird A wonderful thing. “Art! Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’.” That’s one view, anyway, one that gained currency in Europe in the nineteenth century. But where does the defense of l’art pour l’art stand today? “Since art categorizable as ‘art for art’s sake’ is usually produced tangentially to hopes of making money, of reaching a large audience or of being immediately useful, it tends to be the darling of the many-degreed. And because art takes time to make, its makers are often those with a luxury of time—usually the wealthy, occasionally the poor. But there is a way in which art for art’s sake is the art most open to all comers, and the most (potentially) ethical.” If you’re moved by the notion that art need serve no master other than itself, then you will all but certainly cheer the news that UNESCO has designated the Exeter Book as “the foundation volume of English literature, one of the world’s principal cultural artefacts.” The book, a tenth-century anthology of Old English verse, include poems such as “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” and “Christ I,” which gave J. R. R. Tolkien the name for Middle Earth. But it also includes riddles, including this lusty tribute to, well, not what you’re thinking: “I’m a wonderful thing, a joy to women, / to neighbors useful. I injure no one / who lives in a village save only my slayer. / I stand up high and steep over the bed; / underneath I’m shaggy. Sometimes ventures / a young and handsome peasant’s daughter, / a maiden proud, to lay hold on me. / She seizes me, red, plunders my head, / fixes on me fast, feels straightway / what meeting me means when she thus approaches, / a curly-haired woman. Wet is that eye.” It’s easy enough to blame economics and technology for the death of the weirdo local record stores of yore. But what if the real culprit is philosophical? “Genre itself—or, more specifically, genre affiliation as a means of self-identification—feels like another End hovering in the atmosphere this week. No one is asked to choose one affiliation at the expense of another. Instead, it is perfectly normal, even expected, that a person might have a little bit of everything stacked up in her digital library. The idea of ‘Other Music’ as it was conceived in 1995 is unknowable now.” Speaking of philosophy, if there’s one thing I’ve always appreciated about blast furnaces, it’s their unyielding passion for truth. I was glad to learn that the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher agree: “In 2008, Hilla was asked, ‘But why furnaces and conveyor belts?’ She replied: ‘Because they are honest. They are functional, and they reflect what they do—that is what we liked. A person always is what s/he wants to be, never what s/he is. Even an animal usually plays a role in front of the camera … We studied this anonymous architecture, object after object, until we understood the enormous variety of the subject … We learned how blast furnaces worked, how they were constructed, what parts they had … And then it was easier to find out whether there was a front and back. At some stage we asked ourselves: Does a blast furnace have a face?’ ”
June 22, 2016 First Person Habitat for Humility By Ted Trautman Voluntourism in Lesotho, Africa. Lesotho landscape. Image via Pixabay. Lesotho is a tiny country surrounded completely by South Africa, and that’s about all I knew about it when I arrived in the summer—their winter—of 2005. I was a college sophomore, and I’d come with fifteen or so classmates for five weeks of volunteer work and research, or what passes for research among college sophomores. I was minoring in Africana studies in those days, originally as an excuse to read more James Baldwin, but the prospect of actually traveling to Africa enthralled me—it didn’t matter where. The paper I produced at the end of the trip, with feminist intent but offensive result, was titled, “No Bras to Burn: A Time of Change for Basotho Textile Workers.” Read More
June 22, 2016 At Work Dialogues: An Interview with Aaron Stern and Jordan Sullivan By Nicole Rudick Rebecca Norris Webb, Blackbirds, 2006, color photograph. From the series “My Dakota,” 2005–2011. A few weeks before the end of 2014, Aaron Stern and Jordan Sullivan wrote me to request permission to reprint the poem “My Gift to You,” by Roberto Bolaño, which was published in our Summer 2012 issue. Stern and Jordan, both of whom are photographers, had recently opened a small space called 205-A in which they hosted group photography exhibitions with the aim of creating an artistic community in dialogue. They had also begun publishing small-run books; “My Gift to You” was intended for a book pairing images by nine photographers with the work of nine poets. Titled 36 Photographs & 20 Poems, the slim volume is published under the heading Dialogues 01, indicating future installments in a series. The book appeared in limited quantity in 2015. Its dimensions are slightly smaller than those of the Review, and its pale pink covers are unassuming: with only the title and a white rectangle on the front, suggesting an empty frame, it has the austerity of a classic Éditions Grasset cover. Stern, who lives in New York, spoke with me in person; I corresponded with Sullivan, who resides in Los Angeles, over e-mail. The assembled conversation returns again and again to the linked ideas of collaboration, correspondence, and correspondences. INTERVIEWER The epigraph is from Arseny Tarkovsky’s “On the Bank,” a sublime and foreboding poem about the natural world. The book’s opening photograph, by Rebecca Norris-Webb, depicts an army of brown, bowing sunflowers and a plague of birds and echoes Tarkovsky’s line about “the terrible, vegetable sense of self.” Why did you choose to begin this way? SULLIVAN The poem explores the moment when one realizes nature has a language, though that language is incomprehensible. This realization makes the world both troubling and beautiful, and perhaps the world made more sense to him before he was able to contemplate it, before he was fully conscious, before he “counted life in years.” This narrative speaks to this large cosmic complexity, and I think it makes for a nice ground from which the rest of the poems and pictures in the book can grow. Essentially, this book is an exploration of the world at large. There isn’t a concrete thesis or message we’re trying to convey. We were more interested in presenting poems and images we found interesting and organizing them in a way where meaning could be generated from their interaction. Whatever that meaning is, it will be different for each person. Read More
June 22, 2016 On the Shelf Briggflatts, Bibliophagy, and Other News By Robert P. Baird “You’ll eat your words,” God told Ezekiel, and lo, Biblical literalism was born. Image via Gallica. If your daily commute this past year was anything like mine, then your daily commute was nothing like Basil Bunting’s in 1965. That was the year Bunting composed Briggflatts, his magnum opus, while riding the train to and from his day job as a newspaper subeditor. Bunting started the poem not long after Tom Pickard showed up at his door and told him, “I heard you were the greatest living poet.” (At the time, Bunting had not published anything in thirteen years; he later said he wrote Briggflatts “to show the boy how it was done.”) The result, first published fifty years ago, in Poetry, was, as August Kleinzahler has it, “a very particular Northumbrian British flowering of all that Pound and Eliot had earlier achieved in their modernist project, while at the same time more emotionally freighted, more ‘human’ than The Cantos or The Waste Land.” Ask my sixteen-month-old whether books ought to be devoured or digested and he’ll be quick to demonstrate, locking jaws on his favorite compendium of fire-truck photos, that he’s a “both and” kind of guy. In the eighteenth century, it seems, the question was merely metaphorical: “Educational manuals, essays and advice books pitted ‘digestion’ against ‘devouring’ in order to slow down the increasingly fast-paced reading habits of their modern world, realigning reading with the process of character formation. ‘Readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual Food … for want of digesting it by proper Reflections,’ cautioned Isaac Watts in The Improvement of the Mind (1741). This distinction allowed writers to position ‘digestive’ reading as an ethical ideal, while condemning ‘devouring’ as unthoughtful and hedonistic.” I stopped watching Game of Thrones when I realized that the show existed only to supply grist for Sarah Larson’s ecstatic mill. Why watch the rough draft when you can go straight to the finished objet? This week’s episode pushed her to peak form: “A snow begins to fall, and Sansa, fittingly, gets the last word with Ramsay, who’s tied up in a dungeon, with the vibe of Hannibal Lecter. ‘Hello, Sansa,’ he whispers. She gives him a good cold speech and then reminds him that he hasn’t fed his dogs. Ah, the old bark-and-chew. Never have I been so happy to see someone’s face pounded in, then eaten off by his own dogs. Sansa watches calmly, then smiles. You’ve come a long way, baby. Or she’s become a monster, and so have I.” In March, the New York Times held a three-day conference in Qatar, which featured Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, and Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the newspaper’s publisher and chairman. The conference addressed such themes as “What is the civic responsibility of the collector in the digital age?” and “How can true, untrammelled, artistic creativity be harnessed in the service of social and economic wellbeing?” It did not, apparently, worry much about what “true, untrammelled, artistic creativity” might mean in a country that imprisoned a poet, Mohammed al-Ajami, for writing poems that criticized Qatar’s autocratic emir: “The inflammatory issues of the region’s present—censorship, labor rights, dynastic succession—are left unaddressed in the Times’s plenary sessions. Rather, the proceedings circulate around the placid lexicon of TED Talks, platitudes of futurism veering into the apolitical and commercial. But in Qatar, you cannot separate politics from art, in large part because the emir’s family is the patron of the arts.”
June 21, 2016 Look Catch the Heavenly Bodies By Dan Piepenbring Jay Miriam’s first solo show in New York, “Catch the Heavenly Bodies,” opens tonight at Half Gallery. “I think there’s something strange going on right now,” Miriam, who paints from memory, told Adult Magazine last year: “People aren’t okay with being ordinary. I think that sentiment has existed for a long time, but it feels really amplified right now with social media and our online culture, where everyone’s competing for attention, and even being normal is a trend. I don’t see ordinariness as negative. The characters in the paintings can be anyone. Even though I like painting women, they’re not necessarily defined as women … Now everyone is so aware of their behavior and how it looks to others, and there’s not the same freedom in our bodies.” Jay Miriam, Fountain of Youth, 2016, oil on linen, 64″ x 50″. Read More