June 16, 2016 Brushes with Greatness In the Restroom at the Walter Reade Theater By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about her relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Sofia Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola. In 2014, the magazine In Touch broke what is still, to my mind, one of our era’s most quintessential gossip stories. The weekly claimed that Lindsay Lohan was holding court at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, in an apparent attempt to impress her retinue, wrote out the names of three dozen of her sexual conquests—most of them A-list Hollywood celebrities such as Justin Timberlake, Colin Farrell, and Zac Efron—then tossed the list aside. A mistake, obviously, since that was likely when one of the entourage pounced, retrieving the sheet and eventually getting it into the hands of an In Touch staffer. The magazine reproduced the list in Lohan’s all-caps, American-middle-school-girl handwriting. Read More
June 16, 2016 On the Shelf Designing Black Power, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Larry Ratzkin’s design for Black Power. It’s something we all dream of—that our favorite deceased writers will someday roam the earth again as robots. In Japan, that dream is becoming a reality, as the author Soseki Natsume, who died a century ago, prepares to enjoy a second coming: “Soseki Natsume is being re-created as an android by Nishogakusha University Graduate School, and will be programmed to read material out loud and give lectures. Created in a sitting posture, the robot will be 130 centimeters high and built using 3D scans of a death mask and vintage photos … The robot’s voice will be created after analyzing the voice of his grandson, Prof. Fusanosuke Natsume of Gakushuin University. Fusanosuke Natsume said, ‘Since [Soseki is] a human being, it is better that he is smiling.’ ” Tall orders for graphic designers: in 1967, Larry Ratzkin was tasked with designing the jacket for Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power, meaning his assignment was essentially to turn a whole political movement into a book cover. And he succeeded, as Josh MacPhee writes: “The cover was simple yet profound: a white field, the center crowded—almost to exploding—with the giant words Black Power in a thick, slab-serifed type. The authors’ names and book subtitle stack above and below, in a more elegant, thin sans-serif. That’s it. No images, no frills … The cover to Black Power is surprisingly successful, such a simple treatment—almost elegant—for a text that caused massive conflict and defines the transition from the non-violent Civil Rights Movement to the much more militant Black Power Movement in the United States. The initial 1967 Random House first-edition dust jacket was created by Larry Ratzkin, a well-known graphic designer who turned out upwards of a thousand book covers … All U.S. editions of Black Power in the almost fifty years since its initial publishing … have used facsimile re-creations of Ratzkin’s original design … This has to be the most seen and trafficked cover of Ratzkin’s long career, yet it is never associated with him.” Two hundred years ago, Mount Tambora belched a massive cloud of volcanic ash into the sky and ruined everyone’s summer, so much so that they called it the “Year Without Summer.” Perhaps not unrelatedly, Mary Shelley began work on Frankenstein: “Our too-easy version of Frankenstein—oh, it’s all about technology and scientific hubris, or about industrialization—ignores completely the humanitarian climate disaster unfolding around Mary Shelley as she began drafting the novel. Starving, skeletal climate refugees in the tens of thousands roamed the highways of Europe, within a few miles of where she and her ego-charged friends were driving each other to literary distraction. Moreover, landlocked Alpine Switzerland was the worst hit region in all of Europe, producing scenes of social-ecological breakdown rarely witnessed since the hellscape of the Black Death.” London’s Foundling Museum is hosting an exhibition called “FOUND.” It’s about finding things, which, at the risk of being obvious, tends to involve losing them first: “Some found materials have been made into complete works, like the African textiles from Portobello Market that have inspired much of Yinka Shonibare’s art, including the Trumpet Boy … Or Polly Apfelbaum’s string of wishbones, graded from small to large, ‘electroplated like baby-shoes’ in copper—a string of good luck. But there’s bad luck here too, like the chain of pawnbroker’s tickets that Ron Arad found in London early 1970s. All are dated 1951, the year of his own birth, and many are marked ‘GWR’—gold wedding ring. Finding can provoke a shiver, a sadness.” Zadie Smith introduces one of her favorite new writers, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah: “I’m sure she is coolly skeptical of the phrase black-girl magic … but some version of that is what Rachel brings to me. I was very affected when I was a kid by a phrase of novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s, ‘The black woman is the mule of the world.’ This is not the only truth about us, and Zora is proof of that: despite all the difficulties, she lived her life with verve, purpose and joy. Rachel’s got some of the Zora energy; she walks into a room and it’s a kind of event. I’ve learned from Rachel that black culture is a house with a thousand rooms, with windows looking out on so many views. Her writing is like a high-wire act: Can she pull it off? Are these swirling ideas going to cohere? But they do. I admire her bravery, boldness and attention to the craft.”
June 15, 2016 Look Road Trip By Dan Piepenbring Greg Drasler’s exhibition “Road Trip” opens tonight at Betty Cuningham Gallery. Reservations, 2014, oil on linen, 40″ x 44″. Read More
June 15, 2016 On History When Emperors Are No More By Michael Lipkin Why did an intelligent Jewish scholar write an appreciation of a German tyrant? From the paperback cover of Inventing the Middle Ages. In 1992, a medievalist named Norman Cantor published Inventing the Middle Ages, a series of light, biographical sketches intended to show readers how a few historians from the twentieth century had brought the Middle Ages alive to the general public, with, as the flap copy put it, “vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies.” One chapter, “The Nazi Twins,” was devoted partly to Ernst Kantorowicz, a Princeton scholar who’d written a magisterial study of sovereignty in medieval law, philosophy, and art. Cantor alleged that Kantorowicz—who was not only Jewish, but had spoken up against Hitler at great peril to his academic career, and whose mother has perished in a concentration camp—had “impeccable Nazi credentials”: an outrageous slander, in the eyes of his former students and colleagues. When The New York Review of Books ran a largely favorable essay on Inventing the Middle Ages, the magazine received a flood of angry letters. “Where is this Cantor [a] professor? Disney World?” demanded one reader. But “this Cantor” was not entirely specious in his claims. In 1927, when he was only thirty, Kantorowicz had written a seven-hundred-page biography of Frederick II, a Holy Roman Emperor from the thirteenth century. In lofty German that imitated the Latin style of Frederick’s time, Kantorowicz painted the Emperor as a redeemer of the German people who united the north with the Roman south and brought the barbaric East under his iron rule. Kantorowicz had a Hindu good luck symbol, the swastika, put on the biography’s cover, and on its dedication page he recalled laying a wreath on Frederick’s grave in Palermo. “That wreath,” he wrote, “may fairly be taken as a symbol that—not alone in learned circles—enthusiasm is astir for the great German Rulers of the past: in a day when emperors are no more.” Among the book’s enthusiastic readers was Hermann Göring, who gave Mussolini a signed copy for his birthday. Read More
June 15, 2016 Inside the Issue My Twinkie Poem By Monica Youn On “Goldacre,” a poem in our new Summer issue. Photo by Rainier Arenas I wrote “Goldacre”—my “Twinkie” poem—in the wake of the brouhaha surrounding last year’s Best American Poetry anthology, when the white writer Michael Derrick Hudson published a poem under the name Yi-Fen Chou, sparking a media frenzy. As one of the few #ActualAsianPoets to have had a poem (“March of the Hanged Men,” first published in The Paris Review) included in the anthology, I was unwillingly sucked into the whole mess. But after my initial queasiness subsided, the controversy stirred up a familiar set of questions for me. Read More
June 15, 2016 On the Shelf Attack of the De-Constructivists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Rusakov Workers’ Club in Moscow by Konstantin Melnikov, 1927–28. Borges, who died thirty years ago this month, led a life as tangled in riddles as his fiction is. One burning question: How did he pay the bills? “Borges was blessed with the most privileged, ideal life for a burgeoning literary genius. Educated in Europe, raised by his father to become a serious writer, Borges devoted his entire life to literature. He did not take a full-time job for nearly forty years … [But] we see that young Georgie Borges did not actually write his great fictions until after his family lost their money. For anyone who has struggled to make writing pay, Borges’s financial story is a perplexing—yet utterly hopeful—case to consider.” Watching the gay-pride celebrations and vigils for Orlando at the Stonewall, Huw Lemmey tries to parse the movement’s vexed relationship with political power structures: “Early Prides saw placards railing against fascism and police harassment, and calling for the liberation of gay people; at today’s Pride you’re just as likely to see police officers and soldiers marching in uniform, representatives of the arms industry in corporate T-shirts and, for the first time this year, a flyover of military jets. Radicals see this as a violent and exclusionary takeover of a liberation struggle by capital’s most reactionary institutions; liberals see it as a mark of society’s progress, with LGBT people now enjoying many of the rights and protections once denied us. For one group, Pride is a celebration of an anti-cop riot, representing the fundamental disconnect between LGBT people and heterosexual society. For another, Pride is the world’s biggest party, representing a spirit of judgment-free inclusiveness, if only for a day. Both are right.” In Moscow, meanwhile, constructivist landmarks are suddenly slated for demolition as Russians struggle to decide which parts of their past are worth preserving: “ ‘They operate by ticking boxes, but you cannot judge a building in this way,’ says Marina Khrustaleva, an expert on constructivism … ‘By the 1930s, [constructivist buildings] were already rejected for being insufficiently decorative and too western,’ says Khrustaleva. During perestroika, she adds, the architecture was associated with the worst of the Soviet past … Russians’ bad memories of the 1920s, [Alexandra] Selivanova suggests, keep them from appreciating early Soviet architecture. ‘People associate this period with hunger and social experiments,’ she says. Stalinist architecture is more popular: ‘It’s festive and reminds people of the propaganda films of the 1930s and 1950s, which still make an impact today.’ ” In a mad race to professionalize any remaining art forms still given to creativity and informality, Emerson College has decided to offer a B.F.A. in comedic arts, the nation’s first comedy major: “Formalizing the study of comedy into an academic degree may seem like, well, a joke. But Emerson has made strides to pre-empt criticism. The curriculum is heavy on theory and craft, with practical classes like Comedy Writing for Television, Great Screenwriters: Wilder, Allen, Kaufman and Comedy Writing for Late Night, balanced out by headier electives like Why Did the Chicken?—Fundamentals of Comedic Storytelling.” And while we’re on comedy: “Punching up and punching down are relatively new pop-political terms … So it should come as no surprise that they have become entangled with our current national panic over political correctness, which, apparently, not only has created a ‘humor crisis,’ but also is why we can’t properly fight terrorism, control immigration, or make unruly college students read Alison Bechdel and eat faux bánh mì. Western democracy itself hangs in the balance, depending on who happens to be lecturing you at the moment … The question it raises—Who has the moral authority to punch down?—is a messy one, and one rarely asked of those who appear to punch up.”