May 11, 2016 On the Shelf Shit Is Furniture, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Merdacotta—clean enough to eat off of. Because life is a waking nightmare in which the grandees of the universe spread their sagging buttocks over our prone bodies, Budweiser has changed its name to America. Ricardo Marques, a Budweiser veep hastening the arrival of the end times, gave an interview to Fast Company: “The tagline for the entire related media campaign is meant to be incredibly sincere, even inspiring message: ‘America is in your hands.’ When I ask Marques, jokingly, if drinking Budweiser now means you’re drinking America, his reply is dead serious. ‘In a way, it is true,’ he says. ‘If you think about Budweiser as the most iconic American brand when it comes to beer, it’s probably not incorrect.’ ” But we mustn’t lose faith. Even as corporations coopt the nation-state and install themselves as our new gods, people are restlessly creating, inventing … turning shit into furniture. “Made out of clay and cow excrement, merdacotta—literally, ‘baked shit’ in Italian—can be fashioned into tiles, tableware, flowerpots and, fittingly, toilet bowls. An installation of items made out of merdacotta was one of the most memorable offerings at this year’s Salone del Mobile design extravaganza in Milan. Luca Cipelletti, an architect who helped to devise the exhibition, says that ‘people smile and think it’s funny to talk about caca, but behind it all we are exploring interesting and philosophical ideas about man, art and nature as well as the concept of transformation.’ ” Meanwhile, in Russia, the “medical and biological” costs of keeping Vladimir Lenin’s body preserved have reached $197,000 annually. “If carefully monitored and re-embalmed regularly, scientists believe he can last in this state for centuries more,” writes Daria Litvinova for the Guardian. (Note that dangling modifier: if the sentence isn’t corrected, someone might reasonably believe that we must embalm those scientists). “The first idea didn’t involve embalming at all, but deep freezing … In early March 1924, when preparations were gaining momentum, two well-known chemists, Vladimir Vorobyov and Boris Zbarsky, suggested embalming him with a chemical mixture that would prevent the corpse from decomposing, drying up and changing color and shape.” The Rich Kids of Instagram offer appalling displays of conspicuous consumption, but take a closer look and you’ll see that they’re not much different than the paintings of wealthy Europeans that preceded them: “The images and the social relations they represent recall earlier depictions of wealth, in particular oil painting popular amongst European elites during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries … Like the photographs shared on Instagram, the oil paintings of this period call attention to the subjects’ prestige and status—and illustrate the role of depiction in asserting and reinforcing social privilege.” Finally, a look back at history’s most ironic skeleton calendars: “At the end of the 1800s, one St. Louis company marketed their signature pain-relieving product with a series of macabre calendars featuring skeletons at work and play. Ironically, the very product they were advertising would later be shown to be fatal … Acetanilide, the coal-tar derivative, had the unfortunate side effect of producing cyanosis, meaning it turned extremities blue from a lack of oxygen … The calendars survive as a charming memento of a time when pharmaceutical advertising could be a little less saccharine, it’s hard not to wonder what the victims of Antikamnia might have made of these frolicking skeletons if they had only known what was really being advertised.”
May 10, 2016 Bulletin The Norwegian-American Literary Festival Returns By The Paris Review Photo: Johannes W. Berg. For the last few years, The Paris Review has cohosted The Norwegian-American Literary Festival, gathering a small group of American and Norwegian writers and critics for a series of informal lectures, interviews, discussions, and music. We’re proud to announce this year’s festival itinerary: coming to New York for three nights this month, May 19, 20, and 21. All the events below are free and open to the public. We hope to see you there! And yes—that guy in the picture (Torgny Amdam of the Fun Stuff, featuring James Wood on drums) will be performing, too. Read More
May 10, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent In Defense of Moist By Sadie Stein Yum. Many people hate the word moist. Indeed, it has become almost expected to hate the word moist, with its connotations of limp handshakes, cloying Uriah Heep types, and creeping damp. A recent study found that the aversion was real, reported the New York Times: “Data from the current studies point to semantic features of the word—namely, associations with disgusting bodily functions—as a more prominent source of peoples’ unpleasant experience.” But here’s the thing: I like moist. And not just because of good associations with the groundbreaking Moistworks blog, either. I think moist just needs better PR. Read More
May 10, 2016 First Person Cleaning Up New York By Bob Rosenthal Cleaning is a two-way street. There is you (the cleaner) and there is the street … A vintage Hoover advertisement. I cleaned for Sylvia Smith two or three times last year. She lived on East End Avenue in a studio apartment that was falling apart from being recently built. She edited a trade magazine. She would only have me every so often when things got really out of hand. Her kitchen included defrosting the refrigerator and cleaning the oven each time. First I had to get the dishes out of the way. She used cheap tin silverware that was once painted gold but the paint had chipped away enough to leave it mottled tin. The advantage of this silverware was that she had enough pieces to supply a munitions factory and could eat for weeks without needing to wash a spoon. Although the apartment was always very dirty, Sylvia always wanted a fastidious job from me. This is really impossible to do the first time around on a dirty apartment. It would take at least two cleanings to really bring every surface to clean clean status. Sylvia would always detain me at the end of my day with short imperatives like, “Clean this shelf please.” “I think you missed something here.” I performed my duty by being patient and thankfully escaped after much courteous bowing. Sylvia was a person with a need for sleeping pills. Next to her bed was a prescription bottle, which I sampled. Read More
May 10, 2016 On the Shelf A Superman at the Supermarket, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Bob Adelman during the march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965. So you’ve bought an English country house—great! And you have a time machine, allowing you to choose when you’ll reside at said country house—great! May I recommend the interwar period? It was a truly exceptional time to own an English country house. Adrian Tinniswood has a new book about the era, arguing that it was “a world of energy, invention, and change … The loosening bonds between family, mansion and local community meant the country house was changing, but it was not dying … A ‘spirit of restlessness’ characterized the age. Country-house parties could last from forty-eight hours to three weeks. The word week-end entered common usage as expanding rail networks and car ownership meant that people could dash to the country on Friday and return on Monday exhausted after a race, a ball, a shoot, or a political gathering … Women, in particular, were confronted with grueling social expectations: a seven-day shooting party, for example, would require multiple outfits for every day of the week.” The photographer Bob Adelman has died at eighty-five. “In his college years, he studied philosophy to try to figure out the point of being alive,” Ann Beattie wrote of him in 2014. “In the civil rights movement, he found his answer.” Mary Reinholz remembers him as “your quintessential New York Jewish intellectual turned artist and activist … For me, Adelman was also a big daddy figure, a superman at the supermarket who always seemed to be there for this lowly scribe, offering sensible career advice, recommending prospective employers he knew, warning about a sportswriter boyfriend who had broken my heart. I wondered why he chose to live alone after the breakup of a relationship with a much younger woman … He didn’t drink or smoke but struggled for years with his weight and photographed his ‘shrinking’ size in nude pictures he took of himself for Esquire magazine. He once said in an interview: ‘When I photographed, I was intent on telling the truth as best I saw it and then to help in doing something about it.’ ” Ian Penman on Patti Smith’s new memoir, M Train, which finds her visiting writers’ graves a bit too fashionably, if not too regularly: “The spell-casting mood of M Train demands that Smith fly off on a moment’s whim, spurred on by nothing more than a lovely line in a new book she’s picked up: she realizes she loves Writer A, who either lives or is now buried in City B, decides she has to be there NOW, and before you know it she’s graveside again, the Intercity angel of death in dark Helmut Lang pants and Ann Demeulemeester cloak. It’s all so smooth and hassle-free … There are things in M Train that niggle at me in the same way [Bruce] Chatwin’s work often did: the feeling that for all their much vaunted ‘realism’ these treks occurred in a rather privileged sphere. There’s always a rich pal to provide a bed, a dinner table, a handy castle to stay at for the season; there’s always someone in the background to make sure the plane tickets arrive; fresh figs on the bedside table. Special people, living by special rules. Like Chatwin, Smith is also a bit of a consumer fetishist: the simplest things have to have a special aura or signature—or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence.” The landscape architect Adriaan Geuze (pronounced “Huh-zaa”) is changing our notions of what a park can be. But to understand his work it helps to understand his past in the Netherlands—unless you’ve never wondered about the formative years of an influential landscape architect: “‘Ecology in Holland is in grids,’ Geuze said. ‘Every frog in Holland is in a line, because all the water is linear … The smell of the tide near Dordrecht, it intoxicated my brains … All the boys were into soccer, but I could not play soccer.’ Waiting out the school day, he would think, he said, ‘I have a tree hut. I have secret places you don’t even know where they are.’ When Geuze was a teenager, his father took him along to international industry and agricultural shows. ‘We went to the German Hanover machinery expos, where there would be not five machines but five thousand machines. He took me on very big boats, at least in my imagination—ocean steamers—and even an oil platform. Even into the engine rooms, where the violent noise was there. When I am romantic, I am thinking about these things.’ ” Ben Jones and Christopher Forgues, cartoonists who collaborate under the name Paper Radio, have been quietly breaking the mold since 1999: “Working together, often under pseudonyms, they changed the form and content of comics as few other artists have, radically distorting extant storytelling genres and emphasizing experimental approaches to drawing and printing … A Paper Radio publication could contain subversive fan fiction about the Muppet Babies, elaborate fantasy adventures, psychedelic space operas, or crude slapstick gags. All of these works circulated in small editions among an audience of like-minded artists and musicians, members of a largely unchronicled New England subculture whose aesthetic continues to seep, credited or not, into popular visual forms, from music videos to subway advertisements.”
May 9, 2016 Bulletin The Secret’s Out: We’re BORINGASFUCK By The Paris Review Subscribe now and receive 10 percent off with the promotion code BORINGASFUCK. In 1953, William Styron introduced the first issue of The Paris Review with a simple mission statement. The magazine, he wrote, “should welcome these people into its pages … the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders.” He said this knowing full well that non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders are boring as fuck. It was only a matter of time before someone caught on. In the Guardian today, Jessa Crispin blew our cover with three simple words. “We all have to be in job-interview mode all of the time,” she told Michelle Dean of writers today. “We’re not allowed to say, ‘The Paris Review is boring as fuck!’ Because what if The Paris Review is just about to call us?” Our fabled CIA connections notwithstanding, the Review has always admired those who speak truth to power. That’s why, for the next twenty-four hours, new subscribers can use the discount code BORINGASFUCK for 10 percent off one year of less-than-scintillating reading. Subscribe now to enjoy the best in boring fiction, boring poetry, boring interviews, and boring art. Because we all need something to read while we’re waiting by the phone …