November 25, 2015 First Person Our Prefab Thanksgiving By Matthew Gavin Frank Celebrating the old-fashioned way: at an African-themed indoor water park in Wisconsin. The yellow three-track potato sack slide is encased in ice, and the go-kart tarps are encased in ice, and the Paul Bunyan chain-saw carving has grown a beard of icicles so tentacular one can’t help but imagine him having been recovered from one of Verne’s deeper leagues. The afternoon-shift dancers outside the Wisconsin Dolls Gentlemen’s Club wear parkas with fur-lined collars and smoke their cigarettes, waiting for the gentlemen to arrive. Their lips are chapped and their calves are rosy and their exhales hang in the cold air in front of their faces, nowhere to go. They take turns reading the club’s Yelp reviews from a single cell phone, which they pass between them. Every dancer working was cute, with the exception of one. What could be improved? 1. Men’s bathroom. There were 100% more people wearing head bandanas than I expected-saw like 6 dudes wearing them. Also, the Outlaw motorcycle gang represented with a couple of people rocking their colors! Pro tip: with so many blacklights inside, remember to wear your white pants. Housed in a double-wide trailer (for real) and next to a sleazy strip motel (also, for real), disappointing ladies shake and shimmy on a tiny pit-style stage. This last trip was particularly depressing, mainly due to the preggo dancer who was prancing and spinning topless and bottomless with a modified tube top covering her baby bump. For some god-awful reason, I’ve been here twice. Read More
November 25, 2015 On the Shelf Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red in It, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai. In an effort to combat censorship, the British filmmaker Charlie Lyne (such a British filmmaker name, no?) has launched a campaign to produce the single most banal film in the history of the medium: Paint Drying. “The film is a single, unbroken shot lasting several hours (its length is determined by the amount of money raised) of white paint slowly drying on a brick wall. Once Lyne has paid the fee, the [censorship] board are obliged to watch it.” If all goes according to plan, and assuming the censors aren’t fans of Andy Warhol or Modern Times Forever, the movie will send them into a spiral of despair and boredom of a sort not seen since Must Love Dogs, ten years ago. While we’re on film: Prince’s Purple Rain has been remade in Niger, which is a great way to spread the Purple gospel, except that no one in Niger knows who Prince is, and they don’t have a word for the color purple. “The fact there is no Tuareg word for purple means the film is saddled with the title Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, which translates as Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red in It … Swapping smoky Minneapolis for dusty Agadez, the largest city in the country’s central region, the new film follows Mdou Moctar—a popular self-taught Niger musician in real life—as he rides his purple motorbike from performance to performance, struggling to make a name for himself.” The verb to dream never used to stand in for to aspire. Dreaming used to be a matter of sleep—a matter of deluding yourself in slumber. For the shift, “you can blame the Americans. Our collective embrace of the so-called ‘American dream’ was the cornerstone of this particular twentieth-century shift in usage … In 1931, American historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase ‘The American Dream,’ in his book The Epic of America … Adams used the ‘dream’ as a structuring conceit for his gloss of American history, describing this dream as one of material prosperity, but also of what we might now call self-actualization.” For the journalist Jeff Sharlet, in Paris, the events of November 13 began with a kind of nervous laughter: “The point is—something about the jokes we tell not just as frightened people, but as a certain kind of frightened people. Citizens of empire or of a very rich and stylish former empire that still has an aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle … these jokes, now, are different. These are not the jokes of the oppressed, they’re the jokes of those of us who suddenly—suddenly, so many words demand quote marks after terror—find ourselves seen as the oppressors … These are the jokes we tell to hold at bay the knowledge that this isn’t the first time or the last, the knowledge that they don’t hate us because of our cafés but they will attack our cafés, the knowledge that we’re fucked as soon as we find ourselves saying they, and then, worse, the knowledge that we were fucked before we began, because we’ve never had any other word than they.” After 9/11, “Susan Sontag seemed tactless to many in speaking of the ‘sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric” of “confidence-building and grief management’ that resembled the ‘unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress.’ She was attacked for insisting, ‘Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.’ ” Fourteen years later, we’ve not exactly excelled at this not-being-stupid-together business, as Pankaj Mishra points out: “Not surprisingly, the pampered and intellectually neutered industry of expertise and commentary today betrays cluelessness before the spectacle of worldwide mayhem … Only God knows how much we need some real argument and fresh thinking—the tradition of self-criticism that did indeed once distinguish and enlighten the West. For as long as avid conformists and careerists reign over an impoverished public sphere, endless war will remain the default option. And the recourse to Westernism’s self-congratulatory bromides after every new calamity will ensure that we continue to grieve together and grow stupid together.”
November 24, 2015 From the Archive Chubby Boys and Chubby Girls By Steve Gianakos “Chubby Boys and Chubby Girls,” a portfolio by Steve Gianakos, appeared in our Summer 1983 issue. Gianakos, who was born in 1938, had his most recent show earlier this year at Fredericks & Freiser; it was called “Accessories and Other Girlie Desires.” “With formal perfect pitch, comedic élan and fearless indiscretion,” the New York Times wrote of him in 2012, “he creates disjunctive cartoon allegories of surrealistic perversity.” —D. P. Read More
November 24, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Worst Game By Sadie Stein Just as Nabokov would’ve wanted it. The other day, I invented the worst game ever. It all started in the supermarket when I passed the processed cheeses. Velveeta, I read. Then, somehow, I found myself thinking, Velveeta, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Vel-vee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Vel. Vee. Ta. This was quite bad enough, but understandable. I tried it with Chiquita, and Ryvita, and then I forgot about it, because, well, it’s asinine. Then, later in the day, I realized I was muttering, “Flour. Light of my life, fire of my loins.” And later, the same thing, but with asphalt subbed in. Read More
November 24, 2015 First Person Black History By Asali Solomon Celebrating Umoja Karamu, a “ritual for the black family,” on Thanksgiving. From the cover of Disgruntled, Asali Solomon’s debut novel. Back in the early 1980s, no one at the mostly white elite prep school I attended had heard of Kwanzaa, which I’d grown up celebrating instead of Christmas. This was a yearly hassle of explaining: yes, presents; no, Santa Claus. But absolutely no one had heard of Umoja Karamu, “a ritual for the black family” that we observed at Thanksgiving. This one I never volunteered to explain. Black families who celebrated Umoja Karamu (Kiswahili for “unity feast”)—and we were the only one I knew of—were to trade in the ritual of senselessly stuffing ourselves for one in which we used food and words to reflect on the grim, glorious trajectory of black people in America, to recall the crimes of the “greedy one-eyed giant” white man, and to keep the “Black Nation” energized and focused, struggling toward liberation from racism. During Umoja Karamu, which lived in a 1971 booklet (a mere two years older than I was) published by a fellow Philadelphian named Edward Sims, we sat at our special holiday table and took turns reading solemnly aloud from a pithy narrative of African American history that moved from the ancient kingdom of Mali to the Watts riots. Between readings, we ate a symbolic sequence of aggressively non-Thanksgiving foods, including black-eyed peas, rice, corn bread, and leafy greens, all served unseasoned, perhaps to make us more thoughtful. Blessedly, my mother always insisted on a normal holiday meal after Umoja Karamu. But Edward Sims was certainly about his business. Each Thanksgiving, as I waited to get to the stuffing and gravy, I did indeed taste the suffering we read about. I experienced the “bland and tasteless condition under which Black Folk lived during the slavery period” in the form of unsalted white rice and chalky black-eyed peas. But happily, enduring Umoja Karamu, unlike the suffering of the Black Nation, was a private shame, one about which my school friends knew nothing. That is, until I received a fifth-grade assignment to write an essay about family Thanksgiving traditions and to read it aloud. Read More
November 24, 2015 On the Shelf More Than a Blender, It’s a Way of Life, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Peter Muller-Munk, Waring Blendor, model B, 1937. Private collection. Photo: Dallas Museum of Art, via Carnegie Museum of Art Peter Muller-Munk, who died in 1967, designed a really nice chromium-plated water pitcher. He also made the most sensuous blender I’ve ever seen. Then there’s his Lady Schick electric shavers, his enameled cookware—and his gas pumps! What can be said about the man’s gas pumps? Muller-Munk was an impeccable industrial designer, and a new exhibition at the Carnegie Museum aims to give him his due: “Muller-Munk was always attuned to the latest trends in European metalwork … But [he] was never predictable, and moved with ease from a round, fluted silver bowl (circa 1928) akin to Josef Hoffmann’s designs for the Wiener Werkstätte, to graceful leaf-like shapes for a footed silver centerpiece (1929–1930) to a severely squared-off silver-plated tea service with tusk-like ivory handles (1931).” Every week brings another successful trip to the literary lost-and-found bin. This time it’s yielded Twixt Lip and Cup, an early play by a young William Faulkner, first published nearly a century ago in The Strand and promptly forgotten by everyone, until Andrew Gulli rediscovered it in an archive at the University of Virginia. Dubbed a “light-hearted jazz age story,” the play “is set in the apartment of a ‘well-to-do bachelor,’ and sees two friends of around thirty, Francis and Jim, each vying to convince the nineteen-year-old Ruth to marry them … Prohibition is under way, and the friends are enjoying an illicit drink. Ruth’s drinking, however, comes under censure from Jim, who asks Francis: ‘What are our young girls coming to these days? They every one need to be taken by a strong hand,’ adding: ‘I certainly don’t approve of that child chasing all over the known world after a bottle of liquor. It’s disgusting.’ ” Last week we hosted a party at the Jane Hotel to launch The Unprofessionals, our first anthology of new writing in fifty years. The gossip columnists were out in force, natch—by which I mean two of them attended. “An amiable guest of literary note was willing to give me the following quote, anonymously, because, as he confided, he had been expected at another gathering: ‘The porn theme was undeniably hot.’ He also complimented Lorin Stein’s ‘gutsiness in opening up the psychosexual landscape [which] has cleared space for some writing that wanted to get out.’ I thought that was perfectly stated, complimented him on his fine gray flannel suit, and moved on into the evening.” Every writer has an audience in mind. Claire Vaye Watkins writes for that hoary, classic demographic … you know the one, surely? “It was Toni Morrison who pointed out that Tolstoy was not writing for her, who said she was writing toward black women. It makes you wonder, Who am I writing for? Who am I writing toward? Myself, I have been writing to impress old white men. Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati. Not only acquiescence but a beseeching, approval seeking, people pleasing … I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!” Mary Beard’s SPQR, a history of Rome, invites us “not only to ‘meet the Romans,’ but also to acknowledge that we can never really meet them and that, in many ways, we may not want to. The problem goes beyond the limitation of our sources; it lies in the vast cultural gaps that separate us from their world, and the profoundly repellent facts of daily life in ancient Rome: slavery, filth, slaughter, illness, ‘newborn babies thrown away on rubbish heaps.’ Yet Beard finds in Rome, if not a model, at least a challenge … The ancient Romans, Beard shows, are relevant to people many centuries later who struggle with questions of power, citizenship, empire, and identity.”