June 8, 2015 Arts & Culture True Blue By Ravi Mangla A brief history of ultramarine. Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665. Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine. His painting The Entombment, the story goes, was left unfinished as the result of his failure to procure the prized pigment. Rafael reserved ultramarine for his final coat, preferring for his base layers a common azurite; Vermeer was less parsimonious in his application and proceeded to mire his family in debt. Ultramarine: the quality of the shade is embodied in its name. This is the superlative blue, the end-all blue, the blue to which all other hues quietly aspire. The name means “beyond the sea”—a dreamy ode to its distant origins, as romantic as it is imprecise. Derived from the lapis lazuli stone, the pigment was considered more precious than gold. For centuries, the lone source of ultramarine was an arid strip of mountains in northern Afghanistan. The process of extraction involved grinding the stone into a fine powder, infusing the deposits with melted wax, oils, and pine resin, and then kneading the product in a dilute lye solution. Because of its prohibitive costs, the color was traditionally restricted to the raiment of Christ or the Virgin Mary. European painters depended on wealthy patrons to underwrite their purchase. Less scrupulous craftsmen were known to swap ultramarine for smalt or indigo and pocket the difference; if they were caught, the swindle left their reputation in ruin. Read More
June 8, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Role Play By Sadie Stein A still from Holiday in the Protectorate. Readers of the New York Times may have noticed a recent story about a new Czech reality show. In the tradition of Victorian House and other total-immersion programs, this one sticks modern people in another time—specifically a 1939 “remote mountain farm” in what was then the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Hilarity does not ensue. As the article explains, There, they must not only survive the rigors of rustic life with dated appliances and outdoor plumbing, but navigate the moral and physical dangers of life under Nazi rule. German troops (played by actors) kick down their doors in the middle of the night. Local villagers betray them to the Gestapo. Food is scarce. Conditions are crude. Everything about this show sounds distasteful, certainly. Besides the obvious objections, the basic flaw in these time-travel shows—the assumption that you can switch off modern mores along with central AC—seems doubly true here. Reading about it, I was reminded of when my father and I had gone to an exhibit featuring artifacts from the Titanic. To enter, we’d had to show a “boarding pass,” and they’d made us pose for an obligatory picture together at the top of the stairs they’d re-created, just like Rose and Jack in the movie. Read More
June 8, 2015 Look Where They Live By Dan Piepenbring Guy Laramée, via This Is Colossal The French Canadian artist Guy Laramée, whom we’ve featured before on the Daily, has a new series of book sculptures, “Onde Elles Moran”—“Where They Live.” Laramée spent nine months on the series, which features Brazilian birds painted on secondhand, linen-bound Clássicos Jackson—something akin to our Great Books of the Western World, those generically handsome tomes seemingly designed to collect dust on attractive shelves—with the birds’ native habitats carved into the pages. Laramée has become known for his book sculptures, which he began about five years ago; he regards books as raw material in need of processing, and he’s proven unafraid to go at them with a chain saw. But he can also approach the medium with a miniaturist’s attention to detail, as demonstrated in the topography of the landscapes here; he uses oil, inks, pigments and dry pastels, crayon, fixative, and beeswax. “It all started in a sand blaster cabinet,” he said in an interview with ANOBIUM about the sculptures’ genesis: I put a book in there—stupid idea—and there it was. Within seconds I saw the landscape, the drama, Borges, the little people who lived in books, everything … I never really totally forget that these are books, that my raw material is not wood, not even paper, but a book. At times I’m lost in the project, in the landscape. But a book is a book, structurally. The pages are not glued, so you have to respect the structure, from the binding of each pages to the cover, otherwise pages will fly away when you release the clamps. You can see more of his work at This Is Colossal, JHB Gallery, and on his Web site. Read More
June 8, 2015 On the Shelf Teach Your Automaton to Feel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Tim Davies, Space Robot Lovers, 2012. At last, the time has come for robots to harness the single most powerful force known to humanity: metaphor. An attempt to teach emotional nuance to artificial intelligences, The Poetry for Robots project invites people—even decidedly unpoetic people—to react to photographs in verse, which the robots will thereafter memorize, as is their wont. “By feeding poems to the robots, the researchers want to ‘teach the database the metaphors’ that humans associate with pictures, ‘and see what happens.’ ” Pistols at dawn! The duel, which was at the peak of its powers in the eighteenth century, enjoyed a prominent status in the literature of the era. Actually, “without literature, there would be much less to go on, historically speaking. Dueling was usually illegal. It was often tolerated, but, still, discretion was an issue—dueling at dawn was popular for reasons of secrecy … One outcome of the silence surrounding the activity was that, for first-timers, the nearest guide to protocol might lie in fiction.” Vivian Gornick on Delmore Schwartz: “Like the time itself, everything about him was out of control—his beautiful, anxiety-ridden face, his stormy eloquence, his outrageous self-dramatization. He charmed and alarmed. There was a sweetness of spirit at the center of all his dishevelment that made nearly everyone who knew him hold him in tender regard.” Fact: “under the right conditions, three atoms that all repel each other will be forced into an inseparable triad.” Physicists have only recently discovered what existentialists have known for a good while—“hell is other atoms.” In French, the word créneau—what we’d call a crenellation, or a battlement in a castle—has taken on a rich figurative life; it can mean a parking spot, an appointment time, even a market opportunity. In other words, it’s very much like our word slot. So why not ask: “Does it mean anything that the French etymology sees appointment times, schedule segments, and parking spaces as figurative openings in a defensive wall made for ‘shooting or launching projectiles upon the enemy,’ while English speakers see them figuratively as shaped depressions made to allow pieces of wood to be fit together into useful structures?”
June 5, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Beach Brain, Polychromatic Plumage By The Paris Review From the cover of the Talk reissue. In 1965, Linda Rosenkrantz summered in East Hampton—as one does, I guess—and had the good sense to bring a tape recorder with her. On the beach, she logged hours of her banal, brilliant conversations with two friends; in 1968 she published the transcripts as a novel, Talk, to be reissued next month. In many ways the book is as exasperating as you’d expect: Linda and her friends, all approaching thirty, seldom entertain thoughts beyond themselves or their coterie. They gossip about fucking and psychoanalysis; pubic dandruff is among their more elevated concerns. And there are moments when you can hear them ham it up for their imaginary audience, affecting even more weariness, intellect, and neurosis than they’ve already claimed. But who cares? Even at its most vapid, Talk captivates: it’s funny, honest, and not infrequently heartbreaking, and it still feels weirdly provocative almost fifty years later. The dialogue captures the sun-brained rhythm of beach talk better than anything I’ve read. —Dan Piepenbring Amelia Gray’s last novel, Threats, was a weird and wonderful book set on the outskirts of reality. Her new story collection, Gutshot, is an episodic version of the same strange locale, one populated by a convulsive puker, a Brobdingnagian snake, and a couple who trap a woman in the air ducts of their house. It’s a place where “the sun beats the shit out of a dirty road called Raton Pass [and] the closet thing to a pair of matching earrings is a guy named Carl who punches you in the head with his fist.” The characters are all misfits of one kind or another, and they are dedicated to their stories even when they don’t seem to want to be a part of them. The title story (my favorite) reads like a shaggy-dog story, except that the ending is unexpectedly moving and meaningful. The membrane between Gray’s stories and our reality is often thin; it’s sometimes breached by a pinhole, as in “Viscera,” in which the skin flakes and spittle of a paper-factory employee drift into the pulp, “baking the genetic evidence of his future heart disease into this very page, which you are touching with your hands.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
June 5, 2015 On Music Skyscrapers and Everything By Rowan Ricardo Phillips The trouble with gazing upward in New York. Don’t look up, Stevie! About four minutes into Stevie Wonder’s 1973 classic “Living for the City”—a surging, seven-plus minute thumper track about racial injustice, migration, and the failure of the latter to cure the former—the song emerges from its second chorus and breaks down to its sparest parts. We hear the quizzical staccato of the synthesizer flit in and out like lingering sunlight; the dry drums, which just seconds ago were rolling out an elaborate fill, tap quarter-note rimshots on the snare; all the other instruments stop playing. Welcome to New York. This interlude, barely a minute long but seemingly much longer, is a marvel within an already marvelous song. It’s an early example in popular music of that moment when a song recognizes its limits and turns, momentarily, into something larger and stranger. After all, Stevie could’ve just tagged on another verse about New York, keeping the song’s structure intact, but wouldn’t there be something thin and dreamy about that? New York collects anthems like medals: “New York, New York,” “On Broadway,” and “Empire State of Mind” are all, in essence, odes to skylines, with outsized grandeur to match. Their scale grows out of proportion; aphorism replaces emotion; the music hits its mark and no one gets hurt. The lesson for songwriters tackling New York has always been this: if you’re going to sing to the city, sing big. The skyline, as more than few writers have reminded us, can even look like musical notation if you squint hard enough. Read More