August 26, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Eric Banks, Part 2 By Eric Banks This is the second installment of Banks’ culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 12:30 P.M. I put in a few bets in advance on the Saratoga card and head for the eye doctor to get new lenses for my glasses (which would have been a boon to have in place before the trip to Philadelphia and DC). I’ll be lens-less for a half hour or so but I print out anyway a Guardian article by Tom McCarthy on “technology and the novel” that I want to read after finishing C. The book had already dashed my fears that post-Remainder McCarthy had turned art-world prankster at best, experimentalist court jester at worst. The profile’s a funny and smart piece when I squint over it an hour later. C begins at a turn-of-the-century school for the deaf with the burial of the protagonist’s sister while the dead girl’s father, a wireless communications buff, wants to rig the bier with a device so that she might signal if she’s not really dead. McCarthy mentions an anecdote about Alexander Graham Bell—his father also ran a school for the deaf, he also had a brother who died, and Alexander entered into a promise with his surviving sibling (who died early as well) that should either of them succomb, the other would create a device to receive transmissions from beyond the grave. He probably would have invented the telephone anyway, of course, and “remained a skeptic and a rationalist throughout his life—but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there.” I’m not sure I buy it, but C makes me feel like I should. 3:30 P.M. Get back home after picking up the new glasses, and I’m glad I read the essay while I waited for them—the replacement lenses make me feel like I’m seeing the world through a goldfish bowl, and I get a terrible headache as a result. Plus, I lost my bets. In the mail is the new Jonathan Franzen which I put off reading with my funky vision. It’ll have to wait until next week, which means I’ll have to make up a bunch of lies if anybody asks me what I think of it. I’d rather bullshit my way through than face the guilt that I won’t actually turn to it until I’m on vacation. 8:00 P.M. Head is still throbbing so I cancel plans to go see the Tilda Swinton flick I Am Love (the only film it seems anybody’s talking about these days) and turn on The Wild One on TMC instead. I feel like I’ve seen it a million times but this seems like the first time I’ve noticed the actor who plays one of Lee Marvin’s sidekicks—who is that guy? A quick IMDB check turns up Timothy Carey—his face is familiar because he plays the racist psychopath in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing who shoots a horse, Red Lightning, during a stakes race, setting off the racetrack heist. Man, where have I been? I make a note to rent Carey’s only directorial effort, The World’s Greatest Sinner, where he plays a crazed rock n’ roller who turns into a Jimmy Swaggert–style evangelist and is struck down by God Himself in the final scene. Read More
August 25, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Eric Banks, Writer By Eric Banks DAY ONE 11:30 A.M. One of my favorite things about going to Philadelphia is that when you’re disgorged from the train you step into 30th Street Station. I don’t think I’m alone in that sentiment—how many films have been made about the City of Brotherly Love that find some way or another to use the old Beaux-Arts structure as a set? I’m not sure what it says about a city that every filmmaker wants to signify Philadelphianess with the very place you’d pass through if you were either coming or going—or for that matter, why so many Philly films choose to stage their most extravagant moments of murder and witnessed mayhem in this relatively quiet corner of the city—but at any rate I get a little thrill of walking through the station, so much more humanly scaled (if still monumental in its own way) than Grand Central or Union Station but losing nothing of the rustle of urbanity in the process. 11:50 A.M. It’s a quick hop by cab to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the first leg of our seaboard-descending art trip. It’s not so much a staycation—with the price of an Amtrak ticket down and back, plus a night among all the foreign tourists at a Dupont Circle hotel chain, we could as well have flown somewhere. We were lured by the recently restored Gross Clinic, on view for the first time since it’s been spiffied up by its new owners, who rallied to keep the canvas in Thomas Eakins’s hometown when the Walmart heirs were trying to buy it and exile it to an Arkansas museum, and the promise of an Arte Povera installation. The latter turns out to be a bit overblown—really just a couple of ho-hum works thrown in to a room alongside great but familiar pieces by Bruce Nauman and Robert Morris. Povera, indeed. 12:30 P.M. The Duchamp gallery is, happily, nearly empty of other visitors. Our companion, a Yale art historian who did his dissertation on Duchamp, seems almost deliriously placid sitting in front of “The Large Glass.” You don’t associate that sort of copacetic plenitude with looking at Duchamp, and it’s sort of marvelous to behold. “It never disappoints me,” he says in a church voice. I’ve never had that experience with “The Large Glass,” though “Étant donnés,” no matter how many times you’ve peeped through the hole in the doorway, never loses its filthy staying power and fresh smell of mystery. What other creaky and canonical artworks of the last one hundred years can you say that about? I still feel like a perv squatting so slightly to look through the peephole at the splayed, spread-eagle figure and the twinkling faux waterfall. It’s almost obligatory afterward to cut back through the Brancusi gallery and have a look at the plain, unmarked door allowing maintenance access to the piece. The sight is a purgative for the eyes. 2:00 P.M. After a bite in the commissary, we catch the trolley to the museum’s annex, where “The Gross Clinic” is the star attraction. There’s a dismayingly large crowd on hand to see Eakins’s bloody study from 1875, which until a few years ago was off-the-beaten trail at the Jefferson Memorial Hospital (where Gross, a celebrated military surgeon during the Civil War, held his classes). There’s a lot of documentation on the walls about the painting’s history and how its subject matter—the surgery to remove a diseased bit of femoral bone, which pre-Gross would have entailed amputation of the leg—revolted audiences in 1876, when it was excluded from the city’s Centennial Exhibition. I hoped there’d be a picture of how it was in fact installed at the time, hanging at the end of an art-meets-life prefab model army hospital tent, neatly and almost hilariously in situ, but no such luck. The canvas now has far more commodious digs—almost its own mini-chapel, where it’s flanked by Eakins’s other surgical masterpiece, “The Agnew Clinic.” And after the restoration effort, it’s that much clearer just how strange a picture it is. Before, you saw Gross holding his scarlet-flecked scalpel upright like a paintbrush, you made out the scene of the operation, with its attending surgeons wielding their blood-tipped knives like pencils. But so much else was clouded and clotted in a bizarrely blah electrically colored background glare—the tonal registers were just weird, almost fecklessly unresolved. Now you can really pick up the dark clarity of the whole background, including the image of the figure just behind Gross, who’s taking notes and whose grip on his pencil ramifies that of the doctors going after the rotting bone. The sharply foreshortened patient’s fuzzy blue socks jut out at you all that more dramatically and make a clean rhyme against the ether-soaked pillow over his head. And the guy lingering in the hallway—Gross’s son—behind the theater, swallowed in a red haze, is a lot more fiendishly integrated into the scene. I first saw the canvas when it was in the Met’s Eakins retrospective in 2001, and this was like seeing a totally different picture. When we had dinner a couple of nights earlier with an art historian who has a book coming out on the “pleasure dairies” of the ancién regime (the best known being Marie-Antoinette’s white marble Hameau at Versailles), she complained about the recent exhibition tendency to make a fetish of the tech-wiz conservationist. Philadelphia’s played up its efforts to clean Eakins—a misnomer, since what they did in essence was to add a level of varnish that the old medical hospital canvas doctors stripped away to try and make the gloomy tones brighter, mucking up the balance in the process. They’ve clarified it strangely enough by making it more oblique. In a lot of the press notices, the conservators make a fascinating observation that their restoration process can easily be undone by future generations if viewing tastes should change—what they’ve got now is a painting that is more attuned to the way nineteenth-century viewers looked at canvases, though most nineteenth-century folks couldn’t stand to look at them. Could you do the same thing with literary translation—build in some sort of tacit statement that the new translations of Proust or Tolstoy or Kafka that you’re reading are only provisional, or for that matter, opt to retranslate them backward, into their earlier and less contemporary idioms? I’ve just read a passage in Tom McCarthy’s new novel C where Egyptologists are discussing a dig and talk about the fact that what they drag up aren’t pure artifacts but the record of earlier plunderers, Romans, Arab, even pharoaic. Where the latter-day architects make their historical mistake is in thinking that their own moment is somehow the definitive one. Instead, it’s just another chapter in a long book. I think McCarthy would approve of “The Gross Clinic’s” restoration relativism. Read More
August 12, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Hilton Als, Part 2 By Hilton Als This is the second installment of Als’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR I finished watching There Will Be Blood, hours after I’d returned from visiting an actor friend in Brooklyn. She had a terrible accident while filming an episode of SVU (or SUV—I never know what that show’s called). An actor shook her too hard, hurting her neck, so, in order to see my friend, I have to go to her. Despite her pain, my friend was herself, which is to say a real raconteur, one of the last of the best. She punctuates her story-telling with peals of laughter, knowing pauses, and concern. Her presence is part of what makes New York itself, a city filled with jumpy and funny and paranoid people—particularly in the summer. Before I left my friend’s house we talked about how scary we both find Hemingway’s short story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Then I got on the subway, which is far from my house; I had to walk past the Brooklyn Hospital to get there, perhaps my least favorite walk in the world, since my mother spent a great deal of time in that hospital when I was a kid, thus instituting my continual anxiety about separation, and my need to be alone so it doesn’t happen. No one leaves if no one is invited in. After I got home, I saw gothic everywhere—such was There Will Be Blood‘s continuing sway over my imagination. Paul Thomas Anderson in no way obscures the gothic tone in Upton Sinclair’s book, Oil!—the source material for his movie. Indeed, I started thinking about one of my favorite American authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne, during Blood’s end credits. Is Hawthorne not one of the architects of our American interest in a world peopled, say, white-collared, circle girls screaming twice-told tales from a morally divided heart? DAY FIVE Back to the issue of time. One way to measure it’s passing is by watching porn. Before you know it, yesterday’s semi-twink is today’s suited, inscrutable Daddy. While gay porn actors generally make the transition less disfigured by cosmetic surgery than female actors in straight porn, for instance, one sometimes senses what plastic surgery can, at least in part, disguise: exhaustion. Take Zak Spears for instance. While Spears often took on the “butch,” role in early films—the Spears character has always been critical, hard to read, slow to commit to the action but, once engaged, insatiable—one never got the sense that his interest in his partner was diminished by performing scripted sex. Now, in his latest movie, Unsuited, Spears is in full Daddy mode. But behind the gruff instructions to his young “boy,” during their table top assignation, one senses Spears’ boredom with the entire enterprise. Does time erode our ability to find surprise in most situations? As we grow older, do we spend more and more time sitting in craters of boredom? This is the kind of exegesis—porn as a metaphor about time connection—that one could express without a qualm to the late and lamented editor, Barbara Epstein. As one of the founders of The New York Review of Books, Barbara’s profound gift—among many—was for seeing what her writers could not, and not insisting on a change during the editing process that would derail your thought, but enhanced it. She was a real world saint who was familiar enough with this common place that she knew humor was not a character trait, but a saving grace. And among the graces, she was the most graceful. Read More
August 11, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Hilton Als, Writer By Hilton Als DAY ONE There is not enough time for anything, ever. The point was to start this journal yesterday, a Monday, since everyone’s “official,” week begins then—back from the weekend, off to MOMA, what’s at the Frick, that kind of thing—but I didn’t. And this has nothing to do with my general tardiness as much as it does my ambivalence about keeping a record of anything that can’t be contained in a photograph; sometimes I sit in my underwear in my house in despair over how paltry a thing words can seem, particularly when I’ve written them. But challenge is my middle name, and this journal, this record of my life in culture that I meant to begin at the start of the week but didn’t, is my attempt to meld experience and memory with words and see what we come up with. As it happens, my week in culture began not today or Monday, but Saturday, when I was standing on a train platform in Jamaica, Queens, and I saw a beautiful older man in a sky-blue Mao jacket; he was fine-boned, as though drawn out of thin air by Ingres, or David Hockney. Bill Cunningham, of course, the great documentary photographer who, for over fifty years, has been chronicling the hem-lines and moral fashions of any number of New York-based women. Bill was on his way to Bridgehampton to cover an event for The New York Times, but he wasn’t staying overnight. “I never do,” he said, silently wondering. He’s an incorrigible romantic, in love with Manhattan, a city the poet Marianne Moore described as being home to “the savage’s romance.” Bill is a former hat maker from Boston, and his pictures finds a forum where female beauty plays itself out, gladiator fashion: who will win in the world of trend? Ever trendy, I was off to Sag Harbor to visit some fashionable friends. As a matter of fact, my week with culture didn’t begin until several days before that, when I went to visit beauty editor Jean Godfrey June at Lucky Magazine. Jean is the best writer in the fashion business, but I don’t consider beauty fashion since beauty has less to do with the fluctuations—and insecurities—of fashion as it does with wanting to put a nice face on most things, not to mention people. In any case, Jean was very excited by Rodarte’s latest foray into trying to make fashion and beauty fit their world view: cosmetics they’d designed for MAC. Eyeshadow that looked like shimmering, electrified goldfish circling in black vials; “gothic” colors that felt like the best color field painting I’d seen in a while. Read More
August 5, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: J. D. Daniels, Part 2 By J. D. Daniels This is the second installment of Daniels’ culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 9:00 A.M. Slept eleven hours. A dream of my desk, very clean, nothing on it but a flower, inkpens, my hourglass. After waking, I arrange the desk to match the dream. I stare out the window for an hour until the phone rings: and this is why one must take the phone off the hook. My father calls to say he’s mailed two boxes of his old sweaters to me. Ninety degrees Fahrenheit projected for today. NYT and WSJ. 11:00 A.M. On the scale at the YMCA: I have gained forty-one pounds since January, thirty-five pounds of steel-hard muscle and six pounds of greasy trash. My goal is eleven more pounds before I go back to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Encounter with P at the grocery. I haven’t seen him for two years, not since I was so skinny that they called me the disappearing man. “Now you’re a monster,” he says. But I am not a monster: I am a nice person. 6:00 P.M. Walk along the river. Humid. A woman needed help untangling her garden hose: held her dog for her. Sparrows taking dust-baths, beating their heads against the ground. Starlings. A plague of robins. A single night-heron. 7:00 P.M. Pasta with red peppers. Finished Dash Shaw’s graphic novel Bodyworld. 8:00 P.M. Turned on This Old House and saw Bill Pierce from Agni sweeping polymerized sand into the cracks of his new patio. I gave a lecture to his night class at the Extension School last week. A student asked if I worry about what people think when I “write something cheesy.” “Cheese is very good for you,” I said. “It contains calcium and vitamin A and phosphorus. So fuck them.” 10:00 P.M. Staying up late to finish Leila Marouane’s novel The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris. DAY FIVE 9:00 A.M. Rain. Re-reading D. H. Lawrence on Whitman at L’s instigation. NYT and WSJ. 11:00 A.M. I call downtown to see if I’m going to be able to hock my bass amp. The fellow on the phone—enthusiastic, not to say coked up—begins to describe his evaluative process to me. “It’s like Pawn Stars on the Discovery Channel,” he says, “have you ever seen it?” No, but I have been in a lot of pawn shops. The last time I was in this store I threw a fit, the kind of fit I thought I didn’t have any more. But I was mistaken. My analyst found it all very interesting. “Hmm,” he said. He’s always humming, that man. He sounds like an old refrigerator. Sometimes I’d like to break his fingers. There are ten of them. 1:00 P.M. Home, with the bass amp converted into not quite enough money to buy a used saxophone. “My mouth isn’t deformed,” I tell the guy on the phone. “I’m not following you,” he says. “What I mean,” I say, “is can a normal person learn to make a sound on it?” “It’s an easy instrument to begin,” he says, “the saxophone. At first. Relax.” People are always telling me to relax. 4:00 P.M. Cleaning the downstairs library. These other culture diarists are more interesting than I am. I wonder if they are lying. The temptation to lie is very great. DAY SIX 7:00 A.M. A cicada molting on S’s office window. Its slow green leg. NYT and WSJ. 11:00 A.M. To the Y. Maxing out my deadlifts again. I want more, I’m greedy, I’m weak, I have so far to go. I don’t know how Sven Lindqvist maintained his veneer of calm in Bench Press. I never cared about sports until I was thirty and I used to think it was ridiculous when I saw athletes getting psyched up, but now I’m scared enough of being crushed under my squat poundage that I sometimes have to slap my face a couple of times before I can begin. You lift weights with your mind, not your body. 2:00 P.M. Takeout: dumplings, pork with garlic sauce, beef with broccoli, chicken fried rice. Five fortune cookies have been included: apparently this was thought to be a meal for five. 3:30 P.M. Comatose for two hours. 6:30 P.M. To J’s house. Crates of books he must get rid of. Burnaby’s On Horseback Through Asia Minor, wonderful. Giants walked the earth in those days. They taught themselves to do without. Maybe they didn’t want it in the first place. See also: Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. Read More
August 4, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: J. D. Daniels, Writer By J. D. Daniels DAY ONE 9:00 A.M. July is now nearly over. And what have I done with it. My neck hurts. Slept ten hours last night after a three-hour nap yesterday afternoon. I’m overtrained. 9:45 A.M. A letter to H about The Web’s new record, Clydotorous Scrotodhendron. The track now listed as “Luxor” was called “Rookie Season” the summer I sat in with them. Took the phone off the hook this morning to protect S’s desk time—mine needs no protecting, it may need disrupting. Terror that my mother will call the moment the phone is reconnected. 10:00 A.M. The Essential Artie Shaw. Charlie Parker with Strings. 12:00 P.M. Walking to the Farmer’s Market. M says we can’t buy arugula from the Hmong because they use human shit as fertilizer—at least I think that’s what the problem is supposed to be: M can’t say shit or even allude to it, like Henry James not talking about the dog on his porch: “something black, something canine.” Something brown, something fecal. I buy arugula from the Hmong. 2:00 P.M. Reading Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his Fitzcarraldo diaries. He has an iron confidence in himself and in his own vision, his own interests. It’s not about what Herzog thinks he’s supposed to want, it’s about what he actually does want. 4:00 P.M. Double espresso with honey and milk. The New York Times crossword. 6:30 P.M. At the grill. Crumpling newspaper in the bottom of the chimney starter. A single swallow in the sky, twittering. Ants on the bricks in the spilt olive oil. You can see why primitive man thought fire was a god. Now we don’t think there’s any god at all. How primitive is that. An hour later: bad steak, all my fault. Good salad from S. 8:00 P.M. Johnny Hodges and His Orchestra—a.k.a. Duke Ellington featuring Johnny Hodges. 10:00 P.M. Staying up late to watch Mad Men. DAY TWO 7:00 A.M. Decent weather for the first time in weeks. Windows are open all over the house. The air conditioner is silent. Whiz and honk of occasional cars. A far-off train. Wind in the trees. Birds squeeping and skronking. An angry, excited cawing. Gray light. This is a nature diary, not a culture diary. 9:00 A.M. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 11:00 A.M. To YMCA. Hit the wall on deadlifts—when you hit the wall, you need the man with the hammer. Kept going, ripped my palm open, almost passed out. 1:30 P.M. To Stereo Jack’s. Impulse CD of Coleman Hawkins with Ellington, a two-record set of Gene Ammons (“The 78 Era”), Astor Piazzolla’s The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night, Archie Shepp and Richard Davis live in Boston 1989. 2:00 P.M. Comatose for three hours. 7:00 P.M. Too hot to cook. Out to José’s for carne asada. Scorpion tattoo on our waiter’s neck. Read More