short takes
This summer I caught World Cup fever, which has morphed into an obsession with European soccer. I’ve been watching a game or two a week, as well as watching highlights from dozens of others and reading blogs and newspapers’ sports sections. There are a handful of intersections between the sport and contemporary art—another of my interests—most notably Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 film Zidane: A 21st-century Portrait. Now I’ve come across Pied La Biche, an artists’ collective that has riffed on soccer several times. Their video Refait re-creates, on the streets of Villeurbanne, France, the final fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup match between France and Spain. The group has also realized artist Asger Jorn’s 1964 proposal for a three-sided football match, which was played in Vénissieux, France, in October 2009 during the Lyon Biennale. Learn more about the group at their French-language website. (Via soccer blog From a Left Wing. Also, if you’re wondering, I’m rooting for Arsenal.)
My friend Alan Gilbert recently conducted a lengthy and fascinating interview with Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) for Bomb Magazine. Clayton is behind the consistently great blog mudd up!; is the creator of stunning DJ mixes that incorporate music from around the globe; is the author of insightful articles (one, two) on changes in music culture; and lives, I think, down the block from me. Clayton’s Gold Teeth Thief Mix, released in 2001, opened up my ears to musical cultures with which I was unfamiliar, and was a large part of the reason why, when his 2008 album Uproot was released, I was not surprised to discover I was familiar with many of the “obscure” musicians it samples, including Ekkehard Ehlers, whose 12″s under the collective title Plays (later released as a CD on Staubgold) remain favorites of mine. In the interview, Clayton discusses “friction as a process,” the computer as the “folk instrument of composition,” and the economics of DJing. And really—if you haven’t yet heard Gold Teeth Thief, go download it. It’s free.
For several months I have read, in a fugitive manner, Michael Greenberg’s essay collection Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. A compilation of roughly thousand-word essays he has published in the Times Literary Supplement, the book, so far as I can tell, amounts to a haphazard index of New York, a careful and sympathetic accounting of its odd places and characters. I peruse it standing up. I read in a West Village bookstore about a longtime fixer in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Greenberg grew up, and in an Upper West Side indie about Hart Island, a potter’s field where thousands of New York’s anonymous dead lie buried. Now I’m pleased to discover that Greenberg has inaugurated a new column, “The Accidentalist,” in the new issue of Bookforum. Read his first entry, about a “strange fever,” here.
One of my summer goals is to read (or re-read) several of Christopher Lasch’s books, from The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963 (1965) to The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994), as a prelude to reading Eric Miller’s new biography of Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time. Reviews of Miller’s study have begun coming in over the transom. Andrew Bacevich warmly welcomes the book in the new issue of World Affairs, and Alan Wolfe reviewed it in a recent issue of The New Republic. Rochelle Gurstein, once a student of Lasch’s, takes issue with Wolfe’s piece, recommending Bacevich and Jackson Lears as better guides to Lasch’s thinking. (Lears’s 1995 consideration is not yet available online.) I would add two enjoyable, deeply thoughtful essays to Gurstein’s recommendations. One is the reminiscence Lasch’s University of Rochester colleague Robert Westbrook published in Reviews in American History in 1995, and the other is Louis Menand’s 1991 NYRB essay. Unfortunately both require subscriptions to read online, though Menand’s piece was reprinted in his 2002 collection American Studies (it begins on page 198). Also useful is the Christopher Lasch bibliography-in-progress, maintained until 2003 by Robert Cummings. UPDATE, 5/25: Former Lasch student Chris Lehmann reviews the biography in the summer issue of Bookforum.
For several years I have enjoyed Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” column in the New York Times. This morning, looking online, I discovered Gray has been writing about buildings and blocks in New York for over two decades. These pieces comprise a huge and diverting archive, from which I learned, for example, that until the early 1990s my block housed an Episcopal church constructed in 1838 on land donated by Clement Clark Moore. Moore is the author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (more commonly known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), and his family estate, Chelsea, is the source of my neighborhood’s name. Click here for the archive with a brief introduction to the column by Gray. Two books, Changing New York (1992) and New York Streetscapes (2003), also contain materials from the column.
I’ve just surfaced from a particularly pleasant internet-as-black-hole experience. After reading Craig Fehrman’s entertaining article on Mark Twain’s house, I wandered over to his website. There I found a link to Rick Perlstein’s 2002 essay on plagiarism and writing history, published in the Voice Literary Supplement. From there I found a page with links to the contents of more than a dozen issues of the VLS. Good reads abound: Mike Davis on Jane Jacobs (April/May 2000); Luc Sante on street vendors (December 1999); Benjamin Kunkel on W.G. Sebald (June 2000); Michael Eric Dyson on Stanley Aronowitz (September 1998); and much, much more. For those wanting to learn more, Joy Press compiled a brief oral history of the VLS on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary.
John Gray has written the first review I’ve seen of The Shock of the Global (Harvard), an anthology of historians’ writings about the 1970s edited by a super-group of three Harvard-based historians and a colleague from Berkeley. His assessment: “While what one contributor calls ‘the declining autonomy of the United States in international affairs’ is occasionally acknowledged, the idea that globalization might be undermining America’s position in the world is nowhere systematically examined.” Read more in The New Statesman.
Last December I wrote a brief review of Mitch Epstein’s remarkable new book American Power (Steidl). The photographic series it presents was also meant to be presented in public, and a few days ago Pentagram, the design company, announced the launch of the American Power website, located at WhatIsAmericanPower.com. Epstein’s images have been placed on twenty-three billboards in Columbus and Cincinnati with the URL superimposed upon them. Viewers (and website visitors who haven’t seen the billboards) are encouraged to answer the titular question, and the responses are being folded in to the site to create “an immersive context for the project’s content and … a public forum about notions of power and energy in America today.”
I just enjoyed John Vachon’s charming memoir of being introduced to photography by Roy Striker, head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration and amasser of 250,000 images of America taken between 1935 and 1944. (Those who have access to the Harper’s online archive can read the September 1973 piece here.) After working for Stryker for some time, Vachon writes, “one day I told Stryker I thought there were many scenes around Washington that should be photographed for his files. ‘Why don’t you borrow a camera and give it a try?’ he answered. And I did not hear the portentous bells tolling.” So began the first of a widening circle of trips out into the country, which he says allowed “a last look at America as it used to be.” Vachon went on to photograph for three more decades; small selections of his photographs can be found here, here, and here. (The last set was made in Puerto Rico the year he wrote his essay about Stryker.) In 2003, the University of California Press published a book, John Vachon’s America, that combines his FSA photographs with his writings—letters and journal entries, mostly—from the era.
Writing in the current issue of the New Left Review, Mike Davis offers a two-part meditation on the environmental crisis. The first part, “Pessimism of the Intellect,” uses the recent announcement that we have left behind the Holocene epoch and entered an Anthropocene period, made by Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, as the hook for a survey of current climate-crisis literature. The second part, “Optimism of the Imagination,” notes “innumerable examples” that “all point to a single unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any green design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth.” Glancing back at Kropotkin, Ebeneezer Howard’s Garden Cities movement, and the radical plans for public space offered by Constructivist and Bauhaus designers, Davis suggests that the conversations about a “socialist city” of a hundred years ago “provide invaluable starting points for thinking about the current crisis.” To read the full article, which was originally delivered one year ago as a talk at the UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, click here.
The January 2010 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly contains reviews of recent books by two scholars based at NYU. Both books, Thomas M. Truxes’s Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York and Bryan Waterman’s Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature, also happen to focus on mid-to-late-eighteenth-century New York. And, last but not least, both authors happen to be speaking this semester as part of NYU’s Atlantic World Workshop. Truxes appears next Tuesday, February 2; Waterman will deliver a paper on March 23. For more, see Waterman’s blog, co-authored with Cyrus R.K. Patell and called, appropriately enough, Patell and Waterman’s History of New York; listen to Truxes’s March 2009 conversation with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate; and see my brief post on turn-of-the-eighteenth-century New York bookseller Hocquet Caritat.
I’ve just finished reading the new issue of The Baffler, and I can report that every article rewards an attentive read. The writing is crisp and the thinking is sharp throughout the magazine. Somewhat surprisingly, the tone of simmering resentment at the follies of our political and economic mandarins is invigorating, even at a moment of “bailout fatigue.” That tone characterizes the bulk of the issue’s essays, from Michael Lind’s thesis positing a contemporary U.S. oligarchy to Moe Tkacik’s analysis of book-length narratives about the economic crisis. Throw in smart essays on Detroit, Thomas Kinkade, Michael Bloomberg, Nelson Algren, and a two-part opening salvo (1, 2) about how we experience the internet, and the issue is more than worth its $12 cover price. Click here to subscribe, or here to download PDFs of several back issues.
“The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to ‘trouble’ ideas.” So says Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, whose reviews in Bookforum I have always enjoyed. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Roth continues: “Our students may become too good at showing how things don’t make sense. [...] If we humanities professors saw ourselves more often as explorers of the normative than as critics of normativity, we would have a better chance to reconnect our intellectual work to broader currents in public culture.” To read the rest of the essay, which is published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, click here. For those interested in reading even more, he also maintains a blog and writes for the Huffington Post.
Many people have commented upon Tony Judt’s eloquent and acutely observant description of the “progressive imprisonment without parole” that is life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from which he suffers. The first of a series of short essays, on the subject of getting through the night, is in the January 14 issue of the NYRB. Judt has also been profiled recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ve just come across Roger Ebert’s perceptive and unsentimental description of being unable to eat or drink, published on his blog. Both are very much worth reading; each demonstrates a deeply admirable force of will and humbles those of us, myself included, who are blessed with relative good health.
My friends Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, two-thirds of the editorial team behind e-flux journal, have printed excerpts from October’s recent questionnaire about the “lightness of being” that seemingly characterizes contemporary art. “I have arranged the extracts with an eye to connections that exist between them,” Hal Foster, who devised the questions, writes. “My purpose here is simply to suggest the state of the debate on ‘the contemporary’ in my part of the world today.” The last time October sent out such a questionnaire, asking in what ways “artists, academics, and cultural institutions” responded to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the answers were both insightful and revealing. Responses to the new survey by Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, Richard Meyer, Pamela Lee, Tim Griffin, Rachel Haidu, and others can be found here. (Link to e-flux journal originally via Greg Allen.)
I’m jealous of my friend Michael Ned Holte, a talented art critic and film enthusiast, for he has seen James Benning’s Ruhr (2009), the filmmaker’s newest work and first foray into high-definition video. Thankfully, he has also written about it, for Artforum.com, and in the process has offered a thoughtful meditation on some of the differences between digital and celluloid images. It’s “not simply the difference between the ‘purity’ or indexicality of photographic grain versus cold, clinical pixels: Ruhr suggests that, for Benning, the true promise of HD is in its capacity to capture images at durations that push the limits of the viewer’s attention toward an almost-inhuman scale of time—albeit in a physical way that an all-too-human viewer, seated in the theater, will surely register.” Ruhr receives its US premiere at REDCAT in Los Angeles on January 11. To read the rest of Holte’s piece, click here.
Those who remember with some fondness Today in Letters, the blog I published briefly in 2007, will appreciate Letters of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. The author describes it as a “blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives.” Since I began following the site a few weeks ago, it has presented letters from Billy the Kid, Margaret Thatcher, American Revolutionary War General William Howe, and many others. The scans make each entry; it’s fascinating to ponder the material details of each letter, from paper choice (or letterhead design) to handwriting.
From an interview with Wolves in the Throne Room drummer and organic farmer Aaron Weaver: “I think that black metal fundamentally is an attempt to reawaken an ancient spirit. It’s an attempt to touch some sort of transcendent primal knowledge…. I think that black metal is an artistic movement that is critiquing modernity on a fundamental level saying that the modern world view is missing something. It’s missing acknowledgment of a spiritual reality. That estrangement from spiritual knowledge is the source of very deep sadness and alienation.” I’ve been listening to WiTTR’s 2007 album Two Hunters on repeat for the last few days. It’s a pretty exceptional record; read the Pitchfork review here. The band describes itself as combining “an eco-spiritual awareness with the misanthropic Norwegian eruptions of the 1990s.” If only we all could do that.
On Design Observer, Steven Heller looks back at the late-’60s leftist muckracking magazine Ramparts, discussing both its content and its (curiously staid but influential) design. “Marking the end of post-war puritan American values, a younger generation that had been raised on the sour milk of McCarthyism reinvigorated periodical publishing. Ramparts on the West Coast was the clarion of new aesthetics, politics and social mores.” The magazine is also subject of a new book, A Bomb In Every Issue by Peter Richardson, which Dwight Garner reviewed for the New York Times in early October.
The first significant reviews of Gordon Wood’s entry in Oxford’s multi-volume History of the United States are trickling in. Jay Winik, in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, calls Empire of Liberty “the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant thinking and writing” and “as elegant a synopsis of the period as any I know,” noting in particular the way Wood traces the emergence of the middling classes as active, engaged citizens. Jill Lepore, writing in the Washington Post, is respectful but less excited, noting Wood’s “particular knack for writing books with the magisterial sweep” of the volumes in this series while acknowledging that his focus on intellectual and political history leaves out “daily ugliness and economic strife.” For more, see the new article about and interview with Wood in the Post’s “Writing Life” series.
national health insurance, from FDR and Harry Truman to JFK and Lyndon Johnson. The chapter on Johnson draws on newly released archival material to present a “secret history of Medicare” that counters the popular narrative granting credit for the program to Senator Wilbur Mills. It turns out that LBJ, master manipulator of Congress that he was, was in on Mills’s “surprise” packaging of three separate bills—the ones that became Medicare Part A, Medicare Part B, and Medicaid—all along, graciously working behind the scenes to clear the path for the senator to dramatically reverse his longstanding anti–health insurance stance (and even following this narrative line in his autobiography).