The Smart Set
>You begin to see Ken’s influence everywhere
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Greg Beato reflects on 50 years of Ken @ The Smart Set.
As Harley-Davidson Ken #2, Barbie’s perennial boy toy is presented with a scruffy beard and a stand of old-growth chest hair that would make Tom Selleck proud. His leather and denim duds are accessorized with testeronic man-bling: a heavy-duty Harley belt buckle and a dangling wallet chain. On his left forearm, his tough plastic flesh has been permanently ornamented with a “Born to ride” tattoo. Harley-Davidson Ken Doll #2 is aimed at collectors and the ladies love him. “What I would not have given to have this bad-to-the-bone sexy Ken when I was growing up!!” enthuses one at Amazon. “My Barbie’s [sic] are all falling over themselves trying to get next to this bad boy,” exclaims another.
And yet it turns out that even rugged, undomesticated Ken — Ken at his most virile, redolent of leather and gasoline and lusting for the open road — is not quite as autonomous as he looks. “Although he cannot stand unsupported, he is fully jointed and easy to pose,” Amazon’s official description of the product advises.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Unable to stand alone, readily compliant — such is the fate of Barbie’s perpetual plus-one. Fifty years ago, on March 11, 1961, Mattel introduced to Ken to the world. With his trim crewcut, stiff carriage, and vacant but beseeching eyes, he looked like an earnest All-American zombie ready to do Barbie’s bidding. A half-century later, he’s even more servile, devolving into Sweet Talking Ken, an incarnation Mattel describes as the “ultimate boyfriend for every occasion.” With a built-in voice recorder and microphone, Ken possesses the power of speech — but he can only say “whatever you want him to say.”
>Our mechanized existence
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James Polchin on the history and relevancy of 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge @ The Smart Set.
In her book Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge, Rebecca Solnit writes that one of the most common phrases of the late 19th century was “the annihilation of time and space.” The steamship, the telegraph, the railroad — what Emerson called “one web” of a “thousand various threads” — and the photograph each played a role in destroying older notions of time and place. But as Solnit suggests, at heart of this annihilation was a conviction that viewed “the terms of our bodily existence as burdensome,” and that believed technology could do for us what our bodies couldn’t.
You can’t get better evidence for this burdensome body than the photographs that Muybridge made of Leland Stanford’s white racehorse Occident. The animal’s body was carved into a sequence of 24 silhouetted images that record the graceful form of the animal’s gait. These motion studies, as they are known, were a first of their kind and were a precursor to the moving image. Because of Muybridge’s motion studies, we learned that for a split second, a galloping horse has all four hooves off the ground — a reality never witnessed before. Muybridge photographed Occident at Stanford’s Palo Alto estate in the spring of 1872 with the aim of improving the racehorse’s performance. Using a sequence of cameras set along a marked path, Muybridge transformed the body of the animal into an object frozen in time to be studied and improved. The symbolic force of the railroad millionaire turning his prized racehorse into a series of mechanical images cannot be overstated. And it was Muybridge who enacted this feat of industrial will.
>Bedbugs have posed an existential dilemma
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The day K. came in and said, “I don’t care anymore,” was a revelation. By then, the communal living space/art collective housing 17 artists and hangers-on that was my home had been battling bedbugs for three months. Only four of the 17 rooms (mine not included) were actually infested, but communal living as it is, we all had to share in the initial bedbug cleansing procedures familiar to anyone who has had or read about bedbugs — the thorough packing all personal items in plastic, the taping of holes and cracks in walls and furniture, the wrapping of each bed in a plastic sack not unlike those used to wrap corpses at homicide scenes. We tried not to let hysteria get the best of us as we emptied our rooms of every doodad, every picture, and watched the mountain of 17 people’s-worth of belongings mushroom in the gallery space. We pooled $1,500 and vacated for four days while the 5,000 square feet were sprayed with chemical warfare. We then returned, unpacked our belongings, and waited for the bugs to die.
But they did not die. And because only four rooms were actually infested, and the time and expense to spray the entire floor was so demanding, we decided as a group to focus our efforts and money on just those four rooms. Though we were spraying only four rooms (a second time, and then a third…) we all had to pay for it, and it wasn’t long before there was discontent among the masses. People secretly blamed and resented the bedbug-havers for failing to rid their rooms of the scourge. They were seen as unclean. It’s not that anyone meant to ostracize them; we simply could not help ourselves. Of course, no one wanted the bugs gone more than the people who had them, who were still living out of plastic bags, suffering the itchy bites, unable to sleep with their beds against the wall. Our weekly house meetings — where we usually talked about dirty dishes and upcoming art shows — were dominated by talk of the bedbugs: when was the exterminator coming again, what were the bedbug-havers doing wrong and how could they improve their efforts. It was at one of these meetings that A. started to show signs of madness.
>The allure of the burning library
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects — the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives — is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.
There was a time when I thought I could do without much of one. As a student in college and graduate school, moving from room to room virtually every year, the desire to keep my possessions down to what could be stuffed into a Toyota Corolla overwhelmed the reptilian instinct to collect. That in itself became a pleasurable asceticism, and it suited my budget. As so often accompanies renunciation, I came to love the forbidden objects — the books — more and more. I learned to bind and sew my own, to cut the pages, and to print, illustrate, and letterpress them. Exactly because space was so limited, I could spend an entire Sunday afternoon at a certain used bookstore agonizing over several possible purchases, of which I would allow myself only one.
Mainly, during that time, my bookshelf was a rotating amalgam of whatever my heart desired from the library — and these were really good university libraries, with miles of shelves and easy access to interlibrary loan. On a whim, I could flit to the cavernous stacks and pick up an answer to whatever curiosity crossed my mind. Along the way to finding it, I’d end up grabbing a few more books that attracted me. Those ugly buildings — they were always ugly — became more than homes away from home. Walking into one, I’d feel as if entering an annex of my own nervous system.
>Tempting himself with the impossible
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Morgan Meis @ The Smart Set on the romanticism of Mario Vargas Llosa.
The old man has always been a Romantic. It is easy to picture him there in the military boarding school in Lima, 1950. He describes it to us in four words; damp, gray, boring, unhappy. That was Mario Vargas Llosa 60 years before he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In the face of the doldrums, Llosa turned to Victor Hugo. Who else is a sensitive young lad living in Peru going to turn to? I say this jokingly, but also, not. In a curious and enjoyable little book Llosa wrote about Hugo’s Les Misérables (The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and “Les Misérables”), he describes being carried away by Hugo’s world of “extreme misfortune, love, courage, happiness, and vile deeds.”
>On the Road in Mexico
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John Washington details the people and places on his way to Mexico City @ The Smart Set.
The outdoor waiting room of the bus station in Nogales, Sonora was under a high metal roof with horticultural shade screens bungeed to the two-story posts. It had three rows of ripped-out bus seats, with about a dozen or so recently deported migrants slouched wide-eyed in the afternoon heat, some of them eating chicharrónes soaked in hot sauce and lime juice. I sat down in the second row and watched a teenage boy, the son of the woman who ran the food stall, whistle and tease a small parrot in a cage. His two younger siblings, a girl about five and a boy about three, rescued an injured sparrow they found in one of the spidery, cat-piss corners, and then spent a half an hour squeezing and petting the poor bird, screaming at it when it tried desperately (and ineffectively) to fly away until the kids’ mother came over to help. She was a beautiful woman probably in her early 30s, with a carefully made-up face, large hoop earrings, and a round, watermelon-protuberant gut which hung out of her tight tanktop and over her beltline. She took the child-tortured sparrow and introduced it, across the wire cage, to the parrot.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )But it looked as though the parrot, instead of wanting to kiss the sparrow, sensed the introduction of a rival, and wanted to peck the smaller, injured bird to death. The sparrow itself looked as if it were being electrocuted as it vibrated violently and squeaked in fear in the woman’s tight grip. Finally, the mother gave the sparrow back to her yelping, man-handling children, and spent the next 10 minutes or so widely opening her mouth and letting out a slow, childish, single-note whistle, which seemed to be as much as she could whistle, trying to get the parrot to either calm down or repeat her unmusical call. The parrot did neither, which didn’t stop the woman from repeating her kiddie whistle over and over.
>On looking at those who don’t want to be seen
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James Polchin writes on the pleasures and pitfalls of voyeurism at Tate Modern @ The Smart Set
Recently I’ve been experimenting with my digital camera, performing what I call “street shootings.” I set the autofocus, hold the camera casually at my waist and walk around the streets of Paris shooting away at storefronts and pedestrians. The soft click of the shutter catches some people’s attention, raising their curiosity about what’s going on. Is he taking a photo? Is he taking a photo of me?
The result nets a lot of bad photos: blurry, odd composition, horrible lighting. But once in a while will come a couple of photos that capture a fleeting moment when the perspective and the light and the pedestrians come together in a way that I could never had achieved otherwise. Often the best photos catch a person walking down a street thinking they are in their own private moment and are not the serendipitous subject of my camera. I sometimes feel a bit guilty with these walks, knowing that beneath them is a morbid intrigue about intruding on strangers who never consented to my lens.
I say morbid for from its earliest invention to our digital age there has been an uneasiness with photography and the pleasures and horrors it records. This uneasiness is precisely what confronts you at the Tate Modern’s “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera.” A warning — this large and unwieldy exhibition may unearth unsettling experiences between you and photographs.
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>Every street in Berlin is ghosted
>Morgan Meis wanders the street of Berlin and considers the tensions between art and the immediacy of the everyday world around us @ The Smart Set.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In a public park where families take their children to play on the swings, in what was, just a few decades ago, East Berlin, is a wall of relief sculptures. The sculptures date from the Communist days. They depict children who are happy and healthy, adults who are industrious and kind. There is work, play. There is life. Monuments like these — the remnants of the dreams and aspirations of a lost civilization — can stimulate that most disconcerting emotion amongst Germans: ostalgie (literally, east-stalgia, nostalgia for the old East Germany). It is not the first thing you expect to encounter in Berlin, ostalgie, until you realize that nothing in Berlin is settled, no aspect of the recent past has yet been laid to rest.
Just up the block from the park is a square, in the center of which is the Zionskirche (Zion Church). The Zionskirche itself is a church in the form of a ruin. This was once the church of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Do you know that Bonhoeffer taught Sunday school at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem for a little while? This was in the early 1930s. Then, Bonhoeffer went back to Germany where he set up the Confessing Church. He was going to stop Hitler with that church. In fact, he ended up in a concentration camp and was hanged by the Nazis in 1945.
>When are we truly in some particular place?
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@ The Smart Set Paula Marantz Cohen writes on the migration series paintings of Jacob Lawrence.
Soon after I began reading Sharon Wilkerson’s new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which uses ethnography to explore the great migration of African-Americans from the South to Northern cities during the first half of the 20th century, I came face to face with another treatment of this subject during a visit to Washington, D.C. Wandering into the new addition to the Phillips Collection, I was confronted in the first gallery with a set of paintings by Jacob Lawrence entitled “The Migration of the Negro.” I had heard about these paintings, which chronicle the first wave of African-American migration to the North from 1916 to 1919. Stumbling upon them on the wall of this museum, I was dazzled by their expressiveness and power.
Tony Barrell reflects on his exile in Australia and the impossibilities of going back at The Griffith Review.
I hadn’t been in Sydney that long and wasn’t used to much of it. As an Englishman everything was more familiar than it would be to most migrants to Australia, coming from the Balkans, Indo-China, Latin America and East Africa, but that very familiarity made it all the more strange. So many signs, institutions and English place names – Paddington, Kensington, King’s Cross, Canterbury, Cheltenham – colossal Victorian institutions, and cramped little red brick villas, but no Englishness at all. And, of course, it was hot. I had arrived in a steamy January heatwave; very different from what I was used to.
Then one day, after about a year, I had an epiphany. It didn’t make me feel that much more at home (that took at least two decades) but it connected me with others who might have felt even worse pangs of alienation. I was walking down King Street, Newtown, beyond the railway station around the corner and down the hill towards Alexandria. It had been a beautiful old shopping thoroughfare but now was rent with heavy traffic, and many of the businesses were run down or boarded up, but the signboard of one delicatessen caught my eye. The letters in black and green on a translucent plastic light box hanging from the awning said one word ‘Kalloni’. My heart jumped. I knew this word. Surely there could only be one meaning for it? I went inside. It was quite dark, but clean and full of Greek produce. There was yoghurt, fetta, sacks of beans and the yeasty honest smell of dried goods. There were stalks and flowers of oregano, sealed in clear plastic bags. The middle aged woman behind the counter did not speak much English, and my Greek has always been inadequate, but I had to ask her, ‘Are you from Kalloni?’
Lex Runciman considers the relationship between photography and landscape on a trip to Stonehenge @ Terrain.org.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )At my home in Oregon, whenever I go down the stairs I am confronted by a framed, 16 x 20 inch photograph of Stonehenge that I took one January morning in 2006. My wife Debbie and I had arrived with our coach driver Roger Thomas and 15 college students after a pleasant drive east from the city of Bath. We’d been in the UK only a couple of days, and jet lag was still an influence. We’d risen early to the largesse of a British breakfast (including salted fish and stewed tomatoes for those so inclined); we’d eaten our fill. The weather was gray but not raining, the countryside rolling, the coach pleasantly warm—several students fell asleep on the way. Only the shock of motion stopping woke them. Before we left the coach, I reminded them they needed to do some writing in their journals here, on site, before we left. They could do this as they walked or once they returned to the coach, but I wanted them to get some initial observations and responses on paper. Where such notes might lead we’d discuss later.
>What Remains
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| “Still Life with White Box” by Raimonds Staprans |
It is August in Paris, and my friend Alexander with usual irony sent me this piece from The New York Times about the very fashionable things to do in Paris this month. While these items are not on my calender, I am (somewhat) surprised at how the Times can turn even the slow days of summer into a must-do fashion alert. The pleasure of Paris in August is that there are no lists of things to do. The city feels extraordinarily empty, with so many stores and cafes shuttered for two or three weeks. On a warm day (which are few), when you wander in places beyond the tourist centers you have the feeling you are in some small town in the countryside or near the sea. Those who remain in Paris are the tourists, the poor immigrants, those whose jobs keep them in the city, and others, like myself, who enjoy the city in its half desolate state.
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| “The Empty Table with a Green Stripe” by Raimonds Staprans |
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| “Jars #3” by Raimonds Staprans |
And Morgan Meis at The Smart Set reports on the tensions between the Flemish and the Walloons and wonders what if Belgium didn’t exist, maybe it shouldn’t, and what would be left if it didn’t? : “It is not surprising that such ideas are strange and confusing to many. The idea, for instance, that the entity called Belgium could simply go away feels, initially, like a loss, a failure. Even for Belgians who don’t feel any great national pride, the loss of their nation is a potential source of trauma. This feeling is heightened by the petty resentments and chauvinism that gets thrown about in the feuds between Flanders and Wallonia.”
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