It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now

Ever wondered what it’s like to be a visual artist in the 21st century? This episodic essay provides an intimate, hilarious, and very painful look at what’s required to create art without dying or (entirely) losing your mind:

Someone tips off Barneys New York about the boho-chic lifestyle I’ve assumed at Grandma’s, and they reach out to interview and photograph me for their fall catalog. I ask a model what they would get paid for a shoot and propose $2,000 to Barney’s. They reject my proposal and offer a $1,000 gift card. I discover a website that will turn the encrypted plastic into $940 cash and accept.

I line all four walls of my studio with pictures of Barney the dinosaur impersonators and tell the interviewer that I’m working on a new project as a follow-up to my 2016 video The Unthinkable Bygone, in which a 3D model of Baby Sinclair from Jim Henson’s animatronic puppet TV series Dinosaurs (1991–1994) is subjected to simulation, dissection, reflection, and endoscopy. I say I’m interested in pop cultural representations of the surfaces of dinosaurs, and how we hollow out the earth to find dinosaur bones, and then use those bones, along with our knowledge of current species, to literally flesh out vivid caricatures about our unthinkable earthly predecessors. That bit doesn’t run in the interview, but every photo he takes is full of bootleg Barneys.

To others my new life seems like it’s all fun and games, but in actuality I’m miserable. The maxim “money doesn’t buy happiness” starts to ring in my head. Not because I actually have money, but because I’m living with the material comforts of someone who does, and it doesn’t seem to make me feel any better. I have the ugly feeling that an Artforum feature, institutional acquisitions, and another lap around the art world circuit would cure this sense of lack.

But Trump is in office, and my work is deemed less “urgent”—“irresponsible,” even. A curator who selected me for an Art Basel commission ghosts me. A gallerist who wants to work with me says she can’t add a white man to her roster. An esteemed curator from the Middle East tells me I should probably get a day job for a while because my career outlook in the art world is bleak. It becomes trendy to believe that images within contemporary art contexts can directly achieve the goals of political struggle. The proliferation of bad faith gestures toward political change and the aestheticized consumption of other people’s suffering sickens me, especially when these expressions still play into the financial objectives of oil barons, arms dealers, and other vampires.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/ENMAhob

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/K0dQ1FI

Field of Dreams

World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) is a way for travelers to connect with organic farmers who are looking for help in exchange for a free stay (and some teaching). Jaya Saxena looks at the success stories—and a couple of the horror ones—and asks if this is a meaningful way to learn about sustainability.

They also taught me about what “organic” meant, really meant. How to avoid waste and tread lightly on the earth, how to make the best choices you could in an imperfect world. They taught me how to eat an orange like an apple, and just how many flowers really are edible. To date, the eggs from their kitchen were the best I’ve ever eaten. I’d never seen an egg refuse to spread in the pan, taut with protein and power, a yolk like marigold. They told me these eggs couldn’t legally be classified as organic because the chickens were fed with table scraps and worms instead of certified organic feed. It is not about labels, I understood, but the commitment to regeneration and holistic practices.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/0I1JXZb

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/K0dQ1FI

Auto Show Dispatch

Mark Krotov has been attending car-industry shows for more than 30 years; I can’t imagine he’s always felt this despondent about it. But his glumness is warranted (and, thankfully, very entertaining). Reporting from the New York International Auto Show—amid many digs at terribly designed cars—Krotov sets out a compelling case that most of these vehicles aren’t driving toward ecological prudence, but are instead enacting the worst of American urges. Not the most welcoming headline, but a hell of a read.

“It drives so much smaller than it really is,” I overheard an Infiniti QX80 salesperson tell a couple of potential customers. Immediately this stood out to me as one of the truest and most ambiguous claims anyone could make about life in the 21st century. Electrification is a real if unstable trend, and decrossoverification is probably not nothing, but the story that matters above all others is that cars continue to get bigger, even as that size is mitigated by all kinds of refinements. For a recent trip I needed to rent a car with six seats and was upgraded by Thrifty to an eight-seat Chevy Tahoe, which also drove much smaller than it really is. At nearly six thousand pounds, the thing was smooth and nimble: easy to accelerate, easy to steer through the Taconic State Parkway’s precarious curves, and easy to forget the smaller and more vulnerable cars—and their passengers—in the other lanes. I don’t think that any of this constitutes progress. Size inflation has been normalized to such an extent that it’s almost impossible to appreciate the enormity of American cars. The desire for status, the desire for height, a fragile and increasingly attenuated relationship to masculinity, the global war on terror, the rise of safety-consciousness, a legal regime that has made the production of fuel-inefficient vehicles far more appealing to car manufacturers than smaller and more eco-conscious ones—all these have been held responsible for the rise of the SUV and all these are indeed responsible. But the desire to wall oneself off from the world, to float above degraded infrastructure and the threat of violence even as one contributes to both: this is an explanatory factor that shouldn’t be underrated.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/nmNok6B

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/K0dQ1FI

Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife

For Oxford American, Wendy Brenner recounts the joys of working as an art-framer, sharing her process and tales of a boss who’s more than a little off-the-wall. As she considers the satisfaction she gets in preserving timeless treasures for clients, she reflects on her mother’s decline and how humans and memory defy preservation.

The assignments on the worktable each morning have been set aside for me because they’re easy and I’m a novice, or because they’re complicated and there’s a skill I need to learn, or practice. Or because my boss knows I will love them—though maybe I’m imagining that.

Once, early on, I drilled a screw into the back of a frame and it came out through the front, a bad mistake. The frame had to be rebuilt. I arrived at work the next day to find twenty identical manufactured frames from Target or Walmart, allegedly brought in by a customer who wanted only new hangers installed on the backs. A strange order. I spent the day drilling forty holes, installing forty screws, twisting forty wires. My hands hurt for a week.

I work six or seven hours without breaks. I can’t seem to explain this to my friends. Momentum, focus. While I’m cleaning glass, inspecting endlessly for specks of dust or lint, using a marker to cover a flea-sized chip on a frame, time falls away. Everything outside the moment falls away, like a blurred background in an Impressionist landscape. No, I don’t want lunch, no I don’t want to sit down.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/PuHMdi3

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/K0dQ1FI

The Cloud Under the Sea

There are about 800,000 miles of internet cables that traverse the Earth’s ocean floors. These thin underwater cables carry the world’s data and are essential for governments, banks, corporations, and, well, the entire world to function. In this fantastic Verge feature, Josh Dzieza goes inside the subsea cable maintenance industry and highlights the crucial yet invisible work of highly specialized engineers on aging ships that keeps modern civilization from collapsing.

Once people are in, they tend to stay. For some, it’s the adventure — repairing cables in the churning currents of the Congo Canyon, enduring hull-denting North Atlantic storms. Others find a sense of purpose in maintaining the infrastructure on which society depends, even if most people’s response when they hear about their job is, But isn’t the internet all satellites by now? The sheer scale of the work can be thrilling, too. People will sometimes note that these are the largest construction projects humanity has ever built or sum up a decades-long resume by saying they’ve laid enough cable to circle the planet six times.

The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. Others, like Global Marine’s Wave Sentinel, were once ferries. Global Marine recently told Data Centre Dynamics that it’s trying to extend the life of its ships to 40 years, citing a lack of money. One out of 4 repair ships have already passed that milestone. The design life for bulk carriers and oil tankers, by contrast, is 20 years.

But perhaps a greater threat to the industry’s long-term survival is that the people, like the ships, are getting old. In a profession learned almost entirely on the job, people take longer to train than ships to build.

The lifestyle can be an obstacle. A career in subsea means enduring long stretches far from home, unpredictable schedules, and ironically, very poor internet.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/Qy5aFH4

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/K0dQ1FI

The Life and Death of Hollywood

Last year’s Hollywood triple strike (writers, directors, and actors) led to no small number of reported features about labor and the entertainment industry. But none have provided such a thorough analysis of the literal century’s worth of regulation and deregulation that led to the current moment. Daniel Bessner’s piece ain’t a feel-good story, but it’s also required reading if you want to understand how we got here—and why it feels so irredeemable.

In the years following the recession, there was, as Howard Rodman put it, “a slow erosion” in feature-film writers’ ability to earn a living. To the new bosses, the quantity of money that studios had been spending on developing screenplays—many of which would never be made—was obvious fat to be cut, and in the late Aughts, executives increasingly began offering one-step deals, guaranteeing only one round of pay for one round of work. Writers, hoping to make it past Go, began doing much more labor—multiple steps of development—for what was ostensibly one step of the process. In separate interviews, Dana Stevens, writer of The Woman King, and Robin Swicord described the change using exactly the same words: “Free work was encoded.” So was safe material. In an effort to anticipate what a studio would green-light, writers incorporated feedback from producers and junior executives, constructing what became known as producer’s drafts. As Rodman explained it: “Your producer says to you, ‘I love your script. It’s a great first draft. But I know what the studio wants. This isn’t it. So I need you to just make this protagonist more likable, and blah, blah, blah.’ And you do it.”

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/wT4UbZt

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/K0dQ1FI

In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson

O.J. Simpson died this week. In light of this news, here’s radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin’s brilliant essay about Nicole Brown Simpson, the abuse she suffered at the hands of O.J., and how the help she needed never came. Dworkin, herself a survivor of domestic violence, originally published pieces of this essay in the Los Angeles Times; she then compiled and revised that writing for her 1997 book, Life and Death. The essay has since been republished by Evergreen Review:

You won’t ever know the worst that happened to Nicole Brown Simpson in her marriage, because she is dead and cannot tell you. And if she were alive, remember, you wouldn’t believe her.

You heard Lorena Bobbitt, after John Wayne Bobbitt had been acquitted of marital rape. At her own trial for malicious wounding, she described beatings, anal rape, humiliation. She had been persistently injured, hit, choked by a husband who liked hurting her. John Wayne Bobbitt, after a brief tour as a misogynist-media star, beat up a new woman friend.

It is always the same. It happens to women as different as Nicole Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt—and me. The perpetrators are men as different as O.J. Simpson, John Wayne Bobbitt, and the former flower-child I am still too afraid to name.

There is terror, yes, and physical pain. There is desperation and despair. One blames oneself, forgives him. One judges oneself harshly for not loving him enough. “It’s your fault,” he shouts as he is battering in the door, or slamming your head against the floor. And before you pass out, you say yes. You run, but no one will hide you or stand up for you—which means standing up to him. You will hide behind bushes if there are bushes; or behind trash cans; or in alleys; away from the decent people who aren’t helping you. It is, after all, your fault.

He hurts you more: more than last time and more than you ever thought possible; certainly more than any reasonable person would ever believe—should you be foolish enough to tell. And, eventually, you surrender to him, apologize, beg him to forgive you for hurting him or provoking him or insulting him or being careless with something of his—his laundry, his car, his meal. You ask him not to hurt you as he does what he wants to you.

The shame of this physical capitulation, often sexual, and the betrayal of your self-respect will never leave you. You will blame yourself and hate yourself forever. In your mind, you will remember yourself—begging, abject. At some point, you will stand up to him verbally, or by not complying, and he will hit you and kick you; he may rape you; he may lock you up or tie you up. The violence becomes contextual, the element in which you try to survive. You will try to run away, plan an escape. If he finds out, or if he finds you, he will hurt you more. You will be so frightened you think dying might be okay.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/iE2CLHY

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/0Z1VJsy