• print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Down in the Valley

    Most Californians know the inland agricultural heartland of their state as a smoggy blur. Travelers race through it north and south at eighty miles per hour on Interstate 5, windows rolled up to block the stench of thousands of cattle on megaranches. The rest of the country takes fleeting note of the long, flat San Joaquin Valley only during a periodic food-contamination scare—E. coli–laced spinach, say, or raw milk linked to sick children. In his new collection of essays and reporting, Mark Arax tells us what we are missing.

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Bad Seeds

    The first time I thought of a plant as wicked, I realized I had crossed over into some fanatic realm of botanical empathy, joining ranks with plant enthusiasts so allied to particular species that it had become their personal responsibility—destiny, perhaps—to protect good plants, those susceptible sentient beings, against leafy villainy. By contract, of course, a gardener is a guardian assigned to protect a chosen plot from its hostile environment. But I discovered just how fervently humans impose a moral construct on the Plantae kingdom when a docent, in whose education program I was enrolled, compared pampas grass to the

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Garden Party

    In the prologue of Brideshead Revisited, as Captain Charles Ryder looks over the requisitioned property of his great lost loves, he sees Brideshead’s pitted and scarred landscape as the tragic endpoint of hundreds of years of cultivation: “The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide green spaces. . . . All this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Tom Waits For No Man

    Tom Waits once wrote a two-line poem that summed up his attitude toward life as a public figure: “I want a sink and a drain / And a faucet for my fame.” This couplet might seem disingenuous for a performer whose cult-hero career has made little showing on the pop charts, yet Waits has inspired cover hits by the likes of the Eagles, Rod Stewart, and Bruce Springsteen and garnered two Grammy wins and an Oscar nomination (for scoring Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 film, One from the Heart, a sink and a drain of sorts). He has also made it

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Whiting On the Wall

    It is part of Robert Ryman’s legend that he is a self-taught artist. He moved to New York in 1952, at age twenty-two, to pursue a career in jazz. A year later, he took a job at the Museum of Modern Art as a security guard. Paintings had begun to interest him “not so much because of what was painted but how they were done. I thought maybe it would be an interesting thing for me to look into—how the paint worked and what I could do with it.” So he bought some art supplies and began to experiment. At

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Curly Cues

    In 1945, Pablo Picasso was invited to illustrate the elegiac Le Chant des morts, a book of poems by Pierre Reverdy that contemplates mortality after World War I. Yet when the publisher sent him a sample written in the poet’s handwriting, Picasso thought it “almost a drawing in itself.” Inspired by the shape of Reverdy’s script, Picasso crafted bright red, fanciful calligraphic images for the book, offsetting the poems’ melancholy and calling attention to the material presence of the page itself—what art historian Irene Small refers to as “a registration of painting pulled into the physical space of writing.” Picasso

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Occupied Minds

    Artistic and intellectual life in France under the German occupation (1940–44) presents a paradox. On the one hand, there were stultifying pressures: censorship, aggressive cultural agendas, and the exclusion of Jews, Freemasons, and leftists. On the other hand, the authorities—both Vichy and Nazi—encouraged the arts, each for their own reasons, and even some Resistance artists felt a duty to keep French cultural expression alive. The result was a surprisingly active artistic and cultural scene, though distorted in ways that are fascinating to explore.

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    117 Days

    “I was bereft of human contact and exchange. What was going on in the outside world? No echoes reached me. I was suspended in limbo, unknowing, unreached.” Ruth First’s powerful, spare account of her four-month solitary confinement in 1963 under South Africa’s ninety-day detention law is a personal memoir, but it also serves as a group portrait of a movement. Folded into the meticulous details of her internment—interrogations; the sounds, smells, and routines of prison life; impressions of the guards; the effects of deprivation and psychological torture on her active mind—are the stories of her comrades’ imprisonments as well. Her

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Bad Girls Go Everywhere

    When Helen Gurley Brown was a junior high student in Little Rock, Arkansas, her teacher asked the class a seemingly innocuous question: Who was the most important person to them in the world? After garnering a host of conventional responses (Mom! Dad! God! FDR!), the teacher declared, to the contrary, “The most important person to any of you is yourself.” This proved a decisive moment for the future magazine editor, who proclaimed in a 1968 Time interview, “I’m a materialist and it’s a materialistic world. Nobody is keeping a woman from doing everything she wants to do but herself.”

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Black Light

    In 2006, Kehinde Wiley painted Le Roi à la Chasse, in which a T-shirted young black man imitates the pose assumed by Charles I in Anthony van Dyck’s 1635 canvas of the same name. Though Wiley’s model introduces a casualness into the king’s formal comportment by tossing back his head as if to saunter forward, it is the version of van Dyck’s pastoral portrait in Black Light—Wiley’s first foray into photography—that provides a strikingly contemporary interpretation. Here, the model gazes unswervingly out from the picture, catching us with his look and, through photography’s immediacy, holding us fast. The play of

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Not Becoming My Mother

    For years, Ruth Reichl took pleasure in relating what she called “Mim tales,” playful stories of her mother’s fumbles with and trespasses against proper motherhood— as when the dishes she prepared for her son’s engagement party gave guests food poisoning, or when she cobbled together a last-minute snack for her daughter’s Brownie troop by stirring assorted cupboard contents into moldy chocolate pudding salvaged from the fridge.

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Perfecting Sound Forever

    It used to be that all music was recorded live. To cut a song in the Edison era, musicians clustered around a phonograph horn like bees pollinating a flower. The louder they played, the more the horn vibrated and the more undulating was the groove incised in the wax cylinder. If they didn’t like the result, they could try again, but editing was impossible. Eight decades later, the process had become more like an assembly line. For their album Hysteria (1987), the members of Def Leppard separately recorded not only each instrument (standard practice by then) but individual guitar notes,

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Woman Twirling

    Many of the figures in Jo Ann Callis’s photographs are blurred—they’ve been caught in the middle of something: A woman does the twist, skirt flying; a bare-chested fellow clutches his forehead. In these photos (like the one above, in which a young man wails or laughs—hard to say—as he thrashes backward in his chair), a piece of domestic hardware (a plant, a lamp, an electric fan) occupies the foreground like a sentinel insuring a semblance of normality in an otherwise unhinged scene. While Callis surely has a disquieting touch, one evocative of David Lynch’s stagy dreamscapes, her high-contrast prints, featuring

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    Pixu: The Mark of Evil

    Every haunted house has the same damn problem. Somebody’s violated a taboo, and until that sin is expiated, the stain of corruption spreads steadily through the sinner’s abode. In the case of Pixu: The Mark of Evil, the stain is literal—a raggedy black scribble that grows like kudzu across an apartment building’s walls and ceilings, snaking its tendrils through the empty space around objects and infecting everything and everyone in its path. It’s a visual conceit more than a narrative device: a trick that ties together four concurrent, linked horror stories by four cartoonists. Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, and twin

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2009

    The Whole Five Feet

    One day, walking back to the office after a bibulous lunch, Christopher Beha sees Benjamin Franklin walking beside him:

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

    Red Wine and Blue

    Alcohol can cause delusions—among Americans, anyway, who think it’s reasonable to let a person vote and go to war before giving them the right to sip a fuzzy navel. And these are just the latest symptoms of this affliction, which dates back to colonial days. According to wine-industry lawyer and vintner Richard Mendelson, author of the very engaging From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America (University of California Press, $30), “early temperance advocates believed that beer and wine played a critical role in encouraging a life of temperance. So accepted was this wisdom that the ‘Massachusetts

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

    Eminent Edwardians

    The prolific A. S. Byatt has been publishing novels since the mid-’60s (her first, The Shadow of the Sun, came out in 1964), but it wasn’t until 1990, when she won the Booker Prize for Possession—the story of a pair of contemporary scholars whose research on two Victorian poets reveals an extramarital affair between them—that she became an international (literary) household name. But Dame Byatt, who was awarded the DBE ten years ago (and the CBE nine years earlier), credits not the Booker Prize but the Web with her considerably raised profile: “Everything I say or write is now perpetuated

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

    Changing Places

    It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

    The Neocon Bible

    The neoconservative polemicist Norman Podhoretz has chosen an odd time to urge Jews to become Republicans on the grounds that they’re endangered most by the left and their own liberalism. He acknowledges that 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama, but not that Jewish neocons such as Ed Koch and David Brooks defected from the GOP as the populism they’d tried to rouse and channel took a sinister turn. Worse, old-line conservatives, like the late William F. Buckley Jr., have muttered that neocons are conservatism’s misfortune. To update neocon elder Irving Kristol’s quip, today a liberal may be a neoconservative

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

    Atrocity Exhibition

    The fall of Bataan on April 9, 1942, remains the single largest surrender of United States military forces in history, with roughly seventy-six thousand soldiers (most of them Filipino allies) handed over to Japanese captors. Japan’s attack on America’s Clark Air Base in the Philippines destroyed an entire airfield of unprotected planes and unprepared men. While the Pearl Harbor attack of four months earlier is universally acknowledged as a watershed moment of US involvement in the Pacific theater, Bataan, with its less heroic mix of humiliation at the hands of the enemy and betrayal by those in command, has remained

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