From the cover of Secondhand Time.
- There’s a great Tom Waits song called “What’s He Building in There?” that I’ve thought about a lot as we ponder the Trump transition: “He’s hiding from us,” Waits growls. “I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children.” The architecture critic Martin Filler is asking the same question about Trump, looking back at a career of eyesores and evils: “Grotesque though the rise of Donald Trump has seemed to many, his political ascendance has struck those of us who love architecture as a particularly personal affront, given our familiarity with his forty-year record as the foremost architectural schlockmeister and urban design vulgarian of his generation … One of course cannot help but wonder what Trump will impose architecturally on our national landscape, especially since he has promised to create vast infrastructure projects, most notoriously his “big, beautiful, powerful wall” along the 1,989-mile expanse of our border with Mexico … Despite uncertainties about exactly what travails the Trump presidency will bring us, I am convinced that the architectural imprint he has already imposed—extrapolated to a national scale—tells us all we need to know.”
- There’s no good reason not to fear the alt-right and their white-nationalist fantasies—but Jacob Bacharach, a gay, Jewish novelist, spent his high school years immured in what he calls “teenage Nazi” culture, and his message is comforting: these dudes are a bunch of insecure mouth-breathing losers who couldn’t revolutionize their way out of a paper bag. Bacharach recalls a DIY film project he and his friends undertook in 1999, his senior year: “The movie inevitably made its way to our principal. There were plenty of bits to get a decent and unimaginative man riled up—rituals cribbed from Anton LeVay, drug use both simulated and actual, violence, and plenty of fake blood. But I have to believe that the worst moment for that poor administrator and for our poor parents was when they watched another friend of ours, a nice girl from a devoutly Christian family—Lord knows how we cajoled her into participating—crawl between my legs to perform simulated fellatio on a TV remote control. I suspect we meant all this as some kind of commentary on the media. The camera panned up to my contorted face. ‘Oh yeah, baby,’ I growled, ‘Suck it. Heil Hitler, my dick is your Fuhrer.’ ”
- Reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, Vadim Nikitin aspires to a deeper understanding of spiritual and intellectual life in the Soviet Union, where literature was money: “The spiritual aspects of socialism are rarely discussed in Western accounts of the Soviet Union … The most important piece of furniture in Soviet times was always the bookshelf. ‘We grew up in a country where money essentially did not exist,’ one man recalls. Literature was the only real currency … For the cultured middle classes, the prison camp that was the Soviet Union of the 1930s and ’40s had, by the 1960s, become more akin to a university campus … Poets commanded packed stadiums. Strangers exchanged newspapers on the Metro … When hardliners arrested Gorbachev in Crimea and attempted to turn back the clock, the liberal intelligentsia took to the barricades to defend Yeltsin and the democrats. Their hopes that literature could save the world were quickly and cruelly dashed. Suddenly, words and ideas lost their power. Emptied of poets, the stadiums quickly filled with faith healers, hypnotists, and pyramid schemers. ‘The discovery of money hit us like an atomic bomb,’ says a former Yeltsin supporter.”
- At MoMA, a new exhibition shines a light on Francis Picabia, the prankster playboy of early modernism: “Born in Paris in 1879, Picabia was the only child of a French mother and a Cuban-born Spanish father whose combined fortunes (French mercantile; Cuban sugar) meant that he never had to do anything but make art, which they encouraged … As promiscuous in life as in art, Picabia almost always had a wife and a mistress, or two mistresses, who tended to get along. He traveled widely … Picabia may play as crucial a role for our time as he did for his own. He refused to choose between the two great factions of early modernism—one conceptual and linguistic and descended from Duchamp; the other, painterly and formal, from Picasso and Matisse.”
- Jack London, who died a century ago this month, is best remembered for The Call of the Wild, but Benjamin Breen argues that his final book, The Star Rover, is due for reevaluation: “His writings in this period reveal a keenly intelligent man attempting to work through the metaphysics of his own addictions. We see this in John Barleycorn’s personification of alcohol intoxication as a dialogue with a nebulous force that London calls ‘the White Logic’ … And we see it in the central motive force of The Star Rover, which is propelled not by drugs or drink but another form of altered consciousness—the hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation. The book, in short, centers on that famous concept of another drug-taking adventurer-writer, Arthur Rimbaud: ‘the systematic derangement of all the senses.’ ”