• print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Hope Against Schope

    Lakewood Church senior pastor Joel Osteen’s second book, Become a Better You, reportedly made him $13 million; his latest, I Declare (FaithWords, $22), is now on USA Today's best-seller list. Osteen came to lead the country’s most mega megachurch by selling a feel-good message about the relationship between positive thinking and a life well lived. “Explosive blessings,” Osteen tells his congregation, come to those who “speak victory.” Osteen fans, who include Oprah Winfrey, Hulk Hogan, and Cher, are instructed to “develop a habit of happiness.” And while some critics quibble with the pastor’s

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Braising Hell

    “I wanted to rent a lion, but they said the insurance was too much,” Eddie Huang told me, offhandedly, one chilly afternoon late last year. We were discussing the four-minute TED talk he’s preparing to deliver at the organization’s annual conference this February, “I Dreamt of White Lions.” Its main point, according to Huang, who is a 2013 TED Fellow, is that “lions are the king of the animal kingdom like white people rule the world. But neither of those ideas have any power unless you give it.” He was hoping to illustrate his upending of the received wisdom by walking a tame lion onstage,

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Children of the Cornpone

    In late 1948, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip introduced, innocently enough, its merchandising gold mine, the shmoo. The strip’s hero, teenager Abner Yokum, brings the lovable creature back to his hillbilly village of Dogpatch, and nearly ends the United States as we know it. Shmoos, which look like marshmallow quail, are miracle creatures. They lay edible eggs, give milk, taste like chicken when fried and pork when roasted. They provide for every need. Industrialist J. Roaringham Fatback, “the pork king,” sees the national economy plummet, as no one needs any longer to buy or sell anything.

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Disaster Relief

    Practically the opposite of a tell-all, J. G. Ballard’s memoir, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, suggests that this is an author who said all he wanted to say in his fiction. First published in the UK in 2008, a year before his death from cancer at the age of seventy-eight, the genial and reflective Miracles of Life adds little to what faithful readers will have already gleaned about the workings of his mind and the contours of his life from various interviews, his provocative science fiction, and most of all from his two autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Joseph Cornell’s Manual of Marvels: How Joseph Cornell Reinvented a French Agricultural Manual to Create an American Masterpiece

    IN A SKETCHBOOK NOTE, Jasper Johns put the plan and practice of modern art simply: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” As an early-twentieth-century harbinger of this creative tack, Joseph Cornell’s Untitled Book Object was first displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a 1998 show that also featured, appropriately enough, Marcel Duchamp. Cornell most likely acquired the French agricultural yearbook that became the basis for this work on one of his treasure hunts among the bookstalls and junk shops of Manhattan sometime in the early ’30s. Like so much of the

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Collage Application

    David Shields was a stutterer, an athlete, and he’s dying (we all are). Over the course of thirteen books he’s consistently and convincingly illustrated how those qualities make him the writer he is: concise, fearless, and urgent. More: Shields is a soulful writer, a skillful storyteller, and a man on the hunt for the Exquisite—something that can only be broadly described yet also includes deep nuances and exceptions. Shields is also, in a writerly sense, as brave as they come. He plunges, asserts, performs, stands off, and pushes forward. Art is categorical for David Shields: a “pathology lab,

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Space Trace

    In 1971, Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler announced his intention to “photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive, in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled.” His Variable Piece #70 was, unsurprisingly, never completed, but Huebler’s comprehensive cataloguing impulse is telling: It speaks of a desire to map the contours of civilization, to capture and behold the mass of humanity. What do we, collectively, look like? And how do we depict ourselves to ourselves?

    Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen’s The

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Homeland Security

    A few years after she graduated from college, Emily Raboteau received a phone call from Tamar Cohen, a close friend from childhood. Cohen had relocated to Israel, and she longed for a visit from one of her oldest friends. Over the years they had grown apart, so Raboteau didn’t know what to make of Cohen’s request, but she tells us, “Her voice surprised me. It had a desperate timbre.” Raboteau decided to go.

    Ten years after Cohen’s call comes Searching for Zion, Raboteau’s account of five African diasporic communities that left one homeland to find another. The idea first suggested itself to

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Fraught Couture

    Balenciaga head designer Nicolas Ghesquière just ended his fifteen-year stint to be replaced by Alexander Wang, who could, says The Guardian, take the brand into a more “mass market” and less “elitist” direction. One wonders if Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972)—the master craftsman who didn’t even know from “brands,” and wanted his name to die with him (his family decided otherwise)—would appreciate the irony of his make-under for the “street style” set. Between the house of Balenciaga that thrived from 1937 to 1968 as the cathedral of couture, and today’s branding orgy where “the name,

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    All-Consuming Images

    Critics who set out to write about popular culture for the general reader will almost certainly have a tough time of it. Determining exactly who that reader is seems a Sisyphean struggle: How well versed is she in media studies? Is she prepared to forgo television and Facebook in order to read about their grander implications?

    These and other dilemmas leap to the fore in This Is Running for Your Life, by film critic and essayist Michelle Orange. Five of the ten essays collected here—which originally ran in The Rumpus, The Nation, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other sources—address

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Lasting Imprint

    In the town of Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, set among hills and dairy farms two hours’ drive from Washington, DC, a sulfurous odor hangs in the air. It smells like ten thousand vats of cooking cabbage. It permeates everything.

    This is the not-so-sweet smell of paper. Spring Grove is home to one of the Glatfelter company’s paper mills. A fully integrated operation, the mill ingests “roundwood”—logs, trucked in from a radius of a hundred miles or so—and wood chips, stews them with heat and chemicals, pulps them, and pours the resulting slurry into enormous papermaking machines that drain, press,

    Read more
  • print • Feb/Mar 2013

    Paul Schimmel’s Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962

    THAT THE RACE CAR is at the center of Salvatore Scarpitta’s art is hardly surprising, since in life he was perpetually in motion: He was born in New York but grew up in LA, lived abroad for twenty-two years, and traveled a circuit that included the international art world and rural racetracks. His is not the best known of the twenty-six names that make up the roster of artists featured in “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962,” Paul Schimmel’s important final exhibition as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, but Scarpitta’s work is among its revelatory highlights.

    Read more