This situation

Walter Benjamin, from "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century": "Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it--as Hegel already noticed--by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled."

"Three hot pancakes lavishly coated in Grand Marnier syrup and orange peel"

The FT lunches with Marian Goodman, site registration required. (I am not at all in that world except because of having done that show of Tino Sehgal's called This Situation at MG's gallery - she hosted a big dinner for us all at a restaurant before the show opened, and my sense of her corresponds quite closely to what is presented in this article.)

Pang of missing my father, who would have been interested to see this one as he followed TS's career closely - and a terrible pang earlier today as B. and I watched the (hugely enjoyable) movie The Martian. The scene where the lead character's fix-it MacGyverism involves using hexadecimal code to program the camera to communicate through 360-degree swiveling was so much what he would have found enjoyably preposterous that I found myself looking to my side to see what he thought!

Two links

Nico on orchestra as zoo (courtesy of Jane Y.); Tino Sehgal's "These Associations" (courtesy of I.H.D.).

The magic circle

I have to warn you that it is a PDF, but Johanna Koljonen's description of the production by "larpwrights" Martin Ericsson and Christopher Sandberg of the last three acts of Hamlet as a three-day live-action role-playing game in Stockholm in 2002 is a fascinating read.

(On a lighter note, I am still disappointed and mildly outraged that the Clydesdale Hamlet does not feature a redacted performance of Shakespeare's play with gigantic horses in the lead roles!)

As I've researched the topic, the three games I've found myself most intrigued by and attracted to are (from simplest to most complex) the Japanese location-based game Mogi, the Swedish game Momentum and the aforementioned Hamlet; I am not for the most part a gamer myself, though I suspect that if I hadn't taken part in Tino Sehgal's "This Situation" I might not be writing this novel about games.

Day 2: c. 1200 words, 2058 words total.

Miniature, giant

Two old pieces I'm still pleased with: my review of Toni Schlesinger's Five Flights Up (assigned to me by Ed Park, who also suggested the format as an homage to Toni's long-running Shelter column); and the longer spin-off essay in the Believer.

Thinking about this because I'm doing another interview soon, the first for a long time, of a writer I particularly admire: details to follow at a more appropriate juncture...

(Toni was another one of Tino's "interpreters" at the Guggenheim show, though I mostly only caught a glimpse of her as we crossed paths in the stairwell. And a nice bit in the Times this week on another person I know through Tino's gigs: Hugh Raffles, whose book Insectopedia sounds very much the kind of thing I delight in!)

Workload breakdown

At the Times, a delightful piece by Alicia DeSantis on "This Progress" in light of its being done. Some very funny quotations in there, many of which I endorse (I was much less grumpy than usual on the last day because the break room was full of donut holes, mini-cupcakes and possibly the most delicious chocolate-chip cookies I have ever eaten in my life, baked by a teen who I happened to see on campus the next day as I hurried into Schermerhorn for a meeting - she was forlorn, the show was over!):

The schedule could be grueling even for much younger interpreters, who, unlike their elders, were unpaid. (They did receive a hat, bag and a museum membership; adults were paid $18.75 an hour, teenagers $7.25 an hour.) Solomon Dworkin, an 11-year-old sixth grader at the School at Columbia University who was one of the oldest children in the piece, said many of the younger ones had trouble with the pace of 40 to 50 interactions a day, 60 to 70 on weekends.

“They had a workload breakdown,” he said. “They would have liked more snacks.”

Some of the problem may have had to do with the intellectual rigors of the job. The younger children were “all pretty smart for their age,” he said, but “I’ve never met a 7-year-old who can match an 11-year-old in a conversation about philosophy.”

Snippets

An arts-oriented day yesterday with my father, who was visiting from Philadelphia - we went to walk through Tino's Guggenheim show as visitors, then had a tasty dinner at O'Neal's (I had French onion soup and a delicious seafood salad [mussels, shrimp, squid, lobster over mixed greens with parsley and a lemon vinaigrette], my dad had Manhattan clam chowder and steak au poivre with scalloped potatoes and spinach, then we gluttonously shared a traditional ice-cream sundae - vanilla ice-cream, hot fudge sauce and whipped cream, with cookie-crunch topping) before going to see the rather excellent Shostakovich opera The Nose at the Met.

It is a minor opera, I think - the music is locally appealing (beautifully well-performed, and it's an attractive idiom) but it doesn't add up to anything much - certainly not a patch on the Gogol short story. But the Kentridge production is absolutely lovely! I do not think I have ever seen such a delightfully well-integrated visual spectacle on the operatic stage (well, I do remember a long-ago transparent illuminated cube in a City Opera production of Handel's Rinnaldo that I liked very much!) - quite beautiful.

I flew back from Cayman on Wednesday evening with an extravagantly purchased supply of light reading, having found over the years that travel passes very quickly if I have suitable books with me and not if not - first, Sara Gruen's Riding Lessons (purchase spurred by my feeling the loss of Dick Francis!), then Penny Vincenzi's trashy but highly readable An Absolute Scandal (her books are all the same as each other, and not exactly what I like - also I am sure that I have read at least one other novel about Lloyd's Names, but cannot now remember title or author - but you need good long books for plane flights, and hers are highly engrossing!), and finally (this one I finished when I got home) Thomas Perry's Silence.

In other news:

Sam Lipyste offers the aptest answer I've ever seen to the question about a typical day in one's writing life.

The Cinderella solution!

Mr. Cube says "Leave it to private enterprise"... (FT site registration required).

Theatrical things I'm looking forward to: A Behanding in Spokane (if you are a CU affiliate and haven't been checking out the Arts Initiative offerings, you should - I am always a skeptic about these institutionally sanctioned arts programs, but the discounts are really substantial and if you have flexibility on scheduling, they seem to have seats at pretty much all the big stuff you might want to see - the tickets for The Nose were only $25 apiece, and it was a sold-out show, with all the cheap seats gone very quickly and early on); and Jay Scheib's Samuel R. Delany extravaganza Bellona, Destroyer of Cities (I loved the previous piece in the trilogy, Untitled Mars (a few thoughts here)).

"Things are a problem for Mr. Sehgal"

Holland Cotter reviews Tino Sehgal's show for the Times.

Cockles and mussels

Archeologists sift through remains to determine Elizabethan theatergoers' snack preferences:

The preferred snacks for Tudor theatre-goers appear to have been oysters, crabs, cockles, mussels, periwinkles and whelks, as well as walnuts, hazelnuts, raisins, plums, cherries, dried figs and peaches.

Some clues even suggest that 16th-century fans of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe also ploughed through vast quantities of elderberry and blackberry pie – and some may even have snacked on sturgeon steaks.

Bonus link: a nice WNYC piece about Tino's Guggenheim exhibit - I did a shift this afternoon, it was quite tiring but also very enjoyable...

Wednesday miscellany

The second paragraph of this piece was so extraordinarily vicious that I read to the end with a kind of enthralled fascination! I have no reason to disagree with its verdict, and I too am rendered extraordinarily irritable by slack writing, but it has also always seemed to me that it is bad for the soul to write a review of this ilk very often...

At Tor.com, Fabio Fernandes on translating A Clockwork Orange into Brazilian Portuguese.

A countdown of the hundred best fantasy and science-fiction novels?

The syllabus for Matthew Kirschenbaum's graduate seminar on simulations.

Last but not least: Charlie Williams prefers typecasting to podcasting.

This week's mostly all about catching up on miscellaneous medical appointments (nothing major), rehearsing for Tino's Guggenheim piece and trying to sort out a good exercise routine - not doing so well on the last front, but it is a work in progress. The other major activity is a massive reading binge - at the humane society charity shop in Cayman, one of the volumes I picked up was Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo Rising. I liked Dunnett's mystery novels very much when I was a teenager, but her historical ones never held much appeal for me, despite my dear friend E.B.T.'s enthusiastic advocacy of them during our grad school years. But long is good when it comes to charity-shop light reading, and though I wouldn't say it's my perfect light reading (also it suffers from the unfortunate juxtaposition with Hilary Mantel's really brilliant Wolf Hall!), I certainly enjoyed the first installment enough to go and check out volumes two through seven from the Barnard Library yesterday.

(Where, by the way, I ran into a colleague of mine who is also doing Tino's piece - and as we discussed it, the young lady behind the library checkout counter exclaimed, "Are you doing Tino's piece? So am I!" It is a cast of thousands!)

There is something truly lovely and addictive about reading through a huge series in a relatively small amount of time. I read Lian Hearn's trilogy like that; Susan Howatch is perhaps my most recent long immersive series-reading experience, at least the one that comes most strongly to mind; but I was reminded as I plucked Dunnetts from the shelf of how I held out for a long time against the Aubrey-Maturin novels and then read the first one and basically couldn't really do anything else until I had read all of them - every day I went to Cross-Campus Library at Yale and checked out another armful or four or five of them and took them home and read them all, four or five days later I was done and wished I had eked them out for longer, but it was well worth it!

(On which note, I will conclude by adding that Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy, another long book I read in fits of transport...)

Framed

At the Times Magazine, a nice profile of Tino Sehgal by Arthur Lubow. I am participating in the Guggenheim piece (I guess I am one of the college instructors alluded to as a group in the article!) - will post more details as they emerge if you are curious to come and see it...

Alternative commodities

Also at the FT, a very informative piece by Natasha Degen on Tino Sehgal's "This situation", which I was involved with last year in New York:

Last June, New York’s Museum of Modern Art bought his “Kiss” for a five-figure sum. His prices range from between €25,000, for private works, and €70,000.

Complying with the artist’s insistence that no objects be produced in connection with his work, the purchase was finalised with a spoken agreement. “There was an orally communicated contract,” Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator of MoMA’s Department of Media, explains. “As a curator you have to remember it – I was very happy I wasn’t alone because I was afraid I was going to forget everything – and you have to follow the instructions. We had 12 people around the table, including a lawyer, a notary, gallerists, curators and members of the conservation and registration departments. The meeting went on for hours.”

Nothing tangible was acquired with the transaction – no written contract, instructions, script, or receipt. What MoMA gained was the right to reproduce the installation forever, and to loan the piece to other institutions. “Kiss”, an edition of four, was also bought by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Fond National d’art contemporain, France; it is now sold out. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is currently in the process of acquiring Sehgal’s “This objective of that object”, and the Tate purchased “This is propaganda” in 2005, for €39,950.

Private collectors have also bought pieces, though, according to Sehgal, they generally enact the situations themselves. One piece, for example, requires a pair of collectors (usually a couple) to host a dinner party. When the main course is served, the first host leaves, followed by the second host a minute or two later. After several minutes, the two return but switch places. As they begin to eat each other’s food, the guests are provoked to ask what happened. The title of the work – “Those thoughts” – refers to the guests’ confusion and speculation.