Month: July 2009

Metropolis has posted a slideshow of the outtake photographs by Sean Hemmerle for my story on New York’s ballparks. The pictures are phenomenal, so click over and take a look. And if you haven’t read it, the story is here. I’m happy to say it’s been getting much positive feedback. Here’s how it starts:

There are times—too many of them—when it is hard, very hard, to be a baseball fan. I do not mean those days when your team has fallen to its rival by some ignominious score, though that is frustrating. I refer to something more corrosive, a breaking of the unspoken covenant between fan and team on which professional baseball depends. By this agreement, the fan pledges undying loyalty to his team, and in return, said team makes every possible effort to disguise the fact that said fan’s loyalty has been pledged not to a benevolent civic institution but to a mercenary corporate oper ation. It is this suspension of disbelief that allows us to enjoy the game in all its innocence; and this, to a large degree, is why we become fans in the first place. Baseball is at once our national pastime and national palliative.

Continue.

Best wishes to Kevin and Jennifer, old friends and colleagues to be wed today. The bliss of marital union—there is no greater satisfaction. Many, many happy returns.

A century ago today, the French industrialist/inventor/daredevil Louis Blériot took off in an airplane of his own invention—really, more like a moped with wings—flying across the English Channel from Calais to Dover. It was the first crossing of the Channel by air, and won him a prize of £1000 from the London Daily Mail, not that he needed the money. It was the first crossing of any major body of water and across international lines. Blériot was the French Wright and Lindbergh all rolled into one. He made a fortune building automotive headlights, then turned his attention to aviation. He became a leading manufacturer of airplanes in the years after the crossing, which was celebrated as a heroic event at the time. He barely made it across in his rickety contraption. Afterward, he was regularly featured an advertisements for cigars and other products. Bravo Blériot on the centennial of your historic day! An honor to have you on our wall.

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of touring Antwerp with the photographer Sze Tsung Leong, who was there working on an ongoing project documenting cityscapes. We scouted out some of the places from which he’d shoot, and a few of the extraordinary results are produced here. The image above, of the winding lanes of Antwerp’s elegant historic center, was taken from the bell tower of the Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal (Cathedral of Our Lady). The single baroque church facade standing out in the middle right is St. Charles Barromeo, designed by none other than Peter Paul Rubens—he was an architect in addition to his many other careers. Rubens’s tomb is at the Church of St. James, visible in the upper right corner of the photograph.

Continue reading The Photographs of Sze Tsung Leong

I’ve written a good deal about New York’s two new ballparks in various publications and on the web over the last few years, but this new piece, from the July issue of Metropolis magazine, is my last word on the subject, and—I humbly submit—the most comprehensive look anywhere at the stadium game as it has played out here in New York. But I leave that for you to judge. Please do read it; I will not recapitulate the arguments here, but will say that I believe that the two new ballparks, and others of their ilk, reflect a fundamental shift in the way we watch and think about professional baseball.

Magazine stories don’t typically warrant acknowledgments, but in this case there are a few individuals I’d like to thank for their participation in this story, directly and otherwise. Editor Martin Pedersen, fellow Yankee agoniste, commissioned and shaped it. Criswell Lappin designed it. (It looks phenomenal; buy the magazine, it needs your support.) The amazing photographs are by Sean Hemmerle. Jay Jaffe and Ivan Drucker were my intrepid co-explorers. For their time and thoughts, I thank Jim Bouton, Neil DeMause, Alex Belth, Greg Prince, Ben Barnert, Cliff Corcoran, Susan Carroll, John Thorn, Andrew Bernheimer, and the YFSF community.

Update: On an unrelated note, I have another piece running now on the Metropolis home page, on the threat to Moscow’s architectural patrimony.

The first notices for Master of Shadows are beginning to flow in, and I’m happy to report that the initial response has been very positive indeed. To follow are the words of some distinguished writers and scholars who’ve had a chance to look at it. Not to be indiscreet, but the book is now available for preorder from the bookseller of your choice (links in the sidebar at right, for your convenience).

“In elegant brushstrokes, and using as his subject the painter/diplomat Rubens, Mark Lamster gives us here a vivid portrait of 17th century Europe and the political intrigue that led to the modern world.”—Russell Shorto, author, The Island at the Center of the World

“Mark Lamster looks beyond Rubens’s talent for era-defining sensual nudes and delves into his little-known career as a diplomat and spy. The result is an exhilarating portrait of an age as dramatic and richly toned as one of Rubens’s gigantic canvases.”
—Ross King, author, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling

“This adroitly crafted biography of Rubens brings to life an artist so busy wheeling and dealing with the crowned heads of Europe that it’s amazing he found the time to put brush to canvas. Lamster’s account engages the student of history as much as it opens the eyes of those who love Rubens’s art.”—Timothy Brook, author, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

“Master of Shadows is a fascinating account, as lively as it is informed. This utterly intriguing narrative has the knowledge and verve that infuse Rubens’s brushstrokes; Lamster writes with the panache and enthusiastic engagement, as well as the capability, warranted by his marvelous subject.”—Nicholas Fox Weber, author, Le Corbusier: A Life

“Imagine that Pablo Picasso, in addition to painting the most famous masterpieces of the twentieth century, had also devoted decades of his life to secret diplomacy aimed at preventing another world war. That is exactly what Peter Paul Rubens, the most revered painter of his era, did in seventeenth-century Europe. Mark Lamster tells this little-known story with a combination of brio and historical erudition bound to appeal to anyone who cares about beauty, passion, war and peace. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Susan Jacoby, author, The Age of American Unreason

“Art, war, diplomatic intrigue, secret spy missions—all rendered with the erudition of a scholar and the deft touch of a gifted writer. This is exactly what popular history should be. I was utterly transfixed by this book.”—
—Jonathan Mahler, author, The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

“Piercing the darkened, secret world of agents, operatives, and diplomats is a difficult task at the best of times–and in Rubens’s case, one thought impossible–but Mark Lamster brilliantly succeeds at shedding light on this most enigmatic, and aptly dubbed, Master of Shadows.”
—Alexander Rose, author, Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring

“Mark Lamster, a master of vivid writing, provides a highly readable account of the national rivalries and endemic warfare that fostered secret diplomacy in seventeenth-century Europe. Master of Shadows is a page-turner not to be missed.”
—Lita-Rose Betcherman, author, Court Lady and Country Wife: Two Noble Sisters in Seventeenth-Century England

“Rubens’s story surprises and dazzles.”—Kirkus

The photographer Julius Shulman, who died last week at the age of 98, will be forever linked to California’s modernist architecture, of which there was no greater champion. For me, however, he will always be associated with Ezra Stoller, his East Coast contemporary, who died a few years ago, to slightly less fanfare. The two were the alfa and omega of American architectural photography (don’t ask which was which), informal competitors in the same field, a true New York-Los Angeles rivalry, though both were Brooklyn-born Jews. Shulman moved west, lived in a home in the Hollywood Hills designed by Raphael Soriano, and documented the architectural efflorescence there at mid-century. His images were dramatic and clean, like the lines of the modern buildings he shot, but also playful, redolent of the sybaritic California lifestyle that he surely helped to define. His specialty was domestic architecture, and in his later years, with the rediscovery of mid-century modernism and the helpful promotion of the publisher Taschen, he became something of a minor celebrity. Stoller was always the less visible and more clinical of the two, though in the long run he may be more influential. (I had the great pleasure of working with Ezra on a series of books.) He also lived in a wonderful modern house, in Rye, New York, and it was of his own design. If Shulman specialized in domestic spaces, Stoller’s forte was surely the public building: his images would define the way progressive modern architecture—the work of Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies, Kahn, Rudolph, Saarinen, SOM—would appear in print, perhaps how its architects imagined it themselves; it was said that no project was complete until it had been “Stollerized.” Both men will be missed, but their images and ways of seeing will remain for a long time.

The architect John Beckmann, of the firm Axis Mundi, is promoting an alternative to the Jean Nouvel tower MoMA has commissioned as a part of its continuing expansion. I don’t see the folks at the museum, or their development partner, jettisoning Nouvel’s plan, nor should they, especially for what is—let’s face it—a rather half-baked amalgam of several projects by the Dutch firm MVRDV and any number of Archigram-era visions. (MoMA, for what it’s worth, has actually built its own wonderfully hirsute bit of crazy at PS1.) So fine, Beckmann’s scheme is nuts. Nevertheless, I find it irresistible. How can you not love it? Hanging gardens. Stairwells in the sky. A giant jigsaw of a building. Weirdness. Who would not want to explore this cartoon structure? Modernism (and that Vader-like Nouvel building in particular), is all too often impersonal and intimidating, but one suspects even Jacques Tati would be happy in this place. Certainly it’s better than the banality that is Rafael Vinoly’s latest addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art. A few more pics after the jump.
Continue reading A Plea for Crazy in Architecture

By now you’ve read about the unfortunate death of Dash Snow, the art world’s most prodigal son, from a drug overdose. He rests in a long line of dangerous, self-destructive artists who’ve captured the public imagination, Caravaggio and Van Gogh being the most prominent. He, too, shocked with his work and his behavior. Or, in his case, “shocked.” I suspect Snow’s work will have a considerably shorter shelf life than either of those two historical figures—indeed, that his relevance is now past, if it ever existed in the first place. Rubens—because I must connect everything back to him—was a polar opposite in terms of temperament: cool, calm, a model bourgeois. The worst thing one could do, he wrote, was squander one’s own talent. Though he could be critical of the behavior of his fellow artists, he was not dismissive of their work. He was an early proponent of Caravaggio, and advocated on his behalf when it was not fashionable to do so—in part because the Italian was on the run from a murder charge. Rubens was a painter of great dramas, but he tried to keep those to his canvasses. Snow, it would seem, couldn’t keep his art and his life separate. A shame.

Well, it’s the latter, obviously, and from an amazing series of Tour de France photographs by Brent Humphreys. But it does indicate the rather short visual distance between agony and ecstasy. A more extreme example:

Sex or Death?
Continue reading Sex or Biking?