Salon.com > Jennifer Kabat

When we all smelled like teen spirit

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000

RIGHT NOW ON the Bowery you can step into a time machine. It will carry you back to 1993 or thereabouts. It spreads over five floors in a great gleaming building, and to first acclimate you, a line of boxy Samsung televisions broadcast highlights from the year. This was before TVs were flat-screen or LCD or HD, when the initials that stood for high-tech – or any tech – in home entertainment were VHS. Here was a moment before the Internet was big, the World Wide Web did not exist yet (not really), AIDS was still “uncured,” Clinton had just been inaugurated, and it was a watershed moment for art.

This five-story teleportation device is an exhibit at the New Museum called “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star.” Ignore the subtitle. It’s from a Sonic Youth album that doesn’t appear in the show and was, in fact, released in 1994. Though, I’ve read some pretty baroque interpretations of why it fits with such a close textual analysis they veer on New Criticism.

Snowmaking is the most dangerous part of skiing

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:00:00 +0000

DECEMBER a couple years ago, I am on the back of a snowmobile. The gas fumes are overpowering, and the two-stroke engine too loud to hear anything over. I race up a hill with 30 feet of hoses trailing behind me. These are not some small rubber garden hoses but the size of ones firefighters use. I’m clutching onto someone named Nolan, who’s steering. Dusk is settling; the hill is steep, and I worry we’ll tip over as he rounds a bend. Nolan has a first name but doesn’t use it. He’s thirty with rust-colored hair hidden under a hood and balaclava. He wears insulated everything: Carhartts, gloves and blown-out snowboarding boots patched together with duct tape. He’s head of snowmaking at a small ski hill in the Catskills near where I live, and until this afternoon I have no idea what it takes to make snow, the very work involved.

When I learned to hunt

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

THE FROST GLITTERS darkly. It sparkles as if all the constellations of the sky are knit to the ground. Walking down the block in the predawn light, I have on a hat, ridiculous orange, I’m embarrassed of even with no cars on the street and no one to see. It’s 5:30 AM, and I wear two of everything as if I’m preparing to flee or dressed for some Noah’s Ark of winter: two pairs of long johns, two wool sweaters, two hats, two pairs of gloves (plus hand warmers) and one old down jacket (dark purple, just to add to my ridiculous color scheme. I also carry an orange backpack, less bright than the hat, but still…). My winter boots have soles so thick I’m a full inch and a half taller. I’m not sure how to dress, but it’s 17 out, and I’ll be sitting for hours – not moving, not talking. Waiting, watching things rustle and the sun rise and the day shape over a hill by a field in upstate New York. I am going hunting.

Gun violence, by the numbers

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 14:30:00 +0000

10 Minutes – Length of time Adam Lanza was shooting

90 (more than) – Number of bullets shot

38 – Number of mass shootings in 2012

$50,000 – Average cost of medical treatment per homicide shooting victim

$2.3 Billion – Total lifetime medical costs for gunshot injuries (as of 1999)

$6 Million – Those medical costs per day

49 Percent – Amount of those lifetime medical costs paid by taxpayers

20 Percent – Number of gun owners with 65 percent of the firearms in the U.S.

36,000 – Number of guns thrown away each year

16,808,538 – Number of applications to purchase guns in the U.S. from January – November 2012 from legal dealers (does not include gun shows or private sales)

5X – Amount this could arm every NATO member state’s armed forces

Hurricane Irene, one year later

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:42:00 +0000

A flood smells of oil and mold and mud – also shit but you try not to think of that. A heaviness collects at the back of your throat. It stings and crawls up your sinuses then down into your lungs. Breathing can be hard, doubly so if you have asthma. Rubbish is everywhere. A flood does not leave things clean. This is not water as you or I usually know it. It is not pure or pristine or life giving. Living in a city, I never understood water’s power. My first flood I watched it blow out my neighbors’ basement windows. This is not benign. Maybe you know this already.

In cities, these forces are controlled. Not here. In my village an oil tank is picked up and dropped down on the corner of Main Street. The water blows out not just basement windows but the plate glass of the supermarket and the building across the street. A CVS collapses. In the village down the road a motel is picked up and swept away with one person left inside. For weeks later you will see smashed siding along the riverbanks as you drive along the highway. The pale blue is the same cerulean color of hope. You inevitably hold your breath. That woman, the one who had been left in it, died.

Damien Hirst at Tate Modern

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:15:00 +0000

In a gallery at London’s Tate Modern, a slim man in dapper black business-casual clothes is pacing, grasping his cell phone (also black, though the grasping makes his knuckles very white). Mr. Biz-Cas is oblivious to the museum’s temple of hush. He stalks past people and paintings, ignoring the white/cream dots in a grid and a taxidermied dove rising in a gold frame. “Can you transfer 8,000 pounds to my current account?” he asks someone on the other end of the line. It’s shocking to hear – in an art gallery at that.

Welcome to the Damien Hirst retrospective, which might be called Damien Hirst LLC.

A minute later, Biz-Cas slips into another gallery, the final room of the show. Only the work is hung too close together. It doesn’t have the same space to breathe as in the rest of the exhibit, where white walls provide not just breath but a patina of Art, of culture. Here, vitrines hold china and skateboards and a skull that’s been twirled about on a turntable with house paint dripped from above in a psychedelic pattern. It takes a few seconds to realize this is not the exhibit. This is the shop.

Fightin' words

Tue, 20 Apr 1999 17:42:00 +0000

The English are debating an issue that touches on tradition, the royal family, gay rights, left-wing politics, government subsidies for the arts, professional gambling, women's equality, race and the importance of saying, "Up yours!" to Tony Blair. They're arguing about who will be their next poet laureate.

The post, which is a lifetime position and chosen by the prime minister with the queen's affirmation, became vacant with the death of Ted Hughes last November. The matter of who'll take over Hughes' duties has received a degree of media play that would astonish readers in America, where the annual announcement of the U.S. poet laureate barely rates an item in major newspapers -- even during National Poetry Month. (FYI: It's Robert Pinsky, for the third time in as many years.) In England, however, the candidates' poems are printed -- and their chances debated -- in the national news sections of the broadsheets. The press is also discussing the advisability of changing the term to five or 10 years, upping the salary and even adding a proper job description to what has thus far been a lifelong sinecure as a member of the royal household. The identity of the next laureate is such a big deal that even bookmaker William Hill, who runs a nationwide chain of betting parlors, is getting in on the act by posting odds.