Passage One

(1) Illegal public art is in the news. The most notorious instance this summer was the switch of flags on the Brooklyn Bridge, by two German artists, from the Stars and Stripes to all-white versions of the same. Others include a Canadian artist’s scrawls, partly in blood, on a wall in the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum and, in Moscow, the painting of a star ornament atop a Stalin-era tower, in Ukrainian national colors. Internationally, the British midnight muralist (壁画家) Banksy continues his waggish depredations (掠夺), rivalled of late by a female upstart called Bambi, who likewise stencils images, only with a sexy-feminist spin. The over-all phenomenon could use a name—I propose Stunt art—and some analysis, starting with distinctions.

(2) As a category of volunteer art, Stunt art borders the genres of spray-can graffiti and spectacular illegal sport, such as scaling or parachuting from tall buildings. I would set both apart as pursuits undertaken rather strictly for the personal satisfaction or the in-group competition of the performers, although each presents hard cases: glorious graffiti murals like the ones that now, deplorably, are being demolished along with the famed 5 Pointz warehouse building in Long Island City and—return with me to the New York dark age of 1974—Philippe Petit’s breathtaking stroll on a rope between the Twin Towers. Any illicit work or action bids to be Stuntist if its beholders pause in unwilled wonderment.

(3) Stuntists may have explicit political aims, like those of the pro-Ukrainian Muscovites, or the protesters who recently hung a Palestinian flag from the Manhattan Bridge. But all Stunt art at least impinges on politics by exposing the fragility of certain rules and customs that govern civic order. And all Stuntists are—say it—vandals, in no matter how benign descent from the sackers of Rome, in the year 455. (One account of that occasion tells that Pope Leo the Great, modelling official flexibility in face of unruly expression, persuaded the Vandal chief to forbear destroying the city and, instead, to be content with mere pillage.) Stuntists usurp physical sites that they don’t own, as well as the time of people—police, cleanup workers—whom they don’t employ. Are we mad yet?

(4) Common reactions range from citizenly umbrage (愤怒) to anarchic empathy, at alternate effects of disruption and charm. We may be of both minds at once, as I’ve been about the Brooklyn Bridge flag team of Matthias Wermke and Mischa Leinkauf, who fled to Berlin after savoring the immediate aftermath of their feat. Our indelible post-⁹⁄₁₁dread, often centered on bridges and tunnels, doesn’t conduce to indulgent humor, and the fillip (刺激) of an infraction (侵害) in full view of N. Y. P. D. headquarters doesn’t purely thrill. (Let them vex their own cops.) But, then, the thing was so neatly done, a balm to the eye and delicately ambiguous in the mind.

(5) Wermke and Leinkauf told a Guardian reporter, Philip Oltermann, of regretting that they may never again be admitted to the United States. They are consoled by their memories of the dawn hours of July 22nd, a Tuesday. Leinkauf poetically recalls, “Everything was really peaceful. Life in the streets slowly awoke: people walked their dogs, the first tourists popped up. people made their way to work. ” They spoke with passers-by. Says Leinkauf, “A burly American with a cowboy hat” remarked, “ ’Did Brooklyn surrender to Manhattan? I mean what else do white flags mean?’” The artist continues, “ ’I don’t know,’ I answered, ’White also means peace. ’ He laughed and said, ’Oh yes, New York surrendered and America is the most peaceful country in the world. ’”

(6) That’s a little acrid and a lot fun. The prospect of a direct response, rippling through a populace, inspires Stunt art, which pointedly evades the commercial and institutional rat mazes that channel careers in art today. Imagine that you’re an artist driven by the primal will to make a mark on the world. You have the phone numbers and e-addresses of dealers and curators. What they represent depresses you. Rejecting it, might you start to scheme?

(7) Stuntism is to art as weeds are to horticulture: plants in the wrong place. Authorities, social or botanical, define the wrongness, which becomes more arbitrary the more you think about it. Some weeds are as lovely as tulips. A superb gardener I know welcomes the sceptered majesty of common mullein (distinct from the mannerly hybrid varieties) wherever it opts to sprout. So may it be with Stunt art, in a time given to fanatical constraints on human-natural cussedness.

Passage Two

(1) In a certain city there lived a physician who sold yellow paint. This was of so singular a virtue that whoso was bedaubed with it from head to heel was set free from the dangers of life, and the bondage of sin, and the fear of death for ever. So the physician said in his prospectus (产品说明书); and so said all the citizens in the city; and there was nothing more urgent in men’s hearts than to be properly painted themselves, and nothing they took more delight in than to see others painted. There was in the same city a young man of a very good family but of a somewhat reckless life, who had reached the age of manhood, and would have nothing to say to the paint: “Tomorrow was soon enough,” said he; and when the morrow came he would still put it off. He might have continued to do until his death; only, he had a friend of about his own age and much of his own manners; and this youth, taking a walk in the public street, with not one fleck of paint upon his body, was suddenly run down by a water-cart and cut off in the heyday of his nakedness. This shook the other to the soul; so that I never beheld a man more earnest to be painted; and on the very same evening, in the presence of all his family, to appropriate music, and himself weeping aloud, he received three complete coats and a touch of varnish on the top. The physician protested he had never done a job so thorough.

(2) Some two months afterwards, the young man was carried on a stretcher to the physician’s house.

(3) “What is the meaning of this?” he cried, as soon as the door was opened. “I was to be set free from all the dangers of life; and here have I been run down by a water-cart, and my leg is broken.”

(4) “Dear me!” said the physician. “This is very sad. But I perceive I must explain to you the action of my paint. A broken bone is a mighty small affair at the worst of it; and it belongs to a class of accident to which my paint is quite inapplicable. Sin, my dear young friend, sin is the sole calamity that a wise man should apprehend; it is against sin that I have fitted you out; and when you come to be tempted, you will give me news of my paint. “

(5) “Oh!” said the young man, “I did not understand that. It seems rather disappointing, but I have no doubt all is for the best.”

(6) Some three years later, the young man came running to the physician’s house in a great perturbation . “What is the meaning of this?” he cried. “Here was I to be set free from the bondage of sin; and I have just committed forgery, arson and murder.”

(7) “Dear me,” said the physician. “This is very serious. Off with your clothes at once.” And as soon as the young man had stripped, he examined him from head to foot. “No,” he cried with great relief, “there is not a flake broken. Cheer up, my young friend, your paint is as good as new.”

(8) “Good God!” cried the young man, “and what then can be the use of it?”

(9) “Why,” said the physician, “I perceive I must explain to you the nature of the action of my paint. It does not exactly prevent sin; it extenuates (掩饰) instead the painful consequences. It is not so much for this world, as for the next; it is not against life; in short, it is against death that I have fitted you out. And when you come to die, you will give me news of my paint.”

(10) “Oh!” cried the young man, “I had not understood that, and it seems a little disappointing. But there is no doubt all is for the best: and in the meanwhile, I shall be obliged if you will help me to undo the evil I have brought on innocent persons.”

(11) “That is none of my business,” said the physician; “but if you will go round the corner to the police office, I feel sure it will afford you relief to give yourself up. “

Six weeks later, the physician was called to the town grave.

(12) “What is the meaning of this?” cried the young man. “Here am I literally crusted with your paint; and I have broken my leg, and committed all the crimes in the calendar, and must be hanged tomorrow; and am in the meanwhile in a fear so extreme that I lack words to picture it.”

(13) “Dear me,” said the physician. “This is really amazing. Well, well; perhaps, if you had not been painted, you would have been more frightened still. “

Passage Three

(1) One of the more interesting things about Hollywood’s Golden Age is just how much of it was one elaborate, tightly controlled lie. Outside of a few brief years before the Motion Picture Production (or Hays) Code was adopted in 1930, the inner workings and backstage lives of the American film industry were just as much a scripted fiction as the pictures they produced. When big studios controlled everything from scripts to cinemas, movie stars were assets and scandal was a liability. A big part of show business was keeping the ugliness that kept it running away from the public eye.

(2) The Fade Out (Image Comics), by the acclaimed team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, has its sights set squarely on the nasty business of show business in the Golden Age. Set in the fall of 1948, the story takes place in what Brubaker calls “one of the last American gold rushes”: Hollywood in the twilight of its boom years, where casual sexism and racism were par for the course (意料之中的) and the American government could ruin your life if you were ever suspected of having beliefs that could be construed as remotely Communist.

(3) The first issue starts with the sort of thing we see from celebrities all the time today, and the sort of thing that no one was allowed to know about at the time: a hell of a party. Screenwriter Charlie Parish wakes up after having blacked out in a bathtub, only to discover the body of rising starlet Valeria Sommers just outside the bathroom door. It’s her murder, and the cover up that ensues, that sets the events of the series into motion as the cast of characters are slowly introduced and their motives hinted at.

(4) At first blush, The Fade Out is a murder mystery, classic film noir (黑胶电影) in its premise and execution. But for writer Brubaker, murder is just the means by which the story will delve into the social dynamics of the period.

(5) “It gives me a great way into the broader canvas of the story and the world,” says Brubaker. “With the murder comes a cover-up, which gets to the heart of what the book is really about. It creates this ripple effect that allows us to explore a lot of different sides of Hollywood’s Golden Age, because I’m much less concerned with whodunit than with the world around this dead starlet and how it responds to her murder. That gives me a way to tell a slow burn kind of tale with simmering tensions and moments of explosive violence, but that isn’t just about plot or action. “

(6) Over the last 15 years, Brubaker and Phillips have established themselves as masters of pulpy (丰富的) crime narratives with high-concept twists. From the superhero noir of Sleeper or Incognito to the Lovecraftian horror of Fatale the duo tell stories of men and women in hells of their own design. To read a comic by them is to watch, enthralled at the many beautiful and violent ways a life can fall apart.

(7) “For me, I love the engine of a crime story or mystery to weave a larger story around,” says Brubaker. “It’s always really about the characters for me, and putting them in bad situations—that they’ve often created for themselves—gives you a lot of possible paths to go down. “

(8) That’s what makes Brubaker the kind of writer who brings out the best in an artist like Phillips. A man whose work is instantly recognizable, Phillips has long been a master at fleshing out the seedy sides of bustling cities, building worlds that get under your fingernails and never really wash out. His approach to people is similar: all beautiful, with more worries than they can possibly deal with in a healthy way.

(9) It’s kind of remarkable to learn that Phillips isn’t really a fan of film noir or crime fiction, given how good he is at illustrating them. “It’s more the look of them that appeals to me,” says Phillips. “I like drawing frowning people smoking in the shadows, and Ed writes a lot of that!”

(10) With a fantastic start and an ambitious future, The Fade Out is another promising title from a partnership that’s been producing first-rate work for over a decade. It’s a book that’s instantly reminiscent of what they’ve done before, but it also provides a canvas for the pair to go further than they have before. And besides—it’s hard to beat that setting.

(11) “For me, the fact that there aren’t a lot of comics like this is what makes it the perfect thing to do in comics,” says Brubaker. “There are about 200 superhero comics coming out every month. There’s only one comic about Hollywood in the ’40s. “

Passage One

Passage Two

Passage Three