MIKE NGUYEN

They don’t want to show affection in public, so she taps his ankle.

As most New Yorkers know, the subway system is the lifeline of New York City. In 1946, Stanley Kubrick set out as a staff photographer for LOOK Magazine to capture the story of New York City’s subway commuters.

Kubrick was not the first photographer to depict the New York City subway.  In 1938, Walker Evans shot many amazing portraits of unknowing riders with a camera hidden in his coat. This may have influenced Kubrick’s work. This Kubrick image is a very “shot from the hip,” Walker Evans-style portrait.

The human psyche is complex. We often live in our own minds rather than being present in the moment. Intangible thoughts have the power to limit our happiness and success in life. We therefore, become trapped by the limits we allow society to impose upon us. It is these seemingly ‘little things’, that become powerful inhibitors for human beings. Tanapol Kaewpring’s newest body of work gives form to these abstract challenges by using a curious glass cube in the natural and urban environment as a metaphor for the systems we are constrained by. These symbolic boxes can be physical such as a house and an apartment, as well as social frameworks of the family, religion, culture and politics.

Each cube is situated within specific environments, the beach, the forest, the desert and the city. Confined inside are elements such as fire, smoke, light and water. These forces of nature have the capacity for great change, growth and destruction and yet they are still able to be controlled by humanity. Even they have their limits.

Thai food in the United States is becoming bad. It’s getting sweeter—with excessive use of refined sugar—and the other flavors are growing weaker and less reliable. In absolute numbers, more excellent Thai restaurants exist than ever before, but I wouldn’t want to vouch for the average quality of Thai food in America these days.

One problem is that many Thai people have such a wonderful service ethic. I don’t think I have ever once been treated poorly in a Thai restaurant. That has made courting wide audiences relatively easy. Thai food also looks healthy and has beautiful colors—all those greens, reds, yellows, and oranges.

As a result, Thai food has become cool. I first saw this trend in California, in the 1980s, when young people in black started turning up in large numbers at Thai restaurants in Hollywood. It spread. Americans eating in a Thai restaurant are likely more hip than those eating in a Chinese restaurant. Yet hip people do not always have superb taste in food.

As Thai restaurants have become more popular, they have become unreliable. It is so easy to make the food too sweet, appealing to lowest-common-denominator tastes or masking deficiencies in the food’s preparation. The best sweet Thai dishes mix sweet with tart, but there’s been too much abuse on the sweet side and not enough use of fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste or ground white pepper. The most-reliable indicators of bad Thai restaurants are a large bar and sushi on the menu. Those are both signs that the restaurant isn’t that serious about food. Stay away.

Unlike Thai food, Vietnamese food hasn’t become extremely popular in the United States. A large number of Vietnamese restaurants operate in this country, but these are patronized mostly by Vietnamese. The cuisine’s failure to take off is interesting, because Vietnamese food rarely offends the American palate. It even has a notable French influence. You would think it could do better commercially, even if that might mean quality declines.

Vietnamese food has probably been saved from the mass market because most people never master the sauces and condiments that must be added to the food, at the table, for its glories to become apparent. It’s too much trouble, and a lot of people don’t like asking for help, especially if the interaction involves some linguistic awkwardness. (In my experience, it’s not uncommon for Vietnamese servers to speak poor English, so they may come across as confused or indifferent.) To outsiders, Vietnamese restaurants can feel like exclusive clubs for Vietnamese people, and that can be off-putting.

To everyday foodies in America, I say: eat more Vietnamese food! It’s rarely too weird, never expensive, and usually pretty healthy, because it relies less on oils and deep-frying than does a lot of Chinese food. Again, the key is to use the sauces and condiments placed on the table in front of you. You don’t have to know what they are; a lot of them are difficult to tell apart without close scrutiny. Just ask for directions. If the wait staff can’t speak English well, they will show you. Simply pull the table’s sauces and condiments in front of you, point to them, and look puzzled. It’s okay.

Art Is Boring

Schopenhauer ranks boredom with “pain” as one of the twin evils of life. (Pain for have-nots, boredom for haves — it’s a question of affluence.)

People say “it’s boring” — as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us. But most of the interesting art of our time is boring.

Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc.

Maybe art has to be boring, now. (This doesn’t mean that boring art is necessarily good — obviously.) We should not expect art to entertain or divert anymore. At least, not high art. Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye — but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring … e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented).

If we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).

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On Intelligence

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence.”

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Why I Write

There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.

I write — and talk — in order to find out what I think.

But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when- talking). If I’d written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently.

This is what I meant when I said Thursday evening to that offensive twerp who came up after that panel at MoMA to complain about my attack on [the American playwright Edward] Albee: “I don’t claim my opinions are right,” or “just because I have opinions doesn’t mean I’m right.”

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Love and Disease

Being in love (l’amour fou) a pathological variant of loving. Being in love = addiction, obsession, exclusion of others, insatiable demand for presence, paralysis of other interests and activities. A disease of love, a fever (therefore exalting). One “falls” in love. But this is one disease which, if one must have it, is better to have often rather than infrequently. It’s less mad to fall in love often (less inaccurate for there are many wonderful people in the world) than only two or three times in one’s life. Or maybe it’s better always to be in love with several people at any given time.

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On Licorice, Bach, Jews and Penknives

Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long- haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.

Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food.

Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, wagon-lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, penknives, aphorisms, hands.

Things I dislike: television, baked beans, hirsute men, paperback books, standing, card games, dirty or disorderly apartments, flat pillows, being in the sun, Ezra Pound, freckles, violence in movies, having drops put in my eyes, meatloaf, painted nails, suicide, licking envelopes, ketchup, traversins [“bolsters”], nose drops, Coca-Cola, alcoholics, taking photographs.

Rachel Swainston made spot paintings for Damien Hirst in the mid-1990s, before becoming an upholsterer.

Painting spots was very dull. There’s not a lot you can say about them. The canvases would arrive; they’d be stretched and pinned. Damien would specify spot size and we would mark them up and draw them. Then we’d have a massive delivery of household paints, which we’d mix into smaller pots of whatever colours we needed. We’d have hundreds of colours: no two were ever the same. A six-foot square canvas with spots four inches apart would take about a week. Every painting was sold.

It was quite simple really. With the spot paintings: it was, just a formula. Damian didn’t need to have much input. Most of the time, there were two of us, although it would depend on how quickly he wanted them churned out. We were just the small fry. I came out of Goldsmiths [University] thinking I can’t do anything, so I did these. Although they were all hand-painted, meaning each one is imperfect, there is no individual quality to the painting.

Lots of the Old Masters had people doing things for them. Damien created the idea; we just did the manufacturing. It would have been nice to have been credited in some way. We didn’t feel he was particularly grateful, but it’s quite a nice thing to be able to say you have done. Whenever my kids do a project on famous artists at school, they always do Damien Hirst. It means they can say: “My mum did the spot paintings.”

Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina on the set of Pierrot Le Fou (1965).

Ryoji Ikeda

Dr. Taub, one of the characters in Fox’s television show House,has infant twins. He loves them and wants to care for them. The problem is: he finds spending time with them unbearably boring.

Their books put him to sleep. He finds it awkward and unnatural to engage in their play. Taub feels inadequate as a father. I have felt the same way at times.

It’s great to be with your kids, especially while you do something else. (My infant daughter sleeps besides me as I type this.) Judging by all the mothers paying more attention to their smart phones than their children while sitting on park benches, this is probably not an unusual phenomenon.

I went to a screening of Tarkovsky’s film Stalker at the New School in Manhattan last week. There was a panel discussion andGeoff Dyer, whose new book is about Stalker, warned those in the audience who hadn’t seen the film that they ran the risk of getting bored. The movie was very slow, very little happened. He ventured that they’d be less bored if they knew right at the start that this film was no Bourne Identity. It has a totally different kind of pacing. We could eliminate boredom, or at least mitigate it, Dyer seemed to suggest, by adjusting our expectations at the outset.

So, what is boredom, anyway?

It is a state of discomfort, to be sure. It’s a state in which we find ourselves uninterested, perhaps because we are disinterested and detached.

One might say that boredom is the besetting sin of art — in all its varieties: performance, painting, sculpture, film, writing, etc — but also of the lecture hall and the class room. My 10-year-old son is bored in school. What more withering criticism of his teachers could one find? And indeed, describing a movie or book or theatrical performance as boring is about as damning as it gets.

If you stop to think about it, though, the link between art and formal education, on the one hand, and boredom, on the other, may be, if not exactly unavoidable, then, to a certain degree, inevitable.

Consider that what all of these — performance, writing, teaching, etc. — have in common is the structure of detachment. Pupils sit and listen to a teacher. Audiences pay to watch and scrutinize, but they must keep quiet and sit in the dark. Visitors to the gallery can look, and think, but not touch. These events are structured by detachment. That’s where they begin. And so, from the very start, they are always on the verge of boredom. Boredom is the baseline from which they can, at most, strive to deviate.

Some artists, writers and teachers see boredom as the enemy; they battle it the way fire fighters battle a blaze. In their effort to deviate from the baseline, from boredom, they engage the audience. They try to pull down the wall separating them from the kids, or audience, or visiting public. At its best, they do this by, in effect, putting on display a thing of value — knowledge, a story, a sculpture, a painting, whatever — while also providing the tools the audience needs to understand it.

For instance, a piece of music may begin by introducing a theme, thus giving the audience the resources to know what to pay attention to as the theme is developed in the sequel. This strategy also runs some pretty high risks. At the end of the day, the sort of engagement provided by art is only ersatz. You don’t really know or really care about Romeo and Juliet, or the Stalker and his clients, or Jason Bourne.

Indeed, at its worse, the impulse to deny boredom finds its expression in mere stagecraft and manipulation, in the willingness to pander and entertain. We find this tendency at work even in education, where teachers are increasingly pressured to think of their students as, in effect, products, whose performance specifications are being molded, rather than people with minds of their own.

There is another approach to boredom in the arts, one that is, perhaps, more common in the avant-garde. If boredom stems from detachment, and if some measure of detachment is unavoidable in art (and in life), than getting bored is not just an irritating state, it’s an opportunity.

This seems to be how Tarkovsky thought about Stalker. When the studio supporting the film asked him to think more of the audience and pick up the pace, he responded by slowing things down even more. He was trying to be boring.

Or take the case of John Cage. I understand he was invited to give an important series of lectures at Harvard toward the end of his life. As I understand, he produced his three lectures by randomly mixing words from a few different books of note — one of them was Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, I believe — and he then simply read these aloud. Eventually his audience had dwindled to two or three people. He’d been very, very boring. But by affording his listeners maximal detachment — there were no ideas to get, no plot to follow, no meaning to perceive — he had afforded them a different kind of freedom, to think, to let the mind wander, or to contemplate what was happening.

Detachment may be unavoidable in the arts. It is not unavoidable in life (even if conflicts about our attachments may be).

I think Dr. Taub ended up getting it just right. He realized that he can spend time with his kids not by watching them or trying to be one of them, but by doing his own thing with them. So he read the girls articles about the NFL. His enthusiasm was contagious. They couldn’t understand anyway. They all had a good time. Taub stopped being bored by his kids when he stopped looking, perceiving, watching and thinking, and figured out how to just hang out with them.

The “Lives” essay has been running in our magazine nearly every week since 1996. For those who don’t know, it is a place for true personal stories, running about 800 words long, and in the print edition, it’s the last bit of editorial content, right inside the back cover. Though we do solicit professional writers, it is open to anyone with a good tale to tell, and we try as best we can to keep up with the steady torrent of submissions. At the risk of making our jobs utterly impossible, I want to encourage even more writers to take the plunge — because the more stories we get, the higher the quality of what ends up on the page. In doing this, it is not our intention to set people up for failure. The truth is, while getting published is a wonderful achievement, the process of writing a story is itself a rewarding experience. You won’t be sorry for having tried.

To help you think about how you might approach writing your own “Lives” essay, I asked the magazine’s editors for a single, succinct piece of advice. This is obviously not meant to be a comprehensive list, and we would love for readers (and writers) to submit their own counsel in the comments section.

Here’s what my editors suggest:

• More action, more details, less rumination. Don’t be afraid of implicitness. And the old Thom Yorke line: “Don’t get sentimental. It always ends up drivel.”

• If it reads like it would make for a Hallmark TV episode, don’t submit it.

• Meaning (or humor, or interestingness) is in specific details, not in broad statements.

• Write a piece in which something actually happens, even if it’s something small.

• Don’t try to fit your whole life into one “Lives.”

• Don’t try to tell the whole story.

• Do not end with the phrase “I realized that … ”

• Tell a small story — an evocative, particular moment.

• Better to start from something very simple that you think is interesting (an incident, a person) and expand upon it, rather than starting from a large idea that you then have to fit into an short essay. For example, start with “the day the Santa Claus in the mall asked me on a date” rather than “the state of affairs that is dating in an older age bracket.”

• Where, exactly, did it start?

• Write past what you think the end of the story is. (Hat tip to Raymond Carver.)

• Do not make it about illness or death, unless that is the story you have to tell.

• Try an Oblique Strategy.

• Go to the outer limit of your comfort zone in revealing something about yourself.

• Embrace your own strangeness.

• If you can’t write it, try telling it.

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is the story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world’s greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearances, it is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3 star Michelin review, and sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimage, calling months in advance and shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat at Jiro’s sushi bar.

“Regarding the process of designing this cover, apart from the Chinese title of Catcher in the Rye, on the right side of the front cover you may have noticed a slogan written in Chinese calligraphy, which was drawn by Yi Hua and it means “F**k the World”. As for the feature image, we just thought Holden needed a look that can appeal to modern readers. So we combined a modern version of Holden and a sentence that we thought could be his idea of the world.”