Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards Read online

  • Crane’s, the famed stationery company, has been using denim scraps in its all-fabric paper for more than 200 years. It now even has a “Denim Blues” line.

  FILLER

  At the BRI, we call these little extra tidbits at the end of articles “filler.” The Academy Awards has its own version: In the auditorium on Oscar night, the Academy enlists a few dozen “seat fillers”—volunteers whose job is to hang out in the wings during the four-hour ceremony, waiting for audience members to go the bathroom. Then the seat filler quietly runs in and occupies the vacant seat until its owner returns. The reason: Whenever the camera pans the audience, it must always appear to be a packed house. The seat fillers are under strict orders not to talk to or engage in any way with the movie stars they are sitting next to. (We now return you to your regularly scheduled Golden Plunger Awards.)

  THE STATE OF THE ART AWARD

  Christo and Jeanne-Claude

  If your average person decided to take thousands of yards of fabric and drape them

  over a well-known landmark, it might be seen as weird and intrusive. But

  contemporary artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude combine determination

  and lots of patience to make their visions work.

  GOOD COP, BAD COP

  Christo and Jeanne-Claude describe themselves as “environmental artists” because they take an environment and work with it to make art. Urban or rural, land- or water-based, Christo installations take every element of a place into account.

  For years, the artworks were signed and marketed under the name “Christo,” so people believed that he was the sole creator. Now, the pair refer to themselves as “the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.” Christo Javacheff was born in Bulgaria on June 13, 1935—Jeanne-Claude was born on the same day in France. They met when Christo did a painting of Jeanne-Claude’s mother in 1958. Jeanne-Claude describes their collaboration as a “good cop, bad cop” dynamic—he focuses on the vision; she focuses on business logistics.

  Christo has vowed never to repeat himself. He won’t wrap another bridge (as he did to Paris’s Pont Neuf) or surround another set of islands (as in the Bay of Biscayne). Every project is unique.

  A PROLIFIC PAIRING

  Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s six-decade career includes more than 18 completed installations. Here are some of their major works:

  1. Iron Curtain—Wall of Oil Barrels: On June 27, 1962, in protest of the Berlin Wall, the artists closed the Rue Visconti, one of the narrowest streets in Paris, for eight hours by blocking it with 240 industrial oil barrels.

  2. Wrapped Fountain & Tower: Completed in Spoleto, Italy, in 1968, this was Jeanne-Claude’s first work without Christo, who was working on #3, the Wrapped Kunsthalle, in Switzerland. Jeanne-Claude wrapped a medieval tower and a Baroque fountain in white polyethylene; it remained on display for three weeks.

  3. Wrapped Kunsthalle: Christo’s first installation without Jeanne-Claude, this was the first fully wrapped building that the artists conceived. It was installed in Bern, Switzerland, for the 50th anniversary of the city’s art museum.

  4. Museum of Contemporary Art Wrapped: The Bern Kunsthalle was wrapped in translucent plastic, but Christo chose to wrap Chicago’s boxy, anonymous Museum of Contemporary Art in greenish-brown tarpaulin to play up its industrial feel—and for a greater contrast with the January 1969 snow.

  5. Wrapped Coast: Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the rocky, cliff-lined shore of Little Bay in Sydney, Australia, in the fall of 1969. It required one million square feet of erosion-control fabric and 35 miles of polypropylene rope.

  6. Valley Curtain: Plagued by problems, including protests from environmentalists and financial shortfalls, this bright-orange curtain at Rifle Gap, Colorado, which required 142,000 square feet of cloth and 200 tons of concrete, had to come down just 28 hours after it was finished . . . because gale-force winds shredded it.

  7. Wrapped Roman Wall: In 1974, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped a 2,000-year-old wall built by Emperor Marcus Aurelius to surround Rome. Set at the end of the crowded and cosmopolitan Via Veneto, this work highlighted the coexistence of ancient and modern worlds.

  8. Running Fence: A dramatic, 24½-mile white fence running through California’s Marin and Sonoma counties, this 1976 installation brought the artists to the forefront of the American art scene. Charles Schulz gave the authors a nod in a Peanuts cartoon strip with Snoopy coming home and finding that his doghouse had been “wrapped” à la Christo. Twenty-five years later, in 2003, Christo and Jeanne-Claude presented the Charles Schulz Museum with a life-size wrapped Snoopy doghouse that is now on permanent exhibit.

  9. Surrounded Islands: Of course, an installation in Miami’s Biscayne Bay would be done in flamingo pink. The 1980–83 work involved surrounding 11 islands with 6.5 million square feet of polypropylene fabric. It also highlighted an unintentional but significant aspect of the artists’ work: cleaning up debris and leaving natural places the same or better than when they started. Forty tons of garbage were removed from the islands before the project began.

  10. Pont Neuf Wrapped: It took years to get permission to wrap this historic bridge in Paris that connects the Île de la Cité with the Right and Left Banks. When it was complete, the installation highlighted the heart of Paris.

  11. The Umbrellas: This was a joint project—3,100 fabric umbrellas were set up in Japan and California (blue for Japan, yellow for California) and unfurled in 1991. The Japanese umbrellas were positioned close together and the Californian umbrellas spread out in many directions.

  12. Wrapped Reichstag: The Reichstag building, home of Germany’s first parliament, has been a symbol of democracy in Berlin for more than 100 years. But it’s also endured many decades of conflict. So perhaps it’s fitting, then, that it took 24 years for Christo and Jeanne-Claude (with the help of 90 professional climbers) to wrap this building.

  13. The Gates: The original design for New York’s Central Park included a number of gates that were never installed. In 2005, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created their own version of the gates, a series of 7,500 gates made of billowing, saffron-colored fabric panels. It stood for two weeks, spread over 23 miles, and was the largest created artwork since the Great Sphinx of Egypt.

  GATED COMMUNITY

  The artists are as famous for their fortitude in fighting the approval process as they are for the scale and audacity of their breathtaking works. In February 2005, The Gates was unveiled in Central Park. The $20 million installation was conceived in 1992 and had been rejected by several mayoral administrations until Mayor Michael Bloomberg finally approved it. Bloomberg told the New York Times, “I can’t promise . . . particularly since this is New York that every single person will love The Gates, but I guarantee that they will all talk about it.”

  In fact, many people had been talking about it for years. The work’s official title was The Gates: Central Park, New York, 1979–2005. That 26-year span in the date is no typo. It represents the length of time it took the artists to persuade New York City officials to install this work. (That includes 41 formal presentations in 1980 alone.)

  THAT’S A WRAP

  Let’s cover some fun facts about the creative couple:

  • With the exception of 11 architecture students who refused payment for their work on Australia’s Wrapped Coast, there are no volunteers who work on the installations; everyone is paid.

  • According to the artists, there are three things Christo and Jeanne-Claude don’t do together:

  1. Fly in the same aircraft.

  2. Jeanne-Claude doesn’t make drawings. Christo commits all of their ideas to paper and has never had an assistant in his studio.

  3. Christo never talks to their tax accountant.

  • The couple does not take vacations, and they work seven days a week; he works an average of 17 hours per day, and she works about 13 hours a day.

  • They immigrated to the United States in 1964 and, for their first three years, were illegal
aliens. They have lived at the same address in New York City since their arrival.

  “I’d like to thank the rest of the cast. To give a really bad performance like mine, you need to have really bad actors.”

  —Halle Berry, Worst Actor Razzie for Catwoman, also starring Benjamin Bratt and Sharon Stone

  THE SNACK ATTACK AWARD

  Popcorn

  The American Cancer Society includes popcorn on its short list

  of “11 Things That Don’t Cause Cancer.” Pair that with its

  soul-satisfying tastiness and you have an award-winning snack.

  ONE PIECE OF POPCORN A DAY

  A cup of air-popped corn has just 20 calories, and according to a 2004 survey by Jolly Time Popcorn, 86 percent of respondents considered popcorn to be a healthy snack—even though 58 percent also want an intense buttery taste.

  Americans eat about one billion pounds (59 quarts per person) of popcorn every year. Sure, we also nosh on potato chips, pretzels, peanuts, crackers, and rice cakes, but popcorn is special. Crunchy and buttery, fluffy and salty, it’s good hot or cold. (Some people even float it in soups as a garnish!) Popcorn, a starchy carbohydrate, is an indigenous all-American food product that is cheap, wholesome, and low-calorie (in its unadorned form). Did we mention versatile? Throw on some butter or cheese, some sugar or spice—popcorn tastes great any way you serve it.

  YE OLDE CORN

  Actually, the word “corn” doesn’t refer to the green-sheathed cobs we’re used to finding at roadside stands. “Corn” is an Old English word that means simply “local grain.” The “corn” mentioned in the Bible probably meant barley. In England, it meant wheat, and in Scotland and Ireland, oats. So when European settlers came to the New World, they began calling the most common grain found here “corn,” though its proper name is maize.

  Maize has been growing for thousands of years in the Americas. Ranging from smaller than a penny to about 2 inches high, the oldest ears of popcorn were discovered in the Bat Cave of west central New Mexico in 1948 and again in 1950. Those Bat Cave ears may be nearly 2,500 years old. The Aztecs used popcorn in many ways, including as a decoration for statues of the god Tlaloc, who governed rain and fertility. In many countries, including the early U.S. colonies, popcorn was the original breakfast cereal, served variously with milk, cream, sugar, and fruit. And the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts, which introduced popcorn to the first Thanksgiving feast in Plymouth, even made popcorn beer.

  The colonists were also the first to invent an alternate popcorn flavor: kettle corn. It’s mentioned in the diaries of Pennsylvania Dutch settlers (whose ethnic origin is German), and its sweet-and-salty flavor comes from a combination of salt and sugar, honey, or molasses, though some people use two or more.

  MOVIE BUTTER

  It wasn’t until the 1890s that popcorn became a popular snack food, but when it did enter the scene, one of its attractions was in the “pop.” When heated, moisture inside the kernel turns to steam and the pressure of the steam causes the corn to pop. (The kernels left behind are called “old maids.”)

  A popped kernel of corn is called a “flake,” and there are two main types of flakes: “mushroom” and “butterfly.” The former have fewer “wings,” and are sturdy enough to take heavy coatings (like caramel), while the latter have that typical “winged” shape and feel lighter. Most commercially produced popcorn is from white and yellow corn strains.

  The more popular popcorn became, the more venues vendors found for its sale. When street vendors hawking the fluffy stuff started cutting into snack stand sales at movie theaters in the 1920s, the theater owners decided to bring the vendors inside. Thus, a classic pairing began, as moviegoers realized that popcorn was the perfect food to eat while their eyes were glued to the screen. Those savvy theater owners also realized that they could sell more popcorn if they offered butter to pour over the top. Soon a tub of popcorn and a stack of paper napkins were as essential for going to the movies as ticket stubs.

  SMART POP

  Most popcorn is bought and consumed at home (70 percent, both unpopped and prepopped), and the main popcorn producers are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, and Ohio. People buy the most during the fall and winter, when they spend more time indoors. Perhaps one of the most nostalgic popcorn-making methods today is the 1960s–era Jiffy Pop, an aluminum pie pan with a foil top and a handle that the maker shook over an electric burner until the kernels burst and turned the top into an aluminum mushroom cloud.

  The most popular flavors for popcorn include plain, butter, cheese, and caramel, but there are plenty of variations available, including a Halftime Chili and Sour Cream, green apple and blue raspberry, Irish Cream Coffee with white chocolate, loaded baked potato, and even root beer float.

  NUKE IT!

  A new trend in modern popcorn snacking came in the 1980s with the boom in home microwave ovens. Microwave popcorn accounted for $240 million in annual popcorn sales in the United States in the 1990s. Recently, however, microwave popcorn has come under fire as posing possible health hazards. In particular, people who work in the plants where the popcorn’s butter flavoring is made have complained of lung problems (from breathing in the chemicals), though plenty of manufacturers claim there’s no risk for consumers.

  KERNELS OF FUN

  • Old-fashioned method of making popcorn: Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a pan, add ½ cup of kernels, cover, shake, and enjoy!

  • October is National Popcorn Poppin’ Month, as proclaimed in 1999 by then–Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman.

  • Guinness World Records says that the “World’s Largest Popcorn Ball” was created in October 2006 by a company called The Popcorn Factory. It weighed 3,423 pounds, measured 8 feet in diameter, and had a circumference of 24 feet, 6 inches.

  • Popcorn is a whole grain and contains fiber. If you don’t drown it in butter, it’s a healthy low-calorie snack.

  THE COMING SOON AWARD

  Best Movie Taglines

  A picture is worth a thousand words—or at least five or six really good ones.

  THAT PERFECT LINE

  Movie posters excite movie buffs and collectors, who value the art as a snapshot in time of culture and society. In 2005, a collector bought an original movie poster for Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction classic for $690,000—the highest price ever paid for a movie poster. But the words on the posters also help to excite interest in an upcoming movie. According to one film industry marketing executive, a good tagline reinforces a film’s iconic image. The words suggest the experience that awaits the viewer, and are themselves an art worthy of recognition. In some cases, the tagline is more memorable than the poster it’s printed on—and sometimes it’s even better than the movie.

  Los Angeles design firms employ copywriters to come up with the words to sum up a movie. They brainstorm the concepts and words months in advance of the poster’s release. As the first step in the process, ad copy can cement the direction for a motion picture’s multimillion-dollar-marketing campaign. The tagline’s goal is always the same: entice, lure viewers in, and don’t give away too much.

  Since 1971, Hollywood Reporter has been honoring creative movie marketing at its annual Key Art Awards, but it was only in 2004 that a category was added for the best copy line. So far, the paper has honored the following:

  • 2004: The Incredibles (“No gut, no glory”).

  • 2005: Scary Movie 3 (“You’ll die to see these rings”).

  • 2006: The 40-Year-Old Virgin (“The longer you wait, the harder it gets”).

  DON’T GO IN THE WATER!

  Perhaps the best-known tagline, though, comes from a movie that was first a major best-selling book that scared people out of the ocean. In 1975, thousands of people heeded the warning of Jaws’s tagline: “Don’t go in the water.” Three years later, the poster for Jaws 2, released in 1978, used another effective tagline: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the
water . . .”

  Jaws 2’s tagline stands out in movie history for many reasons:

  • It became an international catchphrase—one that’s still in use.

  • It’s better than the image on the poster. (Everyone remembers the first movie’s shocking depiction of an easygoing swimmer unaware of a rapidly approaching shark. But few recall Jaws 2’s picture of a water skier being trailed by a giant great white.)

  • Jaws 2 is a terrible movie. Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, remarked that the movie “simply drones on and on and on” and the shark “looks like something one might ride at Disneyland.” But the tagline built up enough excitement to make the film the highest-grossing sequel ever up until then.

  PLAYING ON YOUR FEARS

  Many movie taglines employ the fear factor. Our other favorite scary taglines:

  • “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby.” Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

  • “There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis’ baby . . . it’s Alive.” It’s Alive (1974)

  • “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Alien (1979)

  • “They’re heeere . . .” Poltergeist (1982)

  • “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” The Fly (1986)

  • “After a decade of silence . . . the buzz is back!” Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

  • “To enter the mind of a killer, she must challenge the mind of a madman.” The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

  • “We dare you again.” Saw II (2005)

  MEET SOMEONE ON THE EDGE