May 15, 2017, Issue

For me, the most enjoyable piece in this week’s issue is Nick Paumgarten’s Talk of the Town story, “Bong Show,” describing an exhibit at apexart, in Tribeca, called “Outlaw Glass,” – “a showcase of glass pipes and bongs, handmade by master lampworkers for the purpose of smoking marijuana in various forms.” Paumgarten reports,

There were four large vitrines, each about the size of a coffin and populated by an array of flamboyant, filigreed apparatuses, lurid plumbing in many colors and forms—dragons, skulls, krakens—which one might find either fetching or hideous, depending upon one’s taste for velvet heavy-metal posters and airbrushed landscapes on vans. No question, the craftsmanship was humbling. Delicate leaves and lace, tubes within tubes, ghouls embedded inside chambers like ships in bottles. One object widely admired by the other lampworkers was a pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass.

That “Delicate leaves and lace, tubes within tubes, ghouls embedded inside chambers like ships in bottles” is superb!

Paumgarten’s piece slightly reminds me of John Updike’s great Talk story “Old and Precious” (The New Yorker, March 30, 1957; included in his 1965 collection Assorted Prose), in which he attends the Thirteenth Annual National Antique Show held in the “not undingy basement” of Madison Square Gardens and notes some of the items on display:

Staffordshire inkwells, Baccarat chandeliers, hurricane lamps, crystal bobêches, Japanese netsukes, doré bronze candelabra, Zuñi necklaces, Bohemian tankards, vellum music sheets, bisque clocks, Basque jugs, and specimens of dragware, creamware, queen’s ware, stoneware, pearlware, and colored, cut, blown, pressed, and authentic milk glass.

Updike liked to quote William Carlos Williams’s “No ideas but in things.” I think he would’ve relished that “pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass,” in Paumgarten’s wonderful piece. I certainly did.