Dibs

Pop Art originated in Warhol’s New York, but in the early ’60s it spread to Los Angeles, where a new generation (perhaps “clique” would be a better word) of artists embraced this new fad, characterized by the ironic glamorization of mainstream cultural detritus. (Think Warhol’s soup labels and Hockney’s swimming pools.) To be frank, most people wouldn’t think that taking a photograph of an empty parking lot and putting the photo on the wall of a gallery (as did Popster Ed Ruscha) really counts as “art,” or anything you might actually want to look at. But Whiting and the over-intellectualized world of art critics have so aggrandized the patently trivial and simplistic themes and techniques of Pop Art that, while reading Pop L.A., one begins to wonder — is it all a big joke? How else to make sense of Whiting’s almost comical hyperacademic analysis of images that speak for themselves? The chapter on “beefcake” photos — homoerotic pictures of well-built young men — has the pompous title, “The Erotics of the Built Environment.” This is what happens when an incisive mind like Whiting’s get too subsumed in academia and its obsessive concern with the significance of every bit of fluff that comes under its withering gaze. Sometimes a parking lot is just a parking lot. Pop L.A.‘s sole saving grace is its extensive series of vivid reproductions, tracing the LA modern art scene from the ’20s to the ’70s, in which you can see with your own eyes how artists really seemed to have talent up until the ’50s, when a Pop Art-inspired wave of self-indulgence and intentional sloppiness rendered the whole scene marginalized.

Grade: D+

This new paperback edition of Rockmore’s 2005 hardcover original re-introduces mathe-fanatics to the dizzying world of Bernhard Riemann, the genius behind the legendary Riemann Hypothesis. More famous to the general public as the man who developed the multi-dimensional geometry that opened the door to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Riemann also hypothesized a technique for predicting the occurrence of prime numbers. So — what’s the big deal? Some theorists feel that prime numbers — those unique, frustrating amounts like 17 and 31 which can’t be divided by anything else — are the key to everything in the known universe. The problem is that prime numbers seem to occur randomly, and no one has ever figured out a way to reliably predict which numbers will be prime, aside from laboriously calculating them out one by one. That is, until Reimann, who published his hypothesis in 1859 — the same year that Darwin published The Origin of Species. And just like with the Origin, lesser scientists have been trying to prove it ever since. But unlike evolution, which even a young student can grasp, the Riemann Hypothesis is so esoteric, and so incomprehensible to the average amateur enthusiast, that it can barely even be described in simplified terms, much less spelled out explicitly. But Rockmore does an admirable job in trying to draw the general reader into the dizzying heights of number theory: along the way you’ll encounter harmonic frequencies, the complex plane, and the dreaded “zeta zeroes,” which are the source of the still unproved mystery of the Riemann Hypothesis. In essence, Reimann concocted a counter-intuitive mathematical formula that produces a series of answers that almost exactly matches the apparently random sequence of prime numbers. What has driven mathematicians to distraction ever since is that no one can figure out why, or how a regular equation can magically predict a random series. A million-dollar prize awaits anyone who can prove the Riemann Hypothesis, a prize that — even after 150 years — remains unclaimed.

Grade: A-

Sex. Writing. Writing. Sex. You’ve always gotta wonder what those two words are doing together in the first place, because I mean … who really wants to get all cerebral and speculative about something so primal and, um, personal? Okay, writing that exists for the very purpose of turning you on, that’s one thing. (And usually it’s called porn, or in cerebralspeak, erotica.) But what’s the point of publishing nonfiction essays, even well-written ones such as these, about doin’ it? The motive behind such anthologies gets all the murkier when bits meant to titillate mix it up with stark glimpses of XXX-film directors, schoolroom sex-ed, and strippers molested as children. Self-indulgences such as Tristan Taormino’s paean to public banging embody the ideological thrust, if you will, that drives much of today’s sex writing: it’s all in-your-face, look-at-me, as functional as a YMCA workout, and anyone who mentions love is slackjawed relic with funny underwear.

Grade: C+

The day a full colostomy bag figures prominently in the plot of a mystery novel is the day when you realize that mysteries have reached a whole new kind of high-water mark — which is where they should have been all along, in the graphic land of guts and gurgling noises. Nothing’s cute or cozy about Fossum’s tale of a teen purse-snatcher, as gorgeous as the angel Gabriel, who meets his match in this latest among a new wave of Scandinavian psychological thrillers. Like the Edvard Munch paintings that also sprang from the author’s native Norway, it bares tortured souls with a relentlessly leisurely éclat. Like one of its main characters, you just keep wanting to squeeze your eyes shut.

Grade: A-

True-crime fans are a separate subculture. Yes, we read other kinds of books too, but a guilty incomparable I-know-what’s-coming thrill springs from these quickie page-turners that follow certain conventions: each covers a fairly recent American crime of passion in extreme detail, usually starting with a graphic description of the crime scene and then delving way, way, way into the life histories of the major players, the pursuit, the before-and-after. Usually there’s just one perp and one or two victims per crime, as these are character studies and that’s the whole point. This sturdy offering by the prolific and reliable Fleeman ropes us immediately into the twisted headspace of an attractive twentysomething North Carolina psychologist who persuaded her lover to kill her equally attractive Air Force-pilot husband.

Grade: B

A Möbius Strip is more than just a parlor trick or childhood toy; it’s a revolutionary topological discovery that has had profound effects on science and cosmology. Invented by otherwise-obscure 19th-century German mathematician August Möbius, this bizarre one-sided and one-edged miracle has a seemingly infinite number of astounding attributes and holds deep ramifications for how we conceive our universe to be structured. Scientist and puzzle-maestro Pickover has assembled the definitive compilation of all things Möbius, from the mathematics behind the topology, to art, to brain-teasers, to Möbius strips in higher dimensions. Best of all, this handy little volume is lavishly illustrated with dozens of illuminating diagrams and photos, without which the whole concept would be simply too much to grasp. The book is peculiar in that it is not intended to be read straight through, but is rather a somewhat hodgepodge assemblage of trivia and anecdotes. Knowing full well that few readers would be sufficiently interested in this topic to plow through 200 pages about the history of German mathematics, Pickover instead consciously created a high-end bathroom book, meant to be browsed and flipped through whenever the fancy strikes. The gimmick works, and curious readers will find themselves grasping esoteric topological concepts even while they’re enjoying the ride.

Grade: A-

“Unspeak” is Poole’s alternate word for euphemisms, which are, as we know, alternate words for other words. Pledging to unravel today’s cleverest and most devious semantic knots while exposing lying liars, the edgy Brit lashes out at those who say, for instance, “tragedy” and “terrorist,” arguing that these are political expediencies rather than true descriptions. But as a contributor to the staunchly liberal Guardian, Poole apparently can’t help but bring a certain bias to the table. The book would have been bolder — and more honestly illustrative of our times, since he says it’s honesty he craves — had he savaged unspeakers on both left and right more evenly. But he doesn’t.

Grade: C+

With the revealing subtitle The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, this is essentially an expanded rewrite of Smedley Butler’s 1935 anti-war pamphlet War Is a Racket. Carroll traces the history of the Pentagon, and the entire military apparatus of the United States — working on the fundamental assumption that all of America’s enemies throughout history were either illusory or could have been mollified through diplomacy. As expected, he comes to the conclusion that, well, “war is a racket,” a scheme to make money for armament manufacturers. Unreconstructed peace-at-all-costs-niks will deliriously devour every word and footnote of this 650-page tome; realpolitikos will find themselves snorting in derision and shaking their heads in disagreement. And, jumping on the memoirization fad found in every corner of the book trade these days, Carroll also traces his own personal connection to the Pentagon — playing in its hallways as a child, then growing up to join antiwar protests as an outsider — which actually turns out to be the most interesting part of the book. Otherwise: for hardcore political obsessives only.

Grade: C

Fundamentalist Christians — in Sweden? Not just that, but Lapland, in this deeply felt character-driven mystery that starts with the partial dismemberment of a preacher and sends a smart Stockholm lawyer back to her snowy hometown. Larsson gets deep inside the heads of even minor characters who pop up only once in the narrative and never reappear. That’s a literary risk, but it’s a testament to Larsson’s talent that — even in translation — she somehow makes us care about all these fleeting Gunnars and Bengts. As befits current fiction-fashions, Christians come out looking less than sane, a slant that some will see as gratuitous.

Grade: A-

The cooler you think you are, the more of a pathetic loser-drone you probably actually are, in Canadian zinester Niedzviecki’s grim vision of an American culture so co-opted by celebrity-worship and corporations (and the latter calculatingly creates the former, his theory goes) that even thinking you’re thinking an original thought is just a sad delusion cooked up by the masterminds who brought you Big Macs and Eminem and even modern-day antiwar rallies, imprinted onto your brain somewhere between the fourth and fifth freeway onramp. It’s a jarring wake-up call, but in blasting sitting ducks while insufficiently dissecting the narcissism epidemic spawned by parents and teachers, it offers too few solutions.

Grade: C+