April 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Ten Superstitions of Writers and Artists By Ellen Weinstein On days like today, we need all the tips, tricks, and good omens we can get. This Friday the thirteenth, we’re presenting you with the superstitions of ten artists and writers who (mostly) managed to avoid bad luck. Charles Dickens Slept Facing North Charles Dickens (1812–1870) carried a navigational compass with him at all times and always faced north while he slept—a practice he believed improved his creativity and writing. Audrey Hepburn Lucky Number Fifty-Five The screen legend, humanitarian, and fashion icon Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993) had a fascination with the number fifty-five. She is known to have requested the number for her dressing room—as it had also been her dressing-room number for both of the now classic films Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Read More
April 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Don’t Hate Us ’Cause We Fabulous By madison moore “Excuse me … are you Prince?” the hotel concierge asked me. At first, I thought he was joking, the kind of slightly homophobic jab I’ve grown used to hearing over the years, so I laughed as I said, “No, I’m not Prince” with a tone of obviousness. “Are you sure?” he doubled down. I couldn’t believe it. Had he never seen a picture of Prince? Over my lifetime, I’ve admired many black divas and pop singers, from Tina Turner and Little Richard to Beyoncé and Lenny Kravitz, but Prince’s fierce, androgynous aesthetic completely changed my approach to my own body. Prince also made me queer. He was proof to my teenage mind that living outside the box is sexy, a kind of magic. Prince, for me, represented freedom. On April 21, 2016, I boarded a flight from London to New York for a special performance-studies conference at Yale organized by my dissertation advisor. I hadn’t been back to New Haven since I graduated in 2012, so I was eager to see old faces and go to all my old hot spots—BAR (the bacon-and-red-onion pizza is to die for), 116Crown … and I really couldn’t wait to get a piece of Lithuanian coffee cake. As the plane touched down at JFK, still rolling down the runway, I took my phone out of airplane mode and was showered with a barrage of messages, from WhatsApp to Facebook, with the news that Prince died. Wait, what? I immediately felt numb. It was a shock to me because Prince was still so young, so active, and I guess I had believed he would outlive all the rest of us. I had left London in a world with Prince in it. Six hours later, he was gone. When I used to pump around the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, a place you know of now only because of the 2014 riots, the place where I spent a small chunk of my early childhood years, kids who wanted to be mean called me Prince. I’d walk down the street really feeling good about myself, and people would just yell, Hey, Prince!—laughing, pointing, sneering. Even when I lived in New York City and actually even until this day, people still yell Prince at me as a homophobic insult. Over the years, I started associating the word Prince with faggotry—not Prince’s own faggotry but mine. Read More
April 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Helen Weinzweig’s Interior Feminist Espionage Novel By Sarah Weinman When I first read Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then I’ve described the book to others as an “interior feminist espionage novel.” That is, of course, a reductive way to look at this work, which is so much more than that single phrase can express. And yet those four words, taken together, suggest the scope and the breadth, the daring and the audacity, the humor and the pathos contained in a work of less than a hundred fifty pages. It was a novel I did not know I was looking for, but finding it was a revelation. The interior nature of Basic Black is central to its unfolding. Shirley Kaszenbowski, regarded from the outside, is the embodiment of the invisible woman. She is in her early forties, long married, with two children. She wanders through Toronto in the titular basic black dress, a strand of pearls around her neck, cloaked by a tweed coat from Holt Renfrew—then and now the city’s most expensive, most fashionable, and snobbiest department store—designed to last for decades. “I fool no one,” Shirley understands. “I am regarded as a woman with no apparent purpose, offering no reason for my presence.” Regarded from inside, however, Shirley is anything but invisible. She is aglow. Her appearance, her age, her station are a cloak for a rich life of travel, adventure, and meaning. As the critic Art Seidenbaum notes in his review for the Los Angeles Times, “Her odyssey is erotic, but her appearance is prosaic.” Read More
April 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Illicit Love Letters: Albert Camus and Maria Casares By Stephanie LaCava Maria Casares and Albert Camus. For the past few weeks, I’ve fixated on a collection of primary source material that reads like a tidy work of epistolary fiction. It’s a big book, nearly 1,300 pages, transcribed from original letters, postcards, and telegrams sent between the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus and the Spanish French actress Maria Casares between 1944 and 1959. It’s too heavy a book to bring on the subway, so I downloaded the electronic version on my phone. My camera roll is now nearly a hundred screenshots of exchanges in French between the two lovers. The book was published in France by Gallimard and has not yet been translated into English. The romance of Camus and Casares is richer, if not sadder, when considered alongside the narratives of each of their work. There is an eerie doubling of life and art. Absurdity is the only certainty, and this is confirmed over and over again by coincidence and chance. The two first met on June 6, 1944, the storied day the Allied forces landed in Normandy. Both were involved in the production of Camus’s play The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu), which was being staged in Paris at the Théâtre de Mathurins. Preproduction, Camus brought Casares to an evening hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (The latter remarked on the young actress’s beauty and confidence.) It is said that that evening, the two began their love affair—Casares twenty-one, Camus nine years her senior. Their fling ended abruptly when Camus’s wife, the mathematician and pianist Francine Faure, returned to Paris from Algeria after the Occupation. Read More
April 11, 2018 Arts & Culture A Homework Assignment from W. H. Auden By Anthony Madrid W. H. Auden backstage at the 92nd street Y in 1966. Photo: Diane Dorr Dorynek I don’t know the backstory on this one. All I have is the assignment below, forwarded to me by my editor: What is he even talking about. Actually, I can explain that. The part I can’t explain is how Auden can possibly have thought anything good was gonna come out of this assignment. He was a glutton for punishment, I’ve heard. But you’d have to have a screw loose to hand out the above as an assignment. It’s not that the students wouldn’t do it; they’d try. But then you’d have to read the results. Take a sec and imagine the anger. Read More
April 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Not a Nice Girl: On Berenice Abbott By Julia Van Haaften Berenice Abbott, Self Portrait with Distortion, 1945. Photography is the most modern of the arts … It is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific achievement than any other … Photography born of this age of steel seems to have naturally adapted itself to the necessarily unusual requirements of an art that must live in skyscrapers. —Alvin Langdon Coburn I like this picture so well because it re-creates for me some of the feeling I got from the original scene—and that is the real test of any picture. —Berenice Abbott, 1953 It’s twilight in late December 1932. Thousands of streetlights and office windows blaze in electrified concert for a scant half hour between the winter-solstice sunset and the lights-out, five o’clock end of the office workers’ day. Just weeks earlier, after three crushing years of the Great Depression, fear-defying FDR had won the presidency by a landslide. Optimism was in the air. High up in the northwest corner of the new Empire State Building, thirty-four-year-old Berenice Abbott aims her bulky wooden view camera at the exuberance below—the glittering, boundless cityscape of Midtown Manhattan, diffused just slightly by a sheltering glass window. She opens the shutter and begins a fifteen-minute exposure. Her triumphant photograph, Nightview, New York, will forever signal “modern metropolis”—as futuristic to us in the twenty-first century as it was to Berenice’s Depression-weary contemporaries. Read More