January 17, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Isn’t It a Lovely Day By Sadie Stein From J. A. Sidey’s Alter Ejusdem, 1877, via the British Library. The day of my thirtieth birthday dawned wet and cool. What started as a determined drizzle had settled, by late morning, into hard rain. This scuttled most of our plans, but my boyfriend and I were determined to fill the day with fun, and set off doggedly for Manhattan. As any tourist knows, filling a rainy urban day can be a challenge; one generally ends up doing a lot of sitting around in restaurants drying off, drinking more coffee than planned (and this in turn creates new challenges). We did this. Our first umbrella blew out and we had to toss it. We took shelter in the Strand bookstore. Our second umbrella was pinched. We saw both Alexander McQueen’s show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, back downtown, a documentary about Candy Darling. We bought a new umbrella from a bodega. Sometime between McQueen’s S/S ’05 Edwardian collection and Candy becoming the toast of Max’s back room, the rain turned torrential. I was not distressed about leaving my twenties, and had never been prone to birthday blues, but around three P.M., my spirits began to flag. Our feet were very wet. We were standing under the overhang of the West Fourth Street subway station, and everyone looked miserable, either to be going out into the downpour or else to be leaving the downpour for a train car that would, without question, smell like steaming wet dog. Read More
January 17, 2014 Arts & Culture The Beetle and the Fly By David Cronenberg From the original cover of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, 1915. I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a seventy-year-old man. Is this different from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis? He wakes up to find that he’s become a near-human-sized beetle (probably of the scarab family, if his household’s charwoman is to be believed), and not a particularly robust specimen at that. Our reactions, mine and Gregor’s, are very similar. We are confused and bemused, and think that it’s a momentary delusion that will soon dissipate, leaving our lives to continue as they were. What could the source of these twin transformations possibly be? Certainly, you can see a birthday coming from many miles away, and it should not be a shock or a surprise when it happens. And as any well-meaning friend will tell you, seventy is just a number. What impact can that number really have on an actual, unique physical human life? In the case of Gregor, a young traveling salesman spending a night at home in his family’s apartment in Prague, awakening into a strange, human/insect hybrid existence is, to say the obvious, a surprise he did not see coming, and the reaction of his household—mother, father, sister, maid, cook—is to recoil in benumbed horror, as one would expect, and not one member of his family feels compelled to console the creature by, for example, pointing out that a beetle is also a living thing, and turning into one might, for a mediocre human living a humdrum life, be an exhilarating and elevating experience, and so what’s the problem? This imagined consolation could not, in any case, take place within the structure of the story, because Gregor can understand human speech, but cannot be understood when he tries to speak, and so his family never think to approach him as a creature with human intelligence. (It must be noted, though, that in their bourgeois banality, they somehow accept that this creature is, in some unnamable way, their Gregor. It never occurs to them that, for example, a giant beetle has eaten Gregor; they don’t have the imagination, and he very quickly becomes not much more than a housekeeping problem.) His transformation seals him within himself as surely as if he had suffered a total paralysis. These two scenarios, mine and Gregor’s, seem so different, one might ask why I even bother to compare them. The source of the transformations is the same, I argue: we have both awakened to a forced awareness of what we really are, and that awareness is profound and irreversible; in each case, the delusion soon proves to be a new, mandatory reality, and life does not continue as it did. Read More
January 15, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Move Over, Big Town By Sadie Stein More calculated than you’d think. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Last night, a circa-1877 water main burst on Fifth Avenue near East Thirteenth Street, resulting in substantial flooding and, one imagines, a grueling night for any number of MTA workers. Reports the New York Times on the City Room blog, Basements were flooded when it cracked, but there were no injuries, said Michael Parrella, a Fire Department spokesman. Fifth Avenue remains closed between 14th and 12th Streets. The break opened up a big hole in Fifth Avenue that repair crews were working on. Buildings along Fifth Avenue from 14th to 12th Streets were without water this morning, the Department of Environmental Protection said. A reader reported that buildings on 10th Street also remained without water. The A, C, E, B, D, F, M, and Q trains all had to be rerouted, so needless to say the morning commute was disrupted for a lot of people and, if you read Twitter, was basically the Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened. People were inconvenienced, and the world needed to know. Easy for me to say. Now that I am working from home, I don’t need to be on the subway by nine anymore—and believe me, I understand how crushing it can be to watch six trains stream past, knowing all the while that the first to open its doors will be packed beyond the dictates of civilization, sanitation, or fire safety. Usually in such situations there is a hapless MTA representative at the station who fields the queries of the baffled tourists and furious New Yorkers who have all been Personally Inconvenienced by any such mishap. If you’re really lucky, you’ll have both an entire preschool class and a high school field trip waiting on the platform with you. As it happened, I did need to be on the subway early this morning. But I decided to hoof it the two miles downtown. It wasn’t, in fact, the scrum of angry commuters, or the cranky children and their poor, harassed minders, or even the prospect of the long wait that made my decision for me. It was the “Jailhouse Rock” guy. The “Jailhouse Rock” guy is normally one of my favorite buskers. He sings only one song—“Jailhouse Rock”—and he sings it on an interminable loop, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, ad infinitum verses same as the first. He has a guitar which he strums enthusiastically and randomly with one hand, while his fret hand lies idle. I have heard people literally groan when they enter the station and realize he is our morning’s entertainment. Once a crazy woman sort of went off on him. He doesn’t care. Today I couldn’t do it. But who cares? We all know what it is to feel imposed upon by musicians during a harried commute. (Likewise, it goes without saying that subway music can be revelatory and interesting. Who at Eighty-Sixth Street wasn’t moved last week by that vet in a wheelchair playing “The Weight” while half the platform joined in on the harmonies?) I’m just another person among thousands, giving money or not giving money, depending on my mood and my finances, on some level thinking of these people with their real lives as somehow a passing soundtrack to my life. Louis C.K. has a bit about self-absorption. “I can’t believe this is happening to me, ME!” everyone thinks. Because a 127-year-old pipe burst, and hundreds of people had to wade in freezing water overnight fixing it, and others were probably scrambling to prevent everyone being electrocuted, and still others had to reorder all the subway routes, and a man who may or may not be mentally ill was singing a song I didn’t feel like hearing, I walked forty blocks. As the novelty tee would have it, COOL STORY, BABE. NOW MAKE ME A SANDWICH. Have you seen Jailhouse Rock? Elvis plays a construction worker who accidentally kills a man in a bar brawl, gets one to ten in the state pen for manslaughter, and is taught to play guitar by his cellmate. I won’t get into the whole plot, but suffice it to say, his character encounters a lot of rejection, a lot of class snobbery, and a lot of humiliation. When he does find success, he becomes so self-absorbed that he loses everyone in his life. And “Jailhouse Rock”? It’s a pop song his character writes in a cynical attempt to make it big. The stylized cell-block dance sequence you have seen is in fact a number the Elvis character performs on a Bandstand-style TV show, rather than a lighthearted musical number from a similarly-toned film. The original title was The Hard Way. Although box-office sales were healthy, Jailhouse Rock received mixed reviews; several critics apparently didn’t like that a film for young people featured an antihero. During filming, one of Presley’s dental caps got lodged in his lung and he had to be hospitalized. Costar Judy Tyler was killed in a car crash two weeks after the film wrapped, and Elvis was so depressed that he didn’t attend the premiere. As they say, everyone’s a critic. The MTA reports that service has mostly resumed, with delays. No one got a tooth in his lung. Oh, and for the first time, today, that guy wasn’t playing “Jailhouse Rock.” He was playing “Tutti Frutti.”
January 13, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 13, or Please Refrain from Touching the Shrubbery By Alexander Aciman Gustave Doré, The Inferno: Canto XIII. This winter, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! Once again we find ourselves lost in a dark wood. Dante notes that in this forest there is no actual greenery. (This is hell, after all. Where does he think he is, the New York Botanical Garden?) As Dante and Virgil pass through the woods, the Roman tells his disciple that what they are about to witness is unthinkable. Virgil, seeing that Dante can hear screaming but cannot tell where the sounds are coming from, tells him to tear a twig from one of the thorny bushes; the moment in which Dante finally removes the twig is one of the most memorable in all of literature. Blood pours from the tree, and a pained, hissing voice cries: Perché mi schiante? Perché mi scerpi? Why do you break me, why do you tear me? The voice belongs to Pier delle Vigne, chancellor to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Virgil asks Pier to tell his story so that Dante can “revive his fame” up in the living world. Pier’s story is as tragic as the moment in which he loses one of his twigs. He was loyal to Frederick, and was later accused of stealing from him. Not long after his imprisonment, Pier killed himself. This ring in which Dante finds himself is the realm of the suicides, who, ungrateful for their bodies on earth, are deprived of flesh in hell. Read More
January 10, 2014 Arts & Culture The Sicilian Defense By Max Ross Photo: Martin Lopatka, via Flickr Dear Mr. Ross, Thank you for sharing with us your review of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound. The piece is colorful and sharp, and it is with regret that we say it does not suit our needs at this time. Too much of the writing reflects back to the writer himself—to you yourself. (And, inexplicably, to your father.) While we certainly don’t mind personal inflection, and even tolerate the insertion of an occasional “I,” a review must be grounded more firmly in the subject or book under consideration. (And less so in the reviewer’s father.) Critiques such as yours are redolent of ego. We say this not as admonishment, but as something of which you may want to be aware as you continue what looks to be a promising writing career. We wish you the best of luck in placing this piece elsewhere, and will be happy to consider your queries in the future. Sincerely,The EditorsThe New York Review of Books The difficulties began when I attempted to write, for The New York Review of Books, a review of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s critical biography of Philip Roth. My intention was simple: to demonstrate that I appreciated Roth’s work with a higher degree of sophistication than Pierpont. But articulating my Sophisticated Appreciation was tough to do. At first this didn’t bother me—an inability to articulate one’s Sophisticated Appreciation, I reasoned, may itself be proof of how complex and nuanced that appreciation is. I’d been invited to submit to NYRB based on the success of an essay I’d written about Philip Roth for The New Yorker’s Web site. (An NYRB editor had e-mailed me to commend its “substantial humorousness,” and asked me to pitch an idea his way.) I wanted badly to be published in NYRB. I had some friends who’d been published in NYRB, and I was jealous of them. Moreover, my father is an avid NYRB reader—“It’s so wonderfully stuffy,” is his line; “the official periodical of leather armchairs and lowballs of Scotch”—and placing an essay in its pages, I believed, would recompense him for having twice paid my tuition to the universities where I’d learned to appreciate things sophisticatedly. (He would be pleased, too, to learn that I’d written something that wasn’t about him, as opposed to everything else I’d published—excepting the Roth piece—since finishing graduate school.) NYRB’s editors expected six thousand words from my desk. Yet for several days I was too nervous to begin. More than anything else, the review would need to establish for NYRB’s readership how intelligent I was—establishing the writer’s intelligence seemed the purpose of most NYRB reviews, and I have always liked to fit neatly into prevailing systems. If it didn’t prove my intelligence, though, my review could only prove my lack thereof, and nothing was more terrifying to me than the idea of being exposed as intellectually inadequate. Read More
January 9, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Beautiful Hide By Sadie Stein Jane Powell and Howard Keel in a poster for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Not that long ago, I was walking down a Brooklyn street and encountered an elderly woman surrounded by grocery bags. I offered to help carry them into her apartment, and I was sort of disappointed when she said yes and I saw what a long staircase it was and how heavy the bags were. After several trips we’d gotten them all in and she thanked me. “I was worried I was going to miss the beginning of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on TV,” she explained. “It’s my favorite movie.” “You know,” I said, “it’s out on DVD now. I’d be glad to loan it to you.” “Oh, I have the DVD,” she said blithely. The film inspires such irrational devotion. Whenever I am down, I go to YouTube and watch the barn-dance scene, which is famous not just because of the number of accomplished dancers in the cast but also because of the sheer, exhausting athleticism of Michael Kidd’s choreography. As a child, I decided that my wedding party would replicate the entire number—I was going to be Milly and do the pas de deux in the middle—but then you grow up and realize that unless you are a dictator on an international scale, this kind of thing is impossible. Nevertheless, I defy anyone to watch it and not get just a little bit cheered up. Read More