December 7, 2023 Dispatch In the Spin Room: At the Republican Debate By Antonia Hitchens Photograph by Antonia Hitchens. Last night, the fourth Republican debate took place in Alabama; Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis took the stage. Immediately thereafter, news outlets started publishing “takeaways” and declaring winners. (Notably absent was the frontrunner in the polls, Donald Trump.) We were curious, in the lead-up to this debate, about what goes on behind the scenes of this staged media event, so we asked Antonia Hitchens, who’s been reporting on the presidential campaign, to write a dispatch from the “spin room,” where she spent one of the previous debates, in September, in Simi Valley. I drove from my apartment in LA to Simi Valley to attend the second Republican presidential debate, and when I arrived, at 1 P.M., the media lot was already so full that I had to park on grass, like at a music festival. Three women from a national newspaper got out of the rental car next to me, carrying their blazers over their arms to put on later, talking about trying the twenty-dollar smoothie at Erewhon while they were in town. I waited in line to board a bus that brought us to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a mission-style building on a mountaintop, overlooking the valley below. I followed streams of people from the bus into a huge white tent, like at a wedding, for journalists to file their stories. Read More
September 25, 2023 Dispatch Lost and Found By Sophie Haigney The MTA lost and found. Photograph by Sophie Haigney. I was thinking, recently, of a scene from the animated movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The island of lost toys, I remembered, was a place in the North Pole where the stuffed bears and Hot Wheels cars and waddling wind-up penguins that disappear from children’s lives ended up. They lived happily in their own colony, tinged only slightly with the sad shadow of their severance from their human caretakers. I went to look up this scene, and it turned out I had misremembered it and had been doing so for years. There is no island of lost toys. In the movie it is the island of misfit toys—all the more poignant, for the toys are not lost but abandoned, because they don’t quite belong. Children don’t want them and so they find one another. Eventually this odd cast of characters comes together to teach Rudolph a lesson about the beauty of being a misfit; as we all know, that particular story ends happily ever after. But if the misfits have found one another, where do the lost toys go? That question sort of answers itself: they’re lost. They’re unaccounted for. There are some possible explanations. Perhaps that treasured stuffed lion, worn around the ears, was forgotten on the red banquette at an Italian restaurant where the child was drawing in crayon on a paper tablecloth. Perhaps it fell between the seats of a Land Rover, or worse, into the bottomless netherland of “under the bed.” But even if these scenarios are plausible or true, they might be unverifiable, and so some things simply seem to be erased from earth. I lose things all the time—credit cards, keys, jackets, sunglasses, books, a necklace, two necklaces—actually, three necklaces, all of them gifts from people who loved me. Sometimes I joke that I practice nonattachment, the Buddhist thing, though the real explanation is that I am clumsy and careless. I do wonder where it is that my things have gone. I have always been bothered by this, so much so that it seems I invented and sustained a belief in a fictional Arctic island populated by reindeer where lost things might one day be restored. Read More
August 21, 2023 Dispatch Searching for Tom Cruise By Jane Hu Tom Cruise at Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One premiere. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CC0 2.0. When asked whether he was going to watch Barbie or Oppenheimer first, Tom Cruise responded with, and I quote, “What’s great is you’re going to see both on the weekend.” “It’ll probably be Oppenheimer first and then Barbie,” the greatest living actor continued. “Oppenheimer’s going to be on a Friday—do you know what I mean? I’ll probably see it in the afternoon; you want that packed audience. And then I wanna see Barbie right afterwards, with a packed audience.” But first, I was going to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One on a Monday. I wanted that packed audience, so I picked the earliest screening possible at the TCL Chinese Theatre—a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and home to one of the largest commercial movie screens in North America. Despite various rounds of rebranding, the TCL Chinese Theatre—formerly known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre and before that Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—will basically always be the Chinese Theatre. I first encountered it in the film critic Nick Browne’s classic 1989 essay “American Film Theory in the Silent Period: Orientalism as an Ideological Form,” which examines the Orientalism of early film aesthetics, and the twenties trend of exotically decked-out American movie palaces that culminated, in 1928, “in the construction of Sid Grauman’s still famous (indeed iconic) Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, described as deriving ‘its inspiration from the Chinese period of Chippendale.’ It opened in May with the premiere of De Mille’s King of Kings with an evening of high ceremonies hosted by D. W. Griffith.” Read More
May 17, 2023 Dispatch At Chloë’s Closet Sale By Sophie Kemp The line outside the Sale of the Century. Photograph by Sara Bosworth. In the high noon heat of the big hot sun, the intersection of Broadway and Lafayette was an ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail, a snake that was not a snake at all but actually a line of mostly women—who were nearly all young and definitely all well dressed—waiting to go inside a NoHo loft to go shopping. But okay—this was not some sort of run-of-the-mill sample sale. No one waiting in that line was there just because they were looking for a little something to do on a Sunday morning in May. These girls were in line because inside that loft was a woman named Chloë Sevigny. She was there because she was selling her clothes. These girls were waiting in line because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was Chloë’s stuff, at an event quite literally advertised, in the promotional materials, as the Sale of the Century. It is not that insane to wait in that ouroboros of a line for three hours, when you think about it. She’s Chloë: Harmony Korine’s muse, wearing bleached eyebrows in the movie Gummo. Dancing to the O’Jays’ “Love Train” in a subway car in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. Appearing naked and pregnant on the cover of Playgirl. She’s the kind of celebrity who can get her one million Instagram followers to wake up early on a Sunday to buy her toothpaste. The second the sale began, it was already a viral event—like Black Friday for fashion-school freaks. TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram were flooded with vibey haul videos, memes implying sartorially motivated violence, posts about new female friendships forged in line, allusions to the Bush presidency, and suggestions that maybe you could find a girl to date among the racks? And most importantly: a reminder that “if you’re in line for Chloë Sevigny’s storage-unit sale, please stay in line.” It is true that a specific subset of New Yorkers seemed to be saying (or posting), “chloë sale! chloë sale! chloë sale!” Read More
April 19, 2023 Dispatch Going Roth Mode By Sean Thor Conroe Newark Public Library, Main Branch. Photo by Jim Henderson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’m not even necessarily the biggest Roth guy. When I got asked to cover “Philip Roth Unbound,” a festival to celebrate and “agitate” his legacy, I hadn’t read but a handful of his books. But, looking over the press release, I was drawn to how intense the schedule was set up to be: three full days of panels, live readings, and comedy shows, all in his hometown of Newark. Roth compared novel-writing to the tedium of baseball, and there was something athletic about how these events were stacked up, one after another, jam-packed with renowned writers and themes encompassing the breadth of Roth’s vision. I’d view this like a marathon, one that I’d need to read the rest of his books to prepare for. I’d read maybe six. He wrote thirty-one. We were a month out. Plenty of time, I decided. Read More
December 9, 2022 Dispatch At Proust Weekend: The Madeleine Event By Olivia Kan-Sperling Over the course of Villa Albertine’s Proust Weekend, a series of talks, workshops, and readings celebrating the forthcoming English translation of the last volume of the Recherche and the centenary of Proust’s death, I ate more cakes per diem than usual: on Sunday afternoon, a miniature pistachio financier, a Lego-shaped and moss-textured cake that reminded me of the enormous chartreuse muffins at my college cafeteria; on Saturday morning, a crisp, disc-like, almond-sliver-sprinkled shortbread cookie with a hole, which reminded me of a Chinese coin; and, on Friday night, at a holiday party, a dish of Reddi-wip and sour cream studded with canned mandarin slices and maraschino cherries apparently called “ambrosia salad.” It reminded me of the music video for Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” But these were really only preliminary research exercises for the episode in which Proust Weekend was to culminate: a “Proust-inspired madeleine event with surprise guests”! Read More