November 19, 2024 Document Fourth Sleeper: Rachel Sindler By Sophie Calle In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited twenty-seven friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed. She photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversation once the door closed. She served each a meal and, if they agreed, subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits, and dreams. The following text is Calle’s narrative report of her fourth guest’s stay, and is the second in a series of four excerpts from the project to be published this week on the Daily. You can read the first installment here. She’s my mother. I call her on the phone at 10:30 A.M. She agrees to replace Maggie X., who was supposed to arrive at ten but didn’t show up. She will sleep on Monday, April 2, from 12 P.M. to 5 P.M. Read More
November 18, 2024 Document Third Sleeper: Bob Garison By Sophie Calle In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited twenty-seven friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed. She photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversation once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits, and dreams. The following text is Calle’s narrative report of her third guest’s stay, and is the first in a series of four excerpts from the project to be published this week on the Daily. I do not know him. A mutual friend gave me his contact information. I call him and tell him briefly about my project. He is hesitant. First, he wants to know if I have a bathtub. He wants to sleep ten hours, at night only. Finally, he agrees. He will come Monday, April 2, from one to ten in the morning. Read More
November 1, 2024 Document Suzanne and Louise By Hervé Guibert Originally published in 1980, Suzanne and Louise tells the story of two sisters—one widowed, the other never married, recluses in a hôtel particulier in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement. The author, who is also their great-nephew, is one of the few who visits them. Suzanne takes a certain pride in having risen from the poor, uncultured working class to her position as the wife of a well-to-do shopkeeper, in having completed her studies and become a musician, after having traveled far and wide, reading Proust and listening to the “great works” of music. Louise respects this accession (her exclusion). “I quit after elementary school,” she says. Before entering Carmel, and then working at the pharmacy for her brother-in-law, Louise worked in Rheims for an insurance company. Louise loves frothy things: sparkling wines, sentimental magazines (on her bedside table, Nous Deux is next to Catholic Life), operetta music. Read More
May 20, 2024 Document Televised Music Is a Pointless Rigmarole By Theodor W. Adorno Herbert von Karajan directing Verdi’s Messa da Requiem in Milan’s La Scala theater. Aired in West Germany on November 26, 1967. From an interview in Der Spiegel (February 26, 1968). DER SPIEGEL Professor Adorno, you once dismissed radio concerts as empty strumming and chirping. Does this characterization likewise apply to the performances of baroque concertos, classical symphonies, masses, and operas that are ever more frequently available for hearing and viewing on the first and second television channels? Is it possible to present an adequate performance of music on television? THEODOR ADORNO As an optical medium, television is to a certain extent intrinsically alien to music, which is essentially acoustic. From the outset, the technology of television occasions a certain displacement of attention that is disadvantageous to music. In general music exists to be heard and not to be seen. Now one can certainly say that there are certain modern pieces in which the optical aspect also has a certain importance. But at least in the case of traditional music— SPIEGEL Obviously on German television—aside from the third channels—only traditional music is performed … ADORNO —in the case of traditional music there is something unseemly about the whole thing, an unseemliness naturally occasioned by the fact that by analogy with its counterpart in radio, a piece of machinery like the television-production process has got to be constantly fed, that something has got to be getting constantly stuffed into the sausage machine. On the whole I believe that the very act of performing music on television entails a certain displacement that is detrimental to musical concentration and the meaningful experience of music. Read More
January 2, 2024 Document The Life and Times of The Paris Metro By Adrienne Raphel Cover of The Paris Metro. Courtesy of the fortieth anniversary issue, published in 2016. In 1974, Harry Stein and Thomas Moore, young editors who’d worked together at New Times, a glossy biweekly in New York, had an idea: Let’s start a magazine—in Paris. Moore had recently come into a windfall when one of his articles, about a bank robbery in Brooklyn, became the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon. He moved to Paris, following his then girlfriend; the relationship ended, but he stayed. Stein had previously lived in Paris, writing features for the International Herald Tribune, and also had a European girlfriend at the time. At first, the idea seemed impossible: Maybe we should sell baseball caps instead of starting a magazine, Stein thought. But Moore had a vision. He stole the name from the café outside his living room window, stole the masthead logo from the subway sign, and their publication was born: The Paris Metro. Stein and Moore called Joel Stratte-McClure, a fellow journalist then in Paris on assignment, to tell him that they had a “scoop” on a nuclear meltdown and ask him to meet them in the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz. (There was no meltdown.) Several martinis in, Stratte-McClure joined the Metro team. He quickly became one of the core reporters, writing everything from regular features—an On the Money column, which advised readers about how to invest in wine or bet on horses—to cover stories like “Our Man in the Seine: Gets to the Bottom of the Dirty River—And Comes Back Alive!” A few months later, Moore approached Stratte-McClure about a new role. “Do you balance your checkbook?” Moore asked. “Of course. I’m a fanatic about it,” said Stratte-McClure. Moore’s follow-up: “Would you like to be publisher?” Nothing else remotely like Metro existed at the time. Other English-language competitors like the Herald Tribune provided local news coverage, but the Metro offered a full high-low smorgasbord, from in-depth interviews with city employees to poetry by writers such as Gregory Corso and capsule reviews of Paris’s worst restaurants to coverage of pickup softball leagues. Stratte-McClure told me in a recent interview that the Metro routinely “tackled taboo subjects. Money, salary, who’s voting for whom, personal details about people.” The Metro also had a robust list of what was going on in Paris, such as job opportunities (“URGENT: Seek Modern Dance Teacher”), personal ads (“WIFE JUST DIED—looking for attractive woman dress size 36, between 20 & 31”; “I should like to offer my husband a totally original birthday present: a good meal out with an attractive girl/woman”), requests for information (“Have you had an abortion in Paris? Share your experience with your sisters”), events (such as, on Bastille Day, the Communist Party’s “traditional swinging affair on the Île Saint-Louis”), and shoestring-budget recipes (“In addition to being extremely good for your health, chicken livers are the biggest bargain at Monoprix”). The magazine allowed its writers the freedom to write what they wanted: to explore longer-form stories that leaned quirky, the result of enmeshment in a subculture or riffing on one’s pet topic. Read More
August 28, 2023 Document Early Spring Sketches By Yi Sang Hubert Robert, detail from “Fire at the Paris Opera House of the Palais-Royal.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC0 2.0. Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a writer in Korea during the thirties, when the country was under the rule of the Japanese empire. His poems, stories, letters, and essays, written in both Korean and Japanese, are celebrated as some of the finest Korean literature of his time, and bear wide-ranging influences: the Chinese classics, the general theory of relativity, and Dadaism and surrealism, both of which he is credited with introducing into the Korean literary lexicon. He wrote during a period when Koreans could be jailed without trial on the basis of mere suspicion of thought crimes, and, shortly after being imprisoned in Tokyo by Japanese authorities in 1937, succumbed to tuberculosis in a hospital at the age of twenty-seven. Nearly ninety years after his death, Yi Sang is perhaps best remembered for his intricate poetry, which features striking, complicated images. In the poem “Crow’s Eye View: Poem No. 15,” he writes, “I sneak into a room with a mirror. To free myself from the mirror. But the me-inside-the-mirror always enters at the same time and puts on a gloomy face. He lets me know he is sorry. Just as I am locked up because of him he is locked up shuddering because of me.” Like many of his contemporaries, Yi Sang also contributed guest columns to newspapers. These writings, collected under column titles like “Early Spring Sketches” and “Miscellany Under the Autumn Lamp,” offered incisive, humorous, and compact observations of life in Seoul in the thirties. He captured the grace and chaos of urban existence among anonymous fellow city-dwellers going about their daily routines. The pieces that follow come from the column “Early Spring Sketches,” which was serialized from early to late March 1936. Encountering Yi Sang through these sketches offers a glimpse into a luminous spirit whose disillusionment with the modernity of his era didn’t culminate in despair but rather, as the poet John Ashbery once wrote, “broke into a rainbow of tears.” —Jack Jung, translator Uninsured Fire (March 3, 1936) The building next door is engulfed in flames. The sky above is murky, filled with furious flurries of snow and plumes of smoke that resemble blobs of ink vomited out by squids. It is rumored that the burning structure is a large factory that stored various chemicals. From the raging bonfire, rainbow-colored smoke billows out intermittently, akin to coughs. The chemicals are exploding. Read More