December 5, 2024 On Things Six Handbags By Simon Wu Photographs courtesy of the author. The big one was too big. And the little one? The little one was too little. I was looking for something in a place where it was impossible to find what I was looking for. I was in an Acne Studios store in Tokyo looking for a “work bag,” and I was delusional. A handbag that costs more than $1,500, made from the skin of an Italian baby cow, does not need to account for the dimensions of a thirteen-inch MacBook. It does not need to work for a living, commute via subway, or fly Spirit Airlines. It is a thing of fantasy. If I were truly searching for utility, I would use a tote bag. The “work bag” was an excuse. What I really wanted was not a work bag or even a handbag but a portal to a glamour so total it could engulf me. I know from both advertisements and experience that there are many such portals. But entry requires preparation and research. A lot of people are obsessed with bags. They talk, vlog, and post about them on the internet. But in real life, it is uncouth to talk about designer bags. It is couth only to have one appear on your arm and, when someone asks about how much it cost, to be nonchalant. I have trouble being nonchalant. I am usually flustered. I deflect, I stress how much of a discount I got. I worry people will think I am shallow, or that I have more money than I do. I just love design, I say, and even I am not convinced. This is how I found myself in an Acne Studios store, looking for a portal. Read More
November 13, 2024 On Things Kevin Killian’s Amazon Reviews, Part 2 By Kevin Killian Amazon Prime van in Milan. Photograph by Saggittarius A, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Kinsey (2004) dir. Bill Condon ★★★☆☆ Biopics Are Always a Little Disappointing … February 10, 2005 No matter how well scripted, they’re hidebound by having to stick to the outward facts of their subject’s life. I haven’t seen a good one since Lady Sings the Blues and even that wasn’t awfully good, though it was fascinating. So is Kinsey, I expect, though people don’t seem to want to go to it. My friend Wayne and I went last night and three women sitting behind us and to the left were laughing at themselves and their own naïveté because, as it turned out, they had come to the theater thinking they were seeing Kinsey Millhone, the Sue Grafton heroine, brought to life by Laura Linney. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when they discovered they were in for a picture showing how America gradually opened up to the idea of sex when supported by science. Another rule of thumb is most movies starring John Lithgow and Veronica Cartwright as the parents are probably going to be pretty overplayed. This was the case here. Seeing this movie was like going into a time tunnel of the cinema—so many of the actors haven’t been in an A movie in ages. Timothy Hutton, Lynn Redgrave, John Lithgow, Katharine Houghton (the young girl from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, now looking unimaginably aged), and even Chris O’Donnell from the Batman movies. How did he get another job? He’s looking good. But Peter Sarsgaard provokes most of the attention by slipping out of his clothes in a cheap hotel room and heading for the shower. Kinsey doesn’t know which way to look but you can see where his eyes are straying to. Peter Sarsgaard isn’t the luckiest guy in the size department, but he’s got nothing to complain about, and once his pants come down, you can predict what’s going to happen through the rest of the movie. I wonder if the real Clyde Martin is still alive? If so you’d think he’d ask for someone with a bigger endowment to play him. Oh well, he (Sarsgaard) is extremely good in the movie and many fans will beat a path to his door. Read More
November 12, 2024 On Things Kevin Killian’s Amazon Reviews, Part 1 By Kevin Killian Amazon Prime delivery van in West Acton. Photograph by David Hawgood, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Going Once: A Memoir of Art, Society, and Charity by Robert Woolley ★★★☆☆ A Bygone Era in Auctioneering January 5, 2005 I feel sorry for the people who came to him during one of Sotheby’s Antiques Roadshow–style days, for he was withering when confronted with the junk people offered him off of Aunt Tillie’s mantelpiece. He is fairly fearless when it comes to painting a portrait of himself as the ultimate New York society queen. Poor guy died of AIDS not long after this book was published, and I still find it enjoyable. It seems as though a lot of Sotheby’s secrets went to the grave with him, for he certainly knew where most of the bodies were buried. His account of the Andy Warhol estate auction is mind boggling, so you will forgive him his gaucheries and his nonstop bitchiness. Another good story is how he auctioned off (for charity) the services of David Hockney, who volunteered to paint your swimming pool, and how the film producer Lester Persky had to be shamed into bidding for what was on the face of it an incredible bargain. We all love auction stories, for they remind us that maybe someday we will find a bargain worth bragging about, whether in the world of the decorative and visual arts, or in romance, as I did when I married my present wife. Read More
September 9, 2024 On Things Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony By Lucy Ives Photograph by Claire CJS, via Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. My earliest memories are of my own interest in perfection. The supreme object of my interest, of my deepest intellectual and sensual love, was a product designed and manufactured with the express aim of capturing the attention of very young girls. I was hardly unusual. I was obedient, even; in some ways unimaginative. Still, I think we can learn something from my thrall: My Little Pony was a figurine copyrighted by Hasbro and first produced in 1982. Based on My Pretty Pony, a larger and clunkier toy with unimpressive sales, My Little Pony was, despite the singularity baked into its name, always plural. There was no “pony,” never a one. Only ponies—many ponies, always proliferating, mutating, re-accessorized. Earth ponies and sea ponies and winged ponies and, of course, unicorn ponies. Each pony with its distinctive not-to-be-found-in-nature shade, its shimmering corn-silk plastic mane, its rump printed with an allegorical symbol, a.k.a. “cutie mark”: ice cream, clover, seahorse, stars, flowering plants, and on and on, emojis avant la lettre. The ponies’ bodies were plastic. For now, the ponies would not decay, although fire might melt them or a car wheel crush them. Their eyes were round and bedecked with long lashes. The irises were illustrated in such a way that each pony eye appeared perpetually brimming. Highlights, as on a meniscus of dew, were standard. The ponies might weep soon. They might cry for joy. They might look in your direction. Read More
August 30, 2024 On Things Toys in the TV By Isabelle Rea There is another kind of television. It’s not quite live action, nor purely animated. It exists in three-dimensional space, yet people, in their conventional forms, are absent, and the stories and characters don’t fit neatly into our practical world. It makes sense that we find this kind of television in the children’s category, because that’s where we leave most irrational things. Toys, especially ones designed for make-believe play, occupy a similar middle ground. Toys are real objects that you can touch, but they don’t work in the way nontoys work. You have a toy elephant, but you don’t have an elephant. You have a toy vacuum, but not a vacuum. If toys are soft, plush, rounded, and malleable, with holes and faulty parts, so are the worlds we create for them. We might watch this happen on TV. Read More
March 22, 2024 On Things A Well-Contained Life By Isabelle Rea Photographs courtesy of the author. What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness. The smallest container you can buy at the Container Store is a rectangular crystal-clear plastic box available in orange, purple, and green. It can contain one AA or two AAA batteries, half a handful of Tic Tacs, or a folded-up tissue. The largest container you can buy at the Container Store is a four-tiered metal shelving unit. It can contain other containers. Containers mediate us and our stuff. They create boundaries and allow our items to exist multiple feet above the ground. Most spaces are divided by containers. These containers might then be divided by additional containers. Containers form a scaffold, or an architecture. They make walls scalable and underbeds reachable. They allow you to put something down and know where it is the next time you want to pick it up. One of the best ways to understand containers is to imagine a world without them. We would have piles. Bracelets, creams, stick-shaped kitchen items, fruit. Small things would get lost under big ones. Or, an alternative: a line of items that snakes through an apartment or house, up and down stairs and spiraling into the center of the room. When you want to find something, you simply walk along the line of items, confronting each individual thing. Read More