January 30, 2017 Our Correspondents Crisis in Cosmetology By Jane Stern I’ve started to realize how homely I’ve become. I look like crap. I need a total makeover. When I was a teenager, and then into my twenties, I would never have let this happen. Back then, I was mad for makeup. I read Glamour and Seventeen with the intensity of a Talmud scholar. It was the pre-hippie days, and no one wanted to look natural. Being a young woman meant knowing about eyelash curlers, and the right hairdo for your face shape (there were only three choices: round, triangle, or square), and how to cover acne pustules with thick sheets of foundation. I worshipped at the altar of every department-store cosmetic counter. With the right mascara, lipstick, and face powder, my life had limitless possibilities. Read More
January 26, 2017 Our Correspondents White-Lady Tears By Amy Gentry This is the last entry in a series about domestic thrillers. Still from Obsessed. Obsessed, as they are, with both the trappings and traps of the middle class, most domestic thrillers are invested in interior decoration to a degree that would make Nancy Meyers blush. Part of the joy of watching these films lies in decoding their object fetishes, which tend to come to a head in the final reel, as improvised weapons define each film’s understanding of the terms of domesticity at stake. Consider the menacing household objects that come into play in the films I’ve covered in this series: the shovel in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (fertility!), the nail gun in Pacific Heights (home improvement!), those perfectly straightened cans and towels in Sleeping with the Enemy (housework!). Which is why, on watching Obsessed, the 2009 film starring Idris Elba, Beyoncé Knowles, and Ali Larter, I was at first nonplussed by the aggressive blankness of its sets. What, if anything, is Obsessed obsessed with? This is an important question, because the future of the domestic thriller is black (or at least nonwhite). While Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, both glossy, self-conscious literary adaptations about downward white mobility, did well, they’ve barely nudged Hollywood’s focus away from teenage-boy-friendly, big-budget action franchises. Meanwhile, Screen Gems, Sony’s small-budget genre subsidiary, has released a black-fronted thriller every September since 2014: No Good Deed, The Perfect Guy, and When the Bough Breaks. Critically reviled, these films nevertheless make healthy returns on their modest budgets while giving actors like Regina Hall, Morris Chestnut, Sanaa Lathan, and Taraji P. Henson something to do that doesn’t involve being a cop, a maid, or someone’s black best friend. Read More
January 25, 2017 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 4: Lullaby By Mike Powell Mike Powell’s column is about living in Arizona. Bryan Olson, Dream Catcher, collage. Driving around for groceries one afternoon I encountered an interesting AM radio announcement for homeschooling. Not any particular method or approach to homeschooling, but for homeschooling in general. Curious about what other forms of isolation such a station might advertise, I listened further. Following the announcement came a string of foggy, sentimental music that the station, 690 KCEE, refers to as “pop classics.” On AM 690, you might hear a teen idol like Perry Como followed by early-seventies soft rock, or “Earth Angel” followed by a highly polished country ballad—Don Williams singing “I Believe in You” or “I’m Just a Country Boy,” maybe—music unified not by style or time but by the internal suggestion that hardship was over and the rest was dream. This was September or October, months that in most parts of the country signal the turn from summer to fall but in Southern Arizona mean continued triple-digit temperatures paired with the collective fatigue of things having been this way since May. I had recently moved to Arizona from New York, an interesting place I always hated. I was nesting, staying in more, reconciling myself happily to a city where there wasn’t much to do. Read More
January 24, 2017 Our Correspondents Sending Springer Home By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. This week: Springer the Orca. Design by Kristen Radtke. Shit, it’s A-73! —The biologist Graeme Ellis Her calls were so loud they practically blew our earphones off. —Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard, Vancouver Aquarium And now, months later, after forming all these groups to help fund this—working with NMFS and DFO, which has not always been easy, and people on both sides of the border—it’s like delivering a baby, and we’re about ready to pass out cigars. —Michael Harris, the Orca Conservancy Name: Springer Species: Orcinus Orca Years Active: 2000–present Distinguishing Features: An “open” white saddle mark; several faint scratches, perhaps from propellers, on dorsal fin Skills: Resilience, a northern accent, an ability to disarm various mammalian species Habitat: Puget Sound, Washington; Telegraph Cove, British Columbia; the open water Additional Notes: The ferry worker called her Boo. Shortly before Christmas 2001, a Department of Transportation employee noticed a very young orca hanging around the docks of Vashon Island, a residential swath of land in Puget Sound between Tacoma and Seattle. Every day as the Evergreen State ferry floated in its slip, the orca would swim beside its bow, disappearing only when the engines started. While orcas in the waters of the Pacific Northwest aren’t unusual, a solo baby orphaned orca was a reason to call the authorities. It turned out that Boo already had a name. Two, actually. Her official catalogue moniker was A73—“A” for the matrilineal pod with which she should be traveling, and “73” because she was the seventy-third birth in A-pod since humans started tracking them. Unlike the transient pods that swim up and down the Pacific coast all year, the orcas in A-pod are resident orcas, and they spend the summer-salmon runs near the shores of Washington and British Columbia. They have their own practices, bonds, and even dialects. A northern resident A-clan orca produces calls never made by, for instance, a southern resident from J-pod. Read More
January 19, 2017 Our Correspondents Some “Ozbervatims” on Edward Lear By Anthony Madrid I just finished reading my review copy of Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry. The book consists of seventeen scholarly essays, many of which got their starts as papers delivered at an Edward Lear bicentennial conference at Oxford in 2012. I found the book admirable, valuable, and annoying as hell. The present note will not be a review, but only a few stray thoughts. Read More
January 13, 2017 Our Correspondents A Meeting of the Fern Society By Wei Tchou After failing to save my dying fern, I decided to look for help among experts. Fern specimens. Last winter, I had a moment of crisis after failing to keep my Green Clubfoot fern alive, despite establishing a complicated routine for my increasingly ailing plant: I set my fern’s pot on river rocks within a tray of warm water, for humidity; I alternated its position according to the sun, and misted its fronds twice a day. But no matter how damp I made the air or how much I considered its position to my radiator, by February it had shriveled in on itself, its tendrils drying to paper. I spent the next spring and summer attempting to read my way into expertise, but every field guide or plant study seemed to unfurl more disparate curiosities. Did you know, for example, that ferns reproduce with spores, rather than with seeds? Since spores are invisible to the naked eye, eighteenth-century naturalists believed the seeds of ferns to be invisible—some even thought you could harness the power of invisibility if you managed to collect fern seeds and stuff them into a pocket. In Fern Fever, Sarah Whittingham describes a method by which these enthusiasts devised to gather the mysterious seeds from bracken: In some places it was said that brake produced a small blue flowers once a year on 23 June, the night before the Feast Day of St John the Baptist, or Midsummer’s Day. The flower’s seed could be collected by stacking twelve pewter plates beneath a frond at midnight. It would fall through the first eleven plates and accumulate on the last one. However, fairies were also meant to be particularly active on Midsummer’s Eve, and if you were not careful, they would seize the spores as they fell and steal away with them. Read More