January 26, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent TLC By Sadie Stein Photo: Anthony Quintano/@anthonyquintano A snowstorm brings with it an abundance of opportunities for philanthropy: neighbors with walks to shovel, older people to help over drifts, cars to dig out, shut-ins to visit and feed. You see the best of humanity, a hundred times a day, at relatively low risk. Conversely, of course, there are plenty of opportunities for good men to stand by and do nothing. You know what happens then. Read More
January 25, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Gayety of Vision By Sadie Stein Karen Blixen in Copenhagen, 1957. INTERVIEWER What is your favorite fruit? DINESEN Strawberries. INTERVIEWER Do you like monkeys? DINESEN Yes, I love them in art: In pictures, in stories, in porcelain, but in life they somehow look so sad. They make me nervous. I like lions and gazelles. —Isak Dinesen, the Art of Fiction No. 14, 1956 When Isak Dinesen gave her 1956 Art of Fiction interview, she was into her seventies. It’s one of the strangest entries in the Review’s Writers at Work series. While the focus is, naturally, on Dinesen’s work as an author, the artist, also known as Baroness Karen Christentze Blixen-Finecke, addresses her career as a painter, too: Read More
January 22, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Let Me Entertain You By Sadie Stein Larry Salk, Summer Cocktail Party with English Butler, 1961, watercolor, gouache, ink on paper. Among my other compulsions, I have an addiction to books about entertaining. Specifically, I suck at cooking but here are my tricks for impressing everyone books. This category encompasses titles like Peg Bracken’s classic The I Hate to Cook Book, but my favorites are less defiant and more conspiratorial. I think it all started with a copy of the food stylist Kevin Crafts’s Desperate Measures: 90 Unintimidating Recipes for the Domestically Inept, which was in my house when I was growing up. It contains fabulous chapters like “Entertaining Is a Self-Inflicted Wound,” “Remedial Entertaining,” and “Patsy Cline Memorial Chili Dinner.” The pictures are, needless to say, outstanding, and I still like his ice-cream-cake recipe. My addiction was hastened by Sally Quinn’s The Party (in which she’s always passing bought food off as her own) and over the years bolstered with any title containing the words entertaining, secrets, trickery, and stylish solutions. Read More
January 21, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Relativity By Sadie Stein Einstein with puppet. I inquired about the mechanism of these figures. I wanted to know how it is possible, without having a maze of strings attached to one’s fingers, to move the separate limbs and extremities in the rhythm of the dance. His answer was that I must not imagine each limb as being individually positioned and moved by the operator in the various phases of the dance. Each movement, he told me, has its center of gravity; it is enough to control this within the puppet. The limbs, which are only pendulums, then follow mechanically of their own accord, without further help. He added that this movement is very simple. When the center of gravity is moved in a straight line, the limbs describe curves. Often shaken in a purely haphazard way, the puppet falls into a kind of rhythmic movement which resembles dance. —Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre” Before there was Charlie Kaufman, there was Forman Brown. And there was Albert Einstein, holding an Albert Einstein marionette. The marionette in question was a member of the cast of Brown’s Yale Puppeteers, who performed a special for the physicist in 1931 at Los Angeles’s Teatro Torito. Read More
January 20, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Acquisition, Part II By Sadie Stein William Merritt Chase, View from Central Park, 1889. Read Part I here. After we’d left the flea market, we walked across Central Park. I had, in the end, rejected all but the most alluring treasures: the 1970s Harlequin romances, a beloved Little Golden Book—Pantaloon—a sort of novelty all-purpose kit from 1957 embossed with the words Girl Friday containing aspirin, buttons, a shoe horn, a pen, tissues, Band-Aids, and giving off a distinct smell of decaying leatherette. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it. Read More
January 19, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Acquisition, Part I By Sadie Stein From the cover of Victoria Gordon’s Everywhere Man, Harlequin Romance #2438. It was so cold that most of the flea market’s usual vendors hadn’t shown up. The blacktop playground was bare. Customers were so scarce that one seller chased us down the street offering ever-lower prices on a painting. We said no thank you. We didn’t need it. Then, indoors, after flirting with a wide velveteen belt and a souvenir spoon, I came across a stall selling books. I picked up a copy of the Little Golden Book Pantaloon. “You’re not old enough to have read that,” said the seller, who was wearing a woolen cap. “I can guarantee that.” Read More