October 23, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Captain’s Doll By Sadie Stein Even creepier than he looks. A friend drew my attention to a news story. It concerned the German-born footballer Bastian Schweinsteiger and his lawsuit against a Chinese company. It seems the company, Dragon in Dream, is selling a doll that bears a more than passing resemblance to the Manchester United midfielder. The suit may sound frivolous, but check out the side-by-side comparison. Also, there’s this: The figurine comes in several outfits—including a version with a steel helmet, white winter jacket and woollen gloves, and another in a typical army uniform, complete with the “Wehrmachtsadler” insignia, an eagle with a swastika above the right breast pocket. I’m sure I’m not the only one who read this and thought of the 1923 D. H. Lawrence story “The Captain’s Doll”: Read More
October 22, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Portrait of a Miniseries By Sadie Stein You’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve lately fallen down some peculiar Bloomsbury Group rabbit hole. And you wouldn’t be wrong. While I was in London last month—and, incidentally, beginning my own marriage—I reread Nigel Nicolson’s classic Portrait of a Marriage. His parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, had an enduring relationship and a successful experiment in unconventional coupling: both were more or less openly gay, they lived often parallel lives, and they remained deeply committed to each other. It is with unreserved enthusiasm that I recommend you listen to this record of Vita Sackville-West reading aloud her poetry. She wrote “The Land” at the height of her affair with Virginia Woolf. Her voice is mellifluous and deep and of another era. It’s time travel. Read More
October 21, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Dressed for Success By Sadie Stein Barbara Pym. Mayotte Magnus © The Barbara Pym Society Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress and shoe designer, has named a shoe after Donna Tartt, the writer. The Tartt is a glittery Mary Jane with a chunky low heel. The color is called Scintillate. It retails for $385 and sold out within hours on NeimanMarcus.com. Here’s how Neiman Marcus describes Parker’s shoe line: She became a fashion icon starring as the quintessential shoe-obsessed New Yorker. Now Sarah Jessica Parker is taking the next natural step: designing her shoe collection. The SJP Collection is her own expression of style with personal touches woven throughout. Take for instance, the grosgrain ribbon details. Adorning every shoe, they’re a nod to the ribbons Parker wore in her hair as a young girl. Some design elements borrow from the legendary wardrobe she wore as Carrie in the show Sex in the City. Even the names of each shoe, such as “Sophia” and “Raquel,” reference her favorite fashion influencers. To create the collection, Parker turned to a familiar name in the industry. George Malkemus (the shoe-guru himself) teamed up to share his thirty years of design expertise. The results? Classic styles that feel as current now as they will in seasons to come. And to ensure they’ll last, every pair has been crafted by artisans in Italy. But with all respect to Parker and “the Tartt,” when I think of literary fashion influencers, I think of Barbara Pym. Read More
October 20, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Precious Moments By Sadie Stein It’s no great shock that Leonard Woolf was recorded on film, not when you think about it—after all, the writer, publisher, and widower of Virginia lived into 1969. And yet! And yet! It seems somehow magical that here he should be, modern and in color, talking about Maynard Keynes for all the world as if he is not a living bridge to a storied past, most of which went as unfilmed—as though Bloomsbury had not belonged to modernity at all, let alone invented it. Read More
October 19, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Premonitions By Sadie Stein Yeah, real spooky, Austin. I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:To you they have show’d some truth. —Macbeth In the Austin airport, there is an ad for a major national bank. “You keep it weird,” it says. “We’ll keep your rates low.” (Okay, so I’m paraphrasing that second part—I stopped paying attention.) It refers, of course, to the famous Keep Austin Weird campaign launched in the early aughts by the Austin Independent Business Alliance. The movement was designed to promote small businesses and maintain the place’s idiosyncratic character, and was later adopted by cities around the country in the face of corporate encroachment. You see Keep Austin Weird merch everywhere in the city, on mugs and tees and coffee carriers, all of it looking as un-weird as possible. But this bank ad was next-level. It was, as magazine people might say, almost too on-the-nose. Read More
October 16, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Luck Be a Lady By Sadie Stein Lady Met, who may or may not be Mrs. Met’s mom, or Mr. Met’s mom, or his ex-spouse, or something … You couldn’t really see out of that big head, so you’d feel someone on your leg but you couldn’t see it, and I’d have to turn my whole body and hold the head to look down—it was a little rough. Later on, I often wondered what happened to Mrs. Met, and maybe they just thought it was easier not to have to deal with all that stuff that I dealt with. The secret lives of mascots are always interesting, inasmuch as the job involves subjugating all ego in the service of a city’s id. That’s why Mr. Met rated a documentary on ESPN. But the quote above comes from an interview with one Lynn Farrell, who played Mr. Met’s wife—or his mother, depending on whom you ask. This was Mrs. Met, née Lady Met, a mascot born early in the franchise’s life. Farrell played the mascot in her seventies-era glory years. After some time away, Mrs. Met was reintroduced two years ago in a more modern form, which makes her story a kind of Christ narrative. It’s what every mascot yearns for: the added drama of death at the hands of Mets management in the 1980s and modern resurrection. Read More