August 5, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent My Day By Sadie Stein The Broadway Melody of 1929 won the Oscar for best picture. The highest-grossing film of the year, it was the first all-talk musical, and MGM’s first musical, period. It contained a groundbreaking Technicolor sequence. Even if you’re not a cinephile, the film’s a great, pre-Code watch. While the acting is certainly dated, and the story somewhat melodramatic and lurid—it centers around a sister-act love triangle—it’s an emotionally and visually satisfying spectacle. Read More
August 4, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent No Name Is Safe By Sadie Stein Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. It has been a bad summer for the iconic characters of Southern literature. A couple of weeks ago, a New Hampshire man named Huckleberry Finn was accused of rape. This was surely not what his parents had in mind when they named him. When the world learned that Atticus Finch had aged into a crotchety reactionary with KKK sympathies, we thought of the children. Not just those thousands schlepping their mauve trade summer-reading paperbacks all over the country. But those named after what we believed was literature’s best dad; Atticus was the #1 boy’s baby name in 2015. As one baby-name Web site puts it, “Atticus, with its trendy Roman feel combined with the upstanding, noble image of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, is a real winner.” As the New York Times put it, “Fans of Mockingbird have been crestfallen and disbelieving that their hero could be so changed, but perhaps no group more so than those who chose that name for their children.” Read More
August 3, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Husbands and Wives By Sadie Stein One soon learns the point of a modern honeymoon. In this day and age, when most couples don’t need the time to become acquainted, it can seem like pure indulgence: a well-earned rest after the interpersonal stresses of wedding planning, and the rare chance to see each other without the intrusion of family and social demands. All very wholesome, I’m sure—but not lasting. Long after you’re home and your muscles have reclenched with tension and those lotus-eating vacation days feel like a hazy memory, you will carry with you the honeymoon’s true legacy. (I don’t mean a baby, by the way—though that, too, I guess, is a legacy for some.) Because by the end of your honeymoon, be it a week or a month or a day, whether you’re in the tropics or Niagara Falls or a nearby motel, you will have a husband. Or a wife. Read More
July 23, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Steins By Sadie Stein Here are the things you hear most often when you announce plans to marry someone who happens to have the same last name: That’s convenient! Guess you won’t have to change your name! Are you changing your name? Is he taking your name? Are you hyphenating? Are you related? I bet you’re sick of everyone joking about your having the same name! Not remarking on this seems to be completely out of the question. Read More
July 22, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Beauty By Sadie Stein From a 1960s Avon ad. There are certain unpleasant life experiences that are not palliated by the fact that you know that they’re meaningless. I am speaking here of something specific: the particular horror of being pressured into spending money on things you know you do not want. When I was seventeen and had to go to the prom with a senior in my homeroom, my mom and I went to Nordstrom so I could buy some simple makeup. Neither of us wore any. My mom entrusted me with a credit card, went to do something else, and came back an hour later to find me miserable, clown-like, clutching a tiny bag and having spent a hundred dollars, then an astronomical sum. And somehow it was very hard to explain to her that the saleswoman had had a wooden leg, and I’d felt unable to deny her anything. I used the lipstick for six years, to justify it, even though the color looked very strange, and it was quickly caked with sand and grit. Read More
July 21, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent All’s Fair By Sadie Stein Tove Jansson. Photo: Per Olov Jansson They lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building near the harbor, and between their studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man’s land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side. Mari liked wandering across the attic; it drew a necessary, neutral interval between their domains. She could pause on the way to listen to the rain on the metal roof, look out across the city as it lit its lights, or just linger for the pleasure of it. They never asked, “Were you able to work today?” Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they’d gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected—those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone. —Tove Jansson, “Videomania,” Fair Play There are not many really good books that portray functional relationships. Certainly not the relationships of artists. Well, that’s not a shocker—happy families, as we are told, are all alike. Fair Play, Tove Jansson’s 1982 portrait of a partnership, is an exception. Fair Play is based on Jansson’s relationship with the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, with whom she shared a life, and a home, for some forty years. If you have read Jansson’s classic Summer Book, certain things about Fair Play will be familiar: the island setting, the spareness, the less-is-more portrait of human connection. These things will be familiar even to those who only know Jansson from her most famous works, like Finn Family Moomintroll. (Indeed, Pietilä was the inspiration for the competent Moomin character Too-Ticky.) Read More