June 23, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Jacket Weather By Sadie Stein Edmond Rostand, twenty-nine, at the first performance of Cyrano de Bergerac, 1898. At a recent tag sale not far from my parents’ house, I came upon a thin, weathered paperback with a yellowing spine. It stuck out amid the other glossy hardcovers. The cover portrayed a stylized, vaguely Art Nouveau couple embracing passionately; an orange moon winked from behind a tree. This was Art of Love, by a Parisian Casanova. And just my luck, I’d found the “unexpurgated” edition. Then I noticed, below the illustration, a line of much smaller print: “Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmund Rostand.” Read More
June 22, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Civilization Was a Crust By Sadie Stein From the cover of Frankweiler. Long before museums were pandering to callow visitors bearing selfie sticks, they were trying to attract young people the old-fashioned way. Any big collection worth its salt has had some sort of children’s guide for decades now: museums encourage kids to look for dogs and cats in Dutch tavern scenes, giving them Bingo-style checklists, colorful maps, and bits of trivia. (Fact: pointillist paintings are made up of lots of little dots.) The Met has always had an especially good kids’ program, and one indication of this is how enthusiastically—and diplomatically—they embrace the classic E. L. Konigsburg novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. For the uninitiated, though I suspect there are few of you: this book chronicles the exploits of the Kincaid siblings, who run away and hide out in the Metropolitan Museum. There, they sleep in a sixteenth-century bed, bathe (and fish for coins) in a fountain, and, into the bargain, solve an art-world mystery. Read More
June 19, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Mister Sun By Sadie Stein Albert Anker, Portrait of a Boy, nineteenth century. Like many small children, my brother was an accomplished con artist. And as is often the case with little boys, his manipulations were most effective when applied to his mother. I can particularly recall one bit of business he’d pull between the ages of about three and five, when we were at the market and he didn’t feel like walking. He’d gaze up at her beseechingly, bat his eyelashes, and simper, “I’ll carry your bundles if you carry me!” By this point, I had decisively lost my looks: at seven I was a scrawny, buck-toothed gnome with a waxen complexion and a mullet, usually stalking around in pantaloons and a sunbonnet. Charlie, on the other hand, was still cherubic. Read More
June 18, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Say Your Prayers By Sadie Stein Christopher Robin Milne with Winnie the Pooh in 1928. Christopher Robin Milne’s first two memoirs, The Enchanted Places and The Path Through the Trees, are in the canon of great ambivalence books. Perhaps you’ve read that Christopher Robin, as A. A. Milne’s son and muse, grew to loathe his fame and the hordes of Pooh fanatics who stalked him even as an adult. (Milne fils supported himself as a successful bookseller; all the royalties went into a trust fund for his disabled daughter.) “It seemed to me almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders,” he wrote, “that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with the empty fame of being his son.” But the books don’t read as an angry indictment so much as an attempt to grapple with his condition. Yes, there’s some record straightening—but the author’s sense of frank exploration is sympathetic, and it feels honest. Although he’d ultimately detach from his remote parents, his feelings are complex, and he describes his experiences with sensitivity and nuance. Milne died in 1996; in later life, he’d even come to embrace his father’s legacy, gamely showing up at the occasional official event coming to appreciate the love of nature bestowed by his Sussex childhood. Read More
June 17, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent So Big By Sadie Stein Detail from the poster for So Big, Warner Bros., 1953. The other night, as part of their Sterling Hayden festival, Turner Classic Movies aired the 1953 film So Big, an adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-winning epic of the same name. The movie, like its source, chronicles the struggles of a determined Illinois farm woman (played by Jane Wyman) and her more worldly son. The title is an innocuous reference to the little boy’s childhood nickname—but initially Warner Bros. publicists decided to sex things up a bit. Posters displayed a hunky illustrated Hayden look-alike in a passionate clinch with a smaller woman and the tagline, “He stood there so big … she was ready to forget she’d ever been a lady.” It’s no secret that the fifties were a good time for playing fast-and-loose with the classics. In The Seven Year Itch, famously, filmmakers had plenty of fun with the idea. We see Tom Ewell’s pulp book publisher examining a cover in his office; it’s a paperback edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women featuring four busty, well-endowed twentieth-century dames and the tagline “SECRETS OF A GIRLS DORMITORY!” Ewell scrutinizes the cover art, produces a pen, and decisively lowers each neckline by three inches. Read More
June 16, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Daily News By Sadie Stein Photo: Joe and Jeanette Archie One morning, I stopped by a Greenwich Village kiosk to buy a newspaper for my commute. When I would’ve walked away, the vendor’s voice stopped me, and I looked up to meet merry, twinkling eyes. “You,” he said roguishly, “are the most beautiful customer I have had all day!” This seemed unlikely. True, the day was young. But I was looking particularly awful: the night before I’d attempted an “extraction” on a pore that, in a magnifying mirror, I had deemed clogged, and now it looked like I was suffering from either a bad allergic reaction or from some kind of strange bug bite. I hadn’t bothered with makeup. I was also wearing a cavernous sweater of my boyfriend’s. But what did I know? Maybe this guy’s other customers were a real bunch of dogs. “Uh, thanks,” I said, not wanting to be ungracious in the face of such gallantry. Read More