May 19, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Bus Pass By Sadie Stein I was anxious about the doctor’s appointment. Not because I thought there was anything much wrong with me, but because I knew they’d want to do “blood work” as part of the “workup,” and that the moment they brought out that thing they use to tie you off, and I saw the vials, my vision would blur, my extremities would tingle, and I’d faint like a neurasthenic fool. Pull yourself together, I thought. That was the old you. Now you’re a grown-up woman of the world who’s not ruled by her neuroses. To prove it, I added a silk scarf to my ensemble; I draped it in a fashion I’d recently noticed on a hypersophisticated, unneurotic mannequin. Read More
May 18, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent He Was a Very Close Friend of Mine By Sadie Stein Your Monday needs something. But what? Could it be … a 1974 clip of Orson Welles reminiscing about his “friendship” with Ernest Hemingway? It has everything: titanic ego-clashing, disingenuous concern-trolling, bullfighting, damning with faint praise, posthumous character assassination. Welles claims to have been the only one with the courage to mock the great man. Welles is chomping on a cigar. Read More
May 15, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The “Layla” IQ Test By Sadie Stein Beloved of dads everywhere. In 1992, Eric Clapton released an acoustic version of his 1970 Derek and the Dominos classic, “Layla.” Inspired by the Persian epic The Story of Layla and Majnun—and, of course, by Clapton’s personal life—the original was ubiquitous at the height of album rock. But the relaxed, dad-friendly “unplugged” take made an instant sensation, too: it was an inescapable part of the soundtrack of the early nineties. To this day it’s a Lite FM staple—just try to visit the dentist’s office without hearing it. When it came out, I remember hearing it was everywhere. In stores; on MTV; in the local salon, Visual Difference, where tough young women gave me terrible haircuts between cigarettes. And whenever that live cover came on in our car—as it did in the cars of countless boomers across the nation and the world—my mom would go on the same tear. Recall, to start, that the set was recorded in front of a Brixton audience. Unlike the rest of the world, the crowd captured on tape was presumably hearing this cover for the first time. Read More
May 14, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent She Would Buy the Flowers Herself By Sadie Stein Today marks the anniversary of the 1925 publication of Mrs. Dalloway. The stream-of-consciousness novel has long been considered a modernist classic, perhaps the most accomplished work in Woolf’s oeuvre—and though its elliptical prose and complex themes render Mrs. Dalloway a particular challenge for adaptation, this has naturally not stopped people from attempting to do so, with varying degrees of success. The above is either the worst or the best such adaptation, depending upon how highly you value things like coherence, tone, and style. It has none of Marleen Gorris’s respectful fidelity, none of Philip Glass’s aggressive atmosphere. Indeed, Natalia Povalyaeva’s animated short, Mrs. Dalloway and the Flowers, has almost nothing to do with the novel at all. Unless, that is, we are talking about the line, “It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.” Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.
May 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Like Rain on Your Wedding Day By Sadie Stein An archetypal Kim Anderson greeting card. In middle school, my friend Marissa and I thought it was pretty darn hilarious to give each other the most inappropriate birthday cards possible. I don’t mean those pre-snark Shoebox greetings full of foul-mouthed grandmas; that would have been tantamount to buying into the earnest Hallmark industrial complex. Instead, we’d look for cards for nephews and stepfathers and babies, and then present them with the hand-knitted scarves and mixtapes we’d made each other. It doesn’t sound funny now. But it was a different time—and I don’t just mean junior high. In my day, we made our own irony. Without wishing to invoke the proverbial snow-walking grandparent, it’s still important to remember that greeting-card window between Spy magazine and Gawker, between Andy Warhol and someecards, between SNL and the Internet. The time, in short, when people dealt in the currency of subversion, but it wasn’t our gold standard.There’s a reason that the mom humor of fifties commercial art juxtaposed with louche captions seemed deliciously wicked then, and why it feels tame now—we were used to doing all that in our heads. Read More
May 12, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Wordplay 101 By Sadie Stein John Ritchie, An Expected Rise in Stocks, nineteenth century. It’s galling to reach adulthood and realize how many things have gone over your head. That, in a single e-mail thread, you can learn both that “Staples” is a pun and that Chips Ahoy! is an allusion to “Ship ahoy.” I mean, you like to think that if someone had forced you to consider the matter for five seconds, you would have realized. But the point is that I had not realized—and I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the definition of stupidity. That night, I tried to comfort myself by thinking of the plays on words I had recognized in the course of my thirty-plus years of relative sentience. U-Haul. The Beatles. Central Perk from Friends. That fish and chips shop, A Salt and Battery. Read More