February 17, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent My Fair Lady By Sadie Stein The doll of dolls: Alma Mahler, or someone near enough? When people know that one has a certain interest—say, dolls—they will very kindly send one stories that they think correspond to the subject. As a result, I’ve had brought to my attention everything from articles about Upper West Side doll-hoarders to videos about sex-doll fetishists. In their way, these are all engaging, and it would seem churlish to explain that you, in fact, don’t particularly care about puppets or mannequins, or that, while you liked Lars and the Real Girl or Daphne du Maurier’s The Doll perfectly well, it wasn’t out of any sort of niche fascination. (In fact, privately I feel that this points to a systemic marginalization of dolls in our society, and that films like Annabelle only contribute to a culture of casual discrimination. Dolls are unfairly maligned as sinister, or as inherently sexual, and while there are certainly a few bad apples—and the fetishistic qualities of any human totem are part of their fascination—I think they get a bad rap. Indeed, following the death of Doll Hospital proprietor Erving Chase, a New York area doll can’t even get adequate medical care. But I digress.) The case of the famed Alma Mahler doll, however, is a special one. While it was sort of a sex doll and sort of a mannequin—and as such, not really my area of study—it also had an unimpeachable toy pedigree: in 1918, after the great muse ended her relationship with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, he commissioned a life-size replica of his lost love from the doll-maker Hermine Moos. Read More
February 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Only Valentine You’ll Ever Need By Sadie Stein The man himself. Recently Gawker posted one of those irresistible lists of horrible celebrity encounters—tales of rudeness and jerkiness and shattered illusions and fallen idols. The moral, as ever, was: don’t meet your hero. Unless, of course, that hero is Mister Rogers. After Fred Rogers’s death in 2003, person after person came forward with stories of the man’s kindness. Davy Rothbart’s New York Times piece showed us a man as gentle and genuine as the neighbor we watched on PBS. And when your faith in your fellow man all but falls apart, you’ve but to watch Mister Rogers’s Senate testimony, and you take heart. (Apologies to Frank Loesser.) A Redditor shared the following image several years ago, but a friend only just brought it to my attention. It made me cry, and it made me happy. I hope it does the same for you. Read More
February 12, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent En Vogue By Sadie Stein Photo: Vetatur Fumare, via Flickr Late last night I posted a picture of myself to a social media account. Not the most flattering picture, and a particularly ridiculous one: I’m standing in front of my bathroom mirror, phone clearly visible in my hand, and staring off at—what? The shower curtain? The radiator?—with a deliberately distracted air and the Flemish-Madonna mirror-face that my family has always mocked. Why, I didn’t see you there with the camera in your own hand! it seems to say. I’d taken this photo because I wanted to send a friend a picture of my garment: a mod, nubbly green tweed coat—or maybe it’s a dress—from the early sixties, with a swing cut and two large pockets in the front. It zips up the back. The high neck chafes after a few minutes, and it takes all my flexibility to manage both the zipper and the buttoned half-belt (also in back). Ever since I bought the coat-dress in a California thrift shop, I’d been saving it for just such an occasion: a fashion event, where I needed something bizarre enough to make it look as though I know what I’m about. Read More
February 11, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent There’s Nothing Wrong with Love By Sadie Stein Isidor and Ida Straus. Many people hate Valentine’s Day for its commercialism and general tawdriness. And even those of us who don’t—who might, say, have invested in boxes of conversation hearts, or bedecked their apartment doors with slightly crooked foil hearts from the ninety-nine-cents store—understand that the holiday is kind of repulsive. However unironically the candy heart beats in your breast, however much you enjoy the prospect of couples sharing overpriced prix fixes or the sight of beleaguered husbands clutching bodega roses, it’s hard not to feel depressed under the weight of the sexy doubles entendres and seasonal boxers. Hallmark holiday? That alone I could handle. It’s the treacle plus a thousand leering letterpress puns that really start to break the spirit. If you’re feeling that fatigue and happen to find yourself in New York, a good antidote is Straus Park at Broadway and 106th Street. Read More
February 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent A Beautiful Friendship By Sadie Stein In a nod to the recent Grammy Awards, allow me to pay tribute to a record that was nominated in 1963, in the category of Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording (Other than Comedy). That record is Enoch Arden, Op. 38, TrV. 181, performed by Glenn Gould and Claude Rains. Most people probably know Claude Rains best as the blithely unscrupulous Captain Renault in Casablanca, or maybe as the gleefully unscrupulous Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood, or even as a wholly unscrupulous senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. No question, Rains brought particular élan to a certain kind of villain—yet nowhere did he commit as fully to a performance as to Enoch Arden. Read More
February 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Hot Stove By Sadie Stein A young Harper Lee, her thoughts no doubt consumed by the New York Mets. Harper Lee fever has gripped the nation. Ever since news of her lost novel hit last week, the famously reclusive writer has been everywhere—trending on Twitter, spawning lists, smiling above the fold on the front page of today’s New York Times. Naturally, there’s been as much controversy as delight: Is the elderly author being taken advantage of? Does she want the book released? According to her lawyer, the author is humiliated by such allegations. Whatever you think about the release of the novel, the whole thing has started to feel a bit squicky, or at the very least odd. All of this has so little to do with the woman herself. Or so I declared self-righteously to my head over the weekend, when I resolved to take an attitude of superior distaste towards the whole business. When I saw a feature on Harper Lee’s New York in the New York Post, my lip curled. Until, that is, I glanced at the annotated map and saw that it listed—along with the Yorkville flat where Lee lived off and on for decades, Capote’s Brooklyn Heights home, and the offices of agent Maurice Crain—the old Shea Stadium. Read More