June 2, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Candy Crush By Sadie Stein Photo: Evan Amos, via Wikimedia Commons My brother was one of those kids who loved camp. He started young, went for years, and, when he was older, returned as a counselor. During the school year, he and his friends would periodically meet up at an Outback Steakhouse in Midtown. He still attends the weddings of those friends. There was one kid in his bunk who was the camp outcast: a physically uncoordinated know-it-all who, in the grand tradition of nerds, managed to maintain an inviolate sense of wounded superiority. His response, when taunted, was to say—with an irony that was surely intended to be devastating—“You’re so kind.” You can imagine how effective this was. I guess my brother was nice to him, in an offhand sort of way. Maybe he just wasn’t actively cruel. All I know is, when we went up there on family visiting day, this kid wouldn’t leave him alone. Mostly he stood around, nearby. But several times he appeared at my brother’s shoulder and held out a hand, silently proffering candy: Airheads, Pop Rocks, those long, flat Jolly Ranchers. While I found the whole thing kind of weird, my brother seemed to take it as his due. Read More
May 30, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent By Conservative Estimate By Sadie Stein Here’s a weekend recommendation for you—think of it as an extended Staff Pick, if you like. Bill and Coo was made in 1948 to showcase “Burton’s Birds,” a troupe of trained lovebirds managed by former silent-movie actor George Burton. And does it ever! The tiny, Trucolor-hued town of Chirpendale is filled with bird characters of all kinds, doing all sorts of remarkable things: working in barber shops, wearing dunce caps, performing in circuses. In this idyll, we are told, “love, happiness and contentment blend together in harmony.” That is, until the Black Menace—a crow—descends and wreaks havoc. There’s romance (the eponymous Bill and Coo), adventure, song and dance. The film won a special Oscar. A New York Times critic deemed it “by conservative estimate, the God-damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.” I adored Bill and Coo as a kid—we had a bootleg Betamax video of it—but I worried it wouldn’t hold up, or that as an adult I’d see signs of avian exploitation. (For the record, I’ve detected no indication of that, although maybe there’s an untold story that bears serious investigation.) I need not have—it is as weird, and as entertaining, as can be. A novelty, yes—but a wonderfully watchable one. The whole film is readily available online—and you’ll be doing yourself a favor if you watch it from start to finish. But here’s a taste. Read More
May 29, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent The Real Thing By Sadie Stein The Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo: Melizabethi123, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1886, Georgia pharmacist John Pemberton placed his first advertisement for Coca-Cola, in The Atlanta Journal. The rest, as we say, is history. Painful history, in my case. I don’t think my parents had anything special against Coke; we didn’t have it in the house, but then, we didn’t tend to have junk food around. We snacked on carrot sticks and yogurt; maple candy was a major treat. But I remember my dad drinking Coke on especially hot days, and I know “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” was part of his repertoire. For her part, my mom would reminisce about trying her first Coke—while, thrillingly, listening to Freddy “Boom-Boom” Cannon sing “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans”—when her paternal grandmother came for a visit from Arkansas. Coke still felt like freedom for her, the taste of the forbidden. But for me, Coke for some reason became the enemy. I had always received positive reinforcement for being “unconventional” and hoeing my own row—what could be a better bugbear (I imagine my thinking went) than a soda that was not merely an agent of tooth decay, but an opiate of the masses. In my mind, Coke was somehow tied up with everything I had dutifully internalized as “bad”: Sesame Street (which utilized advertising-style camera techniques and allegedly shortened attention spans), Amelia Bedelia (unchallenging), Cabbage Patch dolls (hideous), and sticker books (middlebrow). I wanted so badly to please. Coke became my issue. What my parents had probably intended as merely a sop to oral hygiene quickly became, in my eager little hands, a self-righteous moral crusade. I shunned Coca-Cola with the zeal of a nineteenth century temperance advocate, and my sense of superiority was inviolate. Read More
May 28, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Jitterbug Perfume By Sadie Stein William H. Johnson, Jitterbugs (II), c. 1941 This week hundreds of passionate practitioners, armed with their passports and their dance shoes, have descended on the city where it started to celebrate the man who was one of its early creators. “It has a universality,” said Cynthia R. Millman, who co-wrote a memoir with that man, Frankie Manning, who is revered for creating a gravity-defying move. “That’s why it was a phenomenon back in the day and why it’s a phenomenon today.” —“A Celebration of the Lindy Hop’s Founder,” The New York Times Like many people, I have no wish to revisit my high-school years. Although my experience was relatively benign and I have fond memories of the institution itself, I have deliberately hidden my yearbooks and was not tempted to attend this weekend’s reunion. That is why, for a long time, I avoided Irving Place. Through most of high school, my set of friends—some five girls and four boys—and I spent every Sunday evening at Irving Plaza, swing dancing. This was in the late nineties, and the swing revival was in full effect, with Brian Setzer picking up Grammies and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies getting semiregular air play. Even at the time, I found things about it sort of embarrassing—the cherry prints, the Swingers-style bowling shirts, the general L.A. cheesiness—but it was still a highlight of my week. Back then, Irving Plaza, the deco-era theater off East Fifteenth Street, had not yet been renovated. It was splendidly gloomy, draped in mouldering red velvet and bedecked with a giant, 1930s mirror ball. My friends and I learned about its Sunday night swing concerts at the 92nd Street Y, where, on Saturday nights (at my instigation) we would sometimes attend the Argentine tango classes offered by a pair of octogenarians to a largely geriatric crowd. Probably someone told us that the Irving Plaza scene would be younger. Read More
May 27, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Bringer of Jollity By Sadie Stein “The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.” —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair A friend described to me yesterday what he considers the Three Degrees of Being Stood Up. As he explained, these proceed as follows: First Degree: Standing someone up entirely, with no warning, and no subsequent apology. Second Degree: Canceling on someone at the last minute, possibly after he or she has set out for the appointment in question. Third Degree: Breaking a date. He agreed that we have all been guilty of the third. I know I have, too often, and, indeed, was somewhat surprised to hear it grouped with the other two offenses. And yet, he was right: such things inconvenience others and maybe even hurt them. Besides practical questions of schedules and reservations, there are matters of disappointment and broken trust. After a certain point, you cease to depend upon people who make a habit of breaking dates. Maybe that’s what we want. It was funny that this should come up just when it did, because only a few days before, another friend had observed, “people should have the self-esteem to know that their absence matters to other people.” Read More
May 23, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Having a Moment By Sadie Stein Shaker Church Family Barns, Sabbathday Lake Village, Cumberland County, ME, 1970; photo via Wikimedia Commons Big in 2014: the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Founded in 1783 in what was then called Thompson’s Pond Plantation, the community consists of eighteen buildings, an orchard, a tree farm, vegetable and herb gardens, livestock pastures, and hay fields, all spread over eighteen-hundred acres of land. The community practices traditional Shaker crafts—basket-making, weaving, printing—although only three of its members—Sister Francis, Brother Arnold and Sister June—are still active today. This summer, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, will honor the Sabbathday Lake community with its 2014 Maine in America Award, which is presented to an individual or group who has made an outstanding contribution to Maine’s role in American art. Prior honorees include Robert Indiana and Alex Katz. They and the three elderly Shakers may seem like strange bedfellows. Equally unlikely is their association with the famously innovative Wooster Group, whose Early Shaker Spirituals is currently playing in New York. The show—part of an ongoing series based on recordings—is grounded on an eponymous 1976 LP recorded by the Sisters of Sabbathday Lake. Using a technique the company pioneered, the actors wear earpieces through which they hear, as they perform, the actual recordings of Shaker songs. The show also includes pattern dances, inspired by surviving fragments of Shaker ecstatic dance. (You can see clips of a rehearsal here, and watch the actors morph from ecstatic Shakers back into actors, joking and laughing.) These are real and fitting tributes to people whose work and art have added genuine beauty to the world—it’s gratifying to see the community receiving attention while there are still Shakers around, and to know that there is a living record of their history. And yet, one wonders: will the three surviving members come to New York to see the show? Will they go to the Farnsworth Summer Gala to accept their award? Read More