January 28, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Characters Get Together By Sadie Stein Wilshire Boulevard ca. 1959. Photo: Roger Wollstadt, via Flickr There were extenuating circumstances. I was in LA for work, and I had known, intellectually, that it would be warm in California—hot, even. But when you’re deep in a New York winter, who really thinks to pack a sundress? The lightest thing I had was a pair of jeans. So on a particularly Saharan afternoon, I ducked into a thrift store and grabbed a cotton dress off the rack without trying it on. When I got back to my room and changed, I noticed that the dress was brief. It wasn’t until I had donned my sandals that I realized the dress was in fact too small for me. Oh well, I thought. Better to look silly than to burn, as Saint Paul would most certainly not have said. The bus let me off some distance from my destination. I didn’t mind; I like to walk. But I was the only pedestrian on that stretch of Santa Monica. Then, as the wind whipped my flimsy skirt up around my thighs, motorists started honking. One car slowed so the driver could catcall me. If you think this is flattering—and no woman reading this does—think again. Read More
January 28, 2014 On Language Beware Usen’t To By Dan Piepenbring This is what happens when you use usen’t to. Constance Charpentier, Melancholy, 1801, oil on canvas. At ten every morning, Garner’s Usage Tip lands in my inbox—I’m sure Garner could suggest a less clunky formulation for “in my inbox”—providing a quick bit of unfussy, eminently sensible grammatical advice. There are worse things to look forward to. Yesterday’s installment was the third in a scintillating four-part series on used to, which gets pretty spicy, as far as grammar goes. Fun fact: the contracted form of used not to is usen’t to, which has been, despite its pleasant lilt, almost wholly displaced by didn’t use to. You could try to bring it back into style, but apart from sounding pretentious—which you would—you’d run the risk of becoming very miserable. Take a look at usen’t to as it appears throughout literature and you’ll see: it’s almost always used in the context of a total bummer. See below for examples from Forster, Trollope, Beckett, et al., none of which make the sun shine any brighter. Please, if you can find any positive instance of usen’t to, direct me to it. Otherwise I’m inclined to offer a warning: abstain from this phrase, or you’re liable to be plunged into cafard, parochialism, censoriousness, or just sort of a downer mood. Read More
January 28, 2014 On Drugs Free of One’s Melancholy Self By Angela Serratore The Quaaludes featuring the DT’s album cover, 2011. When Jordan Belfort—played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a truly masterful moment of full-body acting—wrenches himself from the steps of a country club into a white Lamborghini that he drives to his mansion, moviegoers, having already watched some two hours of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, are meant to be horrified. His addiction to quaaludes (and money, and cocaine, and sex, and giving motivational speeches) has rendered him not just a metaphorical monster but a literal one. He lunges at his pregnant wife and his best friend, played by Jonah Hill, and equally high; he smashes everything in his path, both with his body and with the aforementioned Ferrari. He gurgles and drools and mangles even monosyllabic words. He’s Frankenstein in a polo shirt. But what of the movie’s glossier scenes? The one where Belfort and his paramour engage in oral sex while speeding down a highway? Where he and his friends and colleagues are on boats and planes and at pool parties totally free of the inhibitions that keep most of us adhering to the laws of common decency? What about the parts that look fun? Everyone I spoke to post-Wolf (at least, everyone who liked it) rapturously praised Terence Winter’s absurd dialogue, DiCaprio’s magnetism, Scorsese’s eye for beautiful grotesquerie. Most of them also included a half-whispered, wide-eyed aside: What exactly are quaaludes, and where can we get some? Read More
January 28, 2014 On the Shelf Your Likeness in Cheese, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Vincenzo Campi, The Ricotta Eaters, 1580. Via Wikimedia Commons. Gift idea: cheese portraits. The medium is the message here—this cheese is made with bacteria cultivated from your mouth or toes. It’s you, indubitably, microbially. The artist adds, “The bacteria that you find in-between the toes is actually very similar to the bacteria that makes cheese smell like toes.” You don’t say. Amazon has purchased another block of Seattle. A technofortress, no doubt, soon to be swarming with drones. The Sims is the bestselling PC game of all time. It also has—no mean feat—the most poetic, surreal software-update notifications of all time. “Sims will no longer walk on water to view paintings placed on swimming pool walls.” Presenting the Daphne, an award for the best book to have been published fifty years ago. Melville the prognosticator: Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and modern-day imperialism.
January 27, 2014 Arts & Culture Any Nosegays, You Blockhead? By Dan Piepenbring Severin Roesen, Still Life—Flowers in a Basket, ca. 1850s. The British dramatist Samuel Foote was born today in 1720. Foote was a playwright in the snickering, rabble-rousing tradition—a dry wit who was always getting himself into trouble. He performed plays without licensing them, basically the eighteenth-century equivalent of smuggling your camcorder into a movie theater; he went riding and was thrown from his horse, resulting in the loss of one of his legs; he spent some time in debtors’ prison; he’s rumored to have made passes at a footman or two in his day; and much of his writing features withering, thinly veiled caricatures of wealthy people, which really pissed off those wealthy people, to say nothing of their wealthy coteries. Most important, Foote is responsible for having coined the phrase “the Grand Panjandrum,” as refined a piece of nonsense as I can remember having heard. (He did it off the cuff, having faltered in the recitation of a text he’d “memorized.”) What better way to pay tribute to the man than with an excerpt? Two centuries before Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs,” there was simply The Nabob, Foote’s 1772 comedy about an aristocrat newly returned to London from the Orient. You could dip into the play anywhere and come up with comic gold; its brand of buffoonery is never out of fashion. Read More
January 27, 2014 On Food, Our Daily Correspondent Sleeping Beauty By Sadie Stein Photo: Cory Doctorow, via Flickr My life boasts few distinctions, but I make the worst coffee you will ever drink. It’s almost as if, on the day I was born, the fairies stood over my cradle (okay, incubator) Sleeping Beauty–style, and the first good fairy declared, “She will be able to remember the lyrics to eighties cartoon themes her entire life.” And the second good fairy said, “I give you the gift of teeth that in the eighteenth century would have seemed straight but look kind of crooked now that everyone else has braces.” But then the malevolent enchantress appeared, cackled, and cursed me with the words: “She will never make a potable cup of coffee.” You would be forgiven, if you have read about my manifold culinary failures, for thinking that I can’t handle myself in the kitchen. In fact, I am pretty competent in that regard, which makes my persistent inability all the more mysterious. And don’t talk to me about single origins, rancid grounds, Chemex, French press, vacuum, toddy, cold brew, hand-grinding: it makes no difference. The curse is stronger than any of these trifling variables. Sleeping Beauty was always my favorite Disney movie. I saw it with my mother in big-screen re-release when I was about four, and was enchanted by handsome Prince Philip and perfect Briar Rose and gruff, mannish little Merryweather, and of course the elegant Maleficent. I was fascinated by the notion that, no matter how far you run, you cannot escape your fate. (It was, I guess, many a child’s introduction to the classic tenets of tragedy.) Read More