November 29, 2013 Arts & Culture Black Friday, the Poem By Sadie Stein “The New York Gold Room on ‘Black Friday,’ September 24, 1869.” —E. Benjamin Andrews 1895 While most of us know Black Friday as the nightmarish commerce-fest following Thanksgiving—a term coined in Philadelphia in 1961—in fact the nom de guerre dates back to the nineteenth century. In 1869, robber-barons Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market, resulting in financial crisis and scandal. E. C. Stedman, a poet and broker (!), wrote the following: One Hundred and Sixty! Can’t be true!What will the bears-at-forty do?How will the merchants pay their dues?How will the country stand the news?What’ll the banks—but listen! hold!In screwing up the price of goldTo that dangerous, last, particular peg,They had killed their Goose with the Golden Egg! I spent too many minutes trying to transform this into a piece of doggerel that incorporated door-buster sales, accidental deaths, Best Buy vigils, and rampant modern consumerism, but it was a losing battle. Some things are beyond parody. Not to mention, poetry. One more note on Stedman, via Wikipedia: “In 1879, he proposed a rigid airship inspired by the anatomy of a fish, with a framework of steel, brass, or copper tubing and a tractor propeller mounted on the craft’s bow, later changed to an engine with two propellers suspended beneath the framework. The airship never was built, but its design foreshadowed that of the dirigibles of the early decades of the twentieth century.”
November 29, 2013 Arts & Culture Loveland By Matt Weinstock “If I had any visual talent, I would have loved to be a filmmaker,” Stephen Sondheim told me in a recent phone interview. “But I didn’t. So this is what I became.” It’s jarring to think that the legendary composer-lyricist of Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods only resorted to musical theater out of an inability to compose a wide shot. In the 1950s Sondheim directed amateur horror movies (“The photography is like a five-year-old’s”) and he later co-wrote the enjoyably chilly mystery film The Last of Sheila, but he has made a relatively piddling contribution to the art form that is deepest in his bones. As he told Frank Rich in 2000, “Movies were, and still are, my basic language.” It’s the language he used to write Follies, the sumptuous 1971 Broadway musical about middle-aged showgirls gathering for a boozy, confrontational reunion on the eve of their old theater’s destruction. While critics have treated the show as an elegy to the theater, Hollywood seems to have been the headiest influence on Follies’ creative team. Sondheim has said that during the writing process, he “could only imagine the spectacle of a Ziegfeldian ‘Loveland’ in terms of movie musicals,” and co-director Harold Prince’s concept for Follies as a story about “rubble in the daylight” grew out of a Life magazine photo of Gloria Swanson standing in the ruins of the Roxy movie palace. Prince insisted that the libretto be rewritten to include cinematic techniques like dissolves, close-ups, and black-and-white flashbacks, and the orchestrations were deliberately rigged with MGM-isms (like the thrilling piano-to-orchestra swell midway through “Beautiful Girls”). Even the casting of old vaudevillians in many of the roles was inspired by Billy Wilder’s casting of silent movie actors in Sunset Boulevard. “We just kept hoovering up people who were close to the story,” Prince explained to me in a phone call. “That’s what Billy Wilder did: he put Swanson in the part so you thought, ‘Hey, she’s playing herself.’ She wasn’t, of course, but you made that connection.” Was the fabled original production of Follies always pining away to be a movie? I called Sondheim and Prince after learning that they actually had cooked up a scheme to make a film version in the early 1970s, featuring dozens of faded stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age congregating on a studio backlot about to be torn down. It is intoxicating to imagine such a film, with archival footage of the stars sewn into the plot, and each cut functioning like an electric restoration of youth. Read More
November 27, 2013 Look The High School Literature Zodiac By Timothy Leo Taranto What does your favorite book from high school tell you about your life? Pause Play Play Prev | Next Tim Taranto hails from Upstate New York and attended Cornell. In addition to The Paris Review Daily, his work has appeared on the Rumpus and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Tim lives in Iowa City, where he is studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
November 27, 2013 Bulletin Instead of the Cross, the Albatross By Sadie Stein We love the Poetry Foundation’s Record-a-Poem project, in which users are encouraged to read aloud their favorite verses using SoundCloud. Now, in conjunction with its upcoming performance of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, BAM is partnering with the program, collecting recorded interpretations of a segment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem; they will ultimately edit and compile the audio into a crowd-sourced animated video featuring as many voices as possible. The deadline is December 1, so take a few moments out of your holiday weekend to be part of something cool! Find the excerpt below, and see full details here. From Part II of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge All in a hot and copper sky,The bloody Sun, at noon,Right up above the mast did stand,No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean. Water, water, everywhere,And all the boards did shrink;Water, water, everywhere,Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ!That ever this should be!Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and routThe death-fires danced at night;The water, like a witch’s oils,Burnt green, and blue, and white. And some in dreams assured wereOf the Spirit that plagued us so;Nine fathom deep he had followed usFrom the land of mist and snow. And every tongue, through utter drought,Was wither’d at the root;We could not speak, no more than ifWe had been choked with soot. Ah! well a-day! what evil looksHad I from old and young!Instead of the cross, the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung. Read the whole poem here.
November 27, 2013 On Food Kimchi and Turkey By Michael Croley This Thanksgiving will be only the second time in thirty-six years I won’t be with my mother for the holiday. Last year was the first, when I spent it with my wife and her family. All day long I sat in her mother’s condo above the shores of Lake Erie—ice floes stretching to the horizon—and I thought about my mother, how she always labored over the turkey and dressing, deviled eggs, mashed potatoes, dumplings, corn, green beans, and three of four pies. That’s probably not that uncommon in a lot of homes across the country or in the Appalachian South where I was raised and where we like to serve two starches for every vegetable. But what is unusual is the sight of my mother, a Korean woman of five feet four inches, with beautiful salt and pepper hair, and a round face and almond-shaped eyes working away in the kitchen. Forty-three years ago she left Masan, South Korea, after marrying my father, and when she came to this country, after brief spells in Phoenix and Toledo, they settled in the hills of southeastern Kentucky. She was a vegetarian then but that was not a lifestyle decision. It was borne of necessity. Her family had never had enough money to afford beef, pork, or poultry, items considered expensive delicacies when she was a child, and her body had not learned to digest them. Rice (bop) was scarce and precious, as precious as cornmeal to my father’s family when he had been a child, and it was often the only thing she had to eat. And when there was no food at all, my halmuni still lit a fire and boiled water so that smoke would rise from their chimney and the other villagers would not know the family had nothing to eat. Read More
November 27, 2013 Look The Female Gaze By Sadie Stein Miss last night’s McNally Jackson discussion of ekphrasis between Ben Lerner, Geoff Dyer, and our favorite moderator, editor Lorin Stein? Luckily for you, Kate Gavino of Last Night’s Reading illustrated one of many quotable moments.