May 2, 2013 Video & Multimedia Hell Is Other Cats By Sadie Stein Henri the Existential Cat waxes philosophical on the price of literary fame.
May 2, 2013 First Person Counter Culture By Amie Barrodale and Clancy Martin “I would have said, You’re getting there. Now that you said, ‘You nailed it,’ we can never go to the Bluebird again.” “I was trying to give him a little encouragement,” Clancy said. “Well, you fucked us.” The first restaurant we liked in Iowa City was the Bluebird. It’s also the only decent cappuccino in town. We’d go every morning, order our fried eggs, and get three cappuccinos each. The waitresses had to make the cappuccinos themselves. We ordered so many that some of them began to dislike us. One in particular, whom we called Lower East Side. But all of them tried to get away before we had a chance to say, Could we get another. All, that is, except for a Swingers-looking guy, slightly pudgy, whom we were convinced was gay until Clancy complimented his signet ring. Read More
May 2, 2013 Humor The Funnies, Part 4 By Tom Gauld From You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, by Tom Gauld.
May 2, 2013 On the Shelf Unpoetic Day Jobs, and Other News By Sadie Stein Day Jobs of the Poets. Have you seen James Patterson’s personally-funded “book industry bailout” ads? By a hair, print still trumps digital in the UK. “How I overcame snobbery to self-publish an e-book.” One man’s story. Gillian Flynn: “That’s exactly my goal: to make spouses look askance at each other.”
May 1, 2013 Arts & Culture The World of Tomorrow By Sadie Stein On April 30, 1939, the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows. You’re probably familiar with the fair’s iconic deco aesthetic and modern marvels, but did you know there was poetry, too? The Academy of American Poets sponsored a contest to find the Official Poem of the New York World’s Fair, with contestants encouraged to write on the theme “The World of Tomorrow.” The prize was $1,000; the judges were poets William Rose Benét, Louis Untermeyer, and, oddly, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. The winner was Pearl Levison and “World of Tomorrow.” (Of the five runners-up, three are also called “The World of Tomorrow.” One is titled “Tomorrow, America,” while Rosalie Moore opted for the economical “Tomorrow.”) A New York Times article from May of 1939 describes Levison as “a 23-year-old poet who has lived all her life in this city,” while the Daily News specifies that the winner hails from “the arty precincts of MacDougal Alley” in Greenwich Village. The poem (which is ten pages long) may be found here. (And no, as close readers will have noticed, the woman pictured is not the poet but “showgirl” Lois De Fee, engaging in “a nudity display” of archery, wrestling, running, and boxing.)
May 1, 2013 Bull City Summer How William Eggleston Would Photograph a Baseball Game By Adam Sobsey Photo: Leah Sobsey/leahsobsey.com I am at war with the obvious. —William Eggleston Not long ago, I wrote about the formal and spiritual affinities between baseball and the genre of music called power pop. Both observe an “unwavering, repetitive adherence to form” while pushing hard against strict, self-imposed formal limits, thus “mak[ing] music out of a very precise, narrow, angular geometry.” Then, on April 8, the day before the Durham Bulls’ inaugural home game of the season, Bull City Summer’s first guest photographer, Alec Soth, gave a talk at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where his show “Wanderlust” is currently on view. He began by showing a slide, not of his own work, but of Flowers for Lucia by the photographer William Eggleston. Eggleston “hangs over me,” Soth confessed, before showing a picture he made of Eggleston himself. These disparate elements—power pop and Eggleston—came together for me just a few hours after Soth’s talk, when the documentary film, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, about the seminal power-pop band, closed Durham’s annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. (Eggleston appears in the documentary, so ravaged and slurred by years of hard living that the filmmakers resort to subtitling their interview with him in order to make him intelligible.) To make a nakedly baseball-centric comparison, you could say that Big Star was a can’t-miss major-league prospect that somehow missed: led by the late Alex Chilton, the band should have found international fame but barely got out of Memphis, the Triple-A city it called home. Read More