October 25, 2012 First Person Swimming Upstream: A Memoir in Pools By Nathan Deuel Because I loved the water and because I moved all the time—in search of what, I wasn’t yet sure—I found that swimming laps was a good way to get somewhere without booking another ticket. Wherever we were, I’d search out an open lane, and sometimes I’d surprise myself, encountering the person who emerged on the other side. You could learn a lot with your eyes closed. Way back, before we moved to the Middle East, I loved the thrill of swimming at Hamilton Fish, the big outdoor pool on East Houston Street, where the Europeans swam fast in skimpy suits, but where there was always plenty of room for everyone. We lived nearby, in Chinatown, and I rode my bike a few blocks to my first big editor job. We were young and it was hard to imagine anything going wrong. Then my wife got the fellowship in D.C., which sent her to southern Russia, where she was detained for three days by Russian authorities, who took her passport, laptop, and notes, and then threatened to take her to trial in Chechnya. When she landed in Virginia, her friends and I were relieved and waved little American flags. Later, recuperating at a hotel near Dupont Circle, she and I swam laps at the National Capitol YMCA, on Rhode Island Avenue, but all the other swimmers were super aggressive—with as many as ten to a lane, shouldn’t these august people have known better?—and I found the crush of writhing bodies too exhausting ever to go back. Read More
October 25, 2012 On the Shelf Is Nothing Sacred? The Brontë Chapel Is Sacked By Sadie Stein The Brontë Bell Chapel, the seventeenth-century West Yorkshire church in which the literary sisters were baptized, has been looted by stone thieves. The crooks took the stones from the tops of graves, as well as from the walls of the building. Scholars at Oxford University may be on the brink of cracking the world’s oldest undeciphered writing system, a series of Bronze Age texts (in the original sense of the word). “I think it’s time for us to advocate for poetry!” Matthew Dickman’s call to arms. Here is a storyboard for The Secret History. Oh, and while we’re at it, here is a Hobbit-themed menu, coming to Denny’s November 6. “Start off your First Breakfast—or Second Breakfast—with six bite-size round red velvet Pancake Puppies made with white chocolate chips and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Served with a side of cream cheese icing for dipping.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 24, 2012 Video & Multimedia Thessaly’s Ideal Bookshelf By Sadie Stein We are so excited about My Ideal Bookshelf, the brainchild of artist extraordinaire Jane Mount and our friend (and founding Daily editor!) Thessaly La Force. The premise is this: Jane painted the favorite books of more than a hundred fascinating people from all walks of life, and Thessaly interviewed them about literature they love and how it has shaped them. Below, Jane paints Thessaly’s bookshelf. Painting an Ideal Bookshelf from Jane Mount on Vimeo. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 24, 2012 Arts & Culture Wild Cats and Meadowlarks: Creating in L.A. By Alex Moore Hollywood was then a small town, quiet though excited. Just across our meadow, and across one more open lot, was a movie studio where they were using a troop of lions in pictures. The dreamlike romance of the place came vividly to mind in the mornings when we would be wakened by lions and meadowlarks roaring and singing. Beth Gates Warren’s Artful Lives tells the story of a group of artists living in Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth century. It focuses on the artistic and personal growth of photographers Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston over the course of ten years, from their meeting in 1913, until Weston’s departure for Mexico in 1923. Mather, though a talented photographer with an undeniably rigorous and progressive vision, has remained in relative obscurity, and this book attempts to correct her omission from the history of photography. In doing so it also sheds light on the group of artists, actors, activists, and socialites who were a part of dreaming Los Angeles into existence. In one tantalizing vignette, a pair of lovers—an artist and an actress—relate hearing the roars of the on-set lions from a local picture company blending with the song of meadowlarks in their backyard, painting a bizarre and idyllic picture of 1920s Los Angeles—a land of wild and exotic ambition, fueled by deep pockets and artistic dreamers. The romantic vision of a young Hollywood, with animals roaming the lot and artists frolicking in their rural studios, may feel far from the contemporary urban landscape, but the tension between fast-paced ambition and sun-drenched creative freedom still holds Los Angeles’s sprawl precariously together. We are both the home of the mainstream—a city decorated with strip malls and billboards—and a renegade network of backyard studios, converted garages, and performance artists out on the frontier. One of the trail-blazing studios was the Selig Polyscope Company. Founded by William Selig, the studio made a host of jungle movies and in order to populate those movies, Selig needed a menagerie of lions, tigers, elephants, and apes. To house—and presumably profit from—these animals, Selig built an ambitious zoo. Read More
October 24, 2012 On the Shelf Pricey Real Estate, Cool Bookshelves By Sadie Stein We love a cool bookshelves roundup. Animal Farm, the movie: begin your dream-cast YouTube videos now, please. New (well, unheard, anyway) audio clips of Flannery O’Connor. Buy (or look at) the Mediterranean villa where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald allegedly stayed and wrote. Whatever, it has its own discotheque. How to write a novel in thirty days, should one have a furious gangster on one’s case or something. (Or should one wish to participate in NaNoWriMo.)
October 23, 2012 On Music Helpless: On the Poetry of Neil Young By Brian Cullman There was a fascinating if incomplete musing on the New Yorker website this week regarding Neil Young’s insularity and on the incomprehensible idea that he never reads. It seemed strange that someone who doesn’t read would decide to write a book, though it’s often true that writing and reading aren’t necessarily two sides of the same coin. They are often very different coins, operating in very different currencies. When you go to a bank to make change, the exchange rate is never in your favor. I forwarded the piece to my friend Bill Flicker, out in Los Angeles, who wrote back that he never listens to Neil Young’s words, that they are simply placeholders or crumbs that are scattered on a walk through a musical forest. Actually, I do listen to his words. Not always. But when I listen, they’re remarkably visual and evocative: Blue blue windows behind the stars. Yellow moon on the rise. Purple words on a grey background To be a woman and to be turned down How did those windows get behind the stars? I don’t know, but I can see them clearly. Sometimes as a child’s drawing. Sometimes as a reflection on an airplane window. There may not be logic involved, but there is something deeper than that. Read More