November 5, 2012 On Film Eyeballs Left Standing By Dave Tompkins The Alligator People (1959). The Invisible Man, neat freak by design, was known to fuss over the grit beneath his fingernails. According to British horror historian Denis Gifford, dirt threatened transparency. In A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, Gifford sees “a pair of disembodied trousers skipping down the lane to ‘Here We Come Gathering Nuts in May.’” The hands are clean. For Gifford, the devil was in the details, if not in all of us: “We who came to stare only see ourselves.” Or through ourselves. He notes the shabbiness of Mr. Hyde’s tailcoat, and the yak-hair transplants on the Wolfman’s face. Also important: “a sinister sofa,” controlled by an underground switchboard operated by a man in a wig. And Frankenstein’s homunculus, taken out by a falling crossbeam no fewer than four times in his film career. These images were filtered through words I’d just discovered. Until last week, I had never actually read the most important book of my childhood. The text had gone unseen. My mother had given A Pictorial History of Horror Movies to my brothers as a Christmas gift in 1973. She still cheerily refers to it as “that book with the girl with the hatchet in her head.” I was forbidden to read it but was never told I couldn’t look at it. Read More
November 5, 2012 Video & Multimedia Sandy’s Aftermath By Sadie Stein The hurricane may be over, but for many areas of Staten Island, New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Queens, the recovery is just beginning. Here, a reminder of the devastation visited on just one of these areas. Learn what you can do.
November 5, 2012 Arts & Culture Letter from Greenwich Village: Plan B By Brian Cullman A young Mitt Romney type in J. Crew stood on the corner of Christopher and Hudson streets, thermos in hand, offering passersby cups of coffee, two dollars a cup. People just gave him looks. Mostly, people were neighborly. Hudson Bagels handed out day-old bagels. Garber’s Hardware, who had a generator, put out power strips for people to charge their phones and offered Pepperidge Farm cookies and coffee (no two dollar donation required). People shared candles and batteries and food and offered neighbors hot showers. (No, not in that way. Although … well, maybe.) Read More
November 5, 2012 On the Shelf Did The Moviegoer Fix the NBAs? And Other News By Sadie Stein It was considered a huge upset when The Moviegoer beat out Catch-22, Revolutionary Road, and Franny and Zooey for the 1962 National Book Award. Slate asks: Was the fix in? And why? Speaking of snubbing Richard Yates: “Each time Yates shuffled into Roads that summer, I avoided making eye contact. Why didn’t he get help, join AA?” Leslie Absher recounts her interactions with the author. Books written from beyond the grave. Dead Mark Twain was especially prolific. You may be dead before you finish these: a slideshow of those books most difficult to finish. He apparently hated beards, and other trivia about Roald Dahl.
November 2, 2012 Arts & Culture In Search of Lost Time: An Illustrated Panorama By Jason Novak The first European in my mother’s family to set foot in North America was a short, olive-skinned Frenchman from one of the outermost communes of greater Paris. He fled France amidst the turmoil following the revolution of 1848 for the gold fields of California and chased an elusive mother lode all the way up the coast into Alaska before giving up. He was an exact contemporary of the early Impressionists, and a full generation older than Marcel Proust. He spent the final years of his life a broken man, having outlived two of his three children, and subsisting on a homesteaded vineyard in the Santa Cruz mountains long before California wine was a profitable industry. The only relic of him my family still possesses is a stack of letters spanning thirty years from his sister, Geneviève, imploring him to come home. A Parisian relation visiting his cabin in the 1890s noted that he wept at the thought of his homeland. As far as I know, he shares no direct connection with Proust, but the world he came from is Proust’s world, and seemed to me, as a child, enchanted when contrasted with the drab California suburb I grew up in. Sadness is a condition that can ripple across many generations, and if his was earned through the loss of a time and place, mine was inherited from the ruined family that struggled to make sense of his mournful legacy. But his still-hopeful departure from Le Havre for the new World in 1852 would have been immediately preceded by a train ride from Paris through Normandy – a train ride through the same countryside that left Proust enraptured on his childhood sojourns to Illiers-Combray. What follows is an illustration of that train ride, as recounted in Proust’s sprawling lifework, À la recherche du temps perdu. This passage occurs in Part Three of the First Volume and constitutes but a few rich, supple pages. Pause Play Play Prev | Next Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.
November 2, 2012 Arts & Culture The Presidency, in Verse By Sadie Stein We may know their takes on climate change, on reproductive rights, on economic policy. But what of poetry? The Poetry Foundation has investigated the poets the presidents loved, and presented their findings in an illuminating and timely post. Just a few pairings: Read More