August 18, 2011 My Literary Hero California Girls By Zan Romanoff Joan Didion. Illustration by Julia Felsenthal. The archetypal California girl is long, lean, and tan with knobbed knees and ankles and salt-tangled, honey-colored hair. I am short and pale, with skin that burns and hair that snarls so that I leave the beach pink, itchy, and disheveled. I grew up in Los Angeles, where the land disappears into miles of ocean. Green coastline erupts above and before the surf, going soft as it fans out into sand and disappears into the crash and spume. No one needed to remind me that I was out of place. My body rejected the state, could not enjoy it, looked ugly in it. Surfers rode California waves, stroking her curves, while I looked on, reading a book under my umbrella. I wanted California but it didn’t want me. I read to escape: fantasy fiction, strange worlds. Even New England was foreign, with its dark winter, snow, and sleet. I watched California roll by on countless screens—Clueless, 90210—but this only made the place seem more impenetrably glossy and unreachable. I existed as an aberration, a blip of grey static interrupting the screen’s bright sheen. Read More
August 17, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Just Kids gets the big-screen treatment. So does Tolkien. Kathryn Stockett triumphs in court (as well as at the movies). Need an alternative to The Help? Try Welty. “As a kid I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays and I would walk home at night. For several years I read the children’s library until I finished the children’s library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them. With the kids’ library I did it alphabetically but I discovered I couldn’t do that with the adult one because there were too many big boring books to read, so I did it by interesting covers.” A tribute to Wendy Wasserstein. Amazon moves in on publishing with first “major” deal. The next best thing to a vacation? Reading about a vacation. The movies may be complete, and the books long finished, but Harry Potter fans need not despair: Pottermore launches in October. The case for spoilers! Who’s your favorite deliciously awful fictional character? Bookstores clear a “Rick Perry” section. “Ah ha! I’ve finally put my finger on a concrete reason for my lingering, irrational, doubtless soon-to-be-jettisoned prejudice against e-readers.”
August 16, 2011 Events It’s About to Get Really Girly By The Paris Review Girl Crush was born one weekend this June over a large pot of summer tea. We had been thinking about making a zine, and the idea was so simple and so obvious, there wasn’t an alternative. A flurry of submissions, a very special contributor, many tireless nights of editing and designing later—and Girl Crush came into being. We threw a launch party last Friday at Thom Bar. —Thessaly La Force and Jenna Wortham Thessaly La Force and Jenna Wortham, the zine's creators. Read More
August 16, 2011 At Work Emmy the Great on ‘Virtue’ By Peter Terzian Emmy the Great is the stage name of Emma-Lee Moss. (The moniker was a university joke that stuck.) The twenty-eight-year-old Anglo-Chinese musician first began to attract attention in the mid-2000s, when a set of her acoustic demos, recorded for a school project, began floating around the Internet, and she subsequently became associated with a group of young London-based folk revivalists that included Noah and the Whale, Johnny Flynn, and Mumford and Sons. Her debut album, First Love (2009), was built around acoustic guitar and her bright, quavering voice. But her early songs also reshaped classic indie pop and girl-group tropes into funny, wordy tales of romantic disappointment: a boyfriend who whiles away his life watching back-to-back episodes of 24; a girl who has a one-night affair with a guy who plays her the song “Hallelujah” (“the original Leonard Cohen version,” the narrator makes clear). Moss’s new album, Virtue, is both more mature and more heartbroken. The songs were written around her real-life breakup with her former fiancé, who left her on the eve of their wedding to join a religious order. We met one July morning on London’s Oxford Street (“About to meet Serious Journalist from Abroad … At Top Shop. #igottopickthevenue,” she tweeted) and went to a Soho café. Musicians often say they don’t want to explain their lyrics or talk about the autobiographical elements in their songs because they want the listener to be free to project his or her own stories onto them. But with this album you’ve talked openly to the press about the breakup of your engagement and how it led to these songs. Read More
August 15, 2011 Odd Jobs Singing Cowgirl; Cigarette Boy By Chris Flynn Detail from 'Peasant Spreading Manure,' Jean-Fracois Millet, 1855, oil. Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs. Jessica Anthony: I was a singing-telegram cowgirl in upstate New York in the early nineties. I wore the dress, boots, hat, and fringe. I went to various places of business and sang, “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” from Oklahoma! to human beings who desperately had no interest in it. Jonathan Lethem: I once had a job as the assistant of a family friend, a very talented artist and theatrical designer who had, in the parlance of the time, “gone mad.” My tasks included helping him move a discarded chrome car bumper from the street to his tiny Upper West Side studio-apartment bedroom; helping him weld the bumper to a sculpture that also included sardine tins still covered in oil and shreds of fish; and walking his poodle to the liquor store to buy him bottles of gin. But there were problems: the unfortunate, confused dog had a giant clot of bright red paint covering approximately a third of its white curls, so that it appeared to have been attacked by an ax murderer. Also, I was only thirteen. Even in 1977, a liquor store on the Upper West Side wouldn’t sell a tall bottle of gin to a teenager leashed to a zombie poodle. Adam Levin: I used to hand out Winston cigarettes at bars for a Chicago “guerrilla marketing” firm. I was required to carry around a duffel full of cigarette cartons. We had some discretion over how many packs to give out to each person—usually between one and four. I also carried a box in which an old digital camera was mounted. If you wanted free cigarettes, you had to let me photograph your driver’s license, and you’d nearly always let me, because you were drunk, which is why I picked you to begin with. So maybe it was more like I used to collect personal information at bars in Chicago for a “guerrilla marketing” firm employed by Winston. Peter Carey: Never, in all my life, have I been employed in a job as absurd and peculiar as the one I have right now. Commuting between 1854 and 2011 is killing me. Chris Flynn is the books editor at The Big Issue and the fiction editor at Australian Book Review.
August 15, 2011 Arts & Culture To Bricktop, on Her Belated Birthday By Patrick Monahan Photograph by Jack Robinson. Courtesy The Jack Robinson Archive. Whenever she was asked about her start in the world, the legendary saloonkeeper Bricktop—born Ada Smith—replied: On the fourteenth day of August 1894, in the little town of Alderson, West-by-God-Virginia, the doctor said, “Another little split-tail,” and on that day Bricktop was born. T. S. Eliot later added, “…and on that day Bricktop was born. And to her thorn, she gave a rose.” Bricktop is a not a familiar name to most people today, though the crumbs of her extraordinary life are indispensable to the telling of a certain moment in the history of Americans in Paris and café society everywhere. Woody Allen’s latest movie, Midnight in Paris, could hardly recall the days of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, or the Fitzgeralds without Zelda crying, “Let’s go to Bricktop’s!” Ada Smith, like many African Americans of her day, was born poor. Her mother, who ran a boarding house, had a passion for cleanliness and a self-confessed trigger-fast Irish temper. Around 1900, the family moved from Virginia to the South Side of Chicago, where Ada got her first taste of the theater. She hung around the stage doors of Chicago’s great vaudeville houses, waiting for the likes of Sophie Tucker, a belting singer known as “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” to emerge. But it was the back rooms of saloons, with their sawdust-covered floors, that captured her imagination. Read More