October 31, 2017 Arts & Culture Hillbilly Horror: B Movies of the Undead South By Chantel Tattoli Still from Two Thousand Maniacs! Years ago, my boyfriend and I drove from New York City, where he was from, to Orlando, where I was from and where we were both attending an old liberal-arts college rich in bats and mossy oaks. South, past the Mason–Dixon Line and into the Carolinas, we went. We were speeding on a forsaken stretch of I-95 late one night when the rearview mirror glinted blue and red. I would have pulled over immediately. But I was not behind the wheel. Nick did not want to stop until there were witnesses. I didn’t grasp his fear: we were a couple of law-abiding white kids en route to school at the end of summer. What did he imagine was going to happen to us? But he drove for more than five minutes—ignoring my advice (so that I pondered whether to phone my dad or his when we went to jail)—before halting in a semi-bright parking lot, switching the radio to country music, and dropping the window. Nick recalls the state trooper as a seven-footer with a gravelly voice and leathery face. What is indisputable is that Nick—a full-blooded Manhattanite—addressed this officer with a syrupy accent and managed to get away with a mere stern warning. Nick looked at me afterward. “This is why I put Florida license plates on the Xterra,” he said. “If that cop knew I was from New York, who knows!” I thought he was nuts then; and I still think he is nuts. But Nick continues to protest: “You didn’t get it. That was the stuff of horror films.” Recently, I have seen his point. There is a robust subgenre of horror that mistrusts the custom of Southern hospitality. It turns on the premise that the American South is a danger zone for Northerners, who remain persona non grata and venture into Dixie at the risk of life and limb. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)—by the director Tobe Hooper, dead of natural causes this August—is the marquee example. Deliverance (1972), Motel Hell (1980, tagged, “It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent Fritters”), and House of 1000 Corpses (2003) are some others. In this category, known as “hillbilly horror,” one film stands out at the get: a low-budget, semi-professional 1964 splatter flick titled Two Thousand Maniacs! Read More
October 30, 2017 Arts & Culture The Inventions of Witches By Kathryn Nuernberger On witches, Derrida, and the impossibility of ever being truly known. John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886. The inquisitors wanted something old from each witch they tortured—a Sabbath orgy or blood oath or cat demon or wolf-faced baby or some other verification of the stories they already believed. They also wanted something new, so they could feel, with each trial and execution, as if they were getting somewhere: With what instruments do you fly? What did the toad in the pot say? Which direction do you turn the horseshoe over the door to summon your demon? According to Joseph Glanvill’s 1681 volume Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions in two parts: the first treating of their possibility, the second of their real existence, the convicted witch Elizabeth Styles’s offering to the investigators in 1664 was that her demon sucked blood. He came to her often. Even when she was tied up in a dungeon, still he came to her pole in the form of a butterfly, to suck her blood as he always did. Though it may seem strange to us now, that the devil came as an apparition of a butterfly was very old news in 1664. Only the bloodsucking was new. Even the great botanist and first ecologist Maria Sibylla Merian, who discovered and documented insect metamorphosis in the same century, had to be careful about her reputation and keep her room of silkworms and caterpillars secret, because there were many who still believed in witches and their power to take the form of butterflies and spoil the milk. Read More
October 30, 2017 On History The Ruin: Roosevelt Island’s Smallpox Hospital By Selin Thomas Renwick Smallpox Hospital. Photo: Andre Costantini To drive up FDR Drive—on Manhattan’s east side, on a slick cold night—is to find solitude. You edge between island and water like a cell in a vein. To the left, streets reach like facades to a vanishing point. Buildings of stone and steel and glass, illuminated from within, look like cave drawings depicting our humanity and its dystopia. Row by row and by the thousands, people in a furious, confused sequence are stacked atop one another. They work or eat or drown in the blue light of televisions. The city is illuminated like it’s the world’s carnival, and this can inspire an isolating sentimentality of being abandoned to the future, when humanity has built then ruined everything and itself, when it is left without want and is poorer for it. It is not as cynical as it sounds. These are the mythical happenings that bind you to this place by their sheer wild or gentle force. This is a place alive. So consumed might you be by this turning shadowbox of life to the west that you might miss, despite the flood lights, the ruin to the east: a mid-nineteenth-century stone hospital across the river, at the southern end of Roosevelt Island. Designed by the venerable James Renwick Jr., the crumbling building is a federal, state, and city landmark that has sat, decaying, for decades opposite ever-ascendant Manhattan. Because it was landmarked in 1976 as a ruin, to wither is its fate. Read More
October 30, 2017 On Sports The End of the Tour: Tennis Stars in Twilight By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Photo: Christopher Clarey There are stories. And then there are “story-stories.” The twin reemergence of Roger Federer and Rafael “Rafa” Nadal this year has been one of those story-stories, full of wait-that’s-not-alls and tell-me-what-happened-nexts. Their return to form has been as emphatic as it was unexpected, a jolt of sun in a strange year. When the two faced off in the final of the Australian Open way back in January—which Federer won in a tense five sets (6–4, 3–6, 6–1, 3–6, 6–3)—there was the sense that the stars had simply happened to align one last fleeting time. Federer was ranked and seeded seventeenth at that time; Nadal hadn’t reached the semifinal of a major since 2014. The match was expected to be lightning caught in a bottle, something to be savored before reality set back in. But since then, Federer and Nadal have played three more times, including in two other finals. They even played on the same team—as doubles partners no less—in a team-tennis enterprise dreamed up by Federer called the Laver Cup, after the great Australian Rod Laver. Most recently, they played in the final of the Rolex Shanghai Masters. Nadal was in imperious form coming into that final, having just won the previous tournament in Beijing and the one prior to that, some minor summer event played in Queens. When they flipped the coin at center court in Shanghai, Nadal was on a seventeen-match winning streak. Federer won in straight sets in barely over an hour: 6–4, 6–3. Read More
October 27, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Millepied, Monk, and McPhee By The Paris Review I knew, when I was a little girl, that I wanted to walk up the steps of Lincoln Center in the gathering dusk. Last night, my man and I put on our finery and stepped into the travertine at Lincoln Center to see the American Ballet Theatre. The evening’s first dance, “Souvenir d’un lieu cher,” by Alexei Ratmansky, felt like a warm-up for Benjamin Millepied’s world premiere of “I Feel the Earth Move” (others disagree). The lights came up after “Souvenir” and we watched a tech cross the floor without cover of a curtain to direct a slow undressing of the stage. Up came the wings and the fly and then, with no music, no light change, no cue discernible to the audience, a battalion of dancers crossed the stage. What followed was some of the most beautiful and fully realized dancing I’ve ever seen. An accomplished dancer, choreographer, and former director of the Paris Opera Ballet, Millepied uses everything he knows and everything the dancers do, too. The piece nodded to traditional corps de ballet movement and to synchronized swimming, to sociology and to the high drama of the theater. The principal, Misty Copeland, covered the stage with hovering energy; Herman Cornejo, also a principal, became my second favorite athlete. The music was Philip Glass. At intermission, members of the American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company and of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School took over the Promenade for Millepied’s “Counterpoint for Philip Johnson,” the “first work to be performed by ABT outside the proscenium setting of the Koch Theater.” There was contagious delight and many iPhones held outstretched. When we settled back into our seats to watch Millepied’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” I was impressed again by his fluency. When nearly everything had been said, Stella Abrera danced volumes about sexual consent. The curtain came down eventually, of course, but with the feeling that Millepied was back there, still dismantling, in the wings. —Julia Berick Read More
October 27, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Barbara Pym By Valerie Stivers This is the third installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In my alternative literary universe, people who wish to read romances would be given one option only: Barbara Pym (1913–1980), an English writer whose dry, hilarious, unsentimental 1950s novels of spinsters and curates, office girls, bored wives and nebbishy male intellectuals are as insightful about the gender wars today as they were when written. Readers would start with Excellent Women, Pym’s best-known work, move on to second-best Jane and Prudence, and take special caution with Quartet in Autumn, a later, darker work written after Pym’s fall into obscurity. All materials would be issued in vintage Plume editions from the 1980s. As domestic comedies, Pym’s books make great use of food, though her women are likely to be poor or bewildered cooks, and the meals are as often absurd as they are comforting. In Crampton Hodnet, a husband announces an affair while topping and tailing gooseberries for a pie. In Jane and Prudence, the cosmopolitan Pru considers herself sophisticated because she rubs garlic on the bowl before dressing the salad. And though Pym herself was not a consummate cook, her food writing inspired her sister, Hilary Pym, and friend Honor Wyatt to publish a cookbook based on her works after her death in 1988, with excerpts to accompany the recipes. Hilary Pym explains: Read More