September 8, 2017 The Lives of Others Roaring Girl: London’s Sharp-Elbowed, Loudmouthed Mary Frith By Edward White How Mary Frith’s reputation changed from bawdy rogue to defender of the patriarchy. Moll CutPurse smoking. When James VI of Scotland took the English crown in 1603, it was heralded as a blessed return to normality. For the previous forty-one years, the natural order had been put on its head by the reign of Elizabeth I, a woman performing the ultimate male duty. Elizabeth’s reign had necessarily been an act of political transvestism. She presented herself as the Virgin Queen, the chaste goddess, but also as the guardian of divinely ordained power; she wore dresses from the neck down, but the crown upon her head remained inherently male. “I have the body of a woman,” she famously reminded her people, “but the heart and stomach of a king.” Read More
September 8, 2017 In Memoriam “Plainness in Diversity” By John Ashbery John Ashbery. Photo: Lynn Davis This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive. Read More
September 8, 2017 First Person Death’s Plus-One By Brian Cullman Early that fall, Amy’s cousin JJ was leaving Bertie’s Hair Salon in Fox Point and decided to try the restroom at Schuyler’s Funeral Home next door. Bertie’s facility was cramped, there was a cat box under the sink, and the loo paper was rough pink squares of construction paper. Well, it felt like construction paper, and it lent a depressingly cheap air to the place. Schuyler’s restrooms were spacious and cheerful, there were clean serviettes on a low ceramic table, and despite the scent of candles and the hushed voices outside, it felt more like a country house than a chapel. Out in the foyer, there was a pot of fresh coffee and a tray of small, star-shaped cookies. Men in dark suits and women in summer dresses looked at the floor and nodded to themselves. JJ signed the guest book and wrote, “My thoughts are with you,” then drew a small heart next to her name and address. The coffee wasn’t bad, though the cookies were too chewy and left a gummy taste in her mouth that lasted all the way to lunch downtown. She was unprepared for the check that came in the mail a few days later. The deceased was a Portuguese merchant with three ex-wives and an alarming number of children, none of whom had lived up to his expectations. More to the point, none had been very attentive during his long decline and illness. And so, he had amended his will so that anyone who showed up at his funeral would get a check for ten thousand dollars. And anyone who didn’t could go to hell. Read More
September 7, 2017 Arts & Culture Five Hundred Glass Negatives By Mary Jo Bang On the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy (1894–1989), who inspired Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection, A Doll for Throwing. Next year, Germany will celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus, a school that stressed the unity of industrial design and all other arts. The celebration will include Moholy’s work. Lucia Moholy, Self-portrait, 1930. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. In 1915, twenty-one-year-old Lucia Schulz wrote in her journal that she could imagine herself using photography as “a passive artist,” recording everything from the best perspective, putting the film through the chemical processes she’d learned, and adding to the image her sense of “how the objects act on me.” On her twenty-seventh birthday, at the Registry Office in Charlottenburg, a borough of Berlin, she married the Hungarian Constructivist painter Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and became, in the blink of a bureaucratic instant, Lucia Moholy. A few years later, when Moholy-Nagy was recruited to teach as a master at the Bauhaus school, Lucia went with him—she, her camera, her technical skills, and her knowledge of the darkroom. The Bauhaus, a school established in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, would eventually become an influential international design movement. The clean sculptural lines of its buildings, the bent steel and leather Bauer chairs, Marianne Brandt’s elegant globe-and-square tea sets would come to represent a break with the preindustrial past. The look itself would become a signifier of urban modernity and of modern life. When Lucia arrived at the Bauhaus, she became, at Gropius’s invitation, the de facto Bauhaus photographer, albeit unpaid. The glass negatives would remain hers, however, presumably to do with as she wished. Read More
September 7, 2017 At Work Writing Roundabout: An Interview with Sam Stephenson By Nicole Rudick Mary Frank and Sam Stephenson in Frank’s studio on West Nineteenth Street, New York, 2010. Photo: Kate Joyce Sam Stephenson’s biography, Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, was published late last month. Its subject, the photographer W. Eugene Smith, should be familiar to longtime readers of the Daily: since 2010, we have run Stephenson’s chronicles of Smith’s myriad photographic projects and exploits with the luminaries of the midcentury New York jazz scene (Stephenson is also the author of The Jazz Loft Project, which was excerpted in issue no. 190) as well as—and perhaps most importantly—stories about the somebodies and nobodies who populated the margins of Smith’s life. Over sixteen essays, Stephenson tracked his subject across six decades, from his childhood in Kansas through the American South to rural Japan and Saipan. And through these essays, Stephenson discovered that he could not untangle his work as Smith’s biographer—a job that has consumed him for the past twenty years—from Smith’s narrative. The very process of writing a life became part of the story in which that process unfolded, and versions of the Daily pieces found their way into his very unconventional biography. Nearly seven years to the day of our first correspondence, Stephenson and I talked on the phone about collaboration, the importance of digression, and, of course, Gene Smith. INTERVIEWER You wrote me with ideas for blog posts in September of 2010, the month I started at the Review. One of them was on the artist Mary Frank, another was on the musician Dorrie Woodson, and another was on the musician Joe Henry. All of those ideas turned into pieces on the Daily, and versions of the Frank and Woodson ended up being chapters in your book. STEPHENSON We got off to a strong start. If you look at the body of work we’ve done together over seven years, it marks a span of time over which my outlook and my style and the final form of Gene Smith’s Sink evolved and took shape. The book became something much different than what I proposed and what Farrar, Straus and Giroux signed up for. I can now articulate that evolution to some degree, and working with you was critical to that development. Read More
September 7, 2017 In Memoriam “Korean Soap Opera” By John Ashbery This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive. Read More