August 3, 2023 First Person Wax and Gold and Gold By Mihret Sibhat GHADA AMER, PETER’S LADIES, 2007, ACRYLIC, EMBROIDERY, AND GEL MEDIUM ON CANVAS, 36 x 42″. From Women by Women, a portfolio edited by Charlotte Strick in issue no. 199, winter 2011. During a school break over the long rainy season, when I was fifteen, my father and I took a trip to Addis Ababa. On our way home, the bus stopped in Bedele, a town known for a popular beer of the same name, for a lunch break. We had an hour before the bus departed again, and I asked him to eat quickly because I wanted us to go for a walk near a row of hotels (brothels) a few minutes away from the restaurant. “Remember the prostitute I was ministering to?” I said. “She’s at one of those hotels now.” I wanted him to help me find Elsa, a woman who used to work at a hotel across the street from our house. Like most of the women there, she was a waitress by day and a sex worker by night. The hotel belonged to a woman who also happened to own one of three TVs in my hometown. While it was a taboo for girls and women—unless one was an out-of-town professional—to go to the hotel itself, we were allowed to visit the lounge next door, where the TV was kept, to watch a game of soccer or a popular Sunday-afternoon program on national TV. The sex workers came over to the lounge occasionally to serve beverages. Several months before my father and I found ourselves in Bedele, I caught Elsa while leaving one of those events and invited her to our home to tell her about Jesus. She accepted my invitation. Read More
July 31, 2023 Overheard 115 Degrees, Las Vegas Strip By Meg Bernhard Photograph by Meg Bernhard. It was 115 degrees outside when I left my house, around 5 P.M. My steering wheel was hot to the touch. So hot, in fact, that I had to steer with the bottom of my palms; some people store gloves in their car during the summer, but I keep forgetting. This was the second Friday of Las Vegas’s heat wave, our seventh consecutive day over 110 degrees. The National Weather Service had issued an excessive heat warning: “Dangerously hot afternoons with little overnight relief expected.” Emergency room doctors treated heat illness patients. At the airport, several passengers and crew members fainted after a plane sat without air conditioning on the tarmac for hours. A man was found dead on the sidewalk outside a homeless shelter. I drove a few minutes downtown to a Deuce bus stop near Fremont Street, and when I parked I saw a woman in a one-piece swimsuit and tube socks posing for photos in a square of shade. My bus pulled up, and I climbed to the second level. We cruised south, down Las Vegas Boulevard, past wedding chapels and personal injury attorney billboards. The Deuce is my favorite way of traveling to the Strip. At the Treasure Island stop, two women, their faces pink and perspiring, slid into the seats behind me. “I couldn’t stand there for much longer,” the first woman said. Read More
July 27, 2023 The Review’s Review Meow! By Whitney Mallett Photograph by Jules Slutsky. The other night, the performance artist Kembra Pfahler told me some top-drawer East Village Elizabeth Taylor lore: the dame crossed paths with the about-town character Dee Finley outside a needle exchange one afternoon and later paid for Finley to get an entire new set of teeth. A quick Google search when I got home revealed that the story, as reported by Michael Musto for the Village Voice, was not apocryphal: Finley recalls Taylor arriving by limo at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, circa 1997—“She had just had brain surgery. Her hair was short and blonde. Liz at her dykiest. YUM!” Taylor, who funded a lot of community work related to the AIDS crisis and had donated to the needle exchange, was apparently out and about that Thursday taking a tour to see what her dollars were doing, and also giving away bottles of her best-selling perfume White Diamonds; though Sophia Loren did it first, Taylor’s powdery Diamonds was what really made celebrity fragrances a thing. (Finley says he promptly flipped his freebie for a couple bags of junk.) The poet and perfumer Marissa Zappas owns a pair of size thirty-eight brown leather kitten heels that once belonged to Taylor, who died in 2011. When I asked her if they smelled, she said, “Not really, vaguely of green peppers at first.” For Zappas, who’s carved out a niche for herself as an independent perfumer designing fragrances for book rollouts and art installations, as well as olfactory homages to historic figures like an eighteenth-century pirate, Taylor has been a lifelong obsession. She even used photos of her idol as visual aids to help her memorize smells when she was training to become a perfumer. Now, after establishing herself through collaborations with pros and internet-famous astrologers, Zappas has returned to Taylor as the inspiration for her latest scent, Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! Typical for Zappas, whose fragrances are more grown and nuanced than her millennial girlie #PerfumeTok fans might let on, Maggie starts off unassuming, with a warm floral musk as paradigmatically perfume-y as Grandma’s after-bath splash (it smells a bit like Jean Nate, to be specific—a summery drugstore staple since 1935). But then it develops into something more feral, a little loamy: like the inside of an empty can of Coke on a hot summer day, or freshly baked bread with a hint of wet limestone, maybe even an overripe peach traced with rot. As I lay around with my laptop in bed in the afternoon, the fragrance mixes with my sweat, its champagne and violets becoming nutty with a note as sharp as paint thinner. Read More
July 27, 2023 Happenings August 1–7: What We’re Doing Next Week By The Paris Review Charlie Saikley Six-Man Volleyball Tournament. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 3.0. Soon it will be August in New York City, a period when everyone is theoretically out of town—they’re always saying this, anyway, in books like August by Judith Rossner. This is mostly a fiction, that everyone’s at their country house and everything is shutting down, but it’s sort of fun to imagine; who doesn’t secretly enjoy having fun while others are away? For the month of August, the Review is trying a little experiment—highlighting some things that are going on during this supposedly quiet month. Every week, we’ll be compiling roundups of cultural events and miscellany that the Review’s staff and friends are excited about around town. (And maybe, occasionally, out of town.) We can promise only that these lists will be uncomprehensive, totally random, and fun. F. W. Murnau’s Faust, introduced by Mary Gaitskill at Light Industry, August 1: Gaitskill, who was interviewed for the Spring issue of the Review, will be introducing this 1926 silent film, which, like many flops, is now a cult classic. Gaitskill saw a clip of the film online years before she had read Goethe’s novel, though she knew the basic outlines of the story of the scholar who made a pact with the devil. “That was enough for me to understand and to feel, to believe, the reality of the segment: the flailing despair, the futile vanity, the experience of running through a live, tactile murk of demons and uncomprehending humans, moving slo-mo through their own fates, trying to undo something that can’t be undone,” she told Light Industry. Read More
July 26, 2023 Eat Your Words Cooking with Elizabeth David By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica MacLean. Elizabeth David considered herself “not a writer really you know, but only a self-made one”—primarily a cook. And she wasn’t a typical writer, even within her chosen genre of food writing. David abhorred the arty and artificial, kept her private life to herself, and made concessions to her audience only when it suited her values. Her voice, especially in her journalism, is acerbic—she was a woman who liked to eat well, and didn’t care what you thought of that. And yet she has been England’s most influential food writer since the peak of her career in the fifties, and she remains a household name in the UK. Her groundbreaking works, A Book of Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking, and simply Italian Food, all published just after World War II, introduced the English to those cuisines. And her prose has the kind of precision and shimmering energy that makes one want to cook. I recently read the NYRB Classics edition of David’s Summer Cooking. I wanted to cook from David, and to understand the secret of her lasting appeal. Summer Cooking is considered David’s most casual, personal, and playful work. It was written after the intense, yearslong labor of Italian Food and contains many of her perennial themes: fresh, seasonal ingredients, bright flavor, and simplicity. In the postwar England in which she launched her career, food was still rationed. People rarely saw meat and couldn’t get eggs or cream. Cans, powders, and substitutes were common. It was neither practical nor socially acceptable to be interested in what you ate. David drew on her experiences traveling and living abroad during the war, in France, Greece, and Egypt, where even basic meals were flavorful and fresh, to effect a massive shift in this thinking. In Greece, Artemis Cooper writes, David lived on “bread, olive oil, olives, salt fish, hard white cheese, dried figs, tomato paste, rice, dried beans, sugar, coffee and wine” and knew their intense joys. In Summer Cooking she applied the lessons she’d learned abroad to what was available in the English countryside, during its brief, wonderful production of “new peas,” “fresh little carrots,” “delicate courgettes,” “fresh green chives, chervil, tarragon, parsley,” “purple sprouting broccoli,” “tender little string beans,” crabs, trout, Cornish lobsters, damson plums, blackberries, gooseberries, and more. Read More
July 25, 2023 First Person Friendship By Devon Geyelin Illustration by Na Kim. He texted me something during staff meeting. I didn’t answer until it was over and I had closed my computer and wasn’t looking at him anymore, and then I told him not to text me, please, for these weeks, like we had said. Then I was upset, and I drove to the other side of the lake, where I parked outside a trailer. It was for work: my job required me to interview people, usually showing up unannounced to where it was possible they lived, or didn’t. A teenage girl opened the door. She was wearing a hot pink sweatshirt with purple sleeves, and her dog was black or dark gray with white on its face. It didn’t make noise as it went around her legs in the doorframe. I turned around, and it bit into the back of my calf. I yelled for a while, and then I was on the ground. Nothing hurt. I put my finger in its mouth to get it to let go, but it bit it. I screamed louder until I realized there wasn’t a point to screaming, because the girl was already hitting the dog with something, maybe a chair, and there was no one else to alert. Then I was free, and the door to their trailer was open, and then I was inside, and I had closed the door behind me. Then I was leaning on the arm of their green couch, and then I was sitting on the seat of another, whose color I don’t know, because I was looking at the small lakes of blood on the floor. They were already congealing, and inside the pools were small flecks of white. I realized they were my fat when I saw similar pieces on the thighs of my jeans. Read More