November 18, 2013 Video & Multimedia Incest Taboo By Sadie Stein Presented without comment: the trailer for the (appropriately lurid) Lifetime adaptation of Flowers in the Attic.
October 2, 2013 Video & Multimedia Good Grief By Sadie Stein Full disclosure: I once played Charlie Brown in a summer-camp production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. It was a deeply scarring experience. I hate Peanuts. It feels good to admit that. Today marks the sixty-third birthday of Peanuts. Here is a slideshow of some of the strip’s greatest hits. And here is the theme song.
September 25, 2013 Video & Multimedia F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare By Sadie Stein When we posted a recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale,” a reader noted that F. Scott Fitzgerald also made a recording of the Keats poem. That audio is great, but on the occasion of the author’s birthday, we thought we’d share another: Fitzgerald doing Othello’s act 1, scene 3 monologue. Keep in mind that the future writer trod the boards while at Princeton; while he may not recite like a trained Shakespearean, his reading is clear, emotive, and confident. And if you’ve never heard his voice, it’s a pleasure of a whole different kind.
September 24, 2013 Video & Multimedia Don’t Do It By Sadie Stein This Dewar’s ad uses words (well, some of them) from Charles Bukowski’s “so you want to be a writer?” While it is all very sweeping and epic and generally the most movingly crass blend of commerce and poetry since Walt Whitman started shilling for Levi’s, the voice actor (cleverly identified by Open Culture as one Tom O’Bedlam) sounds approximately zero percent like Bukowski. But no one can fault the marriage of subject and product.
August 20, 2013 Video & Multimedia Watch The Paris Review on Charlie Rose, Here! By Justin Alvarez Now we’re making it really easy for you! For those readers who were unable to catch James Salter, Mona Simpson, Lorin Stein, and John Jeremiah Sullivan discussing The Paris Review’s sixtieth anniversary on Charlie Rose, are you ever in luck! You can now watch the full segment below (sans introductory interview with Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman). Yes, we’ve given this a lot of ink, but what can we say—we’re proud! If you have issues with the video, click here to watch.
August 1, 2013 Video & Multimedia Commercial Fan Fiction By Sadie Stein And we mean that literally: this is a Tumblr of fan fic based on TV advertisements. And is there more fallow ground than this strange world of smart-aleck kids, idiot husbands, knowing wives, yogurt-eating singles, and maniacally friendly fast-food workers? We think not. (The Barilla pasta-stalker alone could be the basis for a series of thrillers.) Also, we offer the following as a prompt.