05.01.12



this year's edition of the manhattan challenge (in which joe and i take the subway up to 220th street and the henry hudson bridge and walk the island, north to south) was more leisurely than our previous walks; we got started hours later than we usually do, and our pit stops (at earl's beer & cheese, sakagura, and a sunglasses stand on st. mark's) were splashier. we passed three sidewalk domino games instead of our customary two. we discovered the greatest fountain in all of manhattan. we learned that the guys who fish down at battery park all day do not go home empty handed, as we always assumed - they catch sea monsters.

we moved to manhattan nine years ago today. i have no doubt we'll be here nine years from now.

04.26.12: the dirty dozen {twelve people you will meet via the film festival volunteer crew}

01 the proud mother of a girl starring in one of the documentaries
02 the substitute teacher from queens who applies hand sanitizer to the bottom of her purse
03 the actress who talks the concessions staff into giving her six bags of popcorn
04 the twenty-year-old harmony korine aficionado
05 the sales rep training for his first ironman who scorns beer in green bottles
06 the tentative foreigner who's signed up for every shift in hopes of getting an unpaid internship
07 the film critic who relishes the electronic ticket-scanning process ("i'm getting screened! it's pretty hot!")
08 the music-magazine production assistant who loves thousand-year eggs
09 the middle-aged englishman who refuses comp tickets because he doesn't like movies
10-12 the trio of winsome undergrads who eat dinner three times each night*

it was half past eleven when i crossed houston on the way home from my last shift in the village last night. my feet were busted from four hours of pacing around a basement theater, but i was glad to be outside and moving; i like being in the mix when the lower east side wakes up on a weeknight. the folks in the mostly-empty bars you pass are locals, no one's in a hurry to be anywhere, and there's time and room to peer down alleys and get lost in window displays.

i volunteered for the screenings crew because i wanted to carry film. they needed some people to move reels from theater to theater, they said, some people who could handle twenty-five pounds or so. why, sure!** i've never touched film, but i feel strongly about it, and i figured it was about time. i learned (too late!) that the transporters are expected to have cars, so i still haven't touched film; i spent each of my three shifts scanning tickets and badges, handing out and taking in audience ballots, pointing out bathrooms, and so on. at one point i separated a bunch of buckets. deeply glamorous stuff.

we've talked before about how i assign personalities and roles to fellow subway riders, yes? i run through what i think would go down if i were to be stranded in an underground tunnel with the smatterings of people around me as i commute. i'm not especially worried about that actually happening, really, but i like to imagine what i'd learn if we got stuck together somewhere. (welcome to the milquetoast world of introvert kink. episode i: conversation against one's will!). it turns out that screenings crew shifts are a lot like being stuck in a subway car: i had a lot of really long talks with the sorts of people whose stories i invent in the five minutes we share on some platform underneath broadway. they're enthusiasts, these people - not just film enthusiasts, though there were plenty of those, but all sorts. many attended festival screenings for a few years and decided they wanted in. others were peoplewatchers who gave away the vouchers we received after each shift - they were there for the connections, not the freebies. i thought i was there to do grunt work, but i was there for some of all of it: whipping around the venues like a rat between train tracks, trading calling cards (mine) and pocket-size head shots (theirs) with starry-eyed theatre students, arguing about directors and pizza parlors and boroughs with a bunch of strangers too tired to stand up straight when the last show of the night let out. tossing the invented backstories i no longer needed on my way out the door, limping down third avenue on busted feet.

*don't believe the porn, internets: what college gals want is to eat fried eggs and ice cream all night long.

**i love carrying stuff. i'm the queen of helping folks move.

04.23.12

1: ...and eddie the sleepwalking cannibal was there for the q&a after the movie, and he told us about how the gobbets of human flesh spilling out of his mouth were actually montreal smoked meat, so that's why he looked so happy in all of those scenes.
2: it's good that you and joe are both interested in these things, and that you found each other.

04.19.12

THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 9

SURVIVOR: the long ships (frans g. bengtsson)*
CHALLENGER: coco chanel: the legend and the life (justine picardie)

quiet designers like rei kawakubo can roll a stick of dynamite under your dressing-room door and change your life forever;** mad uncles like karl lagerfeld chew english like tobacco, launch a thousand art projects, and bore me to tears with their clothes. where in all of that is coco chanel? holed up at the ritz with her nazi lover somewhere in the middle, probably: her contributions to womenswear undoubtedly made my life easier, and her umpty-four versions of her own life story arouse the editor in me, at least. so i spent some time with some of them.

justine picardie's coco chanel is easily the best-looking biography i've ever read; its pages are thick and glossy, and full of dali, toulouse-lautrec, and warhol (an ear of wheat, a revue poster for which her frenemy modeled, and silkscreens of the chanel no. 5 bottle, respectively). it's not especially incisive or heavy on original scholarship, which is par for the course in fashion magazine journalism: picardie*** (the former features director of british vogue) is surefooted as hell as she's discussing how, say, chanel's years in a convent orphanage shaped her approach to accessories, but she's disappointingly tentative (she has lots of theories and quotes, particularly from claude delay's chanel solitaire, but they don't feel cohesive) when it's time to talk about how and why chanel compulsively unraveled and rewove her own bio.****

according to her birth certificate, gabrielle charnet (a misspelling corrected by a court decree twenty years later) was the second daughter of penniless peddlers, born at a poorhouse in saumur on the loire; variations on this theme appear in picardie's pages beside a photo of saumur, six pictures of chanel buttons, and a tarot card from chanel's rue cambon apartment. chanel's father swept in and out of her life, and illness swept in and out of her mother, who finally died when chanel was eleven; she and her two sisters were promptly deposited with the sisters of the congregation of the sacred heart of mary in the medieval village of aubazine.***** after seven years of dark-fairy-tale-esque (at least as far as anyone can tell) nun-drudgery, eighteen-year-old gabrielle cycled through a boarding school in moulins, a draper's store, a music hall (at which she performed "qui qu'a vu coco?" and earned her nickname), and finally to vichy, where she met her first lover, the cavalry officer etienne balsan; he invited her to join him at his estate, royallieu, and her privileged life as a "kept girl" among cocottes and aristocrats began.

balsan's successor (boy capel, an englishman and "playboy industrialist" who helped chanel get started in the millinery business and open her first shop and was killed while driving from cannes to paris in 1919) was chanel's great love; his riding outfits and jumpers were the first pieces she hacked apart and reassembled as her own modernist outfits. the scrappy-luxe woman capel's high-society friends scorned and encouraged him to chuck over is enormously appealing; though both balsan and capel financed her lifestyle and initial forays into the fashion world, coco's own sweat equity made the house of chanel a success. coco circa world war two, a middle-aged, well-established designer by the time the germans got to paris, is less so. that wildly-unsympathetic chanel is the one i really wanted picardie to dissect for me.

That Chanel's wartime record is imperfect is a reflection both of her own inconsistencies, and the inconsistent recording of them. But her conduct should also be seen in the context of an era of French history marked by a widespread sense of chaos, confusion, and uncertainty, as well as terrible tragedy. To acknowledge this is not to act as an apologist for Chanel; and she herself would have been enraged at the very idea, for she declared that she had done nothing wrong in her relationship with the German [Hans Gunther von Dincklage, an officer with whom she had a long affair while she lived at the german-occupied ritz]. Not that he was even German, in her eyes; his mother was English, and he and Chanel spoke English together; an act of solidarity, as if they were setting themselves apart from German-occupied Paris in their own neutral territory, that of Mademoiselle's private apartment at 31 Rue Cambon.

[...]

But perhaps she was unable to see her German lover without obscuring something of the truth, closing her eyes to his past, as well as his passport; just as she had been apparently blind to previous episodes in her own life.

picardie notes that von dincklage, a "distinguished-looking attaché to the german embassy in paris," was "to some observers...simply an affable, occasionally frivolous, diplomat; to others [including other chanel biographers], a german spy." chanel had a new version of her own story for every listener and seemed to disregard fact when it was inconvenient to her, so...since she didn't believe von dincklage worked for the abwehr (the german military intelligence organization), we don't even have to worry about what she knew about his record? i'm unconvinced.

let's skip over chanel's crazy attempts to meet with her old pal winston churchill and broker peace with the germans (fascinating and deeply weird though they were) and forge ahead to what picardie calls "the most troubling episode of coco chanel's history": "in essence she attempted to use the anti-jewish laws of the german occupation to oust [the wertheimer brothers, who eventually owned 90 percent of les parfums chanel, the company which produced chanel no. 5]". picardie emphasizes that "it is difficult to produce any firm evidence of chanel making anti-semitic statements - the accusations against her are rarely backed up by reliable sources," and admits only to a "disquieting ambiguity" in chanel's comments about jewish friends and acquaintances. "the possibility remains," she writes, "that chanel's tactics against the wertheimers may have had less to do with her own anti-semitism than with her increasingly passionate belief that pierre [wertheimer] had done her an injustice by giving her only a 10 percent share in the perfume company." i confess my opinion of her is low either way.

the manner in which chanel reimagined femininity in her designs was revolutionary; that in which she reimagined her past was confusing at the best of times and deeply sinister at others. picardie had her work cut out for her, obviously, and it feels mean to fault her for failing to chase down new and solid information on her subject. or does that mean she shouldn't have attempted a biography in the first place? i've said before and will undoubtedly say again that deirdre bair's anais nïn (on another notoriously slippery française, for which she had unprecedented access to diary manuscripts) is one of the best biographies i've ever read; insight on shady ladies is possible, provided that one has the proper tools. the snapshots here, evocative though they are, aren't those tools.

VICTOR: tell me i'm not alone in relishing the mental image of a chanel boutique pillaged by vikings. the long ships sails on unchallenged.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 is it unsporting to take a fashion journalist to task for writing a psych-lite fashion biography? (most reviewers seemed to love picardie's chanel; only duncan fallowell in the daily express takes exception to her unintegrated quotes.)

02 which designers, if any, fascinate you?

03 shifty backstories! forget parenting and dieting; is that where french gals really have us beat?

04 have you ever worn and/or owned chanel? would you?

05 what's your roaring-twenties aristocrat name?

06 is picardie an apologist for chanel? does chanel deserve one?

07 if you had thirty-six hours to spend on the isle of man, what would you do there? (that has nothing to do with chanel, i realize, but i just finished booking a trip there for september and i'm unreasonably excited.)

*previous round here.

**the five minutes i swanned around the comme des garçons store in chelsea in one of her fabric-tornado skirts were the highlight of my clothes-wearing career. we'll meet again, skirt, and i'll wear you nonstop for the rest of my days.

***known to some of you, perhaps, as the gal who just did the gwyneth paltrow cover interview for bazaar's relaunch ("As she falls naturally into yoga stretches during the course of the conversation, supple as a cat, you realize that this is a woman for whom working out has become essential").

****"[chanel] was less willing to remember the year of her birth, 1883, adjusting it when it suited her purposes; even tearing it out of her passport. 'my age varies according to the days and the people i happen to be with,' she told a young american journalist in 1959, when she was 76. 'when i'm bored i feel very old, and since i'm extremely bored with you, i'm going to be a thousand years old in five minutes.'" it's a great, bitchy quote, but it has almost nothing to do with the passage in which it appears; it's just color commentary.

*****picardie's account (for the daily mail) of her own stay at aubazine - for which she, like the sisters who still live there, took a vow of silence - made me appreciate her as a biographer a bit more; i like the idea of her pilgrimage.

04.16.12

archetypes reveal themselves when women collaborate on bachelorette gatherings: there are contact-gatherers and listmakers, surreptitious-dildo-crown-buyers and sentimentalists, spa-going ladyscapers and barhopping princesses. me, i'm the scheherazade of simple carbs, and i bake 'til i can't bake no more.




once upon a time for lesley's party in brooklyn this saturday, i made meringue mushrooms with cocoa powder and semisweet chocolate;


    

dark and stormy cupcakes with crystallized ginger (tm yrs trooly), and cookies with smashed-up smoked chocolate, toffee, vanilla, and cocoa nibs;




and caramels with soy sauce and maldon sea salt. the end.

04.13.12 {pulp @ radio city music hall}



i have an amateur video of jarvis cocker slinking up the wall during "this is hardcore" on tuesday night, but it feels dirtier to keep it to myself for a bit before releasing it into the wild. pulp was always good for that.

04.10.12

Three green chameleons race each other across the terrace; one pauses at Madame's feet, flicking its forked tongue, and she comments: "Chameleons. Such exceptional creatures. The way they change color. Red. Yellow. Lime. Pink. Lavender. And did you know they are very fond of music?" She regards me with her fine black eyes. "You don't believe me?"
During the course of the afternoon she had told me many curious things. How at night her garden was filled with mammoth night-flying moths. That her chauffeur, a dignified figure who had driven me to her house in a dark green Mercedes, was a wife-poisoner who had escaped from Devil's Island. And she had described a village high in the northern mountains that is entirely inhabited by albinos: "Little pink-eyed people white as chalk. Occasionally one sees a few on the streets of Fort de France."
"Yes, of course I believe you."
She tilts her silver head. "No, you don't. But I shall prove it."
So saying, she drifts into her cool Caribbean salon, a shadowy room with gradually turning ceiling fans, and poses herself at a well-tuned piano. I am sitting on the terrace, but I can observe her: this chic, elderly woman, the product of varied bloods. She begins to perform a Mozart sonata.
Eventually the chameleons accumulated: a dozen, a dozen more, most of them green, some scarlet, lavender. They skittered across the terrace and scampered into the salon, a sensitive, absorbed audience for the music played. And then not played, for suddenly my hostess stood and stamped her foot, and the chameleons scattered like sparks from an exploding star.
Now she regards me. "Et maintenant? C'est vrai?"

(truman capote, from music for chameleons)

04.04.12

we spent a week in southern california last month. i mentioned that, yes? after nearly a decade of living in new york and stealing back for visits, i think we've let our agenda boil down to its most essential bits. dank, old bars; bright, fresh tacos; as much time with the pacific and my family as possible. a bonfire that gives your clothes a stink you have to name. simmer for ten years and the very best persists.

04.02.12: RIP, pinky the flip phone



for five years you were a doughty and noble 2G companion, pinky; even your audibly carcinogenic buzz, far more intelligible than any of the calls i received through you, was a dulcet tone of friendship. sleep the sleep of the just.

03.26.12: culture blotter {the hunger games}

i picked up a paperback copy of the hunger games at the jetblue terminal at JFK in early december; i tried to buy the sequels six hours later when joe and i touched down in phoenix, but the concessions at sky harbor had already shut down for the night (this is why you lost the war, phoenix), so i talked my mother in law into driving me to walmart* for them a few days later. catching fire and mockingjay are not, in the final analysis, worth a trip to walmart, but the hunger games could be; suzanne collins's writing is every bit as propulsive as stephenie "true love waits" meyer's, but collins uses a variety of adjectives, and her heroine's more than capable of taking care of herself. moreover, her adolescents' interactions have an authentically emotional crackle and snap that harry potter and friends never quite generate as they get older and lumpier, if you ask me; j.k. rowling nailed tween-harry's feelings in her first few books, but his teenage years with ron and hermione read like frodo and sam's wanderings in mordor circa the return of the king scotch-taped into a few episodes of saved by the bell.

but i digress. the hunger games is a winning, entertaining young adult book, and it had the potential to be an outstanding movie. several of the casting choices were brilliant (jennifer lawrence as katniss, stanley tucci as caesar flickerman, elizabeth banks as effie trinket, donald sutherland as president snow, lenny kravitz and his gold eyeliner as cinna), the pre-release marketing campaign was gorgeous (the capitol couture e-zine, with content from design houses like mcqueen and prada, is the most satisfying online tie-in since noel's website circa felicity**), and early footage was so promising!

it was not an outstanding movie, not by a long shot. jennifer lawrence was a fine katniss, and i think folks who argue that she looks too healthy to be a starved district 12 tribute can pipe down and netflix a bunch of off-putting skeletal-christian-bale movies, if that's what they're into (katniss is a hunter and is supposed to be in good shape, at least until the games start); the real trouble with the role is that her character's stoicism works in the novels because they're narrated in the first person and we get her vivid interior monologue.*** lawrence killed as a strong, silent type in winter's bone, but that film traded in shades of minimalism; it hurts me a little to say this, but i think the hunger games needed some substantial voice-overs. the audience needed to know how desperate katniss was in the flashbacks when peeta threw her the burned bread; lawrence did what she could with a look, but we needed the backstory of how his gesture gave her hope. that scene was choreographed badly, as were the few katniss shares with gale; we're supposed to get a lifetime of partnership and communion in that first hunting scene (to inform the awkwardness of gale's viewership later on), but it's hardly clear that he's essentially family. the sad-trombone cuts between gale at home in district 12 and peeta and katniss in the love cave were funny-awkward, not, er, awkward-awkward.

speaking of funny-awkward, can we talk for a moment about how peeta goes all pan's labyrinth on himself after hurting his leg so that katniss nearly steps on his face when she finds him near the river? that was true to the book, and it was a nice detail - peeta's a baker's son and a cake-icin' machine, so he was a quick study at camouflage during the pre-games training - but shouldn't he have been halfway underneath something? did the makeup team really take a good look at that tree-face and pronounce it badass? paint me skeptical; our theater laughed.

but enough about my hunger games; how did it strike you?

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you seen "lana del rey's 'hunger games'"? go ahead, i'll wait.

02 have you seen battle royale (the 2000 japanese movie to which, as umpteen critics have noted, suzanne collins's books bear striking similarities)?

03 did you read any of the suzanne collins books? if so, how many?

04 do you think the movie would have benefited from more exposition - or, as i've argued, more narration?

05 should the violence in the arena have been more explicit? did the fact that the tributes' bodies remained in place (instead of being whisked away as they are in the books) serve a dramatic purpose?

06 would you have stepped on peeta's face?

07 did anyone dress up at your screening? if you were to costume yourself as a hunger games character, which one would you pick (and what would you wear)?

08 should the filmmakers have gone for broke with the mutant dogs and given them the fallen tributes' eyes?

09 will you see the next movie?

*walmart in their town has an LDS book section. i hid some things there.

**please note, however, that i am not one of the felicity people. i have my pride.

***"Dystopian fiction," laura miller writes in "fresh hell," the new yorker essay that convinced me to pick up hunger games in the first place, "may be the only genre written for children that’s routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader."

03.21.12: how it happened {part II}

o, egg mcmuffins. to say that they were my favorite thing about mcdonald's would misrepresent things a bit; let's say that they're healthier than most other menu items and a rare break from meat on an otherwise vegetarian-unfriendly menu.* they were the one thing i liked about driving someone to the airport (or having to go to the airport) for a crack-of-dawn flight. i have a fond memory of walking through belfast's deserted city centre to buy a bag of them for joe and me early one morning on our honeymoon. that was a weird honeymoon.

i have a gloomier memory of the last egg mcmuffin i had (or tried to have), a few years later, at the train station in philadelphia. was it at the beginning of the food-documentary craze? had i recently read fast food nation? i know that in that plastic booth at that moment, lurid, recently-absorbed details of standard factory-farming practices like debeaking (a procedure in which a heated mechanical blade removes a laying hen's beak so that, in theory, she can't peck neighboring birds and can be confined in a smaller space) came back to me, and the feeling of nonspecific angst most of us already associate with fast-food restaurants was suddenly keen and quite particular. it was common knowledge (this was a few years ago) that factory farms produced mcdonald's egg supply, and i knew what factory farmers did to laying hens; that is, i knew what had been done to the hen that produced the egg i intended to eat. as when i realized i had to stop buying leather, i knew at once (and once and for all) that i was done.

or was i? i stopped eating egg mcmuffins, obviously, and i stopped purchasing eggs which weren't clearly labeled "cage free," "free range," "vegetarian," "humanely raised," and/or "organic" - or all of those. a few months ago, my office had me research a brief nutritional piece on what those labels actually mean. surprise: they're trade descriptions, which means that the USDA doesn't regulate them. at all. if they choose to do so, farmers can apply to organizations such as the nonprofit humane farm animal care to be "certified humane" (you can read what those standards mean for different types of animals here). as for the others - that's where jonathan safran foer and eating animals come in.

The USDA doesn't even have a definition of free-range for laying hens and instead relies on producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims. Very often, the eggs of factory-farmed chickens—chickens packed against one another in vast barren barns—are labeled free-range. ("Cage-free" is regulated but means no more or less than what it says—they are literally not in cages.) One can reliably assume that most "free-range" (or "cage-free") laying hens are debeaked, drugged, and cruelly slaughtered once "spent." I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range.

(jonathan safran foer, eating animals)

You won't get buildings with 3,000 ["cage-free"] laying hens—it's 30,000, 50,000, or 60,000. That being said, there are people who actually quantify how much space cage-free hens have, and I think it's something like 110 square inches as opposed to 67 for those in a cage, so that's a lot more space, but draw yourself a rectangle of 110 square inches—it's not what people have in mind when they spend more of their money to buy this product. Cage-free and free-range eggs are the fastest-growing sector of the food industry right now, which says something so amazing about Americans.

[Interviewer] People want to feel good about the product they're buying.

Right. They don't taste better, and they're not better for us. People all across the country are spending more of their money on something simply because they think it's the right thing to do, and they are being taken advantage of, and that should make everybody very angry.

(JSF, in a conversation with the atlantic's jeffrey goldberg)

lifestyle modification II: eggs and dairy products should only be purchased from demonstrably humane sources.

when joe and i got back from california last week, there were almost no animal products in the fridge. we bought humanely-produced, locally-sourced groceries from a cheesemonger at the local public market: eggs, a pint of cream, and a quart of milk. they were all of exceptional quality, and they cost about fifteen bucks.

In the past fifty years, as factory farming spread from poultry to beef, dairy and pork producers, the average cost of a new house increased nearly 1,500%; new cars climbed more than 1,400%; but the price of milk is up only 350%, and eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled. Taking inflation in account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history.

because of the way our government subsidizes corporate agribusinesses, and because of our consistent demand for their products, providing one's family with animal protein means either spending a substantial amount of money or accepting the institutionalized mistreatment of animals—and it often means both.

as you've probably gathered, my decisions about animal welfare are much more emotional than they are logical. truth be told, most of them have been very easy; i wasn't that interested in meat to begin with, there are plenty of replacements for leather out there, and no one's forcing me into mcdonald's. my relationship with ostensibly non-lethal forms of animal protein is much more complicated: i'll buy the straight stuff from the good guys, sure, but what about products which count them as ingredients? what about dining out? what do i feed our cats?

jonathan safran foer is a polarizing guy, to put it mildly, but you don't have to love him or his analogies (...michiko) to agree with eating animals's premise.

[W]e know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless—it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.

watch this space.

*even mcdonald's hash browns and fries (still!) contain "natural beef flavor."

03.20.12