Summed up perfectly by Alex Ross, New Yorker (non-pop) music critic: “There is nothing shameful in unchecked enthusiasm. If I walk out dancing on air, I say it in the review.”
On that buoyant note, here’s a savvy meditation by my esteemed former colleague (at Legal Affairs, you media-mapping loonies) John Swansburg on the James Dean morbidity cult, Brando, Hamlet, and the invention of the troubled teenager.
Here’s a photo from Russia—a tank from the Kursk battlefield, which I visited last month, and a bird that was hopping in and out of it. Most of the other photos (all taken with throwaway cameras, hence thumb cameos) are up on Flickr too; I’ll be posting them here from time to time. Dig the ad for the Moscow “retro-style” restaurant whose decor “creates the atmosphere of the Soviet era 1970s.”
Glad to to see that Sasha Frere-Jones is a Pete Seeger fan. Since Seeger’s on my all-star list, here’s a tribute for the great man’s 86th birthday by Studs Terkel, who’s also on that list. “Hail Pete, at 86, still the boy with that touch of hope in the midst of bleakness. There ain’t no one like him.” Thanks for the link, SFJ! I’m also struck by Terkel’s rhetorical question “How could there be labor rallies without songs? It was in the true American tradition.” I wondered this myself after hearing Seeger on an NPR retrospective, and going to a sunny and meandering anti-nuke rally in Central Park soon afterward. Chants get old really quickly, and so does rhetoric. Music is the definition of unity; it might help lift current protesters from our general crestfallenness if we sang, not just new songs but what Seeger already taught us. Totally old-fashioned, true. But it’s been known to work.
I’m honored to be Normblog’s Friday profile today. This is a good place to develop your dossier about me. I tried to keep my answers shortish so Norm wouldn’t have to cross the Atlantic to pelt me with old scones, so there were people I ended up leaving off my lists of intellectual and cultural heroes (particularly the latter). They keep coming back to me, like one of those recurring dreams that you didn’t turn in that 15-page undergraduate paper about Kim Novak as auteur—oh wait, that’s true. Tim Clinton, I put you on my list of intellectual heroes because you taught me so much about film, and I swear I’ll finish it if you’ll let me.
Hi to my new Australian readership! I’m happy you’re here.
I mean it. Let’s see how I can best entice you. It’s a play that’s not expensive ($15! amazing seats). It’s very, very funny and quite moving. It’s about existential despair, and the costumes are excellent. There’s a wig and low-cut dresses and a crooked mustache. It’s on the Upper West Side (78th Street Theater, just off the southeast corner of 78th and Broadway). It’s by a Canadian playwright named Morris Panych. (Canadians: funny. Can’t deny it.) The women are hot and have great comic timing; the men are debonair and never stutter in their long waterfalls of dialogue. The play’s tagline is “One man on a ledge, twelve people who could care less.” Doesn’t sound funny? Oh, but it is. Panych’s publisher puts it well: “A fast-paced, sophisticated and hilarious play—a man’s contemplation of suicide leads to a charming and surprising ending.” Here’s a plot synopsis:
7 Stories is a comedy that tackles the issues of morality and the meaning of existence. The play opens with a man standing on a ledge of a building on the verge of jumping to his death. His silence is broken when a bickering couple burst from their window in the middle of an arguement. This begins a domino effect of eccentric characters coming out to engage the man on the ledge, oblivious to his state and consumed with their own lives.
Yes, eccentric’s one word for them. Other words are loony, tuney, goony, puny, moony, swoony, and kablooey. Besides that, my handsome and charming cousin Nick Lawson is in it, with a long monologue that demonstrates Panych’s uncanny premonition (in 1990) of Friendster:
And so is Paula Burton, as a daffy old lady (though she is, in fact, young, great-looking, and British to boot):
Not to mention these these swell actors, whose names you should recognize from major TV shows and other good plays—when you see their faces you’ll know immediately. Names without comment indicate that it’s the middle of the night and I can’t look up all their famousness, but you’ll have to trust me on this one.
Man: Tom Bain [You must not miss him in this. He plays the man on the ledge and never leaves the stage. Incredible.]
Marshall: Paden Fallis
Leonard: Nelson Lee [Traffic, Oz…]
Rodney: Happy Anderson
Charlotte: Teresa Heidt
Nurse Wilson: Jaime Hurley
Michael: Derek Ahonen
Al: Eric Thorne
Jennifer: Sarah Fraunfelder [Va-voom!]
Joan: Sarah Lemp
Rachel: Anna Mannas
Directed by Paden Fallis, Martin Friedrichs, and Nelson Lee; lighting design (excellent) by Chris Jensen.
Why this play? Why not any one of two dozen others? Because it’s cheap, it’s easy to get to, it’s not in Times Square, and it’s actually GOOD. Am I sweet-talking you into seeing it just because my cousin, Undisputed King of All Williamsburg Pizza Deliveries, is in it? No. I only recommend plays I’m really crazy about. From RocketShip’s (the theater company) manifesto:
For those who find pretension and artifice off-putting, who feel that theatre doesn’t neccesarily need to be handled in a reverential way, who tire of its high expense coupled with an all-too-often low pay-off—Rocketship is the night for you.
Rocketship is a jam session for actors, a truly accessible, eclectic, ambitious night of theatre. In the same way that minor league baseball attracts those who love the smell, the feel and the passion of the game itself—Rocketship was created by and for those who feel the same way about the theatre.
Rocketship pulls no punches, but relies on the old-fashioned premise that magic can happen when the actor, the text and the audience collide.
I’ll say! This play—the writer, the director, and the actors—gets it. You’ve got to see it. Buy tickets here now. Here are the remaining shows:
Saturday, April 30 @ 8pm and 10pm
Thursday, May 5 @ 8pm
Friday, May 6 @ 8pm
Saturday, May 7 @ 8pm
And give Nick a really good tip next time you see him. He’s earned it.
And boy are my arms controlled. Incredible time, incredible place. To come: the new regular cartoon-caption contest on the Back Page, and I attempt to time the complete reading of a single issue (the new one). Three hours? Six? I have no idea. But we’ll all know soon!
By the way, I have the dynamics of group travel on the brain after reading the sprightly Tad Friend piece about Lonely Planet in last week’s issue, and having just zipped around myself. This brings to mind A Room With a View, in this case the movie. I’ve been worrying over Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, because it’s so curiously prissy considering his character’s supposed anarchic oneness with nature. Or maybe it’s all right because it would take a fairly fussy person to build a perfectly environmentally harmonic house and guard it like a cave-dweller, not to mention protect his adolescent daughter from pretty much the entire world until it’s Too Late. Anyway, I took another look at the 1985 movie, and wouldn’t you know it, Cecil “the sort who can’t know anyone intimately” Vyse’s superior smirk returns with a vengeance to Day-Lewis’ face in Jack and Rose. I’m only a little alarmed because I’m not used to seeing his characters crop up again, since he’s so famously versatile. Who could forget him as the canny, ardent punk Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette—which, remarkably, opened the same year as A Room With a View? And all the rest. I just don’t want to see him narrowing. As his father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, once wrote of something entirely different,
A frost came in the night and stole my world
And left this changeling for it…
Still, I have faith. Johnny is still there, and Christy Brown and Tomas and Hamlet and Gerry Conlon, and so on. I’ll be all right as long as I don’t have to see that unchangingly haughty cast of face too often. I feel too much warmth for him to be iced out like that.
A Room With a View Is Everywhere and A Little Peek: Male Nudity in the Movies [Bjørn Smestad]
Two Travellers [Cecil Day-Lewis, via Old Poetry]
They do. I’ve seen it.
In all seriousness—and contrary to appearances, I am often serious—what I’ve seen so far of Russia (Moscow, Volgograd/Stalingrad—somewhat astonishingly, there’s a movement to change back the name) has been overpowering. Everyone I’ve met here seems to be bearing the weight of the country’s cumulative tragedies and madness and manifesting its famous determination, and I know I risk falling into the cliche of the noble Russian soul, but there’s a heaviness of spirit here that’s not about economic turmoil or alcohol or politics or even war. It’s heavy like crystal. I can’t be eloquent in a fluorescent business center on scant sleep, but I am so glad I’m here. Hope you’re enjoying the travel issue—I am! So much to discuss when I return. Keep sending those letters to the editor; it is very good and useful to know what you’re thinking and what you’d like to see covered more or, God knows, better.
I’m going to the land of the last scene of The Queen’s Gambit (a country also featured in the travel issue), and will return on the 22nd. Till then, I encourage you to cook up and send some letters to the editor (that’s me, not David Remnick—those should be directed here). What would you like to see me cover? Did you go to a magazine-related event recently, or not at all recently, and have a tasty anecdote? Is there a New Yorker writer you consider underappreciated, or overrated? I’ll print everything but unsubstantiated and/or potentially harmful gossip, and pointless snipes. Oh, and I never use private correspondence without permission. That leaves lots of room for you to create. Go to it!
Speaking of the travel issue, here’s Nick Paumgarten on NPR talking about that crazy ski thing. See you soon!
In today’s Newsday, I review the fascinating Holy Skirts, a novel by René Steinke about the turmoil, longing, aesthetic leaps, and no-goodnik husbands of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—the best-dressed radical nude model ever.
A Singular SensationHOLY SKIRTS, by René Steinke. Morrow, 360 pp., $24.95.
Sophisticated readers like to think that nothing can shock them. But they also tend to forget about periods more shocking, artistically speaking, than their own. The 1910s and ’20s were such times, when everything—from art to industry to politics—exploded into brilliant and unpredictable fireworks. At the center of one of those explosions, and the igniter of some of the blasts, was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the German-born poet-model-sculptor-scene-maker whose life is the heart of René Steinke’s new novel, “Holy Skirts.”
Holiness is the topic here, but not the angelic kind. The Baroness (as she was known after her marriage to a shifty nobleman) and her friends worshipped novelty, inappropriateness, audacity, not piously but with ferocious abandon. They advanced those things, too; her friends and associates eventually included Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp.
Her loyal editor, Jane Heap, whose magazine risked publishing Elsa’s agitated and impudent poems (not to mention a chapter of “Ulysses”), described Baroness Elsa as “the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada.” Steinke has called her a “proto-punk rock female artist.” A sexual radical, Elsa knew well how to barter her looks—or else mess with them by, say, shaving her head and painting it purple.
In the novel, Steinke retells a good deal of Elsa’s story, from her dismal childhood to a wild Berlin life as a nude “living statue,” which included training in both acting and quasi-prostitution and led to a serious stint as an artist’s model. Then—after three marriages to scoundrels—her manic, radical glory in the streets, galleries, little magazines, bars, bedrooms and women’s prison cells of New York City.
Still, in life and in “Holy Skirts,” for every great fashion spectacle (teaspoon earrings, tomato-can bra, gilded porcupine-quill eyelashes, a birdcage hat with a live canary in it, postage stamps as beauty marks) and truly avant-garde act (regularly reciting surrealist poetry at the top of her lungs at a rough saloon), Elsa made a lot of bad decisions. Ridiculing potential patrons was just one of them; a penchant for unworthy men another.
Steinke, an American writer and literary magazine editor, spelunks the darkness of the writerly consciousness (and the state of a woman whose sanity is often in question) extremely well. It’s perplexing, though, why she chose to write in a faux non-idiomatic English, even when Elsa is still in Germany or thinking, e.g. “She went man-crazy up to her ear tips.”
In the book’s final section, as Elsa enters a sort of trance state of poetic creation, romantic obsession and self-destruction, Steinke’s prose crystallizes and floats, and every detail seems exact and urgent. All of Elsa’s personae and mysterious half-truths fall away; the Baroness, all lust and gum-wrapper necklaces, becomes braver and more purposeful even as she crashes and burns.
Except for the distracting idiom and some overdone scene-setting, “Holy Skirts” is a mighty book, as grand and peculiar and off-kilter as the Baroness’ found-object sculptures. After you read it, you’re likely to find yourself not only wanting to do and make daring things, but actually doing it. Now that’s a legacy, and a literary coup.
A Singlar Sensation [Newsday]
The Dada Baroness [Artnet]
A Short Biography of the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Including Some of Her Writings [Christopher Lane]
