I’ve always wondered if this “treatment/exercise method” still exists:
“Gordon Baldwin: I think [Edie’s] idea was to model in New York. Much of that summer she went to a salon where they literally pounded her legs into shape. Her legs were not good in those days––piano legs––but by the time the course was over she ended up with those legs that were so famously beautiful.”
–– Edie: An American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton
Last night, while watching Born Schizophrenic: One Year Later (I’ve been following Jani’s progress for a while now) I had a somewhat disturbing thought. When the parents said they had a hard time getting out by themselves because they couldn’t find babysitters equipped to deal with their 10 year-old schizophrenic daughter and 6 year-old autistic son, I said to myself, “I’ll do it!” As I started planning my introductory email to them and thinking of how to finance my plane ticket, I realized that maybe this was a little unusual.
Yes, yes, of Mrs. Doubtfire fame––I used to have a tiny grudge against her because I feel like she stole my chance at stardom by being cast in the Miracle on 34th Street remake (we’ll discuss over drinks, M) but now I kind of have a friend crush on her, to the point where I ALMOST DRUNK JOINED TWITTER TONIGHT AND DRUNK TWATTED AT HER to respond to the following post on her blog. Excerpt:
When I was a child, Saturday was my least favorite day of the week. The Jewish sabbath day is supposed to be a day of rest, but to a child, rest is boring and boredom is death. We couldn’t turn on the radio or computer, and TV was strictly off-limits. 1 We had to go to temple and listen to prayers in another language for hours, which hardly appealed to me: I was a conscientious kid, but apparently not a very spiritual one. There was only one upside, and that was that my mother’s loose interpretation of “rest” meant we could have candy. She was strict about our sugar consumption during the week, but come Saturday, candy, cookies, and sweets of all kinds were no longer off limits. Judaism’s laws against eating milk with meat also meant we were allowed to eat chocolate before dinner. Jelly beans and gelt were given out in Hebrew School, and going to a Bar Mitzvah meant getting to eat the gummy candies that had been thrown at the boy who had just become a man. Every Sunday was spent in a sugar hangover.
There was little I wouldn’t do for candy in those days, and my peers were similarly desperate. We lived for candy-rich holidays like Halloween, Easter, or Purim, and teachers regularly bribed us with Warheads (which were sour until they were sickly-sweet) and Blo-Pops (which were far superior to Tootsie Roll Pops). It was pure cruelty when a substitute teacher bribed my class with two caramels, saying she would give them to the two quietest, most studious students of the day. 2 My parents also didn’t allow me to have candy on set, for fear I’d get too hyped up on chocolate and sugar and then crash when I needed to be focused on acting. This meant that every night, as soon I wrapped, I would raid the Craft Service table. We filmed Matilda an hour away from Burbank, and I often spent the nightly car ride back home in a backseat sugar orgy so shameless and desperate Lou Reed could have written a song about it.
My tweet was going to be:
@marawilsonwritesstuff –– watch Seinfeld’s bit about candy immediately if not sooner.
Mara if you read this, email Siobhan to set up drinks.
Mars (the planet) wrote me an email.
Well, stolen from me… before I was born.
When I was at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, I considered writing a mock-children’s book about a bookstore in which the characters in famous books come to life at night and haunt the daughter of the owner. Dorothy Parker would teach her all about the stupidity of romance, Yukio Mishima would commit seppuku on loop, and Jean-Paul Sartre would smoke (a lot.) It would be kind of like In the Night Kitchen meets Midnight in Paris, except with a more international cast of writers.
However, it seems someone else, namely Christopher Morely, wrote a book called The Haunted Bookshop, which will be out this August from the adorable Melville House. Synopsis as follows:
“When you sell a man a book,” says Roger Mifflin, the protagonist of this classic novella, “you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.” Mifflin—whom we first meet in Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels—is an itinerant bookseller, ensconced in literary Brooklyn.
“If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages,” he advises, “it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop.”
The shop, haunted by “the ghosts of all great literature,” provides the alluring setting for this suspenseful novella. Strange things are happening: books disappear and reappear, suspicious characters lurk, and the distant First World War may be encroaching even on the peaceful old brownstone where the shop makes it home. A thoroughly entertaining tribute to the bookseller’s art, and one of the most beloved bookish novels of all time.
I will pay you if you get this internship and will do recon for me.
Internship at the office of Marina Abramovic
Abramovic LLC
(New York NY)
The office of artist Marina Abramovic is excited to announce our summer internship position.
The internship will primarily involve work on an exciting project in Marina Abramovic’s video archive. For this reason, we are seeking applicants with technical video skills. Knowledge of the history of video as a medium, a variety of videotape formats and current software platforms such as Final Cut Pro and File Maker Pro is strongly desired. A basic understanding of and a sincere curiosity about video and art history is also desired.
We are seeking applicants to begin immediately. The position is a three-month commitment, with some flexibility. Interns will work 2 to 3 days per week.
The position is unpaid, though past internships have led to longer collaborations and other exciting projects.
This position is a rare opportunity for anyone interested in a career in the arts.
Please email abramovic.intern@gmail.com with 2 PDF attachments:
-Your resume
-Your cover letter
In the body of the email, please include:
-Your name and email
-The names and numbers of three references
“Good girls are bad girls who don’t get caught.”
You sound like good fun, Faigy Teitelbaum.
My boss always cites this as the best title of all time, and for quite a while I thought this was a fake-book, but it turns out it is REAL (though a play.) Someone needs to re-stage this immediately. Synopsis below:
Despite the title, it has intense meaning for these times. The scene is a room in a wealthy country club, to which the men’s committee is hastily summoned early one morning after a carousing dance. Problem: what to do about the 16 luscious but low life females who drove up in a Rolls Royces and then proceeded to the tennis courts, where they are now disporting. While the committee huddles, we learn that they are the vulgar, crass people. They are good for nothing but blustering and simpering. It is the attendant, far more refined than they, who is invited out to play with the bevy of beauties, just before the final assault and the collapse of their cardboard world.
DESPITE the title?
A while ago––I know now it must have been 2010––I read an article in the Times about a rundown mansion in the Hudson Valley (I thought that was it) that housed the eccentric members of a blue blooded American family and their various guests and tenants. The house sounded like a bohemian dream, sheltered from the outside world by hundreds of acres and the thick atmospheric padding of centuries of history. I wanted so badly to write to the inhabitants there and ask if I could come stay a while, but I quickly forgot all of the important details of the piece, namely the family’s patronymic, where the house was, exactly, and what they called the house. I searched on the Times with every weak combination I could think of, usually a combination of “bohemian,” “family,” “mansion,” “Hudson.” Of course, I got nothing.
Then yesterday I was sitting in Union Station in Washington DC, painfully full of steak and feeling inexplicably melancholy (considering I’ve been in relatively high spirits as of late.) I started to read the latest Smithsonian magazine and almost tossed it aside, as I felt plagued by an old jealousy of the writers whose work was featured, and the fascinating, productive people they profiled. But I idly skipped to the book review section at the end, and found a review of a forthcoming memoir from HarperCollins entitled Astor Orphan. Below, a description via HC’s website:
The Astor Orphan begins in Alexandra Aldrich’s tenth summer, at the moment when her father returns home with an alluring Frenchwoman. The interloper sets into motion a series of familial feuds and disasters that unmoor the last remnants of Alexandra’s family life.
But as Alexandra reveals, the origins of her family’s disintegration can be traced back to the Gilded Age when the greater Astor legacy began to come undone, leaving the Aldrich branch virtually penniless and squabbling over what little was left.
Alexandra grew up in the servants’ quarters of Rokeby, the family’s beautiful mansion, foraging for her next meal, battling for dominance with her wealthier first cousins, and striving to get her pathologically distracted parents to take care of her. Amid the chaos and squalor of the household, the young girl, forced by circumstances to become wise beyond her years, rose promptly at 6:30 each morning, adhering to a strict schedule of exercise, cleanliness, and intensive violin practice that imposed order on her anarchic world.
Illustrated with sixteen pages of black-and-white photographs that bring this faded world into focus, The Astor Orphan is Alexandra Aldrich’s heartrending story-a memoir of staggering power with the unflinching pathos and grit of The Glass Castle and the faded glory and madness of Grey Gardens.
Of course! Rokeby! I immediately went back and found the original article and was entranced anew. (Aldrich is a convert to Orthodox Judaism!) Now the only things left to do are:
1. Decide whether or not to purchase the book––doesn’t sound like my usual fare, but it’s gotten very good reviews, and I do freaking love Grey Gardens
2. Find the street address for Rokeby (I came close; it’s possible they have no mailbox.)
3. Think of a good excuse to visit/stay for a vacation, and write to ask them if I can come.
When I was in college, I was far more glamorous than I am now, which is to say I spent my parents’ money freely on baubles and fur shrugs and went to parties downtown at Bungalow 8 and other places that used to be cool. I also interned at the most famous fashion magazine in the world, and I would stumble into work on Friday mornings wearing last night’s make-up and dark green wedge heels and proceed to romp around the closet and order messengers most of the day. While there, I became friendly with my boss, who was close with the jewelry designer Lulu Frost, aka Lisa Salzer. Lisa was making these necklaces out of the numbers from the doors at the Plaza Hotel, which at this point had just been sold. I had a huge friend crush on Lisa and went to visit her studio, and she, in recompense for my affection, sold me a Plaza number necklace at a discount price. And today I was wandering around the interwebs looking at jewelry in a moment of intellectual laziness and came across Lulu’s website and OH MY G-D I should have stayed friends with her and tried to snatch something from her “Let’s Bring Back” collection, such as this necklace made of eyes.
Casati-inspired.
It occurs to me that this is at least the second post I’ve written about ocular necklaces, and at least the third about necklaces designed to look like human body parts. I would have made a great voodoo priestess.
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