THE NOT-SO-SECRET DIARIES OF A DOMINATRIX
Many things come easy in life to smart, beautiful women. Melissa Febos, the author of "Whip Smart", understands this. It is what allows her to nail job interviews and collect boyfriends with ease. But Febos also has gifts as a writer, including a knack for self-deflation. "Whip Smart" is a memoir about the author's four-year career as a dominatrix in a dungeon in midtown Manhattan. "An hour alone with a naked man with whom you do not intend to have sex can be a very long time," she recalls thinking on the day of her first session. Already we like her.
Now a writing instructor at SUNY Purchase College and the Gotham Writers' Workshop, Febos begins her story with her search for a job that pays better than her gigs in publishing. She was then a recent graduate of the New School university in New York, with a minor heroin habit, an inborn curiosity and a petite and curvy figure. Her neighbour, whose apartment bears such signs of sophistication as an Egon Schiele print and air-conditioning, is a dominatrix who seems to enjoy her job. The two women talk: trade secrets are shared, seeds are sown.
Febos locates the Dungeon of Mistress X through an ad in the back of the Village Voice. The place is nicer than she had expected, a sprawl of spotless dungeons outfitted with hanging cages, riding crops, paddles and coffins. Coffins? "For clients into sensory deprivation," explains Febos's superior during the tour. Ah, yes. She is hired, and her asking price will be $75 for an hour-long session, plus tips. Work starts the following Monday. read more »
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THE FEED: MAR 12TH
What we're reading:
Will kids understand Shakespeare better if they don't have to sit still? (Guardian)
A show of letters by J.D. Salinger
Salinger's dam of silence has sprung its first leak (Wall Street Journal)
Thousands of non-believers zealously converge in Melbourne, Australia (BBC)
What's in the David Foster Wallace archive?
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas inherits the mess of papers he had stashed in a dark garage over-run with spiders (New Yorker)
Today's quote:
"By focusing on criminalising a government and making military intervention the top priority’, he argues, ‘[the Save Darfur Coalition] has made peace more elusive and increased the suffering of ordinary Darfuris."
~ Rob Crilly, author of "Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War", in a review by Philip Hammond, "Darfur: every celeb’s favourite African war" (spiked review of books) read more »
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WHITNEY'S TEPID BIENNIAL
Sleet spattered over VIPs queuing outside for the opening of the Whitney Biennial on February 23rd. We suffered in silence, in darkness, our conversations drowned by the monastic groaning of an outdoor installation that cast an eerie blue hue. Dumpling trucks prowled and rogue cameramen interviewed some on a scrap of red carpet. We inched along as the storm intensified, sentries sifting us into various purgatories.
Once inside, past menacing squads of security officers and Blackberry-wielding event planners, we were rewarded with heat, light, DJed electronica, crowds, food, wine and, eventually, art. We began our tallying for our respective cost-benefit analyses: was it worth the wait?
The Biennial spans three floors—more when counting "Collecting Biennials", a nearly year-long show of permanent-collection works by artists featured in Biennials past, in celebration of the show’s 75th year. Francesco Bonami, this year’s co-curator, broke it down for us: floor four is “spectacle”, three is “video” (the first Biennial to devote an entire floor to the medium) and two is “creepy”. We are meant to choose our own path, but the most convenient approach is to take the elevator to the fourth floor and walk down. read more »
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THE FEED: MAR 10TH
What we're reading:
A demolition of Hank Paulson's memoir
A critic huffs that Paulson sounds tough but was in fact all too weak (New Republic)
A book that defends plagiarism, champions faked memoirs and declares fiction dead has the literary world up in arms (Salon)
The trade paper fires its two top critics, moving to freelance reviews (Los Angeles Times)
The late choreographer's dance company embarks on a final tour before disbanding (Wall Street Journal)
Today's quote:
"[T]his poor sap of a show feels as eager to be walloped as a clown in a carnival dunking booth."
~ Ben Brantley on "Love Never Dies", Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequal to "The Phantom of the Opera", "Same Phantom, different spirit" (New York Times)
(Via The Economist)
Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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FRITZ LANG'S HAUNTING PRESCIENCE
"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator," declares Maria to her underground followers in "Metropolis". When Fritz Lang's apocalyptic silent film premiered in Berlin in 1927, it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was also a commercial and critical flop. Paramount Pictures swiftly acquired the film, trimming its length and simplifying its plot to appeal to an American market. It didn't work: the film bombed in America, too, and the original cut was presumed to be lost forever.
In the meantime, Lang's stylish vision of a grim future has become a cult relic, fascinating cineastes and inspiring directors such as Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. Now, over 80 years later, the film recently enjoyed another world premiere, again in Berlin—this time as the director's cut.
Set in the year of 2026, "Metropolis" features lowly, expendable labourers toiling in polluted darkness to support the wealthy few. Lang's imagery is bizarre and haunting, full of grinding machinery, a mad scientist and a fembot villain. It also boasts a plot full of weird gaps and confusing transitions. In 2008 a previously unknown copy of "Metropolis" was found in a museum archive in Buenos Aires, complete with missing scenes. This "sensational discovery", according to Rainer Rother, the head of the Berlin film museum Deutsche Kinematik, has filled in some of the more mystifying parts of the story. Smaller characters are fleshed out; bigger characters are better motivated. read more »
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THE FEED: MAR 8TH
Today's links:
Extraordinary intelligence may not be genetic (Salon)
The problem with a new biography of Nina Simone is the woman herself (Washington Times)
Is a "Best Actress" award sexist? No (Los Angeles Times)
It's time for Russian writers to engage with the country's dodgy past (New York Times)
Today's quote:
"Well, the time has come."
~ Barbara Streisand, presenting the best director Oscar to Katherine Bigelow, the first woman to win; in Roger Ebert's Oscar round-up "No Pain for 'Hurt Locker,' Bigelow" (Chicago Sun-Times)
(Via The Economist)
Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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THE Q&A: JOHN SUSSEX, AUTHOR, TRADER
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Scene: ground floor of the Royal Exchange, London, 1983, 8:30 am. The bell sounds, prompting a roar from hundreds of men wearing orange, red and blue jackets, shouting orders for all manner of financial contracts. Phones ring, clerks scribble instructions from clients and rush into the pits shouting the order and dealer's name. By noon, thousands of trades have been made; millions of dollars have been won or lost.
When outsiders observed the London Futures Exchange (LIFFE) from the balcony above, they likened the scene to a gladiator's pit or a bullring. It was a roiling, sweating, shouting and laughing manifestation of global capitalism, the market made flesh. All eyes—hundreds of them—were glued to the ticking movements of prices on the screen above the floor. Nicknamed "Maggie's boys", these traders thrived in Margaret Thatcher's England, a time when a certain rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial spirit challenged the City’s elitist status quo. They are the subject of "Day One Trader", John Sussex’s colourful book about life in the pits of the exchange in the 1980s and 1990s, before electronic trading put these men out of business. A former trader himself, Sussex was on the floor when LIFFE started in 1982, and continued on 20 years later, when the exchange was sold to Euronext and the open outcry method gave way to computerised trading. The result is a somewhat wistful account (with help from Joe Morgan, a journalist) about an era and a group of men who now seem anachronistic. On March 1st Frankfurt's stock exchange—Germany's largest—announced it would also end its traditional floor trading and move to an electronic system. read more »
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THE FEED: MAR 5TH
Today's links:
Nostalgia for bookshelves, already (Globe and Mail)
Not even an Oscar boosts box-office sales for documentaries and foreign films (Los Angeles Times)
Ostrich eggs used in stone-age communication (Discovery News)
Know the name St Clair McKelway (New York Times Book Review)
Today's quote:
"Surrealism isn't surreal anymore. It doesn't shock or jolt. It isn't confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners."
~ Morgan Meis, "Say 'Fromage!': Photography's surprising impact on the Surrealists" (Smart Set)
(Via The Economist)
Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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GO EAST, YOUNG WOMAN
When reading Elif Batuman’s "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them", her debut book of essays, it’s easy to feel as though you are witnessing a love affair. “Half understanding” is how she describes her infatuation with Russian literature. She adores the way reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, et al, involves oscillating between visceral resonance and terrified confusion. The result is an intellectual thrill—both for her and her readers.
Batuman’s “fascination with Russianness” began casually. As a child, a first-generation Turkish-American in New Jersey, she found herself bewildered by the eccentric mannerisms of her Russian piano teacher. Mystification becomes bewitchment after she discovers an old copy of "Anna Karenina" as a teenager at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara.
“How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small—so serious and so light—so strange and so natural?” What Batuman loved about the novel is what she would later love about Russian literature in general: these seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes. For her "Anna Karenina" is “a prefect book, with an otherworldly perfection; unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a supercharged grey zone between nature and culture.” Indeed, the book's contrast echo Russia itself, that sprawling country peppered with weird little villages. read more »
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THE FEED: MAR 4TH
Today's links:
When children's books go gay (New Republic)
Public-service ads that rely on shame don't work (Ad Age)
The rise of the sombre musical (New York Times)
Ryszard Kapuscinski was a great story-teller, but how much was fiction? (Guardian)
Today's quote:
"We all of us change and develop as we pass into adulthood and beyond, and there is no reason to suppose that a child who murders should be exempt from this inevitability."
~ Brian Masters, "Jon Venables is no longer the guilty boy who killed James Bulger" (Telegraph)
(Via The Economist)
Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comment of the moment
quote How could Mr. Ewing talk about board game renaissance without mentioning Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, which are far less repetitive than risk or monopoly and have been the true catalyst of the recent board game revival. ...