The last of the tomatoes are coming in now, wide and cracked, heavy with the captured humidity of passing summer, each one a Neruda poem shedding its own light, benign majesty. It is time to eat them, these sunsets of the season, then put away our flip-flops and face the fall.
Dear Sam Sifton: You are a wonderful writer, and yes, tomatoes are magical and delicious. But your editor should probably have reigned you in a bit on this one.
And now for today’s accounting of things that are dead or otherwise over: Paste magazine. Heeb magazine. Felicity Merriman, the Revolutionary War-era American Girl doll (once owned and beloved by my childhood friend Joanna, whose mother wouldn’t buy her a doll tied to a more recent historical period because it wouldn’t have been educational enough). Novelty shops. Books–again, or still (according to Ms. Harper Lee). And thankfully, the month of August.
Alive and well: Five of the dresses Vivien Leigh wore as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, after fans responded to a museum appeal by donating $30,000 to restore and preserve them.
Today’s best headline: “‘Cougar’ Trend of Women Chasing Younger Men a Myth.”
You don’t say.
The glut of 90’s-centric fashion has finally led the Times to an obvious source of influence: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, wearing all those poufy floral patterned dresses, often paired with jackets and boots. Writer William Van Meter thinks her look incorporated a range of styles, including “early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious zealot.” Of course, in it’s latest incarnation, “the layered floral/tough girl Elaine look is nostalgic.”
What’s weirder is how Van Meter explains the current embrace of this style as an amalgam of “this season’s trends of the early ’90s and the working woman” (love how those are both analogous “trends”). He claims many hipsters decked out in Elaine-inspired outfits “are too young to realize whom they are referencing”–dubious, since Seinfeld is in constant syndication–and quotes one stylist who attributes it to a backlash against the tight, short clothes women embraced not long ago: “This is a more covered-up look and looking like you have a brain. Elaine had a job. She worked at J. Peterman. She was a go-getter.” A career girl role model in blousy calico! Next up, Murphy Brown (or did I just miss that one?).
Elsewhere in Thursday Styles, Jon Caramanica plays Critical Shopper at Scout Vintage T-Shirts, a store full of “questionable pasts…a small warehouse of rejected memories.” He writes:
I pondered what made some shirts, once vessels of memory, acceptable detritus. Did people no longer wish to advertise that they had survived the 1989 Bay Area earthquake ($38) or the Wisconsin blizzard of 1982 ($28)? (True survivors — which is to say, true victims — probably didn’t buy commemorative T-shirts.) Did the Pulaski Academy Jogathon ($18) not merit a memento?
Good questions. And in the end, I have to respect the fact that Caramanica goes into places like this with clear boundaries: “I won’t buy something I, or my imagined self, wouldn’t have worn in its original time period. Clothes send messages, and I have no interest in looking like someone else’s yesteryear.”
Look, I love Mad Men. LOVE. And I’m willing to buy that Matthew Weiner is some kind of genius. But I’m getting kind of sick of reading interviews with the cast that repeatedly invoke the show’s creator like he is some kind of oracle, you know? It starts to seem like they are all brainwashed.
A few days ago, I went through a stack of back issues of The New Yorker, pulling out articles I wanted to read and tossing the rest of the issue (this is really the only way to deal with the relentless arrival of that magazine; sometimes I feel like it breeds in my mailbox…). Somehow I’d missed David Owen’s essay from the January 25th issue, “The Dime Store Floor,” about he and his sister very deliberately visiting their childhood haunts to see if they still smelled the same: the building where their dentist’s office used to be, an art museum where they went on many field trips, the titular dime store (“which had once been flavored mainly by dust, plus a sort of comforting over-scent that was related to mildew in the same way that cognac is related to wine” and was now “dominated by scented candles”). Visiting his childhood home in the midst of a renovation by the new owners, he notes the many things that had been changed along with the startling number of things that had not: “Each surviving detail was a pushpin holding the past to its easel.” And along the way, he looks back on things that aren’t places he can simply drive to and drink in for comparison’s sake—the smells that got snarled in his mind and formed the actual seed of his memories.
The essay ends with Owen reflecting on the indelible associations of things like shampoos and deodorants, how the smell of someone’s hair in high school can be the baseline of what you find attractive for the rest of your life, and how if you realized that time would inevitably move a particular product off the market, “you could have bought a few bottles and placed them on a shelf somewhere, for later sampling and contemplation—once each spring, perhaps, or during the final moments of life.” He buys, accidentally-on purpose, his father’s brand of deodorant, and “was almost knocked over by what I can only describe as a physical memory of my father.”
Owen (whose books include one about going undercover as a high school student, and one about the invention of the Xerox machine) is wallowing in the kind of naked nostalgia that’s usually seen as embarrassing and indulgent, old or aging men lost in the fog of their pasts. But it’s really different than Garrison Keillor’s arrogant, half-imagined approach to “the good old days.” Owen isn’t apologizing for lavishing time and words on the specific content of his memories; his approach is both forensic and romantic, largely (if unconventionally) evidence-based. His directness is sort of unnerving, and feels entirely earned.
Without a subscription, The New Yorker’s website only lets you access an abstract of the essay, which sort of hilariously reduces all its sensitivity and depth to what must be an automated (or intern-generated) summary: “Writer recalls the fragrances of his paternal grandmother, known as Gaga…Writer recalls the smell of cigarette smoke and the parties his parents threw when he was a child…”
Jezebel flips through Time Out New York’s sex issue from 1996—a year “when business was booming and ‘hookup culture’ hadn’t been invented yet”—and finds that things were sorta-kinda different then, but not really.
Meanwhile, The Awl takes a pretty ambivalent look back at Kids, on the fifteenth anniversary of that movie’s release.
The Times reports on an annual reunion of people who posed for Norman Rockwell—those still around are mostly elderly folks who modeled for Rockwell as kids. I do wonder what they have to talk about…how much mileage can they really have gotten out of that experience? The paper also recently offered a dispatch from the Chinatown Fair video arcade—”one of the last of the traditional arcades left in the city”—and a piece pointing out how, despite it being difficult and sort of useless, psychological researchers are determined to find a basis for generalizing about generations:
Generation Y’s collective personality, if such a thing exists, is not likely to be much different from other generations’. Still, small differences may matter…[one psychologist] has found a slight decrease in trust over the generations and a slight increase in a something called “ascendancy,” or “competence” — a self-professed confidence in getting things done.
At Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, an elegy for the “cluttered little beauty” of a Union Square newsstand that was recently replaced by one of the slick new glass and steel designs.
e.p.t. brand pregnancy tests are offering a special pouch you can send in for, in which to preserve your peed-on pregnancy test and by extension, “the moment you knew.”
Anticipating a time when “[b]ooks will…suffer the fate that has already befallen letters sent by mail: preciousness,” Mark Oppenheimer writes in Slate about what we lose when electronic devices take the place of books, whose covers we’ve come to count on to tell us something about the person reading them: “[W]hat will you do, Kindle generation, when you cannot tell which of the quiet boys holding the e-reader on the subway is engrossed by the latest, predictable legal thriller, and which one by a cheery, long-forgotten Laurie Colwin novel?”
At Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz commemorates Kodachrome film, the very last frames of which were produced last month:
Kodachrome photos were luminous and warm but not garish; in some inexpressible way, they seemed to capture the sensation of remembering the past, fixing nostalgia along with people and places….Its official end as a commercial format — one that you could just drop off and pick up at the local pharmacy — is yet another notable marker in an ongoing story: society’s total conversion from analog to digital media….That’s ultimately what the end of Kodachrome is really about: the end of a small but significant kind of poetry that was bound up with analog image-making.
Right, Katie Roiphe’s piece about Mad Men from a couple weeks back: “In the early ’60s they smoldered against the repression of the ’50s; and it may be that we smolder a little against the wilier and subtler repression of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times,” she writes by way of explaining our obsession with the show, and suggesting that we might learn to embrace some of the oh-so-sexy “messiness” that shapes the lives of its characters. “Juxtaposed against all this flamboyance, the tameness of contemporary sins can be a little disheartening.” Maybe it’s the attempt at juxtaposition that’s the problem?
In a smart response at The Awl, Peter Birkenhead wonders, “Where has she gotten the positively Mad Men-era idea that ‘embracing the responsibility’ of marriage precludes a messy, exciting—sometimes even transcendentally so—life? Does Roiphe not get that, in her creaky old (and exceedingly bougie) critique of ‘bourgeois culture,’ she sounds like one of the be-goateed trust-funders Don meets during the first season of the show?”
Speaking of Mad Men (and really, when aren’t we?), Ruth La Ferla considers the relentless cycle of nostalgic fashion, most recently inspired by the ubiquitous show: “Lately though, such revivals seem shopworn — not to say mindlessly literal. Where, after all, is the irony in pushing replicas of grandma’s twin sets, camel’s hair coats and crinolines on a generation bred on loose-fitting T-shirts, denim and cyberworld tints?”
And check out these gorgeous color photos taken between 1939 and 1943…It’s amazing how your whole sense of that time can change when you see it captured in something other than black-and-white. Call it The Wizard of Oz effect?
