The TueDo List: Blue Eyeshadow + Disco Emoji + Whitney Biography
And an excerpt from TueNighter Stephanie Gangi's new novel
THIS WEEK
📖 READ: Hail Mary J. Blige: beauty disrupter, Super Bowl headliner, and how-to-live inspiration. Coke killed Tab soda and superfans are trying to save it. Welcome to the menopause gold rush. If you got divorced, would you register for gifts, go on an extended outdoor adventure – or both? Better yet: Why not do a boudoir photoshoot? How Poly Styrene broke the mold. Inside an all-female fight camp: “I thought there was no way I could do it – not at my age.” Ana Marie Cox is ready to answer your questions about sobriety.
👀 LOOK: We are finally, finally getting a disco ball emoji. Your favorite TV series, in one word.
🎧 LISTEN: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, a new audiobook in which 90 (!) writers read their work. “Under Pressure,” but make it opera and cabaret.
🛒 ADD TO CART: The new Whitney Houston biography. TueNighter Issa Mas’ Grief Thoughts: Brief Anecdotes About Profound Loss. Converse’s Valentine’s Day-themed sneakers. 25 Black-owned brands to shop for everyday essentials.
LOL: Blue eyeshadow is back with a vengeance. Parents roastng their teenagers on Twitter. If you loved Jezebel’s “LOL Vogue” features 15 years ago, you will appreciate Awkward Zara. Vocabulary, grammar, and phrasing for people over 50. Wise advice from a 5-year-old.
📺 WATCH
Wednesday: Pam and Tommy looks awful but we’ll probably watch it anyway.(Hulu)
Thursday: And Just Like That... The Documentary. (HBO Max)
Friday: Halle Berry stars in Moonfall. (Theaters)
Sunday: This is Going to Hurt, a dark comedy series about life as a doctor. (AMC+)
STORY: Excerpt from Carry the Dog
By Stephanie Gangi
The following is an excerpt from Carry the Dog (Algonquin), the new novel by longtime TueNighter Stephanie Gangi!
I’m in the dark, I can’t see.
The glow of electronics in the bedroom messes with my melatonin so I’ve shut down the computer, unplugged the printer, there’s no phone or tablet charging nearby, no LED clock numbers. It must be two or three a.m., a winter night. City noise outside is sporadic, but bus brakes and sirens still shriek, and random humans and cats do too, and dogs bark, and the traffic on the highway rumbles, tidal. Under everything is the constant night hum peculiar to Manhattan. It sounds like the whir of the Vornado standing fans in the house where I grew up.
I once read that if you can’t sleep, don’t force your eyes closed, keep them open. To tire them out. So I search the dark for what I know is there—armoire, desk, big chair, Dory the dog—but can’t see. I feel-think around the rims and detect a slight burn and heaviness, like my eyes want to close so I close them.
Here we go. My brain is like a tourist clicking through souvenir scenes on an old View-Master with faded slides and old-fashioned darkroom prints. Click, a photograph emerges doubled behind each eyelid. Click, the two merge into one. A boy and a girl nap together. Nine and six, brother and sister, it’s in the faces and the geometry of the limbs. The sheet’s folds and wrinkles fit and draw the eye. Our shoulders are bare. My brother is on his back, arms wide, one leg flung off the side of the bed. His face is in shadow, obscured, but the way his curls cling to his neck, it is hot despite the fan. Summer. I am on my side turned away from him but close in the big bed, and my hands are held together under my cheek, like praying. My hair obscures my face too, except for my mouth, a slack bow. My brother’s mouth is a slack bow, too.
My mother took the photograph. She shot us while we slept, and Nap is the only candid included in the series that came to be known in the newspapers as the Marx Nudes.
Don’t move. Stay still.
Miri shot Nap with a Leica, but for the staged photo shoots she used an old-fashioned large-format view camera because she wanted to make big pictures. That camera was cumbersome outdoors, hard to move once set up, completely manual and labor-intensive. She would pose us, disappear under a canvas hood, managing exposure and composition, and wait for the light. We three—Ansel, Henry and I—would forget Miri was shooting and we’d wrestle and bicker or outright fight while she worked.
The hours we spent in the woods as subjects of our mother’s work were our chores, and we got an allowance which she called “pocket money.” I tell myself I was just a kid, that I didn’t know any better. I obeyed, I complied, I followed along with Ansel and Henry although I hated chores. Our bodies were arranged by my mother, shot, developed, printed, and hung on gallery walls by my mother. If we resisted, Miri used her arsenal to get us back up into the woods: our competitive natures, her artistic calling, and, of course, the threat of withholding the pocket money. If one of us complained (me), slammed a door (Ansel), disappeared at the appointed hour (Henry), our avoidance tactics would earn us days of silent treatment, no eye contact, and messages relayed through whoever had been most cooperative or our father, Albert.
Dory dream-growls and deep-breathes and dog-paddles in her sleep, curled in the curve between my ass and my thighs. I punch the pillows. I try another insomnia cure, a little movie of the mind, starring me. I am in the cast-off T-shirt and jeans of my brothers, I am barefoot with my black hair in a braid, I am sweeping each room of the Grand View house. I sweep, sweep my way to the darkroom at the back, and there is Miri in a denim apron with leather ties, photos pinned to a line above her head. Her hair falls, hiding her face. She’s smoking and stirring prints in development trays. She uses tongs, grips an edge, pulls me out, dripping. She frowns. I have not developed to her satisfaction. I am not who she saw through her lens.
Miriam Marx is long dead, and yet she’s inside me, where she has been my whole life, from before my life, from when I was cells inside her trying to gang up and become a person. She seeped in, with her low murmur and cigarette smoke and darkroom chemicals. She’s dead and yet when I catch a whiff of sour wine in last night’s glass, or the stubbed butts from my ashtray on the fire escape, it’s like smelling salts. She’s revived. Just the thought of green beans makes me gag, remembering how she would dump them from a can into a pot and heat them in their tinged water to show Albert she’d put something green on our plates. I would push them around with my fork, try to relax my throat, try to swallow to keep peace at the dinner table. Miri sat back with her wine, her cigarette, the squint that meant she was killing time until she could retreat to the darkroom with the day’s film.
On a night like tonight I think, Where was Albert?
I grope the bedside table for my notebook, my pen. I can’t see but I scrawl Albert with a question mark across the page, a note for the memoir I’m trying to write. The title is Exposed. Or Exposure. I can’t decide. It’s a work in progress, glacial progress. My idea is to look back from the brink of sixty and tell my story. The brink of sixty, it’s rough terrain for anybody, time to take stock of your life even if you didn’t have Miriam Marx as a mother.
I was born Berenice Marx-Seger. We were hyphenated before it was common but I dropped Marx a long time ago. I go by Bea, a nickname my mother hated. My brothers and I were each named for a photographer Miri idolized: Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Miri called Henri “Ahn-ree,” with a Parisian spin. She teased Ansel that he was lucky, she wanted to name him Weegee but Albert put his foot down for once. Albert is still alive, parked and idling at the Sandy Edge assisted living facility in Delray Beach, Florida. Ansel is dead. I haven’t spoken with Henri—he’s Henry to me, the regular way—in decades. So much has kept us apart.
Every few years there’s an article about my mother and then a rapid round of attention to Miriam Marx and her work. Culture vultures pick through everything old, everything “vintage,” especially art, especially controversial. People with a dark interest in naked kids explore my mother’s work from the anonymity of their devices. The backstory increases the buzz. I ignore the calls and the emails and the notifications and hide out until it all passes, but recently high culture, in the person of the associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, has found me.
Violet Yeun has been trying to contact me for months. Ms. Marx, on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art . . . Ms. Marx, as Associate Curator of the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art . . . Ms. Marx, if I may request an hour of your time . . . She is the foremost authority on my mother, besides me. She thinks my mother was a feminist visionary. She thinks the Marx Nudes represented a radical departure from the traditional family values of that era. She thinks Miri’s photographs showed that childhood is dark, innocence is a myth, motherhood is a trap, and art—Art—will set you free. Dr. Yeun wants to restore my mother’s reputation. I get it, I do. And yet. That’s me in the photographs, with my brothers, posed by our mother. Nude seems different than naked, nude means on display. A generation after Miri, Sally Mann got famous for photographs she took of her children, and there was a rush to compare us. At some point I got brave and read everything and zoomed in and the thing is, her kids look like themselves, except naked. We don’t. We’re on display. We’re nude.
I wonder what Henry would say.
The black room has blurred to dark gray. It must be predawn— four-thirty? Five? I can almost see the armoire, the desk, the books, shapes that loom. I can feel Dory breathing and I pace my breath to hers, the rise and fall, and that helps me sleep, almost. In old movies, magical spiritual types—Aborigines or Native Americans or the Amish—recoiled from cameras. They worried the camera would steal their souls, that the image would be cursed and the person in the photograph would suffer. From my own experience, the magical movie types had a point. I do feel like part of my soul was stolen by my mother’s camera. I do feel cursed.
Also, I’m waiting for some test results.
I go by Seger but inside, I am still part Marx. I can’t help it—I blister with something like pride when I read about my mother, the groundbreaking female photographer. I despised chores, but Miri stood me on a box and helped me fit my head under her canvas hood. She told me what to look for through the lens. She taught me how to look wide and change my perspective to see close. She showed me that far away is one place and near is another, even though they are both aspects of the same landscape. How the light will tell you what to see, if you wait. How if you wait, the right light will light the dark.
My brain hurts like a warehouse. I’ve always loved that Bowie lyric. There’s a storage unit north of the city with all of Miriam Marx’s work. I’ve never been there. I imagine it’s packed to the rafters with her cameras, equipment, undeveloped negatives, original prints, all the versions, rejected work, slides, videos, journals. All the images of me and my brothers. The Marx Nudes. I assume. I don’t know.
From CARRY THE DOG by Stephanie Gangi. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Copyright © 2021 by Stephanie Gangi. All rights reserved.
TUENIGHT 10: Paula Bernstein
Age: 53
Basic bio: Paula is a former entertainment journalist turned author and documentary filmmaker. She’s written three nonfiction books, including most recently, How To Be Golden: Lessons We Can Learn From Betty White.
Beyond the bio: I've finally (just about) gotten over my imposter syndrome. I've learned not to be so hard on myself, and am working on being kind to myself.
What makes you a grown-ass lady? Researching and writing my book about Betty White was really inspirational. She didn't become truly famous until after she was 50 – and then she only became more beloved as she aged. I wish that upon all of us!
Here’s her TueNight 10:
On the nightstand: An eye pillow filled with lavender that helps me to relax, When Women Invented Television by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and AirPods so I can listen to my favorite podcasts, including You Must Remember This and The Kitchen Sisters.
Can't stop/won't stop: Acting like a big kid, learning new things, working to make the world better in whatever small way.
Jam of the minute: The newly released Summer of Soul soundtrack.
Thing I miss: My father, who died a decade ago on Valentine's Day. I love his motto: "You can't go wrong doing right."
'80s crush: Rob Lowe, especially in Oxford Blues.
Current crush: My husband (really!), but also George Clooney.
Latest fav find: Obsessed with Weleda's Skin Food Body Butter, which I keep by my keyboard at all times!
Last thing you lost: Hmmm...can't think of anything I've lost recently, but I did walk out of the house without my keys just this morning!
Best thing that happened recently: I've started working on a new documentary project that I'm really excited about.
Looking forward to: Seeing friends and family again.
Happy New Year, TueNighters!
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