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The art of storytelling is the art of simplification—of giving smooth contours and sharp points to messily loose-ended incidents. That’s why, when artists tell their life stories, the plethora of factual details is secondary to the emotions, the ideas, the insights, and the sublime style that distinguish their art. So it is with Nanette Burstein’s documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” which is built around a series of audio interviews with Taylor from 1964, by the Life magazine journalist Richard Meryman. In them, Taylor reflects, at thirty-two, on the tumultuous life she’d been leading, as a Hollywood actress, since childhood. Without hearing the unedited tapes, it’s impossible to know what Burstein has left out (or what Taylor and Meryman avoided talking about), but what comes into focus in Taylor’s keen-edged anecdotes and reflections, is the studio system in which she worked. “The Lost Tapes” (which streams on Max starting August 3rd) not only unfolds the inner life of a movie star but also puts under intense scrutiny the very nature of Hollywood—the distinction between the art of movies and the distortions wrought when studios transform that art into big business.
Burstein keeps the movie’s focus on its main source—Taylor’s voice. Her words are often heard over footage of a reel-to-reel tape recorder, in a way that draws attention to the power of her voice. Burstein further emphasizes voices by offering no talking-head interviews; supplementary interviews (including with the actor Roddy McDowall, Taylor’s friend Doris Brynner, and agent Marion Rosenberg) are heard but not seen. The soundtrack unfolds over a judicious and often poignant selection of archival footage (including home movies, promotional reels, and news reports) and still photographs. The method is effective; “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” is no radical advance in documentary form, but its emphasis on the auditory over the visual subtly suggests the disconnect between a private individual and her public image.
As Taylor tells it, she was set on becoming a movie actress from the age of ten, when her parents took her to visit a Hollywood studio. Her father happened to know an M-G-M producer, who, having agreed to audition her as a favor, then immediately signed her to a contract and cast her in “Lassie Come Home” (1943). Told that she was too short to play the lead role of a child jockey in “National Velvet” (1945), she stretched herself with exercises to grow three inches in three months, got the part, and was propelled to stardom. Yet there is bitterness in her recollections of adolescent stardom. Her school lessons happened at the studio, with three hours of classes amid eight hours of work—“ten minutes here, fifteen minutes” between takes. She calls the routine “grim” and is adamant that switching constantly, on the set, between schoolwork and filming was detrimental both to her education and to her acting.
Taylor’s story is that of a managed life. Not only was she working as a child—a process no less stunting for children employed in the so-called dream factory than for those in regular jobs—but she was also being thrust into a public role, a faux identity, that distorted her emotional development and sense of a private life. She is clear-eyed about the creepiness of the way that the studio sexualized her image, as early as her mid-teens. (The documentary shows a promotional film touting her “glorious sixteen-year-old cover-girl beauty.”) And as with the publicity, so with the roles: “All of a sudden, at the age of sixteen, but looking twenty-four,” Taylor says, she found herself playing the wife of Robert Taylor, an actor twenty years her senior.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
When I was 9 and first ventured online in 2005, the internet was my playhouse. Every evening after school, I would jump into my online cartoon world where I could choose between dozens of websites made for kids my age. At Club Penguin, I adopted colorful pets called puffles and purchased kitsch furniture for my virtual igloo. In the Neopets haven of Neopia, I visited the money tree to collect items others had discarded. On Pony Island, I dressed up my herd of colorful horses (despite my aversion to the animal, I found the game irresistibly cool). And on Furry Paws, my favorite game of all, I raised, trained, and bred virtual dogs.
I loved the game so much that I taught myself HTML and CSS to decorate my kennel above and beyond the in-game options. I designed quirky, unreadable fonts and banners that flashed so brightly they should have come with a warning sign. Nearly a decade later, I took those skills to the next level by studying computer science in college. I can’t help but think my afternoons on Furry Paws shaped that decision.
Nowadays, at 28, I stick to just a few, far less joyful websites. I read the news or scroll through Instagram and TikTok — my colorful cartoon pets long ago abandoned. Even if I wanted to go back to relive the nostalgia, I couldn’t. Most of my online childhood haunts don’t exist anymore — at least, not in the way that I remember them. It’s a stark contrast to when childhood memorabilia of generations past like comic books, board games, and cartoons stuck around for decades. As younger generations spend more and more of their lives on the internet — which is more ephemeral than most realize — and as internet trends cycle through increasingly brief lifespans, our past disappears earlier and earlier.
The late 2000s and early 2010s were the heyday of massive multiplayer online games designed for young kids. Dozens of games emerged, including Webkinz, where real stuffed animals morphed into digital pets; Toontown, Disney’s cartoon universe; Moshi Monsters, where 80 million players worldwide raised pet monsters; and Stardoll, a dress-up game that at one point had 400 million users.
For my generation of young millennials and elder Gen Zers, these games were far more than just a way to pass the time — they were formative experiences. Dylan Maleno, a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania, recalled starting his online gaming journey at just 5 or 6. “I was big on Club Penguin, Wizard101, Moshi Monsters, and this obscure one called Ourworld,” he told me. He was particularly drawn to their cozy environments and their “sense of false responsibility.” Most games involved furnishing virtual homes, decorating spaces, and caring for digital pets — essentially, an online version of playing house. “It probably tickles some part of the undeveloped brain,” he said.
Club Penguin, which ran from 2005 to 2017, stands out as one of the era’s most beloved virtual worlds. At its peak, it had more than 200 million users. Lance Priebe, who created Club Penguin and sold it to Disney in 2007, said that the game was “modeled like a Saturday morning cartoon or a show” and has become a “cultural artifact.” “As a child, I’d rush home from school to watch cartoons,” he said. “That same generation logged into Club Penguin to play with friends.”
Read the rest of this article at: Business Insider
Alex, 24, thinks reading for pleasure is a waste of time. Instead, he reads to learn about current affairs, maths, and Black history. Similarly, Finn*, 24, has only read one fictional book outside of his childhood. “I don’t really find the time to read, but if I do, it’s usually non-fiction,” he says.
Alex and Finn* both feel compelled to make ‘good’ use of their time – ‘good’ being a capitalist innuendo for ‘productive’. In our increasingly time-poor, grind-obsessed hellscape — 7-9 gym, 9-5 work, and 5-9 side hustle — coming up for air from being a cog and curling up with a novel just because you want to is a borderline sensual pleasure. “Our culture makes a fetish of practical outcomes, and perhaps because the outcomes of fiction-reading don’t patently lead to higher wages, it seems less worthy,” says Suzanne Keen, Professor of English at Scripps College.
Generally speaking, reading is an indulgence that women permit themselves more than men. In 2022, Deloitte predicted boys and men would continue to spend less time reading books and read them less frequently than women and girls. They were right: in 2023, women made up 80 per cent of the book-buying market in the UK, US, and Canada, and accounted for 65 per cent of all fiction purchases in the UK according to Nielson BookData. The bookish man is a rare species. Case in point: 1.2 million people follow the @hotdudesreading Instagram.
Read the rest of this article at: Dazed
The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power.
I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.
It bears repeating: I believe in the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it is called in South Florida, the Skunk Ape. There have been too many credible accounts and oral histories passed down over thousands of years to discount its/their existence. During my time working as a teacher on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I heard from students and elders very detailed and grave encounters with a large humanlike primate in the swamp. In the course of publishing Islandia Journal, a periodical of hidden local folklore and history, I also meet swamp enthusiasts—historians, hunters, hydrologists, et cetera—who describe encounters clearly. Though I’ve never had an encounter myself, I believe these stories intuitively, told by those who have nothing to gain from their telling. Unfortunately, no biological evidence supports the idea that Bigfoot exists. Attendees of the conference wax rhapsodically about what the future holds thanks to eDNA. The discovery of primate DNA in the water or dirt near an encounter location would rekindle the possibility of a biological Bigfoot, but for now, we’re waiting.
This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance. She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Paris Review
The weird thing about growing up in oil country was that I had no idea I was growing up in oil country. I thought we lived in Hollywood. Sure, Culver City didn’t have the glitz and glamor of the parts of town where the movie stars lived and partied; it was a film-industrial suburb, where they went to work. But it was still Los Angeles after all, not West Texas or Saudi Arabia, where one expects to find pumpjacks bobbing in the sun.
But before LA became Tinseltown, it was an oil town. And though the oil wells that loom even today atop the nearby Baldwin Hills should have been a clue, it never really dawned on me that LA still is. Throughout my childhood, over the years I lived elsewhere, and today now that I’ve moved back, those pumps have been extracting oil 24 hours a day, every day of the year, some less than half a mile from my home. Though the city’s grandees no longer gather to drink and sing “Yes it’s oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil,” the industry remains. For now.
Baldwin Hills juts up 500 feet from the flat expanse of the Los Angeles Basin, the result of millennia of seismic activity along the Newport-Inglewood Fault, a dextral strike-slip fault that runs for 47 miles from Culver City through Signal Hill to Newport Beach. The fault, formed some 30 million years ago when the Pacific plate collided with the North American plate (an intersection that now sits at the San Andreas Fault), expresses on the surface as a series of low, irregular hills. Below the surface, seismic activity created a series of oil and gas reservoirs, including the Inglewood Oil Field.
LA’s geologic past is more than a niche interest for rockhounds and petroleum engineers. Deep time processes shaped the city’s contemporary urban geography, and still do. Rather than grow along transportation lines — the typical pattern of residential sprawl during the 19th and 20th centuries — LA’s new developments often followed oil strikes. Subterranean discoveries helped to produce the city’s famous suburbanized sprawl — a network of “black gold suburbs” that oozed away from the city’s urban core.
The hydrocarbons that pooled in structural traps throughout the area began as microscopic plankton and other organisms during the Pliocene and Miocene epochs, roughly 3-12 million years ago. The city we know today thus began to take shape with the burial of ancient life on an ancient seafloor. So if you’re stuck in traffic here, you can curse the decaying diatoms of eons past.
“The weird thing about growing up in oil country was that I had no idea I was growing up in oil country. I thought we lived in Hollywood.”
Or perhaps it is fairer to blame the oilmen who coaxed the liquified fossils to the surface. Had the oilfields been left fallow, we might’ve had a different city, one easier to traverse and live in. But the relentless force of capitalism enticed the nation’s early petroleum engineers to perforate the landscape, opening channels for oil to spray forth. “The inside of the earth seemed to burst out through that hole,” Upton Sinclair wrote of a Los Angeles strike in “Oil!” (1927). “[A] roaring and rushing, as Niagara, and a black column shot up into the air, two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty—no one could say for sure—and came thundering down to earth as a mass of thick, black, slimy, slippery fluid.” Sinclair’s book is a work of fiction, but scenes like this played out countless times as the oil industry metastasized across Southern California in the early 20th century.
Exploration of the rugged topography of Baldwin Hills began in 1916, but it took until April 1924 for The Los Angeles Times to report that “the wildcat wells” were “showing promise.” This, the boosterish paper smirked, caused “the petroleum pessimists [to] appear to be a trifle down in the mouth.” By July, conditions underground in Baldwin Hills “warrant a thrill,” the Times asserted, and visitors to the well “would not be surprised if a very productive oil sand would be found.”
“NEW OIL POOL TAPPED” blared an exuberant headline at the end of September that year. Standard Oil Company began commercial production in Baldwin Hills with 175 barrels a day. The most “significant feature” was the oil’s “unusually shallow depth”; at just over 2,000 feet deep, Standard’s LA Investment No. 1-1 well was “the shallowest production in any of the present-day fields of Southern California.” Seismic luck, it seemed, had blessed those coastal-scrub-covered hills.
Read the rest of this article at: Noema
