Miley Cyrus and her remarkable shape-shifting abilities

February 4 – March 11, 2023

December 10, 2022 – March 11, 2023

The painter and poet Florine Stettheimer should have been easy to cook from. Her poetry, commercially published for the first time in the 2010 collection Crystal Flowers, has a section devoted to “comestibles”—including airy tributes to ham, bread, and tomatoes with Russian dressing—and her paintings often portray food. She was born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York in the late eighteen hundreds, part of a social circle that included Neustadters and Guggenheims, and she held salons that were a Who’s Who of the New York art world. (Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, and Leo Stein were regulars.) Stettheimer did not oversee the cooking, but part of her work’s deliberate feminine aesthetic involved recording the parties, personalities, dishes, outfits, interiors, furniture, and floral arrangements that made up her life. On one canvas, Soirée, a plate of salad and pitcher of cocktails adorn a table in the foreground of a drawing-room scene, where assembled luminaries gaze at Stettheimer’s paintings-within-the-painting. These were unorthodox choices for a woman artist of her time—many others made strenuous efforts not to seem too overtly feminine.

Yet perhaps this femininity was also subversive. Today’s art world is reevaluating Stettheimer in the wake of the publication of Crystal Flowers and a 2022 biography by Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer, published by Hirmer. Bloemink situates Stettheimer as a surprisingly modern figure whose “female” topics—furniture and domestic interiors, flowers and frills, diaphanous fabrics, social events, her family, social narratives—were presented both unapologetically and with a wry, critical distance. Through the witty, effervescent tone of her poems and the originality of her painterly technique, she transformed her subjects into baubles for the artist’s gaze—and in so doing, de-gendered them. The following untitled poem is representative: “Mary Mary of the / Bronx aerie / How does your V garden / Grow? / with beans and potatoes / peas and tomatoes / and shiny bugs all in a / Row” is representative. Stettheimer’s choice of wording and image show the poem to be about making art, not salad. The “V garden” is cheekily abbreviated; its rhyming food is aesthetic and playful.

To cook from Stettheimer’s work, then, would be to acknowledge that her interest in food was not literal. In the section “Comestibles,” rhyming ditties, light as meringue, are entry points into discussions of sex and desire. Stettheimer went about this with a frankness unusual for the time period, and with a dollop of irony as well. A “comestible” is alimentary but not elementary; the fancy and fanciful word removes food from the cupboard and makes it more like art, if a bit unconventionally. In one poem, Stettheimer writes: “You stirred me / You made me giddy / Then you poured oil on my stirred self / I’m mayonnaise.” A frothy crush comes to a gluey and unsexy end in a mere four lines. Another untitled poem runs, “You beat me / I foamed.” In the next lines, its subject is “drowned” in sweetness and “parceled” out. She concludes, “You made me hot – hot – hot / I crisped into ‘kisses.’” Here, Stettheimer puts a lover’s attempts at mastering her into her oven and bakes them into female pleasure.

After 11 years, Milan are back in the last eight of the Champions League. Dotun and Andy are joined by Nicky Bandini who explains just how it clicked for this young, inexperienced team last night. Maybe Spurs gave a helping hand.

But guess who it didn’t click for? After another early exit, we ask whether it’s finally - finally - time for PSG to rip up their Galactique model and start again, while Andy has a huge theory about the futures of Neymar and Kylian Mbappé…

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Marcus and Luke struggle to stay awake through some Champions League drudgery, as Spurs went out with a whimper against Milan. At least the score improved from the first leg!

We wonder if Antonio Conte’s heading for departures and what Spurs fans can reasonably expect from this team. There’s also some mocking reserved for another early PSG exit and we bid a fond farewell to Scott Parker’s brief stint in Belgium. 

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***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

January 21 – March 10, 2023

January 19 – March 8, 2023

How Naatu Naatu became a viral sensation

The 'radical honesty' of the 1952 novel Forbidden Notebook