A Trip to the Vault: All of The Chatner's Anna Wintour and Joan Didion Videos
My novel is due this week, so please enjoy a few pieces from the Chatner’s vault. Some years ago I purchased a gray wig on Amazon and used it to stage a complicated yet warm friendship between Anna Wintour and Joan Didion. I lost the wig a few moves back, which is why I stopped making the videos, but I’ll see what I can scrounge up and try to see if inspiration comes calling again later this summer.
From 2017:
I am not a regular reader of Vogue, and I think the only work of Didion's I've ever read is like half of that essay about the time she bought a dress for Linda Kasabian, and "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" in, I want to say college but might have been high school. So most of what I know about Anna Wintour and Joan Didion is just what I've vaguely absorbed from watching a lot of TV and spending a lot of time on the Internet. I imagine the two of them as being very distant friends who do nothing but solemnly approve of each other's haircuts as they glide silently past one another at Fashion Week.
It begin with the following dialogue:
JOAN: Hello, Anna Wintour. I like your severe gray bob.
ANNA: Hello, Joan Didion. I like your severe gray bob.
And things escalated from there.
I have no desire to learn anything else about either. Joan Didion sleeps in a jeweled casket buried underneath the 110 freeway, Anna starts each day at exactly 5:45am with three spoonfuls of peanut butter that she eats out of a hummingbird feeder.
Joan gets trapped in a Waldorf salad
“This year, I have stolen the hair from Graydon Carter’s head, as well as his first three – and most important – memories. I have no doubt he will be here for them quite soon. Yes, we have been fighting since well before the world was new, and we will fight long after the world is gone.”
“I had myself thinly shaved into an asparagus fennel salad for the spring”
Joan Didion discovers Susan Sontag and lesbianism
“My very nearly dear friend Anna Wintour! It’s me, mostly Joan Didion. Recently I’ve been made aware of Susan Sontag, a camera surrounded by scarves that achieved sentience in 1971, immediately whereafter it invented lesbianism. Pauline Kael, you’ll recall, gave lesbianism a terrible review later that year in the New York Times, and the two of them never spoke again, or before.”
Things I imagine Joni Mitchell has said despite never really engaging with her work
“The Jam-Man isn’t pepper friendly, isn’t pepper friendly to the least.”
“No one’s ever seen, the man from the Air Force, not by his name nor by his eyes.”
“All I’ve ever eaten is the same baked potato, the one and selfsame baked potato, all my life, all my life.”
“The man from Ontario who wasn’t, he strides, he arrives, he’s all enclouded in change.”
“I’ve been a-courting and a-reeling in my man from Normandy, I’ve walked all round my knees before five this morning.”
Joan and Anna establish a religious confraternity
“I was eating a Cobb salad at the Hamburger Hamlet in Sherman Oaks, not to be confused with the Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood Village, which has long since fallen out of the light of the Spirit. My knowledge of the character, my love of the hand that wrote it, and the lengthy wait between the placement of my order and the arrival of the Cobb soon gave me the curiosity to open it. I did not eat the tomatoes; it is not my custom to eat the tomatoes in a Cobb salad.”
“Do you think the central premise of this conceit is Ageism, my sparkling journobuddy?”
ANNA WINTOUR: So what’s the other 70% of the joke?
JOAN DIDION: That the habits of the extremely wealthy are often very silly, and very strange. That I have been fashioned into a totem for a certain type of person in much the same way a poster of Audrey Hepburn has served a certain, slightly different type of person! That the writer does not really understand journalism, much less New Journalism, much less the New Left, what happened in the 1970s! Possibly, also, that the writer is attempting to understand themselves as someone who cannot continue to be considered an outsider, and yet also lacks a permanent institutional affiliation.
Joan Didion gets a phone call from Anne Carson [in video form here]
ANNE [determinedly]: joan, if a person were resolved in making a decision, finally, between margins and husbands, how would such a person eliminate the eel of uncertainty from their mind? —best, ac
JOAN: Between the unmeliorated husband and the eel of uncertainty there is no space. Claim either, claim both, and you will find the map of your own mind remade in an instant. The margins, at this point, edit themselves.
I have thought about Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter fighting over the cosmic egg for years
Omg I remember the Susan Sontag one! It’s been living in my mind rent free ever since.