Sunday, February 10, 2008

Blue Period

Was it just me, or was the world of The New Yorker briefly, but intensely sexual a few weeks back?

There was Carolita's saucy and excellent rejection which was smart, timely and had a political edge - and is both like and unlike a similar cartoon in this week's magazine. Carolita voicing the cynicism of the woman on the street, Cheney suggesting the irresponsibility at the top.


Regular reader, Lagusta, blushed over another suggestive cartoon, by Roz Chast, less explicit, but that was the joke.

Lagusta mentions too, that the same issue included "fascinating women artists being fascinating artists, no modifier necessary!" Could she really mean Judith Thurman's biographical essay on photog and girl-about-town, Lee Miller? Which seemed to me was all about how Miller's work, and life, were entirely circumscribed, and, as it so often happens, enriched, by her dark and complicated gender identity and sexuality.

Whether or not Thurman's article treats these issues with the gravity and insight they call for is for each reader to decide.

Also in the eye of the beholder - Emdashes' response to the Currin images. I swear I had no idea what she was was talking about. Oh, that. I think I buy into that whole if it isn't a photograph it isn't pornography thing. Which is a total lie, in so many ways, but there it is.

And then there were the bodies that Lauren Collins offered us. Safe to enjoy - in their literary form - without, perhaps, attracting leers from commuters or questions from small children.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Seen and Heard

The Determined Dilettante's Coney Island Anti-Nostalgia (I wish there were a real word for this. Is there?) is bracing as the sea air on a spring day. Singer claims, "Kitsch nixes nostalgia." Since when? Some of the images are Online Only.

Jossip's digest of this week's New Yorker is a little harder to read. I can't quite catch the tone. And will paid labor really produce a regular, weekly feature, where our heartfelt labors of love have faltered? Faltered in a good way, of course.

Friday, February 01, 2008

David Denbyisms

There are lots of interesting things to note in and about TNY of late and I wish I could but I don't have the time. But here's one I can't ignore: I just read Denby's [whoops, not Denby, Lane's] Jan 14 review of the film The Orphanage, a wildly unweildy film I actually saw. Anyway, in the middle of his review he refines his [Denby's] old Knocked Up argument down to the fine point of aphorism,

"Carole Lombard would have taken one sip of a film like that and tipped it down the sink."

At that level of abstraction, and in hindsight, I totally agree.