I Hate The New Yorker

carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life

2011-11-30T15:58:00.003-05:00

You tell 'em. Anthony Lane made me laugh with joy in the bathroom:

There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.

This sounds Guattarian to me, in both it's tone of celebration, and in its basic argument, "at the movies, one pays to be invaded."

Hasenpfeffer Incorporated

2011-11-30T14:40:00.003-05:00

Do I have any idea who this Whitney Cummings person is? Does my television even work? Have I ever seen more 30 Rock than the awful pilot? No, no, and no. So thank you, Emily Nussbaum, for so quickly and smartly painting a vivid picture of what's going on this year with women and funny and so on.

I can wait to find out what Denby thinks of Michelle Williams as Marilyn.

Grunge! Rinse. Repeat.

2011-10-11T18:29:00.009-04:00

Courtney Love and Johnny Depp all in one issue? Is it Sassy? Is it 1991? No, it is this month's Vanity Fair.

But I always stop reading articles about Johnny Depp about half-way through. He's never really as interesting as the interviewer seems to think he is (even when that interviewer is Rimbaud-lovin' Patti Smith. Also, that was just in April!). You'd think this problem would be endemic to interviews with really attractive people, but it never hits me so hard as with old Johnny Depp. At this point, let's just say I admire his acting. I was also tickled, and completely convinced, when Tom & Lorenzo suggested that Johnny Depp has a body double do his airport appearances in Japan.

The Courtney Love thing, though, is amazing, in part because of herself, in part because the author, Nancy Jo Sales, is an amazing narrator. She just wrote that whole thing about the Quaids' conspiracy theories for VF and I'd read that, and that becomes part of this, and I'm pretty sure that celebrities with drug problems are a target for swindlers but I'm not interested because I'm sympathetic to these poor, defrauded celebrities. I'm interested because . . . I'm interested. A while back, Go Fug Yourself linked to Courtney Love on her own addictions and that was pretty compelling too.

I almost always like Nancy Jo Sales and the very wry attitude she takes towards her subjects. In my imagination she wrote a thing about the Hilton sisters and their mother and how awful she is for The New Yorker in the late 1990s and it appeared with a photo of the two girls in a (literally) chintzy hotel room. But, apparently, she wrote the article for VF in 2000 and The New Yorker ran the photo in 1999. And in that interview with the Hilton family, Paris claims to like Hole.

So, yeah. Vanity Fair has me and my very serious reading material pretty well figured out.

And all this during Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Retrospective week. It's like I'm back in that middle-school carpool listening to NPR.

Over the Rimbaud

2011-09-21T18:13:00.004-04:00

I found Mendelsohn's "Critic at Large" piece on Rimbaud completely enjoyable. I loved the way Mendelsohn wove together the best one-liners from critics, and reviews of the (not so recent) biographies of Rimbaud to create his own lively narrative of "The Brief Career of Rimbaud." I also liked the way we landed, ever so gently, yet somewhat cynically, on Mendelsohn's personal experience (and others') of reading the poet. And it ends with a fine pun.

Free, but worth more to me than the stack of magazines I paid to have delivered to my apartment.

Ouch.

2011-07-07T14:41:00.005-04:00

Anna Faris = Feminist Masochism. Her life, her work, the article itself. Makes you want to go cold turkey and enter some sort of upstate separatist enclave.

Failing that, spend a moment or two with this amazing new comic from Carolita Johnson, "Oscarina."

Films People Walked Out On Summer 2011

2011-06-27T14:06:00.006-04:00

If you're not inclined to see Tree of Life, Anthony Lane's review will bring you up to speed.

David Denby on Meek's Cutoff, "a pleasureless, anti-sensuous aesthetic." !!?? Whose experience does he mean? That of the characters? Or the audience? Or the filmmaker? In each and any case, I don't agree.

Richard Brody is better, but his second take on the film is odd too.

In his review of Kelly Reichardt’s Western “Meek’s Cutoff” in the magazine this week, David Denby refers to the movie’s “new kind of feminist and materialist realism.” I don’t think it’s new, but it is materialist, and it’s a kind of realism that plays into an ongoing cinematic fallacy: the notion that poor people facing physical travails lack inner lives, as if having a life full of stories, dreams beyond survival, religious beliefs, and a thick tangle of social and emotional connections were a sort of luxury—and as if spending too much screen time finding and depicting them would be a form of disrespect or indifference to the characters’ immediate practical and economic difficulties.

Me? I love blankness and don't need a full-fledged 20th c psychological subject from every film I see. Especially if the film is about ye olde pioneer women in the 19th century . . .

He ends up, "The politics and the sympathies of Meek’s Cutoff are liberal; its aesthetics are not just conservative, but reactionary."

Which is funny, right? Because Tree of Life is so ideologically reactionary, but it tries to be aesthetically experimental.

I also read about Osama and Acai.

And you did see this, the funniest thing in The New Yorker ever? "New App on the Kindle 2GO" Directions to T.S. Eliot's house, "Arrive around 7:30. Our phone is 917-555-0133. Much appreciate if you could bring a dessert—keep in mind that I’m lactose-intolerant."

The Trial of St. Joan

2011-06-10T09:59:00.006-04:00

Did you really think I was going to let that slide? Denby and "The Case for Joan Crawford."

Denby seems – rightly – rather scared of Joan Crawford. Not because she is all the intimidating and vaguely unflattering things he says she is, but because she is an amazing artist and he is . . . a man with opinions. I feel a conflict of interest here. He should recuse himself from passing judgment on Crawford.

This turn of phrase occurred to me as I was bitching about the article in the car – the magazine was not at hand. Imagine my surprise, then, when I started this post and read the following, from Denby, “Any call for justice to Joan Crawford, however, runs into a dead end . . .” Oh, we’re at dead end alright. I’m not sure evaluating Crawford as a date “the date who raises your blood pressure, not you’re your libido” is going to work out that well.

But he’s right, Crawford did “place herself at the vanguard of current erotic taste”- this is definitely my take on her adorable boyishness in Our Dancing Daughters “in which [according to Denby] she is pleasure-loving and wild yet candid and friendly, a straight shooter who gets the guy.” Well-put. And she develops and changes this basic persona to suit changing erotic tastes, and maintains it.

Also cute: how he describes her early commitment to her own celebrity as “dress-up-to-go-grocery-shopping.”

And I liked, “If you look at pictures of her at any age, the whites of her eyes show not just above the irises but below them, too. Her eyes are so wide open that she seems to be devouring the future.” The first is objectively true, the second is lovely.

Again with the eyes, on her amazing performance as Daisy Kenyon, “with an open-eyed stare and a hardened voice.” I like this wide-eyed image that isn’t innocence. And his take on the brilliant match between her tough elegance and Warner Brothers is easy to agree with.

I wasn’t that taken with his attitude towards the contrast between Crawford “bittersweet” and “melancholy” as the pushover stenographer in Grand Hotel, and Crawford “determined to show the audience how big a bitch a woman faced with few choices can become” in The Women. He’s right about the contrast between the two performances, but that right there is the brilliance of her artistry. Not all femininity is charming in its desperation. And not all desperation is charming. And that’s the difference between performing femininity for women and performing it for men. Yes indeed, “She was always a bigger hit with women than with men.”

I also dislike the idea that there’s “nothing flexible or playful” in her performances and that just doesn’t make sense to me. Denby seems fully aware that Johnny Guitar exists. And what about when she lifts the lid on that canary in What Every Happened to Baby Jane?
That film is every kind of brilliant.

And finally, do we, does Crawford, does anyone, need to be “rescued from camp?” If he's her self-appointed advocate, that's not working either. Thanks, but no thanks.

where intelligent classy well-educated women who say "fuck" alot meet...

2011-06-03T12:49:00.004-04:00

"Christ, What an asshole!"

Apparently, one of the earliest uses of the word "asshole" in TNY involves no less a powerful and artsy triumvirate than Janet Malcolm, Ingrid Sischy and Rosalind Krauss.

And a bathtub in the kitchen and a bowl of chopped tomatoes. Check it out.

geez louise

2011-06-01T18:29:00.003-04:00

I read full articles on Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Taylor in VF this past weekend. I was at the beach, right? I've always loved Taylor's looks, at every age, in every way. But she's not that interesting, apparently. Except for the part about her using her celebrity to support early HIV/AIDS research.

In addition to The Fug Girls, I also read Tom & Lorenzo now and then and it annoyed me that they didn't realize that Katy Perry on VF cover (and, I think in one of the inside photos), was supposed to look like Liz Taylor. Not even like Liz Taylor, like photos of Liz Taylor in that very issue of VF.

And Hills. I constantly disagree with her political positions, but I admire her a bit.

But really, this post is about profanity at The New Yorker - stop briefly at old favorite languagehat and continue on to The Awl.

untidy thoughts

2011-05-03T00:46:00.007-04:00

I've got a new subscription to Vanity Fair, which means I read part of Rob Lowe's autobiography. Yup. I've also got a subscription to The Nation and boy do I love their arts and lit coverage. And I can't find my issue of TNY with the Anna Faris profile. I also read Elizabeth Kolbert in a National Geographic at the doctor's office.

If I don't get up early enough in the morning (and I've been getting up pretty darn early), my cat shreds a New Yorker to wake me. Seriously. What else?

This Sceptical Expat has a great list of what bugs her about TNY. I like especially point number

6) The way so many articles end abruptly. The first couple of times I encountered this I thought it was refreshing. No conclusion, no final aphorism or take home message – OK, not everything lends itself to a neat closing summary. Now I regard it as another smug idiosyncrasy of the house style.
...
It reminds me of my erstwhile supervisor’s critique of a colleague’s formless research papers: ‘He always says that that’s just how the material is. But that’s how all material is until you find something to say about it.’

Understatement of the Week

2011-03-16T23:19:00.002-04:00

Denby on Jane Fucking Eyre: "This fervent, angry novel gave a strong impetus to both feminist fiction and romance novels."

Feminist fiction and romance novels. You don't say.

and jon stewart doesn't bake a linzertorte

2011-02-26T10:48:00.004-05:00

I just saw that Daily Show from January where Jon Stewart doesn't quite have the time to bake a linzertorte. Huh.

motherhood, feminism, groundhogs

2011-02-17T20:14:00.003-05:00

Just a few of the recently recurring themes here at the blog.

If David Sedaris won't do it, New Yorker poet Ellen Bryant Voigt will. Confirm the bureaucratic nature of groundhogs, that is. The beginning of her beautiful poem,

Groundhog

not unlike otters which we love frolicking
floating on their backs like truant boys unwrapping lunch
same sleek brown pelt some overtones of gray and rust
though groundhogs have no swimming hole and lunch
is rooted in the ground beneath short legs small feet
like a fat man's odd diminutive loafers not
frolicking but scurrying layers of fat his coat
gleams as though wet shines chestnut sable darker

...

I'll get you, my little pretty!

2011-02-13T21:24:00.014-05:00

"This is the infuriating thing that dawns on you one day: even if you would never sleep with or even flirt with anyone to get ahead, you are being sexually adjudicated." That is, of course, Tina Fey in TNY.

Apparently, about a year ago Fey was subject to some sort of "feminist" backlash. I can see where the quote above could - if you're blaming other women for this problem - come from a comic persona that spends too much time pointing fingers "in a field of slutty, slobby, neurotic [female] morons." But here she tries not to.

And I don't watch 30 Rock but the article as a whole actually helped me explore a feeling of solidarity with mothers that I don't always feel. And isn't solidarity the better part of feminism? So, paradoxically, the above gets my vote for best quote of the piece.

Unless it is the delicious description of the difference between childish and adult pleasures: "Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate."

And also, most little girls love and admire witches, right? So what is she's worried about in the first place?

Tiger Moms and House Cats

2011-02-11T11:23:00.003-05:00

Although I had no idea this public kerfuffle was going on, I'm glad Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about it for TNY. She took the whole thing fairly seriously, in its personal and political dimensions.

I'm also in the middle of Haggis v. Scientology. But, to quote (roughly) a recent caption contest runner-up,

"Let's make this brief. I have to go back to staring out the window."

this is why we have a subscription

2011-02-05T19:48:00.004-05:00

Magical Dinners is right. Korean food, Thanksgiving memories, subscribers only! I loved this, especially the part about licking the mini blinds.

Vanity Fair/Sanity Air. Just in time for Valentine's day, a love letter from James Wolcott to NPR. Wolcott puts a finger on why so much NPR (ie, Ira Glass) bugs me - no spleen! But then he moves on to the good stuff. He calls our attention to "a feminism so integrally wired into the basic circuits that it can be taken for granted, until you start listening/watching/reading someplace else." Yes, it's a seventies feminism, but it's very important. And there's something very nice about the way he segues to reflecting on this feminism from his discussion of NPR as a sound medium.

And I just read the Munro story about the pair of college sweethearts.

solipsistic and desultory reading of TNY

2010-12-03T15:14:00.006-05:00

As opposed to what? Keywords: Linzertorte, Kanye, Hathaway, Ballet, Groundhog

1. You know I love linzertorte. Long story short, A. Goodman?

Don't used blanched nuts, hazelnuts are traditional, almonds are fine.
Don't neglect to mix plenty of lemon or alcohol in the jam.
Don't strain the seeds and don't sweat the lattice.

But the correct proportion of jam to crust is crucial, and highly subjective. And the illustration is insulting.

2. I can't believe Sasha Frere-Jones didn't mention the Kanye tweets as cartoon captions thing. He asks, instead, "Which Kanye did you follow this year? The newcomer to Twitter, who liked to talk about expensive chairs and Mark Rothko, and sometimes tags his tweets “Greatesttweetofalltime”?"

Bob Mankoff commented on the whole thing awhile back, but (am I in an extra-ornery mood?) he's wrong. The mix of Kanye Tweets and New Yorker cartoons are NOT really incongruous, nor do you need to know that Kanye penned the caption to find the squirrel image+paparazzi caption funny.

3. Strange but true, I fully enjoyed Denby on Black Swan and Love and Other Drugs. Indeed, I spent the whole of my Thanksgiving holidays praising the "vivid and generously expressive" Anne Hathaway and surveying the uneasy marriage of media found in "ballet films."

4. On Jon [oops!] Stewart, David Sedaris told us that he wanted to include a groundhog story in his collection of animal tales, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, but his editor wouldn't let him because "we have no preconceived notions of groundhogs," or some such. Benj and I were saddened by this, because we always think of them as bureaucratic, and behind on their paperwork, and we had hoped that someday a famous comic author would confirm this for us. But now we'll never know. In any case, the stories in the collection are also strange, but true.

strange fruit

2010-11-04T14:45:00.005-04:00

I'm reading a John Le Carre spy novel from 1989, Russia House - I heard him interviewed on Democracy Now - and, when I'm in the bathroom, I'm reading a clever essay on hipsters, in New York magazine, "adapted from What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation, by the editors of n+1, published this month."

Oh, I also read the profile of fightin' Harry Reid in TNY.

whatsername

2010-10-17T22:21:00.003-04:00

I read that thing about the little tween fashion blogger. Interesting enough, I guess. Oh, and I actually loved the cover of the fashion issue, the one with the animals in furs. I liked the style and the weirdness of the concept too.

Also, "Oh Sting, Where is thy Death?"

there's a time and place for everything

2010-10-02T13:07:00.002-04:00

Geez. Another one of those annoying throw-away Proust references. Who wrote this?

Oh, Roland Barthes. On the death of his mother. Er. Nevermind.

Ms. The Boat

2010-09-17T15:39:00.002-04:00

I got the New Yorker with Jane Mayer on the Koch brothers and I thought to myself, "Yawn. Libertarian bazillionaires convincing the public to vote against their own interests? What else is new?? I'm so not reading that." Well, I guess didn't have to. Cuz it got plenty of coverage from Maddow and Goodman and the NYT in the ensuing weeks. Sometimes I am just so clueless about what is important news.

Speaking of Maddow and Goodman, I was feeling overwhelmed by their hysterical economics coverage when suddenly, via the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast, I heard a nice, level-headed conversation taking place in (mostly) dulcet tones, between Dorothy Wickenden and John Cassidy. Deep breath of fresh air.

what did you think?

2010-08-11T11:21:00.002-04:00

Charles Schumer. Toobin, cute, but no biggie. (subscription only)

The Senate, in general, by George Packer. Funny, sad and easy to read. (avail)

David Sedaris on airline travel, and hate. Hits a nerve. (subscription only)

Hospice by Atul Gawande. The title for this in the paper TOC was so dull - "rethinking" something or other . . . But the article was amazing and I was reduced to tears on a bright summer's day. Lagusta warned me! (avail)

John Lurie. Tad Friend really captures the weirdness. (subscription only)

Nicholson Baker on video gaming. Oh My God. He was born to write this. (subscription only) I'll probably even listen to the podcast, eventually.

Also, Gil Scott-Heron and Agatha Christie.

A.O. Scott

2010-08-06T19:47:00.004-04:00

Lot of people love him, lots of people mock him. But does he always write with such insistent internal rhymes, I ask you?

On Sitting Down to Read A.O. Scott's Review of The Other Guys,
Once Again

He sings of angry populist satire
Of a British weasel-for-hire

Of topical provocation
Of whatever worldly anger and frustration

we may be harboring.

With the crow of an inflamed bantam rooster,
and the eyes of a combustible milquetoast,

gullible,
irresistible,
less comprehensible
than sensible.

Vixens, lions, tunas, scams,
hedges, bailouts, Ponzi schemes,

A mooning goofball
A spoofing fireball
A going-out-of-business sale at the comic video boutique,
brought to you by the infinitely fungible voice of Will Ferrell.

Not so.
Macho.
After all.

Kanye, Copyright and New Yorker Cartoons

2010-08-05T14:36:00.004-04:00

You saw this, right? (Huffington Post)

James Thurber's Seal Barks and Kanye West's Tweets united in holy matrimony by some comedians named Paul and Storm.

The funniest thing to happen to New Yorker cartoons since the advent of the Anti-Caption contest. Or maybe ever.

Everyone's saying how funny it is but no one is saying why. When I am choking to death laughing it has something to do with the WASP-y asshole privilege lampooned in the original cartoons mirroring the hip-hop asshole privilege of the tweets . . .

ongoing issues

2010-07-23T19:19:00.003-04:00

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, they published a letter from a reader who expressed some discomfort with the whole justifiable "state secrets" thing in Katchdourian's piece on WikiLeaks. Good.

***

But the first letter of the batch addressed Sasha Frere-Jones on Pandora. Sasha Frere-Jones was writing about Pandora!?

I've been complaining about Pandora for weeks. Ever since I started using it. Algorithm my eye! I think this story is particularly illuminating:

I started my station with Public Image Ltd’s “Poptones,” a 1979 song that is loaded with bass, dissonant guitar, and the sinus bray of John Lydon, once known as Johnny Rotten. The band’s sound is deeply indebted to reggae—the original bassist was named Jah Wobble—but I couldn’t make a reggae song appear on my Poptones station. I did get lots of bands I like: the Minutemen, the Birthday Party, and Fugazi, who all make aggressive music that, like Public Image’s, is heavy on articulate rhythm and acidic guitar.

There's something sort of shallow about Pandora's analysis. Sometimes I do feel like they play you things they think you'll like (from a marketing perspective - same age, same niche) but they miss things that have a meaningful musical relationship.

And sometimes I think Pandora is too synchronic and not diachronic enough, which speaks more to the letter-writer's gripe, that you can't learn about music being made now that might be influenced by music you liked the last time you paid attention to pop music. And how helpful would that be?!?

***

If you didn't already read Hilton Als on Tyler Perry, but you want a Tyler Perry primer, I recommend. Back in April (!!), subscription only.

***

Hilarious: a "Shouts and Murmurs" that makes fun of Thomas Friedman, and cliches in general. And places Osama bin Laden in a quotidian/bourgeois US mise en scene: prosciutto, J.Crew and Arts and Crafts-style homes.

wild pair

2010-07-09T11:25:00.002-04:00

Yesterday Vandana Shiva went toe to toe with independent journalist Gwynne Dyer on Democracy Now regarding, you know, the coming global warming apocalaypse (currently in previews). I would have preferred that Goodman NOT open it up to a "Debate on Geoengineering," which was a bit nuts, but rather let Shiva more deliberately explain the alternatives to Dyer's rather, um, dire scenarios, which he had the time and space to explain more fully in an interview with Gonzalez and Goodman.

But the whole business reminded me of a New Yorker fiction I like a few months back and never commented on - you remember - "Diary of an Interesting Year."

WikiLeaks (late but not out-of-date)

2010-06-29T11:51:00.011-04:00

Since the publication of Raffi Katchadourian's piece on WikiLeaks in the June 7 issue, some relevant news has broken - (1) a US soldier claimed to be the WikiLeaker who shared the Project B video footage and (2) uh, someone published a little something in Rolling Stone. The WikiLeaks piece was, as of June 29, still (again?) high on the list - in the #3 position - for most emailed, which is a little unusual. And in the issue of TNY that arrived June 30, the first Comment (often, I feel, the best piece in the whole magazine) is on McChrystal. Or not. Rather, it is, as it should be, on the misguided Afghanistan war policy.

In any case, reaction to Michael Hasting's Rolling Stone article seems, to me, to cast light on the dark end of the piece:

"The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all#ixzz0sGBfknQU

In the conclusion that frames this passage, there seems to be an implication that "democratic governments" and "liberal societies" includes the good ol' U.S.A. and so we, as readers, should worry more about the abuses WikiLeaks might perpetrate than the good it might do. But if we realize that Hastings report wasn't just about name calling, but rather about policy (see Rachel Maddow, the actual article, etc) then things shift a bit. And the anti-Hastings media backlash (from, say Lara Logan at CBS) in which he's accused of breaking some code or vow of silence or something is dangerous. When it comes to bad Afghanistan policy, I've NOT agreed that my government and its free press can "hold secrets" "in order to protect legitimate policy." Quite the opposite. Hence the need for WikiLeaks.

See also, Amy Davidson's excellent TNY blog post, on the issue (Afghanistan and the press, not WikiLeaks) - "Defending Rolling Stone."

In other news, Eugenides' story was also still among the most emailed (my dad liked it, I read it) and I'm trying to keep up with TNY online a bit more - I actually activated my online subscription and I'm using the lovely iPhone app.

eat me

2010-06-21T12:55:00.002-04:00

Elif Batuman, "Letter from Istanbul, The Memory Kitchen." From the abstract: "The writer notes that food has never played a large role in her mental life, but that night at Çiya, she viscerally understood why someone might use a madeleine dipped in tea as a metaphor for the spiritual content of the material world."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/19/100419fa_fact_batuman#ixzz0rVWEPd5c

I really wanted to read an article about food in Istanbul. When the author admitted that she wasn't that interested in food herself, I was intrigued. When she made the ol' Proust reference, I put down the magazine. Enough already.

But really, how cool is this? In a food essay! "I get so confused by nutritional, budgetary, ecological, ethical, aesthetic, and time-managment concerns that I often subsist for weeks on instant oatmeal and multi-vitamins." Maybe I'll try again now that I'm better rested and less testy.

How do you read The New Yorker?

2010-05-26T10:23:00.000-04:00

Interesting news regarding Kindle-iPad-paper subscriptions to The New Yorker. I can't tell if the threat of censorship from Apple is real or no but apparently, "We're going to publish what we're going to publish," Mr. Remnick said. "If the Pentagon isn't going to talk me out of a story, then Apple in Cupertino isn't going to either. If they throw me off, they throw me off."

I like the bit from the commenter, too, "as S.J. Perelman reportedly said to James Thurber when asked about The New Yorker's social purpose, moral perspective, and aesthetic obligation: 'Jeezus, Jim, it's just another ten-cent magazine.'" I've never heard that one.

Remember, summer is here and the beach has sand, water, sun and all kinds of things that make the reading of screens difficult and dangerous.

Also, I just this week gave away my New Yorker archive CDs . . .

happy mothers' day

2010-05-10T16:18:00.001-04:00

The best mothers' day reading?

Gail Collins on birth control (NYT) and John Seabrook on international adoption (TNY).

I don't love the Seabrook piece. As a matter of fact, I hate it in some ways - the child's name is Rosalie. Rosalie. [Actually, the child's name is NOT Rosalie. It is Rose and remains Rose throughout the essay. See comments.] Ask anyone named Rosalie and they will tell you that their name is not Rose. Ask anyone named Rose and they will tell you their name is not Rosalie. The silliest, most trite response, I know, but international adoption is an issue that renders me inarticulate and angry whenever I have to think or talk about it, which is maybe every other year. International adoption, in practice, seems to violate a lot of what I think of as basic human rights and it forces me to explore the idea that I believe, after all, in basic human rights. For children, no less.

So I usually don't think about it but I was in the middle, literally, of reading an excellent novel about international adoption and/or child trafficking, set in Guatemala - The Long Night of White Chickens - when I got this week's issue of The New Yorker. Seabrook is available to subscribers only, I think.

summer reading lists

2010-04-29T14:48:00.004-04:00

In addition to being a spine-tingling, page-turner that kept me up until all hours even during this busiest of busy seasons . . . Janet Malcolm's article on the Mazoltuv Borukhova murder is also a sharp reflection on justice and journalism.

I know there's a lot of news out there, right now. And this isn't exactly timely. So bookmark it for your beach bag, maybe. Speaking of which, any recommendations and must-reads from the past few months? I have my own beach bag that needs filling.

more love for richard brody

2010-04-08T13:41:00.001-04:00

He writes, "I’ve been waiting for a while to see a movie in which a woman has an abortion and lives happily ever after." Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/03/being-greenberg.html#ixzz0kT5QGgm4

Hey! Same here! Of course, this movie would be Greenberg, which I wasn't gonna see because it's a romantic comedy and all. Also, Denby, "All credit to Ben Stiller, who gives the best performance of his career." Read more of that: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/greenberg_baumbach#ixzz0kT79XSv8

Gee, it seems like only yesterday . . .

"you laugh, you cry, and you go to the kitchen"

2010-03-08T15:24:00.012-05:00

If you are looking for bracing, unadulterated Oscarspleen, go to (of course) The Reverse Shot Blog.

But TNY has some pretty hilarious things to say about last night's Oscars, too. Richard Brody, Judith Thurman and Tad Friend chat with readers at The New Yorker online. Nothing profound, but a funny and slightly mature perspective (they love beards - the kind on the face, they don't love John Hughes).

Thurman disagrees with the Fug Girls, re. Bullock's hair and lipstick. Friend didn't immediately get something obvious to most of the Gawkers who were commenting live, ie. that Bridges was not, so to speak, unprepared. Halfway through the convo it clicks. Maybe someone texted him.

And there's some cute shtick:

"RICHARD BRODY: My favorite performance of the night was Whoopi Goldberg’s, in the commercial for Poise."

On the horror film montage, and The Shining:

"TAD FRIEND: My favorite Kubrick film, that one. Shelley Duvall’s highwater mark.

JUDITH THURMAN: Diane Johnson wrote it, right?

RICHARD BRODY: I thought that Shelley Duvall’s high-water mark was Popeye."

And more Kubrick (these conversations are actually woven together and internet stuttered, time-wise, in a fun way, in the original):

"RICHARD BRODY: My favorite Kubrick film is the last, Eyes Wide Shut; I think it’s deeply personal and it shows.
JUDITH THURMAN: I disagree, Richard. I don’t think it translated to the modern era. It was a fin de siecle story of decadence and Weltschmerz.

RICHARD BRODY: No, it’s just a story of modern marriage.

TAD FRIEND: Judith, we’re conducting the conversation in English.

JUDITH THURMAN: Okay—let’s see—world weariness,

TAD FRIEND: I was kidding."

Maybe not hilarious, but funnier than Martin and Baldwin.

And maybe a bit too much favorite this and favorite that. The three of them don't make a real effort to discuss the politics of Hurt Locker (or Avatar), but an online chat is hardly the time and place for it. Brody basically thinks he's got it pegged on both accounts, but I don't quite agree with him. Brody on Hurt Locker (and on Jim Emerson on Hurt Locker) and Avatar, (again) and on the nominees in general. I might write more about this later.

Also, Honest Movie Posters, via kottke.

more Shutter Island

2010-02-26T17:51:00.005-05:00

Richard Brody is apparently trying to make it up to me for all the lousy movie reviews TNY has ever published. Since Kael, he's been the New Yorker film reviewer with whom I've been most simpatico. So, of course, I've only ever written about him once. But check it out. He defends Shutter Island! My favorite line, from a recent blog post, is this: "A critic invoking reality is like a politician invoking God—if insincere, it’s demagogy; if sincere, it’s dogmatism."

Oh. Wait, no. It's this: "A movie isn’t a mere reflection of reality but, more important, an expansion of it, and that’s what lots of viewers are seeking and getting from this one."

Actually, screw it. You have to read the whole thing, and his post on The Prophet as well. Again: "The possibilities of movie-making are more or less boundless; a movie isn’t only what it shows but also what it omits."

All of this sounds like a dismissal of my least favorite masculinist sub-genre: the false-consciousness film. Shutter Island is tricky, but it isn't a false-consciousness film. It doesn't treat its audience like dupes. It makes them skeptics. Along the way, Brody opens up my favorite can of worms (he calls it the, um, "r-bomb"). He also mentions the packed theater, a significant part of my own Shutter Island experience.

Anthony Lane (and others) on Shutter Island

2010-02-22T12:09:00.004-05:00

I think the New Yorker film reviews may just get on my nerves until the end of my days.

I loved Shutter Island. Loved it. The horror of watching a moral universe in which we can know and do wrong and right replaced - by force - with a remote island of personal, individual trauma? Noir for now.

But, apparently, no one else likes this movie, and I'm OK with that. What I'm not OK with is one more of those awful, awful references to Adorno. Anthony Lane, you should be ashamed!

A.O. Scott and Lane seem to agree that the film isn't serious enough to address the horrors of WWII. But it is. Plus Scott writes, "the plot [...] does not so much thicken as clog and coagulate." Just what I want. Actually, to be honest, Scott's who review had me grinning . . . we just didn't agree.

Also good: Gawker and its commentators, on "precious, twee hacks" and a great Thomas Mann/Marty and Leo analogy.

why, in the end, i kind of love the new yorker

2010-02-21T23:28:00.003-05:00

The brilliant Hendrik Herzberg is a senior editor. After all.

And they would never call themselves a "family" publication of any kind. With a straight face. (Jeffrey Toobin is a regular contributor.)

I was just looking at the most recent TOC and I read only very short pieces by Hilton Als, Joan Acocella and Schjeldahl. I must be busy. Or shallow.

The sociology of drinking: newyorker.com

2010-02-13T22:59:00.000-05:00

The sociology of drinking: newyorker.com

New Haven, Bolivia, Italian-Americans, diaries. Gladwell.

when poetry goes thud

2010-02-10T12:22:00.003-05:00

I was a little put-off by the translation of the Césaire poem, in the Jan 25 issue, but I didn't know quite what to say about it. I'm not sure that nomad and poet Pierre Joris does either, but he brings up some interesting points. One of his commentators puts it this way, "The complexities of communist or any political temblors in the Caribbean require exactitudes of expression from both poet and tranlator."

On the New Yorker's poetry in general, Joris' own elaborate prose made me smile: "the editors must have decided that the traditional light fare of its poetry department, which has usually been intellectually somewhat less demanding than its cartoons, needed to be upgraded for the occasion." Well, you get the idea. And it's funny.

corny c.1986

2010-02-03T15:14:00.002-05:00

I liked Seabrook's tribute to Salinger, but it was the only one I read.

Benj wants to see more cats represented in the New Yorker's artwork.

Fiery? What quality?

2010-01-22T17:20:00.004-05:00

It's so cute that Hilton Als calls Young Jean Lee's production of King Lear "a hot mess." And I think that this review might be my favorite thing in this week's magazine.

(I dunno about Neil Gaiman. I'll get there.)

And I love the idea of a Lear-less King Lear. But I think I have to disagree with Als' big, closing jab,

What makes the conceit of her production so powerful—so fundamentally original—is the fact that [Lee] dispenses with the patriarch and chooses, instead, to wrestle with the souls of women in a manless land. The problem is that she retains Edmund and Edgar. Had she eliminated them, too, we might have been able to grapple directly with what Lee has suggested but not quite conveyed: what it must feel like for an exceptional young woman to stand up to the theatre’s ultimate Great White Father.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2010/0/25/100125crth_theatre_als?currentPage=2#ixzz0dNmfiEq3

Lee has to retain Edmund, Edgar and Gloucester. Their struggles are 1) physically beautiful and sort of comic and 2) essential to the critical analysis of patriarchal authority in King Lear. I mean, you could leave them out, but I seriously would not.

white christmas

2010-01-18T16:00:00.008-05:00

I started watching Mad Men with friend this year, on her TiVo. And I got so into it, I insisted on watching the final episode "live" so to speak. How do we say this? "When broadcast?" Then, over the winter holidays I made an effort to catch-up and watch seasons one and two. By the time the NYT published that story about Netflix maps I wasn't surprised to see Mad Men mapped neatly on to spaces of privileged whiteness.

Recently, I've been speculating wildly at resistance is fertile, where lagusta wrote a fine series on Mad Men for Feminists. There are a variety of perspectives from the Emdashes people. And I started searching the New Yorker archives to see what they said. Lots of Mad Men references in the blogs.

George Packer: "So the question is obvious: what’s so interesting about this annoying show?" He's got one answer ready.

Ben Greenman gets to the point, "sometimes the plotting is too elliptical (read: nonexistent)" and then goes on about Hendricks and Dungeons and Dragons.

Nancy Franklin's first mention came in a piece that I'd read for other reasons (Glen Close, romantic comedy, etc). She wrote:

Have any states yet legalized marriage between human beings and TV shows? If so, I’m going to throw a few things in a bag and run off with “Mad Men,” the new drama on AMC set in the world of advertising at the dawn of the sixties—and encompassing New York life, and marriage, and sex, and repression, and what America was and was not. It is gorgeous in every way. As it should be—it’s the spawn of all those handsome, stylish office movies that were made in the fifties. Like those movies, “Mad Men” is smart and tremendously attractive, and it stirs you more than it probably should. It may not be deep, but if you’re a certain age and have a certain sensibility and certain fantasies of what New York used to be like (thanks to those movies) it hits a deep place in you, like a straight-up Martini made of memory and desire.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2007/07/23/070723crte_television_franklin?currentPage=2#ixzz0d03Kqeji

WHAT ARE these stylish office movies she's talking about? Anybody? I've been thinking a little bit about mid-century office ennui, but I had mostly literary references in mind . . .

And, finally, Franklin has a nice review and recap of the tantilizing changes - for men and women - that the Season Three Finale promised. Promises, promises.

whole foods, boy bands, grace kelly and the UC system

2010-01-05T12:11:00.007-05:00

Three profiles and some bad news. Now that's a New Yorker. Something about each and everyone of those topics.

Paumgarten goes over the Mackey basics for people who don't already avoid Whole Foods. From where I sit, he's trying to be even-handed, but the very last paragraph seems entirely dismissive, like something you'd write about someone who you are very glad to see go:

Talk turned to food, as it often does. “You only love animal fat because you’re used to it,” he said. “You’re addicted.” He urged me to consider reprogramming my palate. He also suggested that I try Grofian breathing.
After a moment, he got up to leave, and I watched him walk toward Sixth Avenue, in a suit that looked a size or two too big, thinking, or not thinking, about what he was going to say on the Fox Business channel.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all#ixzz0blAMmSpS

The thing about boy band Vampire Weekend (well, not that kind of boy band, but still) was a little more indulgent. Like their older sister wrote it. I bristled at the quote from bandmember Koenig: "There are probably a lot better reasons why you could say we're not good." Sooooo smart he knows better than you do what is wrong with the particular brand of wool he's pulling over your eyes. But this profile also included a pithy paragraph of disdain, but this time from a quoted source, rather than the author. Pitchfork said:

"The image they project is practically The Darjeeling Limited brothers of indie rock bands - globe-trotting sons of distinguished men clumsily exploring distant cultures, despite only being passively, naively invested."

And Pitchfork's readers said: "It's like the Whiffenpoofs started a ska band." Eeek.

Anthony Lane on Grace Kelly is hilarious and kind of meta when he explains the concept of "the Chinese whisper, whereby [a biographer] quotes somebody who quotes somebody who knew the subject in question." The things folks said about Grace Kelly (naughty and nice) were only somewhat interesting.

And Tad Friend's letter from California, about the crisis in the UC education system, was useful, timely and much more important than the other items mentioned here . . .

gail collins, my heroine!

2009-11-30T21:49:00.006-05:00

Or, The Moment When (not really) Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.

One of my biggest pet peeves (you probably know this) is when people assume that "women" in the US went to work in the 1960s or that two-income households began then or whatever. Please. Only if you ignore the history of the (African-American, Latina, white, immigrant) working class. Bite me, Michael Pollan. Etc.

And a big working-class, feminist thank you to Gail Collins and to Ariel Levy, who reviewed Collins' book in the Nov 19 New Yorker!! Levy quotes Collins,

“In reality, however, by 1960 there were as many women working as there had been at the peak of World War II, and the vast majority of them were married,” Collins writes. Forty per cent of wives whose children were old enough to go to school had jobs.

Ahem!!

This isn’t just about the haze of retrospection: back then, women saw themselves as homemakers, too. Esther Peterson, President Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of Labor, asked a high-school auditorium full of girls how many of them expected to have a “home and kids and a family.” Hands shot up. Next, Peterson asked how many expected to work, and only a few errant hands were raised. Finally, she asked the girls how many of them had mothers who worked, and “all of those hands went up again,” Peterson wrote in her 1995 memoir, “Restless.”

The rest of the article is not quite so good, and, in fact, painful to read, in parts. Levy is worried that people are mis-remembering and mis-representing second-wave feminism, but she seems to have just as deeply misunderstood identity politics, liberation activism and sexuality.

eustace tilley, lost at sea

2009-11-07T09:25:00.004-05:00

I was watching the movie Lifeboat and one of the opening shots is a copy of The New Yorker magazine, with a Eustace Tilley cover. The magazine is floating amid other debris from the torpedoed ship that had carried the rag-tag crew that would eventually find themselves in the aforementioned lifeboat. Cute.

i love the NYRB

2009-11-02T23:11:00.002-05:00

If you find yourself with time to read the Nov 19th issue of the New York Review of Books cover to cover, go for it!

More 1930s realism; Jonathan Raban on 2 Dorothea Lange bios. Critical in the right ways.

And a bit on Irving Penn. Smart enough.

The Gaia Hypothesis. Weird, brilliant and very British.

The Glorious Revolution. Not so British, after all.

American education: history, theory and practice. Excellent.

Peter Brooks on the history of the Louvre. Elegant.

And Dan Chiasson reminded me of all the reasons I love Wallace Stevens. Before I got (as usual) bored.

let's pretend it's the week of sept 21

2009-10-20T22:20:00.003-04:00

We've all just gotten a new issue of TNY and we're mulling things over. These things might be:

Crain on the culture of the Great Depression, and Depression-era "holidays." This Dickstein book is something I'd like to read. I love 1930s realism.

Denby on Campion's Bright Star.

Campion makes only one serious mistake: when Whishaw recites the lines “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,” he actually rests his head on Cornish’s chest. The literalness borders on the laughable . . .

This made me smile. I had the same reaction during a recent episode of "Mad Men," when Don is confronted by his father's ghost. I think, time-wise, Denby wrote this before I yelled at the TV "No, don't look at your hands!" I give up. We have a deep, spiritual bond, Denby and I.

Though, immediately afterwards, I think he's wrong. The sentence continues . . . and you wonder, disconcertingly, how these two relieve what look like unbearable states of arousal. Maybe Campion is making the joke that you are laughing at Denby? Did you ever think of that? She makes lots of great visual sexual jokes. She's like that. Then again, so do the MM writers.

Paul Simms' "Shouts and Murmurs." A hilarity that exists somewhere between houseguests and colonization.

And Ben Yagoda's letter about Rose Wilder Lane. She is "in fact, the first ghostwriter in history." Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Art Smith, "Boy Aviator" owe her.

Thank god my wait at the doctor's office did not allow me to read all of "The Eight Days of the Financial Crisis." I don't even think I made it through day one. But I was impressed with what one might call the (pardon me) "economy" of the writing. Not a lot of superfluous detail. Stewart sets the scene and gets to business. Everything he tells you means something, and soon. I wish more New Yorker pieces were this controlled.

I also laughed out loud at more than one of the cartoons. Including the contests in the back. Fellow patients stared at me in wonderment.

Block that Metaphor!

2009-10-11T21:56:00.001-04:00

Hollywood Manipulated The New Yorker

And lots of nasty names were exchanged. Read all the way to the end.

Shared via AddThis

On their game.

2009-09-28T11:51:00.002-04:00

Martin Schneider, of Emdashes. Takes The New Yorker to task for hedging about a man's sexuality with the word "partner" - "You know, either bring it up, or don't. But avoid this in-between."

And Sasha Frere-Jones, at his New Yorker blog, "I’m only tweaking the faithful because there are so many to tweak and I’m a terrible person."

my two favorite things: sleep + The New Yorker Magazine

2009-09-15T16:53:00.003-04:00

Christoph Nieman on insomnia. In the NYT. Doing battle with the mosquitoes. With TNY.

the overpopulation of the moral high ground

2009-09-05T14:38:00.004-04:00

I enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert on "eco-stunts" in a paper copy of last week's magazine that I bought in a local news shop. I read her book review immediately upon waking up, so this is through a happy, groggy Labor Day Weekend haze.

The first thing that I thought was that Kolbert was, literally, calling the author "No Impact Man" because he had no real impact, politically. Or, really environmentally either. I only realized slowly that that was the actual title of his book. In any case, it was a good weekend read simply because she put so well things that I feel: personal extremism is silly and doesn't make for real, lasting change; change needs to be structural, large-scale, social and political; these stunt-ers taking the moral high ground are dull and annoying and yet another example of the self-indulgence of late capitalist nincompoops. So, not the most informative article for me, but satisfying in a small way that allows me to take the moral high ground and thus the cycle of life continues . . . etc, etc.

I love the ending: What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

Ah, there's the pun.

But there was something about the cloth diapers and cloth napkins and the reusable food storage and the one-car/no-car family that really seemed familiar, do-able and appealing. What if Americans all did just live like it was the 1970s? Could we run the statistics on that? If Americans just created as much landfill waste and used as much electricity and emitted as much carbon as they did (per capita) in the 1970s? And maybe recycled as much as they did during WWII? What would that look like in terms of large-scale change? Can we legislate that?

I also learned a few things about Thoreau that I did not know before.

Well Played

2009-08-20T17:51:00.001-04:00

Another New Yorker reference on Go Fug Yourself! Well Played, Fergie/The F.U.G.

Shared via AddThis

Another article I missed!

2009-08-09T18:55:00.004-04:00

IndieWire mentions a key plot point in the new movie Cold Souls:

The film plays out on the edges of fantasy and reality with Paul Giamatti portraying an established American actor - named Paul Giamatti - who is trying in vain to perfect his interpretation of “Uncle Vanya.” Stymied by his anxiety, he happens across an article in The New Yorker about a high tech company that can alleviate personal trauma by removing souls. Giamatti goes for it, hoping the temporary removal of his soul will allow him to concentrate on the character in his performance.

High-brow wackiness ensues.

hungry much?

2009-08-04T15:02:00.008-04:00

I still haven't renewed my New Yorker subscription. But Lagusta has some tantilizing things to say about the Ariel Levy password protected profile of Nora Ephron.

And you know how I feel about Nora Ephron. And romantic comedies. And Julia. And Jacques. So I'd love to read this, if I can figure out a way to get my hands on it. Maybe I'll buy the issue at my favorite bookstore and then, finally, resubscribe.

it could be worse

2009-07-27T22:16:00.003-04:00

Or better. Sasha Frere-Jones' forthcoming book on Michael Jackson.

All of you who followed his live blogging of the memorial will have to let me know what you think.

acocella and gladwell make me sick

2009-07-27T13:31:00.005-04:00

I found myself reading The New Yorker at the doctor's office again.

Although I was intrigued by Gladwell's thoughts on "Overconfidence" and the Wall Street crisis, I put the magazine down after I read the following:

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

I go with structural every time. I'd read an article about how psychology plays a part, or about how an overconfident Wall Street psychology is structurally produced. But putting it this way is just silly.

However, I picked the magazine right back up again, because the wait at my doctor's office is very long. Because she's an asshole? NO. Because our heath care system is structurally unsound.

Anyway, I read the thing about the new director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Brilliant analysis of an institution, in all its complexity. Rebecca Mead, not online.

And I read Joan Acocella on Michael Jackson. Offensive, without directly confronting questions of race, fame, fortune, art, power, money, gender, or sexuality at all. Offensive because it indirectly invokes all these issues, in the half-assed way that most of the MJ coverage did, does and will. Possibly the worst thing I've read in The New Yorker in recent memory. A predictable failure.

She can describe dance moves so that you can see them in your head, though.

the song of the snark

2009-06-14T11:09:00.006-04:00

Benj is reading Barbara Tuchman's history of the fin-de-siecle-before-last The Proud Tower, which I thought I had begun and not finished. But every time he tells me something new from the book, I realize, "Oh, I read at least that far." Hm.

Anyway, one of these exchanges took place when Benj got to the part about Strauss' opera Salome. And this, combined with other factors caused me to buy, immediately, my own copy of of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, which I am now reading. Beach reading is no joke, because I go to the beach a lot.

Ross uses the phrase, "for whatever reason," which a lot of people don't like. But I like it. It's more palatable in polite conversation than saying something is overdetermined. And it's kind of respectful. As in, you know the reasons as well as I do.

We still haven't renewed our New Yorker subscription. But I picked up the fiction issue and I read Louis Menand's account of the history of "Creative Writing." Smack dab in the middle of it, he uses the word "snark" in the old-fashioned Lewis Carrollian sense of the word.

coasters, $.80 each

2009-05-14T22:21:00.014-04:00

So I still haven't renewed my New Yorker subscription. Which puts me one giant step behind the Fug Girls. Or at least Heather, w ho has a pile of them on her coffee table. And I thought all we had in common was Anne of Green Gables, the Wakefields of Sweet Valley and Bea Arthur. And fur sleeves.

Barney Frank, ways back

2009-05-08T08:36:00.003-04:00

I thoroughly enjoyed Toobin's profile of Barney Frank.

Now it's kind of a moment in history (January 12th, 2009) but it's maybe even more interesting than it was?

I have cable TV. And the rest is history . . .

2009-03-18T09:49:00.002-04:00

My media diet has been omnivori-fying. (Horrifying.)

My New Yorker subscription has actually lapsed (so I can't play with the by-subscription archives mentioned here**). And I now have cable TV.

So I saw the cover of a New York Review of Books that hasn't arrived yet in my mailbox on Rachel Maddow. And I also saw Mark Danner there. He was doing this weird thing where he claimed that the very language of the victims of CIA torture - as he quoted it - would testify to the authenticity of their accounts. It's been awhile since I thought about language that way.

I actually heard the same news - that the Red Cross is calling it torture - on the radio, on Democracy Now. In the car. Such is life.

** Martin Schneider follows up on a twitter from Matthew Yglesias and discovers an elaborate nest of New Yorker love/hate.

Milk Monitor

2009-03-17T15:49:00.003-04:00

Hilton Als review of Milk in the NYRB was pretty interesting.

He calls our attention to the fact that the movie is not about one man finding personal freedom, though it could have been, if it had been about the first half of Harvey Milk's life. But is, instead, about one man devoting himself to a community.

Als also registers his discomfort with a few tired cliches, and falls into some himself (calling the film and Van Sant's aesthetic "cinematic" when he really means "visual"). And there's this interesting high school theme running through; Als mentions Van Sant's Elephant and ends up at the Harvey Milk High School.

Als is particularly good when he describes the actors, though not particularly clear.

On Brolin, "a remarkably controlled film actor - he doesn't overact and give the camera more than it can handle; he keeps his facial muscles relatively still . . ." - that's a lot of punctuation!! "His ramrod-straight back growing tighter and tighter." Ouch!!

On Hirsh, "as Milk talks, Hirsch seems to resign himself to his attraction, letting his arms fall to his sides. In most of their scenes, Hirsch makes Penn resist the temptation to play cute by confronting him with a vulnerability that's greater than his own. Indirectly, Hirsch represents Van Sant's intuitive visual approach to filmmaking, while Penn sticks close to his need to please - a desire that mirrors Milk's own desire to charm, always." His whose? But he's right.

On Penn, "[he] mutes his voice in his private scenes with Brolin, like a particularly caring coach."

I was planning to read Sanford Schwartz on Peter Scheldahl too. Also in the NYRB.

Oh, and it seems like missed a lesbianostalgia thing in TNY. Damn.

Suprise! Poetry!

2009-02-15T21:16:00.003-05:00

First ever? Poem I liked in The New Yorker.

"Acting Like a Tree" By Jonathan Aaron. Back in the Dec 15 issue.

The cartoon on the facing page was good too. "I'm such a perfectionist."

Your Turn

2009-01-02T09:47:00.002-05:00

I played the official caption game. It was pretty fun and a bargain too.

Like Boggle, it's fun to lose and your perception of something (the board, the cartoon image) changes suddenly when everyone else offers their contributions. And good thing it's fun to lose, because my family did NOT ONCE vote me funniest caption.

My favorite caption for this image came from Little Brother,

"Fine, go ahead. But you've mislabelled my photo in the last three newsletters."

We didn't use the board, we just kept score.

If David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell had a love child...

2008-12-16T17:21:00.005-05:00

...it would, perforce, be an adopted baby from China? Brooks on Gladwell, in the NYT.

Synecdoche, New Yorker

2008-11-22T21:11:00.005-05:00

"The seller is extremely motivated."

That was a caption contest winner, right?

There's a rather similar image, accompanied by a very similar line, in the very eh Synecdoche, NY. I should have read the Lane review. Or heeded other signs, of which there were plenty.

what we're reading

2008-11-21T10:35:00.002-05:00

Brando in the bathroom, pyschopaths in the living room.

i think my subscription has lapsed

2008-11-11T11:48:00.008-05:00

Remember that cover? For the record, I didn't think it was funny.

It bothered me that so much of the defense of the cover insisted that you just had to take the cover in context - you had to know this and the other and then it was funny. Well, there were contexts in which it was not funny - if you knew this, that and some other other - and those contexts seemed just as important.

Also, I hated the teacherly position that so many folks took, explaining satire. I know what satire is, and I know when it is a useful political rhetoric.

What else is new? Oh, they've got Emily Gordon tied up in a basement (with internet access) over at Emdashes, and now Martin Schneider, Benjamin Chambers and the mad cartoonist are running the show. Link to a recent Gladwell thing that may be of interest.

Red Sex, Blue Sex was a little slight. We wanted more. Sex. Or more talk about not having sex.

And Herzberg's Karl the Marxist punchline awhile back just killed me! Ha! Ha!

spike lee, dw griffith and the history of film studies

2008-10-06T12:16:00.002-04:00

Someone recommended that I take a look at this, and I recommend it to you. See the part about Spike Lee at NYU, from Colapinto. Lee was, apparently, "fresh."

talk. talk. talk.

2008-08-12T08:21:00.003-04:00

It's true. That is all I'm good for.

(1) I am very much in sympathy with Emdashes' "Banned Words and Phrases," in a general sense. And I am supportive of the ban on "exhausted," in particular. And I would like to institute such a ban against my busy and hyperbolic but hardly --------- self. You know this.

Rebecca Mead and Roger S. Weick demonstrate the proper use of the word, in an Aug 4 talk:

[Queen] Claude, a near-contemporary of Anne Boleyn, who served her at the French court as a prepubescent lady-in-waiting, was betrothed at the age of six to her cousin François, the Duke of Angoulême and heir-presumptive to the French throne. She was wed at fourteen. She went on to bear seven royal children, including a son who became Henry II of France, and she died at twenty-four. “The French say that she was épuisée—exhausted,” Roger S. Wieck, a curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Morgan, explained the other day. (27)

(2) "Fish Story," 7/21. I didn't like the way Mike Peed included panhandlers in a list of non-human objects. I did like the way he got distracted at the end, "Suddenly, an even bigger question loomed: What does the world have against eels?"

(3) I feel like it's interesting news that Sasha Frere-Jones is selling his vinyl collection. I hope he keeps us posted on that.

(4) Ug. On Saturday, on my local radio station, I heard someone desecrate James Thurber's "How to Tell a Fine Old Wine," in a reading for Selected Shorts. It was just so bad. Tension and excitement in all the wrong places. The actor clearly was not acquainted with dry, modern wit. While John Lithgow reading Roald Dahl's "Taste" was pretty good.

talk of nettles. and thistles. and other things to eat.

2008-08-05T08:23:00.011-04:00

You did read "Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers," didn't you? Oh, delicious.

And "Soup to Nettles," one family's experiments in 19th C Russian cookery. Also tasty.

The Emdashes interns are right, hip-hop Sesame Street is sublime. I also liked both Sasha Frere-Jones' posts the price of soul at the Christies' auction of James Brown miscellany. One sounded a bit like a good Talk; in the other, a picture spoke a thousand words.

The end was a bit pat, on Frere-Jones' longer piece (and the Russian one, for that matter), but that's how Talks are, huh?

Well, maybe not. The end of "Kranking It" was quietly dismissive in the best way.

Rebecca Mead's nuptial Talk was alternately seductive and repulsive. I got confused when the now-divorced Ms. Tucker is describing her wedding ceremony:

"'My dog Rosy was in the wedding. She wore a thistle collar. It was very me.' Was it also very him, she was asked. Tucker paused. 'I have no idea,' she said. 'Herein lies the problem.'"

The first two times I read it, I thought the him was the dog Rosy. The gender of dogs escapes me, I fixate on the weird psychological shit people put their pets through, I don't know . . . Anyway, when I went to post today, I realized the him in question was probably the ex-husband.

But the absolutely most disgusting line the whole thing is this, "The couple have been engaged since before Niederhoffer was pregnant with Magnolia but have no immediate plans to marry." Ew. Just ew. If you live in a world where you feel you have to be explicit about the dates, just . . . never mind.

To quote Tucker, “It’s like the perfect bohemian existence, except not.”

oh, please.

2008-07-14T09:45:00.005-04:00

Have you seen the latest issue of The New Yorker?!!? Of course Harold Bloom is a goddamn Yankees fan!!! He would be!

As for that other business, I'll get back to you.

Allen Shawn in the NYT Magazine

2008-07-12T19:22:00.002-04:00

Remember William Shawn's daughter Mary? Allen Shawn's autistic twin sister? Sure you do. Anyway, Allen Shawn writes about her in the NYT Magazine's "Eat, Memory" column a few weeks back. It's a tough piece.

He begins, "These days, children with the degree of autism, mental retardation and elements of schizophrenia from which she suffers are more likely to live in a group home than to be institutionalized. Indeed, even the notion of 'suffering' that I just suggested has come to look a bit suspect, since it implies that it is 'best' for a person not to have certain 'deficits.' And I am no longer certain that she suffers more than others . . . "

Here, he reveals his own attitude towards his sister. He assumes she suffers. Wait, no, scratch that, he used to assume she suffered. But then the passive construction of the second sentence - his assumption has come to look suspect - inserts a bit of distance and suggests that it really just looks suspect to other people. What about to him? Maybe he's not entirely on board with accepting her, as is, as other people "these days" might. So things are kind of up in the air. He's self-conscious about his more conventional judgments and values, he's revising them, but they are very present. Good set up.

And then he tells a story: about how the family hosts annual birthday parties for Mary, and they invariably serve the same thing, a menu that Mary gets excited about and talks about and anticipates and so on . . . same thing, every year for 50 years.

Well, finally, one year, Mom is aging and the kids (and assorted "friends") have to throw the party, but things spin out of control a bit and someone makes a platter of antipasti and someone makes a salad and some fruit and Mary enjoys it and Allen realizes "how vast and mysterious we all are." Even Mary.

On the one hand, the story is great. Shawn is confronting the limitations of how he and the family have related to his sister in the past.

On the other hand, the story is old hat. "We" watch a disabled woman become human. While she eats. Shawn mentions "our mother" and "our friends" and the we of the our is always he and his brother.

The photo is infantilizing and reeks of the dining room scene in The Miracle Worker. The author's prose is better; he describes Mary's "comfortable, confident . . . ease" at the party.

Also annoying is the mysterious role of "an extraordinary woman named Marjorie" who lives with his mother when she is, you know "unable to take care of herself in any way" and helps throw the most recent party. Allen Shawn does not tell us if her extraordinariness is paid, professional labor. I suspect it is and I think that that should be recognized.

But all in all, I'm glad he wrote it and I'm glad I read it.

the head swims: acocella and kinsley

2008-07-09T17:07:00.000-04:00

In the real heat of summer, the kind we have now, this caught my fancy,

At first, I thought I was alone in the pool. It was a sparkling blue gem, implausibly planted in the skyscraper canyon of downtown Los Angeles, as if David Hockney, heading toward Beverly Hills, had taken the wrong exit on the I-10 freeway. This fine pool was the consolation and only charm of the Soviet-style complex where I had rented an apartment so that I could walk to work at the Los Angeles Times. It was early, not even 6 A.M. I had finished my laps and was enjoying the emptiness of the pool, the faint sounds of downtown gearing up for the day, and the drama of the looming office towers . . .

Then what I had thought was a ripple in the water turned out to be—no, not a shark . . . It was a tiny old man in a tiny black bathing suit. He was slowly, slowly completing a lap in the next lane. When, finally, he reached the side where I was resting and watching, he came up for air. He saw me, beamed, and said, “I’m ninety years old.” It was clearly a boast, not a lament . . .

The rest is here, "Reflections, Mine is Longer than Yours, The Last Boomer Game" by Michael Kinsley, in the old April 7 issue. It is best described as cynical.

I recently had a similar experience when an elderly swimmer told me that, although today he felt slow, "On Wednesday, I felt like Johnny Weissmuller."

Also very cool, Acocella's recent preview of Mark Morris "Romeo and Juliet." How is Christian Science relevant? Well, you'll have to find a paper copy of the July 7&14 issue and read it to find out.

it's the little things

2008-07-05T19:00:00.003-04:00

I think I love Chiasson's profile of Frank O'Hara in the old April 7 issue. I like the title, "Fast Company," and I like all the following bits:

"(...he called writing 'playing the typewriter.')"

"(in the words of a home-town friend) the spot to 'lie down on a chaise longue, get mellow with a few drinks, and listen to Marlene Dietrich records.'"

and, of course,

"glistening torsos sandwiches"

Of these four, the first is Chiasson quoting a letter written by O'Hara, the second is Chiasson quoting O'Hara's "home-town friend," and then, the third is an actual O'Hara poem.

But it all sounds pretty darn good to me.

I absolutely loved this bit of analysis, from Chiasson:

"When O'Hara includes, in his poems, urine and sequins, aspirins and Strega, it's not because he's addicted to reality - on the contrary, he is addicted to artistic transformation, and is distressed by the fact that bits of the world haven't been subjected to mimesis, and preserved by it."

I loved O'Hara at the movies and living in apartments.

But maybe Chiasson is addicted to sandwiches. He mentions the sandwich image on at least 3 separate occasions. That's a little annoying. And the bit I liked, above, about the chaises, well, actually, it is part of a sentence that is way too long and contains too much information. The sentence about the chaises also mentions, in passing, that (1) post-WWII Harvard "overflow freshmen slept on cots in the gym" and (2) Edward Gorey was O'Hara's college roommate!! Chiasson also relies too heavily on parentheses.

NYT also has a review of the Selected Poems.

And I found James Wood's review of Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances (June 23) really compelling. Like, I felt compelled to find and read the book. And that never happens. I was dizzy by the end of her short story, "Region of Unlikeness" so I think I'll be fairly swooning by the end of the novel.

a case of the giggles

2008-07-03T13:48:00.006-04:00

Even if you usually skip such things, you might want to read Lauren Collins' review of the much-maligned restaurant Ago in the July 7&14 issue. She carefully and methodically works up to the kind of cliched pun that smacks you silly with its utter brilliance.

I also loved this:

And I'm a big fan of Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day (thanks, little-brother-who-gives-the-greatest-gifts). Recently they used a funny quote from Anthony Lane to demonstrate the not quite medicinal use of the word "costive." Check it out.

all in good time

2008-07-01T14:09:00.009-04:00

Look at this: a faux Schjeldahl review. Clearly ersatz, not just because the author uses the word "duh" but because the tone is pissy and dismissive, which Schjeldahl never is.

Note to C-Monster: This should be more legible is right. The photo (not just the clunky prose) is difficult to read.

Gawker recently noticed a Gladwell backlash.

And Martin Schneider, at Emdashes, stumbles onto the old flickr set of TNY author photos that was so generously shared with us the year before last.

Finally, someone that is not me coined the phrase "New Yorker Fatigue," abbreviated NYF. Of course it's abbreviated. We're exhausted (Sorry Em).

empirical research

2008-06-30T14:39:00.001-04:00

"(In Bolivarian Venezuela, 'the Empire' is the United States.)"

From Jon Lee Anderson's whatever-it-was (profile? diary? string of vignettes?) on Hugo Chavez, in the June 23 issue.

I've heard that from a wide variety of Latin American socialists, not just those in/of Bolivarian Venezuela. And why is it in parentheses? If this sounds like nitpicking, on my part, it is and it isn't. The way Anderson's whatever-it-is is written it falls into the trap of making it all "about" Chavez, the whole revolutionary socialist hero bit (closely related to the blame it on a dictator bit). What about the guy holding the huge poster?

A Roy Cohn for Every Era

2008-06-27T14:51:00.002-04:00

In sum, Roy Cohn has recently appeared in The New Yorker as a friend of Barbara Walters, an eater of burned bacon and devilled eggs, a haver of sex with men (not gay), interested in power and access, and a role model to Roger Stone. In Lemann's "I Have to Ask" (May 12 issue) and Toobin's "The Dirty Trickster" (June 12).

Something prompted me to dig out (and through) my New Yorker archives and I found the very first mention of Mr. Roy Cohn in E.B. White's May 9, 1953 "Talk of the Town." Here:

"For us, a comical side light of the Washington quiz programs is that one of the quiz masters is Mr. Roy Cohn, who, we figure, was six years old when the banks closed in 1933 and every third man in America turned into a political philosopher overnight. A lot of the questioning of witnesses seems to turn on what the witness was thinking in the early thirties. (Mr. Cohn, of course, was an anarchist at that period - all children are.) Some witnesses, it has been revealed, philosophized themselves into the Communist Party and did a stretch there. Most of us, it would appear, just whirled around in beautiful, ever-widening circles of thought, soaring with the eagle of N.R.A. The only way to get through the day in that era was to plan societies, we recall that very clearly. When you got up in the morning, there wasn’t anyplace to go, so you sat down with the classified ads for awhile and then drifted smoothly into political theory. The fact that one of the fellows digging into the lives of the inhabitants of that tragic period is Mr. Cohn, who must have been playing with his celluloid toys in the bathtub at the time, gives us a chuckle."

A year later, White wasn't chuckling:

"Whether the Army resorted to blackmail, whether McCarthy and Cohn used improper pressure, are questions that interest everybody. But one thing is quite clear: this is no “squabble” (as it is often called) between the Army and McCarthy. This is the showdown on the country’s top problem in internal security. It involves the infiltration of Communists into places where nobody wants them to be, and it involves the infiltration of Senator McCarthy into the institutions that he doesn’t approve of and would to rearrange: the Constitution, the White House, the Army, and the Department of Justice; the press and other forms of ‘extreme Left Wing’ dissent; the two-party system (in which you call the other side anything you want to except ‘traitor’); the delicate balance between the three main branches of government; due process; and the nice old idea that a citizen isn’t guilty of anything just because someone ‘names’ him as guilty."

June 12, 1954, "Talk of the Town," E.B. White

Then, they pretty much left him alone.

In a profile Mark Singer did of an elderly court buff, in 1980, said court buff reminisces, "I still say Roy Cohn had the sharpest mind."

There's this cartoon. In 1988, two years after he died.

Supposedly, Roy Cohn is a keyword for a piece Remnick did on George Stephanopoulos, in 1996. (I couldn't figure out why Cohn was a keyword, but the profile did contain a joke about the still-humorous NYRB personals!)

And he came up, of course, when Angels in America was reviewed, as a play and as television.

if you like pina coladas, and getting caught in the rain

2008-06-26T10:03:00.006-04:00

Kottke links to this. A discussion (post and comments) of the personals in the New York Review of Books that is, maybe, even funnier than the personals themselves. Although I let my subscription lapse this past fall, I have a few notes.

1. I suspect the "anthropologist at heart" is not comparing herself to more superficial anthropologists, but actually admitting a guilty secret . . . no? Like being a romantic. Or a chocoholic.

2. I'm switching to the London Review of Books right now!!

3. And is there a name for the (fairly common) comical bait and switch in pulsford's second example?

4. Also, note to my Aunt Eleanor (who is clearly the "yoga nazi"), don't you already have a "dumpy, bland moccasin-wearing M?" Work on him first then go looking for another one.

This cracks me up, obviously.

Overinformed Uncles and Other Patres Familias

2008-06-15T22:17:00.008-04:00

Jeffrey Toobin on Roger Stone and George Packer on "The Fall of Conservatism" made an interesting pair of essays. Or they would have if I'd read the whole Stone thing [I'm reading more of it, out of order, in the bathroom], but it was dull, or he was or something; the New York Magazine summary of the article is snappier.

George Packer (who may or may not have a tattoo of David Brooks on his back) held my interest but I began to wonder somewhere along the line exactly what percentage of the essay was quotes from Brooks. A large percentage, anyway.

On a more personal note, I firmly believe that the NYT was baiting me with that minute by minute parenting article (and the insane piano photo) on the front page. I don't care how many days they leave it up there, I will not read it. But exactly how stupid is it? You tell me.

Barbara Walters Steals the Show

2008-05-27T09:58:00.007-04:00

This morning at about 5 AM, Benj asked, frantically, "Where's that article I was reading about Barbara Walters?" I mumbled, "Oh, that was awesome, best thing in the magazine."

But I was referring to the excerpt from her memoirs published in the June 2008 issue of Vanity Fair. Not the New Yorker piece he was in the middle of. Which I will definitely read. But about the Vanity Fair, which I left on the plane:

Walters is a great writer, the story is fascinating, and it includes lines like,

"Thank heaven for Alan Greenspan. We dated rather seriously for several years, and he really saw me through this agonizing time."

Her use of cliche evokes a distinct historical period and I love it. "That ship has sailed." Full excerpt here. The photos are also quite nice. Not the ones included online, of course, but the 2 page collage of action shots.

Miley who?

Puffins, Again

2008-05-19T21:35:00.006-04:00

So I meant to say something long and involved about how Franzen's "The Way of the Puffin" (Journeys April 21, 2008) did this thing that I like: a kind of wide-eyed and wonderful naif says, "Oh, look. It's different here. There are no convenient spaces, near the cities, for me to birdwatch" and this draws our attention to the ideology that produces certain kinds of spaces, and cities, and citizens and, in fact, birdwatching. But apparently, the moral of the story (as gleaned from the audio interview) is that Chinese people are "the same as other people."

In light of recent natural disasters, we might be thinking of what it is that creates environments and we might be thinking that it might not be a good idea just to wait around for capitalism to run its course and individuals to get their consciousness raised and join the Sierra Club and make birdwatching more widely available, or what have you. The audio interview includes thoughts on "progress," "The Simpsons," "complicity" of various kinds and "potholes."

What about the tigers piece, in the same issue?

I've also recently read two pieces on churches - "Project Trinity" (Sanneh on Wright) and "The Bishop's Daughter" (Honor Moore on her father).

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

2008-05-13T16:18:00.003-04:00

In the jungles of postmodern irony, such is the encounter,

Jonathan Franzen writes, of his guide to developing China, David Xu, "He had the fashionably angular eyeglasses and ingratiating eagerness of an untenured literature professor . . ." (92) Hullo.

I'll post a bit more on "The Way of the Puffin" later, as I did not hate it. At least, that is to say . . .

and it's better if i don't read the fiction in its entirety, too.

2008-04-24T16:53:00.003-04:00

I was reading (unawares) Alice Munro's story in the old anniversary issue and I started at the part where Nita was telling the story about the deadly rhubarb poison to her visitor (the magazine and I were in the bathroom) and I thought, this story is great. And then I turned to the first page and it was by Munro and I thought, well, I just have to read it. And then it turns out, well . . .

I wonder why she wrote the story in the way she did.

But you know why, really, my posting has been slow? Because I actually hate The New Yorker. That thing that was supposedly about umbrellas, but was really about people who manufacture plastic crap - excuse me, "moldable foam tubes" - in China? That was the last straw.

see. it's better when I don't read the fiction.

2008-04-16T09:40:00.003-04:00

My responses are somewhat unsophisticated. Rivka Galchen, "The Region of Unlikeness."

"Sitting at the table next to mine in a small Moroccan coffee shop on the Upper West Side, they were discussing “Wuthering Heights,” too loudly, having the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me."

Ha.

"Jacob looked about forty-five; he was overweight, he was munching obsessively on these unappetizing green leaf-shaped cookies, and he kept saying 'obviously.' "

Ha ha. We had a joke once about "clearly."

"And a bearded young man next to them moved to a more distant table."

Get it? The young man was so pretentious that he had a beard, and yet even he had to move to a more distant table. Oh, I'm dying.

"Ilan added, 'But since Jane Austen’s usually the token woman on university syllabi, it’s understandable if your average undergraduate has a hard time shaking the idea that women are half-wits, moved only by the terror that a man might not be as rich as he seems.' Ilan laughed. Jacob refined Ilan’s statement to 'straight women.' Then to straight women 'in the Western tradition.' "

It happens in JUST THIS WAY.

"He had a great deal to say, with a steady gaze into my eyes, about my reading the New York Post, which he interpreted as a sign of a highly satiric yet demotically moral intelligence. Jacob nodded. I let the flattery go straight to my heart [...]"

This too happens. One blushes modestly and then . . .

"The only thing that came to my mind was the old joke that time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. I couldn’t bear to say it, so I remained silent."

Under similar conditions, I have said it.

something glossier - VF 4/2008

2008-04-08T08:42:00.004-04:00

Or, letting it all hang out.

I really, really liked Robert Frank in China. Something about guys that age. And it was so well written and so about nothing much. Read it, if only online.

I also read something about Bush trying to be all clever with Palestine, and Bilmes and Stiglitz estimation of the real cost of the war. The latter was smart in content, but what I was paying attention to was form - how well they excerpted from a larger work, The Three Trillion Dollar War. They're all over the place, doing this, but practice makes perfect, I guess.

I picked up the April Vanity Fair because of the funny ladies thing, but that was totally slight and not at all funny. I liked the photographs. Not the one on the front, so much as the tarts inside. My favorite photo, the one set in a hotel room, you have to see in the actual magazine.

And Ingrid Sichy on Calvin Klein. The history of a man who sold water, underwear and jeans at above market prices. Among other scams. Read between the lines, if you read it at all.

I also had the opportunity to read the controversial Vogue and a random issue of Self. See thoughts (and links) at Electric Warrior. For the record, I don't think the cover image was inadvertent, and I do think every body looks good in a bikini.

is it it about race, or is it about racism?

2008-03-14T23:32:00.010-04:00

So, right now, I either have time to read TNY or write about it, but not, it seems, both. I've read:

Frere-Jones on this Winehouse character. Aural blackface.

The spine-tingling Long Island murder thing.

And Collins on Obama, Michelle. I'm not sure that that joke Obama made at the spa is so much "a blunt discussion about race" as it is part and parcel of the couple's strategy for confronting racist anxieties about black people with political power. But there you are.

***

Finally, I've never done this before, and I may never again, but I'm happy (overjoyed) to report that recent keyword activity, according to ye olde statcounter, has included searches for "fake maltese dogs with realistic features in stores" and "lesbians who love lauren collins." May you find what your heart's desire on the internet. May you read I Hate The New Yorker until you do.

Also, Specter on carbon footprints. But you knew that.

And Hersh on Israel bombing Syria.

Blue Period

2008-02-10T17:14:00.000-05:00

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.

Seen and Heard

2008-02-07T16:46:00.000-05:00

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.

David Denbyisms

2008-02-01T12:18:00.000-05:00

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.

new haven, ct and the return of the homocidal wife

2008-01-18T08:02:00.000-05:00

Again with the sensational retrospective suspicion that the feminine half of the economic and creative partnership murdered the masculine half. An act for which Wikipedia has no word. But surely there is one, right? Or maybe there's just a word for this recurring paranoia I've read so much about. In the New Yorker.

Anyway, this time it is Mrs. Thomas Ince, otherwise known as Eleanor Kershaw. A passing reference in Dana Goodyear's "Chateau Scientology." Or maybe she just connived (Eleanor, not Dana).

But what about New Haven? Hotbed of lost or soon to be almost lost artifacts.

Cynthia Zarin, in the olde Oct 15 issue reports on a miniature that might or might not be of Lady Jane Grey and is now in the possession of the Yale Center for British Art. I would have liked it if Zarin had spent less time on the pop culture references and more time on the part where "her father (Jane's) sold her guardianship, for two thousand pounds, to Lord Thomas Seymour." So does that make her a bargain or a hot commodity?

And Burkhardt Bilger's heroic Alan Solomon, of "Mystery on Pearl Street" (Jan 7) finds himself staring at a portrait of architect Ithiel Town, hanging in the church on the New Haven green, as he (Alan) tries to interpret the significance of a heap o' bricks of uncertain provenance. Now avail as abstract and podcast.

luc sante is just brilliant

2008-01-01T13:38:00.000-05:00

As everyone who cares surely knows by now, Facebook has elmininated the "is." I'm one of the people that likes this, and I now offer friends and family long, active, vaguely 19th C descriptions of my life and times. Indeed, almost all of my status updates include dated cliches.

Which brings me to Luc Sante, in the NYRB, away back in the October 25 issue. On the publication, in English, of the collected faits-divers of anarchist and writer Félix Fénéon. This biographical review is lovely. When Mr. Sante compares the pre-Fénéon items in Le Matin with the the author's, I actually get it.

"'In Brignoles, Mme. S., who had recently given birth, killed herself yesterday by jumping out a window, during a bout of fever.[15]'

The inertness and complacency of these sentences is immediately evident when they are compared to Fénéon's:

'Again and again Mme Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields.'"

But what does it all mean?

"If each item is a miniature clockwork of language and event, the full thousand-and-some put together make a mosaic panorama. They represent the year 1906 in France, and they are charged with the essence of that time and place in a way that is routinely available to artifacts and impersonal documents while often remaining outside the grasp of literature. They testify to the growing importance and menace of the automobile, the medieval conditions that still prevailed in agriculture and country life, the often fortunate inefficiency of firearms, the vulnerability of rural populations to epidemic disease, the unflagging pomposity of the military establishment, the mutual suspicion and profound lack of understanding between the French and their colonial subjects, the increasing number of strikes and the unchangingly brutal state of factory labor, the continuing panic over the threat of anarchist bombs (twelve years of relative calm had gone by, while the next wave of anarchist violence, spearheaded by the Bonnot gang, lay five years in the future)."

Sante makes no mention of the relevance of this kind of writing to the, um, poetics of new media. But it's all there for the taking, subtle, dark, perfect.

"like a dissertation on alcohol"

2007-12-25T08:59:00.000-05:00

This is about "Day of the Dead, The Mysterious Demise of Malcolm Lowry," by D.T. Max.

One of the most exciting things that happened to me in the last 6 years was, somewhere in there, the sudden release of my attention from a prolonged period of intensive reading.

Anyway, I began to wander through the three dimensional world noticing all kinds of shapes and textures that I hadn't the week before. Neat.

At another point, I endured a period of frantic skimming (not reading) and then, suddenly, when my time was my own, again, I tried to read a mystery novel. You can't skim a mystery novel. And I had to adjust my readerly attention. Also neat.

Brijit summarizes Max's article and calls it a "massive, well-written feature" but I read it in one evening, so I wouldn't call it massive exactly. And, if you can't skim a mystery you really can't summarize one either. But I did love it.

Max lends to the baffling air of mystery by adding a son. The current online version includes the correction. Nephew, not son.

In related news, I recently read that in the 19th C, reviewers of Wilkie Collins presumed that his novels would not be read twice by the same person, the sensation being a kind of "once in a lifetime" effect. For this 20th C reader, let me tell you, this does not hold. On the one hand, I certainly believe that people read differently in different historical and cultural moments. On the other hand, the very fact that Collins was published serially, and then in volumes, suggests that he was read twice, even back in the day . . .

I will say, though, that D.T. Max has this funny habit, in the Lowry article, of quoting full sentences of Malcolm and/or Margerie and letting them sort of just sit there, as if the language proved something or other - that Margerie was a brilliant editor who curbed Malcolm's florid prose, that Margerie was, on her own, a hack mystery writer, that Malcolm was, in the end, truly gifted, etc, etc . . .

Me, I couldn't tell the shit from the Shinola. Maybe I'm out of practice. Or maybe I just like hack mysteries too much. Anyway, best line in the whole thing is the quote that heads this post, which is pure Margerie. Malcolm being dead by that point.

And yeah, Max call her Margerie and him Lowry. How very 1940.

feeling relegated

2007-12-24T08:06:00.000-05:00

If you found Dan Chiasson's review (Nov 19) of the work of poets Mark Strand and Robert Hass a little frustrating and dissatisfying, and put it down after the first paragraph or two (I did), consider this:

"Biographical criticism often trivializes a poem by ignoring its larger philosophical questions and reducing it to simplistic emotions. That Strand chooses to omit biographical details should tell readers that he wants the focus on other, larger issues, and that the poems are driven by powerful, complex emotions that have more than one source."

In a letter from Sharon Bryan, Dec 24&31.

"Chiasson's review of Robert Hass's new book of poems characterizes Hass as primarily an autobiographical poet whose work consists of 'small dinner parties and hikes' or 'a recipe for onion soup' . . . Yet Hass undercuts these pleasures by situating the lyric within a larger history of violence, suffering, and collective indifference. In eliding the political and historical work contexts of Hass's work, Chiasson replicates the very 'American amnesia' that Hass indicts and furthers our cultural tendency to relegate poetry to an art of the quotidian."

In a letter from Jessica Fisher and Margaret Ronda, same.

Both letters seem to fault Chiasson with a mis-reading of the poets' work as biographical, (worse) quotidian and, finally, apolitical. But I have to say, I was guilty of that very same mis-reading of Hass and Strand (based on only slight exposure to their work) before I started Chiasson's review, and I wasn't interested in reading Chiasson state the obvious. I think the question is WHY are these poets open to such a misreading. If we cannot address that - and, as they appear in TNY, these letters don't - we're pretty much stuck, poetry-wise.

check it twice

2007-12-19T16:33:00.000-05:00

Really awful dinner companions may have heard about Gladwell's "misreading" of some point in The Bell Curve. Take your cue from Gladwell; what the Bell Curve authors actually do claim is "not, if you think about it, any less ridiculous" than what Gladwell had thought that they advocated. Maybe it would come up at the office party or something.

Remember Gawande on the ICU checklist? That might be good for some family gathering conversation. Benj liked that one too.

UPDATES: Kottke notes that evidence from the world of horse racing suggests that "Nuture is really kicking ass these days" and Roger Ebert's best film of 2007 is Juno. Good to know. See below.

for everyone on your holiday list

2007-12-13T10:23:00.001-05:00

For those wed to genetic explanations of everything, and their unfortunate dinner companions. Highly recommended by Amardeep Singh and my partner in crime - Gladwell on IQ.

For those who are considering seeing Juno, or being pressured to do so. Emdashes reconsiders the Knocked Up debate, feminist angle. And my heroes at reverse shot blog, the "quirky" debate, pseudo-indie-bullshit angle. Not once, but twice they slammed this manipulative nonsense.

I'm buying everyone local organic honey and staying home, alone.

on having it both ways

2007-12-06T20:19:00.001-05:00

White Bread and The New Yorker, a visualiterary pun. I like to think that the creative people at Sara Lee have most deliberately created a public meditation on consumer culture and the historical construction of "taste" that addresses the material, visual and gustatory sensorium.

The heads up (and a charming excuse that mentions the ever-controversial BLT) came to me from Emdashes, the image comes from something called MarketingProfs Daily Fix.

Best of all, you can find this work of art and social commentary at a grocery store near you.

Double Takes

2007-11-19T10:36:00.000-05:00

In the November 19th issue. Lauren Collins (twice), Richard Brody, Larry Doyle and, of course, David Denby (twice).

Best line in the whole magazine, in "Why We Strike" - "Management is currently offering us adjusted bubkes of what they are making off Internet sell-through, streaming, ringtones, Webisodes, cellisodes, iPodisodes, celebrity-narrated colonoscosodes, or the psychotic episodes they've been beaming into your brain, brought to you by Clozaril." (51)

My emphasis. When I regained my breath, I realized that that's how you spell bubkes.

I liked Lauren Collins on the restaurant Taim. Not gushing and a little ironic, "You get the feeling she spends a lot of time at the Container Store," but positive. And she nicely manages the contrast between the attempt to "make gourmet food 'street'" and the yummier ambition, to "take street food, and make it gourmet." She sets it up and doesn't belabor it. And maybe it helps that I'd actually like to eat the food she's describing. (19) Or maybe that's the intended effect of a good review.

Apparently Ethan Hawke is playing a "not very bright kid brother" in a Sidney Lumet caper. Excellent. (26) Thank you, David Denby!

Richard Brody says some smart things about Griffith, Murnau and Eisenstein. Except that thing about Eisenstein as the cinema's "first modernist" . . . that's a bit much. (30)

Lauren Collins' "No Seconds" on the famous last meal thing is, fortunately, in extremely bad taste, since it appears while there is a moratorium on executions in the US. And dull into the bargain. And, just for the record, I would never, EVER buy Secret Ingredients, The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink which is advertised, oh-so-conveniently, on the next page.

Skipped Jon Lee Anderson's latest installment in the adventure serial he's working on.

I valiantly read pages and pages of Pierpont's essay on Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier. My favorite part was "Oliver then insures that the film is too unnaturally beautiful ever to be confused with reality."(72) That's Henry V (1944).

John Lahr doesn't love Mel Brooks' Broadway adaptation of "Young Frankenstein" and admits, "These are hard words to write." Really? (88)

But the biggest surprise of the issue has got to be this: Brian De Palma's new film Redacted, set in midst of the violence of the Iraq war, is actually about film critic David Denby's media habits. Check it out.

slang, euphamism and straight talk

2007-10-22T23:57:00.000-04:00

This line jumped out at me during a spell of unavoidable delay, from Kramer on LeCompte (Oct 8) which a lot of people liked. I started it but it seemed a little too cute. Except for this, a quote from LeCompte:

"We had that security that middle-class kids had then, before the worst of the Vietnam War. We somehow knew that, for us, it would be all right." (51)

I like it when people are up-front about their apolitical privilege. It's all so wrong, it's right.

Less cool is Kramer, just above, "she landed a Friday-through-Sunday job baking." That's got to be the worst use of "landed" I've ever read. Not that it's ever good, except, literally, in cases of planes and gymnasts and ice dancers. I can't even describe how much that annoys me. It's kind of in keeping with the whole thing, at its worst. Am I babbling?

Put down your magazines!

2007-09-29T11:05:00.000-04:00

Everybody's not-reading! Jason Kottke on not-reading about Donatella Versace! Gawker on Kottke not-reading!

Also, isn't there something delightfully muppet about the original DV?

who looks funny?

2007-09-26T10:56:00.002-04:00

I hate the cover of the style issue. To the point where I might tear it off and throw it away. Sometimes funny and fashion don't happen.

Sometimes they do; I kept up a steady chuckle reading Henry Alford on the solar panelled jacket. That's just the abstract.

The article itself opens with "History has not been kind to garments that serve a function other than that of keeping their wearers warm or unnaked or adorable." Too true.

And yet, I think he's right in his enthusiasm for the solar panels in his new jacket. I think that there is a secret desire that clothes should become more like computers and bikes and our bodies and DO something. They have too much to-be-looked-at-ness so to speak. Fashion isn't even, usually, 3 dimensional enough, for god's sake.

The only other Donatella Versace profile I ever read was in TNY - when and by whom? And why does Lauren Collins not even mention that it's been done? Or does she? I lost interest.

Basics, but as usual so smart. James Surowiecki. On fasion, copyright, and the capitalist temporality of the trend.

And what else is news?

Electic Warrior is reading the NYT Sunday Style Magazine, or at least looking at the pictures, and thinks you should too.

The Determined Dilettante isn't reading that rather dull thing about olive oil, is reading something interesting from Mark Singer, which is in an issue of TNY that I misplaced.

Juniper Pearl's abiding love for TNY is tested by Adam Gopnik's drive to eat local.

Kitchenography entertains the Live Chicken! fantasy (past the recipe).

Sepoy declares, "I am sticking to not-reading NYT’s editorial page." Or did declare this in a heated moment.