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February042008

Best of the 2.04.08 Issue: Vaffanculo for Victory

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I finished this issue before the end of Sunday, which left me in a pickle on the G home from Carroll Gardens after the Super Bowl: Since I was without the book I’ve been reading, my friend Debbie Millman’s savvy and hilarious How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, I had to reread the listings, in detail this time, and luckily a) they were entertaining and b) the ride was short. Meghan Daum, whose classic New Yorker essay of the late ’90s, “My Misspent Youth,” was a piercing warning bell to many who were wearing earmuffs at the time (and then iPods), wrote that one of the hallmarks of arrival among her college friends was to “to know at least two people featured in the New York Times wedding pages on any given Sunday”; I duly report that a subsequent hallmark may be to know at least one performer listed in Goings On About Town who showed up drunker than Captain Haddock for a date at a bar. Next stop, Nebraska!

Anyway, the reason I’d polished off the magazine before kickoff is that the whole issue was a breeze this week. Everything was so fun to read, especially my two favorites, Evan Osnos’s “The Boxing Rebellion,” about the driven, state-supervised Chinese boxing star Zou Shiming, and Tom Mueller’s Letter From Italy, “Beppe’s Inferno,” about Beppo Grillo, who makes even the smartypants American celebrities seem dopey and inarticulate. Both Osnos and Mueller do a stellar job painting a portrait of a country that’s projected from and reflected within one of its most famous figures. I know, that sentence is kind of wack. I worked on it, but I couldn’t do much better than that.

Other high points of the issue: this line of David Denby’s, from his review of How She Move and The Witnesses, and here he’s referring to movies like Flashdance and Chicago that show “fragmentary close-ups” rather than complete dancers in motion: “Dance is devoted to the splendor of the body, but these movies turned bodies into pistons, pumps, cylinders — at times, we might have been watching a Soviet documentary on milk production.” (Extra points to Denby for the use of the term “fancy-Dan.”) Nancy Franklin’s frank analysis (almost a chiasmus!) of therapy TV. And two photographs: the sexy one by Jesse Frohman on p. 81, of the cast of “Come Back, Little Sheba,” and the other sexy one by Frank Paulin — “Playland Cadillac, Times Square, New York City, 1956” — on p. 12.

Finally, from newyorker.com, a juxtaposition even the visionary Rea Irvin couldn’t have foreseen: “Most read: Tilley; naked ladies; Clintons vs. Obama.” Don’t forget to vote!

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