Monthly Archives: September 2006

An Art Spiegelman Interview

in the Syracuse Post-Standard. From the piece (by Laura T. Ryan):

Q: How has the world of comics changed since you entered?
A: Well, I would say while America has been going into an absolute nose dive and turning to (expletive), comics have been doing great, much to my happy astonishment . . . and I would say, during the last few years, more so than ever. Comics have just been kind of upgraded in their cultural status.
Q: They’re more respected as a form of literature now.
A: Yeah, when I was first being a cartoonist, I would really hesitate to tell people what I did. It certainly didn’t win me any points with the girls, I’ll tell you.
Q: And now it’s got cachet . . .
A: It’s got cachet! It’s like being a small-scale rock ‘n’ roll star.

New Yorkers: Go See Agora II

Why? Because my old friend Stephen Sheffer is in it, and he’s cute as a button. Why else? Here’s The New Yorker‘s notice (in today’s magazine) for the show; links mine:

“AGORA II”
The site-specific choreographer Noémie LaFrance returns to the vast, empty pool in Greenpoint’s McCarren Park. This time, to fill the massive space, LaFrance’s troupe teams with dancers from Streb, the Young Dance Collective, Celeste Hastings and the Butoh Rockettes, and many others, and select audience participants, who perform unison moves they’ve learned in advance on the Web site. Bora Yoon directs the live music as dancers swarm the pool and the featured characters—including an astronaut, a waitress, a butcher, and a roller skater—emerge. Meanwhile, a beat-boxer flies by on a bicycle, a stuntwoman breaks boards, a bunch of movers carry furniture, and people dash in with buckets of water, filling an inflatable pool. (Lorimer St. at Driggs St., Brooklyn. 718-388-6309. Sept. 13-16 at 8. Through Sept. 30.)

Buy your tickets here. For the easily frightened (you know who you are), it’s the perfect way to spend an evening in Brooklyn without excess timidity—unless modern dance scares you too, in which case I can’t help you.

Can’t Get Festival Tickets?

Or can’t afford the portable hard drive, or both? This auction, which benefits the nonprofit Project Cicero—they donate books to NYC classrooms and libraries, so it’s certainly worth giving them money anyway—might help you get over those nagging feelings of inadequacy and despair. Things you can win, and I’m quoting: New Yorker Festival V.I.P. packages; autographed books by New Yorker writers; your own custom cartoon by a New Yorker cartoonist; a night on the town, including tickets to a Broadway show; etc. It (the auction, not your despair, which may be longer-lasting) goes till September 22.
Looks like the bidding’s going to be heartbeat-quickening—at press time, the New Yorker Geek Pack (“$250 GEEK SQUAD Gift Certificate and ‘The Complete New Yorker’ DVD-ROM collection plus a Sony VAIO laptop computer!”) was going for $719. Better get in there!

How to Live to Be 102

An Irish-born man in California named Morris Cantley is a chipper 102, and it’s a plausible hypothesis that it’s his choice of reading matter as well as his fondness for citrus fruits that may have done the trick. Bobbe Monk writes in The Daily Facts:

Morris Cantley reads four newspapers, one news magazine and the New Yorker magazine nearly every day; exercises for one to two hours in exercise classes; and leads a semi-vegetarian lifestyle.
He said he is amazed at cell phones, considering them a blessing especially in emergencies; decries the necessity of security guards in so many places and likes sports, especially Golden Bears football and basketball and the Lakers.
He is 102.
A resident of Plymouth Village since 1982, Cantley has diabetes and is hard of hearing, but that doesn’t stop this centenarian who is a popular resident at the village.
A native of Dublin, Ireland, he came to the United States when he was just a baby, his family settling on the West Coast. His father worked for Edison, finding a job just two days after arriving and staying with the company until he retired.
…
Over the years Morris was active in the UC Berkeley Alumni Association, the Inland “Cs,” was for many years Scholarship chairman for San Bernardino County; served on the 1973 Grand Jury and was a member of the Grand Jury Association. He was also a member of the San Bernardino County Museum, World Affairs Council of Southern California, Kimberly-Shirk Association, Friends of he A.K. Smiley Public Library, Redlands Art Association, Edward-Dean Museum in Cherry Valley and an honorary member of the Democratic Club.
…
Another part of his health regime is to eat oranges every day, from one to two, as well as drinking orange juice frequently. He likes all kinds of fruit including bananas, pineapple, grapes and melons. He eats a lot of vegetables, but not much meat.
…
Looking back a little, he said there were some good things about the “good old days.”
“Doctors came to your home when you were sick. You didn’t have to sit around in a waiting room full of old magazines.” Of course now he doesn’t have to either, the doctors come to him.

Depends which old magazines, doesn’t it? Just think, TNY wasn’t even around till he was 21!

Now I Know! And I Cheer!

Caleb Crain, who wrote the terrific Mass-Observation movement piece last week, not only has some fab links and photos and suchlike so we can keep making observations of our own, but reports that the blogger who does Drunken Volcano has been writing a haiku summarizing every piece in The New Yorker. I love everyone involved, instantly. (Caleb, I already had great affection for you, but now have still more.) Said blogger (“inmichigan”) writes at the start of the project:

Welcome to the haiku synopsis of The New Yorker. Like many people, I enjoy reading The New Yorker on a weekly basis, but often feel like it could be more concise. For example, Seymour Hersh’s piece “Watching Lebanon” in the Aug. 21 issue was brilliant, original reporting on the thinking behind Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon. I think we can all agree that it does no disservice to the importance of the article to observe that, at 5077 words, it was roughly 5060 words too long.
I hope to post these regularly. I’m still fiddling with formatting, and welcome suggestions. Preferably in haiku form.

I like this one about the magazine’s recent celebration of conducting:
Onward And Upward With The Arts: Measure for Measure
By Justin Davidson
Conducting’s first rule:
Win hearts, earn respect, or else
Players will play you.
Later: Even more Mass-Observation, as reported in The Global Game:

Bolton, England | A New Yorker article by Caleb Crain has peaked our interest in the Mass-Observation phenomenon and its relationship to football in Britain. Near the top of Crain’s treatment (see “Surveillance Society,” 11 Sept 06), “Anthropology of football pools” appears, tucked between “The aspidistra cult” and “Bathroom behaviour,” as one of the potential objects of study….

Finally, because I get to do whatever I want, happy birth, Noah Lennox Baker! I’m sure, given your mum and dad, it was a dramatic entrance.

David Remnick, In Profile

Why is nearly everything in the Guardian and the Observer so damn good? Oh, those British, who’ve been practicing the language for a while, they know. From the profile/review by Gaby Wood:

Celebrity culture is far from over; if you wrote a plan for a magazine and said you thought you could make a profit by publishing 8,000-word pieces on the future of various African nations, hefty analyses of the pension system and a three-part series on global warming, hordes of people would laugh in your face. So how has Remnick done it? Before I met him, I asked this of an acclaimed New York journalist, who said: ‘If you can work that out, you will have the scoop of the century. No one knows.’
Remnick is well aware of the apparent mystery, which is why no focus group is ever involved in an editorial decision. As he puts it, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo. ‘So you throw it out there, and you hope that there are some things that people will immediately read – cartoons, shorter things, Anthony Lane, Talk of the Town. And then, eventually, the next morning on the train, somebody sees this piece, and despite its seeming formidableness, they read it.’
You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick’s most winning eccentricity.
We meet at the New Yorker offices in Times Square on an obscenely hot day in August. Remnick extends a courtly, ironic offer of rehydration: ‘Coffee? Water? Drip?’ His glass box of an office is decorated with original cover art and scattered photographs – a portrait of AJ Liebling sitting under an apple tree; Dean Rohrer’s wonderful image of Monica Lewinsky as the Mona Lisa. On his desk is a rare book about Jean-Luc Godard, in French.
…
In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: ‘Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it’s about inspiring the enlisted.’ It’s a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, ‘gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out’. He adds: ‘I don’t believe in swagger. I think it’s infantile.’

Thanks to Jesse Thorn, arbiter of all things awesome, for the awesome tip. For lots more Remnick, mosey over here. Has the site in question (Berkeley’s) fixed the misspellings and messy punctuation yet? I suspect not. Again, I volunteer.

Later: Berkeley’s taken down the page. Because of too much traffic after Kottke linked to it? Because of the iffy punctuation that they’re fixing? Either way, please bring it back! It’s a great conversation!

Still later: I was so excited to read the Slate Hackathalon after Remnick mentioned it in the interview, but alas, it seems to be missing as well (maybe because it was in Slate 1.0, or an early incarnation, anyway). Bring that back, too, please!

Stanley Kunitz Memorial, Sept. 20

From the NYT:

Stanley Kunitz, the former poet laureate of the United States who died in May at 100, will be celebrated in a free memorial tribute on Sept. 20 at the 92nd Street Y. Among those scheduled to reminisce and read from his work are the poets Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Galway Kinnell and Genine Lentine, and Gretchen Kunitz, his daughter. Mr. Kunitz had a long association with the Unterberg Poetry Center at the Y, first reading there in 1958. An archival film of one of his appearances is to be shown. Information: (212) 415-5500.

Related on Emdashes:
Stanley Kunitz, 1905-2006

Birthday Snacks

A profile of P.S. Mueller.

Want tickets to P.J. Harvey and Hilton Als at the New Yorker Festival? At least on eBay, you can Buy It Now.

The Huffington Post has the scoop on Cancer Vixen, the brand-new book by New Yorker cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto. Here’s an excerpt from the interview by Cynthia Kling:

CK: #11. How did you start doing the book?

MM: Lauren Brody of Glamour asked me to write about it. When the cartoons ran in Glamour, The New York Times wrote about it, and we sold the idea to Knopf. I had wanted to do it as a book, so I’d kept everything — receipts, notes, Sketches, e-mails. My friends are now afraid to say anything to me, because they think I’ll use it. (That’s kind of a joke, but not really.)

CK: #12. While you were sick, did you play the cancer card?

MM: Oh yeah, to get out of stuff that I didn’t want to go to. Friends would say, “It’s ok under these circumstances, but if you continue to use it after you’re better, we’ll know you’re full of shit.”

CK: #13. Anything about having cancer that surprised you?

MM: I was coming from this whole da Silvano restaurant world, twenty-year-old blonds ricocheting off my husband and that made me feel really insecure. Then I realized that there was this great sisterhood of survivors out there who are really caring. It’s ironic, but the worst situations bring out the best in people.

CK: #14. Did you have any secret weapons to help you through it?

MM: Lipgloss and shoes. It was more of a secret attitude. I just really believe that if I look better then I will feel better.