Author Archives: Emdashes

Bloglish mishmosh: modish

From the Observer, thoughts on the wild new lingo that’s taking the indiesphere by storm. Lynsey Hanley writes, “I’ve found myself scratching my head at some of the words and phrases used by bloggers to describe things that once would simply have been described as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’s brilliant fun and completely baffling at the same time.” Just “good” or “bad”? I think, say, Arthur Danto, Greil Marcus, Pauline Kael, John Lahr, et al. might have another point of view. Anyway, continues Hanley:

You could never get away with this level of obtuseness on such an august title as the New Yorker, which prides itself on bringing the same sort of acts championed by Pitchfork – Dizzee Rascal, MIA and Lady Sovereign, among others – to the attention of doughty Manhattan [what means this “other four boroughs”?] intellectuals. In print, the magazine’s pop critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, can explain the cultural significance of East End rap collective Roll Deep in terms that your parents would understand, but uses his website, sashafrerejones.com, as an outlet for a style of writing which, though utterly infectious in its enthusiasm, is also often impossible to follow.

He drops street slang and music-insider references into his musings, calling, for instance, Burt Bacharach’s new album ‘dire bougie make-out piffle’ and, later in the same entry, referring to a promotional video by ‘smooth jazz footsoldier’ Brian Cuthbertson, complains that ‘dude is a turbochoad’ who speaks in ‘marketing pre-cum’. Come again?

‘Nobody’s paid to read my blog; nobody has to sit through it to get to The Sopranos,’ says Frere-Jones of his idiosyncratic blogging style, ‘so if I sometimes write in an unfiltered way, it isn’t likely aimed at other critics, but is simply a reflection of how I think when no one is watching.’

Asked if he hopes one day to transfer some of that unfiltered quality into his print journalism, Frere-Jones quips: ‘I hope to use the jaculation “Christ on a plastic dolphin!” in the New Yorker soon.’ Don’t we all, dude.

I don’t think Frere-Jones’ blog writing is like anything else I read online, or anywhere. I find it occasionally elusive (I skipped half a decade of pop music when I learned to lindy hop), but it’s fun to see people in different writing modes—memo to co-Eyebeam panelists, there are different writing modes—and if you get really lost, there are pictures.

Biondic woman

The Yale Daily News reports on a talk by New Yorker visual editor Elizabeth Biondi:

Biondi discussed her passion for aesthetics before an audience of about 45 students and faculty at an Ezra Stiles College Master’s Tea on Wednesday. Biondi, who has worked with the New Yorker for nine years, said that even though she is not a photographer or illustrator herself, she enjoys her position as visual editor because it gives her the power to organize images in a text-heavy publication. During the tea, Biondi presented a series of slides and discussed the slow introduction of photography to the New Yorker magazine, which once only featured illustration.
…
The New Yorker does not publish photos that are digitally enhanced, Biondi said.

“Our photography is based on content,” Biondi said. “We visualize our stories … Pictures are never arbitrary. They are always based on fact.”

Some audience members asked Biondi about how she chooses images to match with essays. Biondi said essays about abstract ideas or concepts are better supplemented with illustrations.

“Not everything lends itself to photography,” she said.
…
Sochie Nnaemeka ’09 said she was moved by Biondi’s presentation [and] was impressed that Biondi has accomplished so much without a formal education in her field.

“It kind of makes you question, what are we doing here?” Nnaemeka said.

Biondi said that while she has worked at a number of different publications ranging from glamour magazines to other literary magazines, she does not intend to leave the New Yorker.

And here’s Biondi on CNN last year, talking about her experience chairing the World Press Photo Awards:

BIONDI: This [by Jean-Marc Bouju of The Associated Press] is the one we pulled out in the end, and that stayed with us. You know, judging is sort of a long process. You look at a lot of things, and then you narrow it down, and eventually you come up, well, hopefully, with a photo that everyone in the jury is excited about and believes in.

And this one really touched us, because, obviously, we looked at a lot pictures from Iraq, and there were a lot of pictures that showed violence, and death and killing. And this one here, it’s a father, it’s a prisoner of war with his son that he had to be put in a detention camp and put on the hood. And you know, when you look at this, you can imagine what he feels like. He’s holding his son, and he’s comforting his son, and the military actually allowed him to be with his child, and in the beginning his hands were bound, and now they’re unbounded, so there was some humanity on all sides.

But we were all touched how this father cares for his child, and you know, war turns life upside down. More.

And here’s a gallery of 50 years of World Press Photo Award winners. Amazing collection.

Avast, ye corporate pirate jokes!

Daniel Radosh continues his genius, and wildly popular, parallel-universe caption contest by providing an alternate opportunity to complete this week’s Drew Dernavich cartoon. Dernavich’s drawings (he’s the one with the boldly lettered “Dd” signature) are always so beautiful they can stand alone without context or icing, but this one’s aflutter with possibilities. Read the Radosh fans’ absurd, inspired squawks, submit a few of your own, and send the plausible ones to Bob Mankoff. He needs them! Win and I’ll interview you—how’s that for incentive?

Coming attractions: The startling lessons of Shopgirl.

Frere-Jones, Newton, Teachout triptych

‘Cause they’re on a panel, haw. The details (which are here; click for tickets):

Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 p.m.:
The Art of Online Criticism

Maud Newton, Sasha Frere-Jones and Terry Teachout with Bryan Keefer, moderator

“Everyone’s a critic,” as the saying goes, but it’s true now more than ever. Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds. MAUD NEWTON is the founder/editor of prominent literary blog maudnewton.com. TERRY TEACHOUT contributes arts criticism to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, among others. SASHA FRERE-JONES is the popular music critic for the New Yorker. The panel will be moderated by BRYAN KEEFER of CJR Daily.

Contact Information: www.makor.org

Brought to you by: Makor/Steinhardt Center

Cost: $12/advance $15/door

Check out the photo—I suspect foul play. I liked Frere-Jones’ piece on Houston rappers this week; it’s winsomely written, in his newish, freer, more relaxed style. If you haven’t read John Lahr’s Profile of Steve Buscemi yet, by the way, get ready for reading heaven. Lahr is anti-dish, all poetic precision (“He is pale, almost pallid—as if he’d been reared in a mushroom cellar…. His boniness carries with it a hint of negativity, a kind of rejection of the world”), and makes even Martin Schoeller’s thoughtful (and a little roguish, as if Buscemi were crashing a J. Crew shoot) photo redundant. Lahr’s prose and reportage, which achieve the rarity of being almost indistinguishable, add colors to the spectrum of human experience.

“The Art of Online Criticism” has or less the same premise as the panel I was just on (or was not on, depending whom you ask). I have a feeling this bunch will be a little more lighthearted than we were, since I doubt they’ll be fussing over the already musty canard “Will manic, unqualified loons with God complexes eat the children of nice, hardworking old print jourrnalists?” Hi, world: Blogger and journalist are not mutually exclusive (see: panelists above), and most of the people you probably read are both. Some of them can even spell, a good number of them are trained fact-checkers, and many of them contribute simultaneously and respectfully to print media. Read the resumes, check the clips, then judge away!

FYI, another Makor NYer-related event: November 16, the premiere of As Smart As They Are: The Author Project. Bet it’ll sell out—Dave Eggers, Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, and Rick Moody are in it, and, well, you know. Auster and Moody (as well as the noble Edward Albee, Sandra Cisneros, Philip Gourevitch, Emma Reverter, and Colson Whitehead) were especially excellent readers at the sometimes shocking, sometimes heart-choking, sometimes darkly amusing PEN event against torture the other night.

Eggers? Did you say Eggers?

You want to do this tonight. Get there early, though—last year it was standing room only.

PEN American Center presents:

State of Emergency: Readings Against Torture, Arbitrary Detention & Extraordinary Rendition

with:

Edward Albee, Paul Auster, Sandra Cisneros, Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Martín Espada, Philip Gourevitch, Jessica Hagedorn, Heidi Julavits, Nicole Krauss, Rick Moody, Walter Mosley, Grace Paley, Emma Reverter, Salman Rushdie, Martha Southgate & Colson Whitehead

Tuesday, November 8, 2005, 7:00 p.m., The Great Hall at Cooper Union

7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue

Subway: 6 to Astor Place or the R/W to 8th Street

FREE ADMISSION—Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

For more information, please visit www.pen.org.

Girls Gone Wild: “Female Chauvinist Pigs”

Newsday logo

Girls Gone Wild

By Emily Gordon

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
By Ariel Levy. Free Press, 224 pp., $25.

One afternoon last winter, I went by myself to see “Inside Deep Throat,” the explicit documentary about the making of the classic porn movie, and found it hilarious and informative. Still, it bothered me that the filmmakers seemed to endorse the line that star Linda Lovelace, a subsequent anti-porn spokeswoman, was a loon to say she was ever abused by either the industry or anyone in it.

Afterward, I talked to two young hipster guys who’d gotten a kick out of the movie and also mocked Lovelace’s change of heart. “But it’s very well-documented,” I began—and I could see the red alert in their eyes: Tiresome feminist harangue ahead! Pro-sexual expression crusader or uptight speechmaker? They were both roles I resented being shoehorned into.

This annoyingly familiar dilemma makes it somewhat difficult to address the theme of Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” In a tone of deep disapproval, Levy outlines the ways in which women—by endorsing, imitating and producing the “raunch culture” of porn stars, strippers, exhibitionist celebrities like Paris Hilton, “Girls Gone Wild” flashers and other shameless hussies—are eroding the gains of the second-wave feminist movement under the banner of feminist choice-making, individuality and sexual freedom. Indeed, she argues briefly but persuasively, many young women have “relinquished any sense of themselves as a collective group with a linked fate.”

American women are indeed barraged with images of their counterparts acting like Jessica Rabbit. Levy argues that regardless of whether these women are drunk, peer-pressured spring-breakers or former women’s studies majors cheering on pole-dancing at New York’s exclusive Cake parties and flamboyantly smooching their female friends, they’re all making the opposite of an empowered statement.

She interviews both disapproving pioneer feminists and unsure-sounding younger women to prove the point. Levy’s polar universe leaves no room for more ambiguous figures, such as the triumphantly unionized strippers in San Francisco or retro-burlesque dancers all over the country whose art form is genre-bendingly new and old at once. There are no quotes from articulate young feminists about how, for instance, porn (including the non-mainstream, female-centered variety) could be in any way entertaining, sexy or edifying.

One of Levy’s major points is both vital and extremely well-illustrated. Adolescent girls are under tremendous pressure to adopt an image of sexual willingness and to prove it. Unlike women in their 20s or 30s, they’re unlikely to have a media-savvy filter for the messages they absorb. As a result, they’re in serious danger of being slandered at school and online, of sacrificing their youth to self-conscious nymphettishness, of getting pregnant and contracting STDs more often than girls in comparable countries, and of learning too late that sex is something they should actually enjoy. Her chapter on the confusing paradoxes of contemporary urban lesbian culture will also have relevance for younger lesbians unsure of where they fit in.

Unfortunately, “Female Chauvinist Pigs” as a whole lacks the requirements of really energizing feminist polemics—a smooth, engaging prose style; a bird’s-eye view of class, race and geography; and a rallying cry for concrete solutions or alternatives. Most distractingly, Levy provides readers almost no sense of her own background with or relationship to these subjects, except in a few tantalizing statements (inevitably in parentheses).

On the penultimate page of the conclusion, she writes, “Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at freewheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety.” The complicated nature of that anxiety is worthy of a more focused look.

(Published in Newsday, November 6, 2005)