Author Archives: Emdashes

Sempé Fi: Old News

1-4-10 Ivan Brunetti Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New.JPG
_Pollux writes_:
It’s not just out with the old and in with the new. The old are condemned to hard labor for all eternity, like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill.
“Ivan Brunetti’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Brunetti trademark egg-headed, stick-legged little people appear as lab technicians on the January 4, 2010 cover of _The New Yorker_. The cover, called “Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New,” gives us a twist on the old iconography associated with New Year’s.
In Brunetti’s vision, Baby New Year is being manufactured and readied by hard-working scientists, mathematicians, data analysts, and technicians.
Father Time, meanwhile, who is associated with the older, passing year, is unhappily mopping the floor of the manufacturing plant. 2009 was a year that will forever be associated with economic woes; perhaps Brunetti’s Father Time has found that he cannot retire comfortably. He must keep on working. Despite his experience, he is at the bottom of the ladder at the factory.
Will the same fate await Baby New Year 2010? The year 2009 was once full of hope and energy too, until economic and political challenges added wrinkles and gray hair to its once youthful frame.
Brunetti’s technicians, perhaps fueled by hopes of green jobs and economic recovery, work hard to ensure that 2010 will be a good year.
However, despite their best, most scientific efforts, other forces will be at work in the coming year as well: chance, chaos, divine intervention, randomness, serendipity, and fate. It’s a new year: may it be a happy one.

Notes on “Notes on Camp”: The Persistence of an Aesthetic

Martin Schneider writes:
A couple of weeks ago I caught the final show in John Waters’ Christmas Tour, which ended at B.B. King’s. He was vastly entertaining. Afterwards, he made his way to the bar area and greeted a few of the diehards who opted to hang around (it was after midnight), of which I was one. A fun experience.
In connection with this event, I was talking to my young companions (a good fifteen years younger, as it happens) about the concept of Camp, and mentioned Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay. Not very surprisingly, neither of my friends had ever heard of it, a circumstance for which mere youth is not the full explanation. Now, in 2010, it suddenly popped into my head to give it a look. Now that was a terrific idea.
The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this…. etc.
1. It’s the best-written thing I’ve read in months. Months.
2. The astonishing variety of references in the essay are a clue to a problem that was never much of a problem anyway. That is, since Sontag later became a symbol of a certain kind of highly refined left-wing thinker and aesthete (nothing of the kind ever really happened to Pauline Kael, for instance, despite her quasi-apocryphal “Nixon” remark), to what extent was Sontag occupying a necessary role in society, one that someone else might just as well have occupied, and to what extent was she an original?
It’s safe to say that Sontag was really very original indeed. The references show the wide range of her intellect, curiosity, and perhaps most important, pleasures, and that sort of thing is not readily reproducable. Sontag forged a path that led to a place only she could have reached.
3. Is there anything that any hipster has ever done, anywhere, that would have surprised Sontag? I doubt it. This is the reason there is no “Notes on Hipsterism.” There isn’t any point, Sontag had already gotten there.
4. This doesn’t make her infallible. I think punk might have perplexed her a bit, or even maybe Devo or Kraftwerk. The article coincides with the arrival of the Stones and the Beatles, so she could not have ventured any thoughts on rock or used rock bands as examples (jazz seems to occupy that slot in her cosmology). Does anyone know if she ever had any serious “take” on rock music?
5. Sontag seems to have been the first and possibly most perfect example of a type that is relatively common nowadays, the intellectual who enjoys high and low culture with equal avidity. Sontag is more “perfect” because her choices include opera, high art, and the entire gamut of high modernism. Her latterday incarnations are far, far less likely to know Richard Strauss and Jean Genet, although they probably enjoy Jane Austen and chop-socky movies about equally.
6. The essay has not dated in any material way.

Cartoonists A – Z: Michael Maslin’s Directory of New Yorker Cartoonists

_Pollux writes_:
It’s a work in progress, but Michael Maslin’s “Directory”:http://michaelmaslin.com/index.php?page=nyer-cartoonists-a-z of New Yorker Cartoonists serves as a very useful compendium of _New Yorker_ cartoonists’ names and biographies.
Maslin includes useful information, such as when a cartoonist’s work began appearing in the magazine.
Maslin’s _New Yorker Cartoonists A – Z_ also includes some photos and self-portraits, as well as some interesting biographical details about the diverse pantheon of people who have contributed their immortal cartoons to the magazine. Enjoy!

The U.S.’s Bygone Angostura Autarky

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Edge of the American West has helped us catch up with the Angostura Bitters shortage of 2009–10, since we’ve been taking a bit of a break from the cocktail-shaking scene.
If only Angostura, now a division of Bacardi, were still manufacturing its concentrate for U.S. distribution in Jersey City, as it was at the time of a 1934 Talk piece about the secret recipe, protected by the evasive wiles of the then custodian, Alfredo Galo Siegert:

It takes eight months to make Angostura Bitters. “After the first four months, we do different things for the next four months,” Mr. Siegert told us in a burst of confidence.

But you don’t need fancy bitters to make an authentically pre-Prohibition mixed drink. The 1910 Siegert-sponsored Complete Mixing Guide at my elbow contains numerous recipes using the bitters, but also a ton of others, mostly with this rough structure:

WHITE PLUSH

Use whiskey glass.
Allow customer to help himself to bourbon or rye whiskey, then fill glass with milk.

Here’s to Monday! For more on alcohol in The New Yorker, see this New Year’s entry in the Back Issues blog.