Via Gothamist, the long-awaited Bryant Park movie schedule!
June 19th The Birds
June 26th To Have and Have Not
July 3rd M*A*S*H
July 10th Bullitt
July 17th The Band Wagon
July 24th High Noon
July 31st A Shot in the Dark
August 7th The Manchurian Candidate
August 14th Charade
August 21st Rocky
Friends and future friends, I’m available for picnics most of these nights. Especially June 26. Maybe I’ll save that one for someone I’d really like to be in the dusk with.
Update: I swear I didn’t know Hilton Als was reviewing the new BAM production of the play this week: “The modern literature Wilde is referring to here includes the play we are watching, which, until its final, improbable moments, has very little to do with simple truth and much to do with pretense; loyalties and affections are dropped and picked up like the stitches in an especially complicated piece of needlework.”
A lot of people are writing about Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell With All That, but my favorite piece so far is the smart, wide-ranging, and fair-minded review by Ann Hulbert in Slate. All of it is this good:
But the Flanagan who dispenses the provocative diagnoses also seems, a la Poppins, to have taken a swig of rum-punch potion herself. What is fascinating—if also infuriating—to watch is Flanagan parading as almost a parody of the spoiled-child-parent she scolds her contemporaries for being and lauds her own mother for not being. The minimemoir that emerges from these essays betrays more adolescent Sturm und Drang than she seems to realize. The mother Flanagan idolizes as the acme of accomplished housewifery in fact got fed up at home and went to work, defying a husband (writer and historical novelist Thomas Flanagan) who told her to drop dead—and leaving a daughter feeling abandoned and, years later, obviously still very ambivalent about her role models. How else to explain a worshipper of domestic expertise who has never changed a sheet or sewed on a button, and who boasts about it in print? Flanagan also airily confesses to being “far too educated and uppity to have knuckled down and learned anything about stain removal or knitting or stretching recipes.” In a scene I suspect few readers will forget, the Flanagan who insists on her at-home-mother status describes summoning the nanny, Paloma, to clean up one boy’s vomit. Meanwhile Flanagan, the writer with the clout to leave the mucky work to others, stands “in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up—the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me.”
Hulbert observes, “It’s telling that this book leaves out the one article in which Flanagan ventured [in The Atlantic] to speak up in the larger liberal cause of economic justice, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement.” Also in Slate, posted the same day: Melonyce McAfee’s “I Hate Secretaries Day.”
Lee Siegel’s TNR blog (“an anti-blog blog that consists not of byte-sized thoughts and links, but of arguments, insights, and literary style,” says the email promo) just debuted, and I’m sorry to note that for a man purportedly obsessed with accuracy, he’s got a bad case of the typos.
As you may have noticed, the magazine occasionally has an audio feature on its online TOC. Last week’s, for instance:
This week in the magazine, David Remnick writes about global warming and a new documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” featuring Al Gore. Here, courtesy Simon & Schuster Audio, Elizabeth Kolbert reads the introduction and preface from her book “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” which grew out of her award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker last year.
Click here to hear the reading.
PLUS: Last April, Elizabeth Kolbert discussed climate change with Amy Davidson.
There are so many great possibilities here—I hope that in the rumored upcoming web redesign, there’ll be new audio content weekly. Imagine what’s in the audio vaults, and what outside events and interviews they can put up if the magazine has or can get the rights to them. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do with this.
Good news about good writers:
failbetter is organizing a poetry reading — to take place April 24th at 7:30 at the Reading Between A and B series at 11th Street Bar (510 E. 11th Street, between Aves. A and B).
The three scheduled readers are Amy Holman, Sasha Frere-Jones and Max Winter (Amy and Sasha are former contributors and Max is in the new issue).
For more details check out our website:
or see
Despite the obvious thrill I get from new things, I also love discovering things late. It guarantees non-currency—all the copycat hype has subsided, and there’s just you and the thing, meeting in the shadows like the Lady and the Tramp, sharing a solitary spaghetti after the world has moved on. This is happening to me with Eugene Mirman, who’s hardly old news, but is new news to me, and I’m drunk on the comedy, the voice, the Emo Phillips admiration (“I was playing tennis, and this girl said to me, she said Emo, wanna double up?”), the Christian anti-gay-marriage phone-company calls (“I’m just more worried that a sandwich would marry a bear”).
From a 2001 (see what I mean?) interview with Chunklet; link mine:
Besides Eugene Mirman, what’s the best thing to come out of Russia?
I’ll tell you what it’s not: communism. That’s a bullshit system of government. I don’t know. Probably caviar, smoked fish. Depressing literature? Pushkin? Daniel Kharms. He’s an absurdist author from the ‘20s and ‘30s. Mostly it’s a kind of attitude. I find that there are three kinds of Russian people. Some who will be like, “The world is cold, wet misery.†And others who are more like, “The world is cold, wet misery, who wants to go see a movie?†And there are those who are simply somewhat upbeat, “Let’s have some chicken and wine!†I’m somewhere between the last two. The best exported thing was an optimistic outlook on dreary things. I’m slowly recovering from this election, while my American counterparts are still throwing up in the streets.
My tardiness aside, Mirman is, of course, more famous than ever. Check the site for his tour schedule and his regular Wednesday-night gig at Cinema Classics (11th between 1st and 2nd). I wonder where he’s from in Russia? I didn’t see any mention of a town.
So Bjork arrived at her Times interview wearing “white rubber rain boots and a sweater with a knitted owl across the front,” and that sounds like a great outfit that I’d like a lot. Now that swans are carrying bird flu, a fact that upsets me quite a bit but probably upsets Bjork even more, will she sport fewer avian flourishes, or more, in solidarity? Will the owls, and birds in general, that have been preoccupying designers diminish with the murdered turkeys?
I think they won’t; I think they’ll proliferate, just as National Geographic specials multiplied as the rainforests were cut down. (Remember that great essay about how we have no idea how little there is left of the wilderness because there are so many nature shows? Was it in Harper’s, maybe, sometime in the ’90s?) I think we’ll need to wear more birds, made soft and friendly, and have more bird figurines in our houses, chirping in unsinister ways. It can’t be a coincidence that all the fun of Snakes on a Plane is happening as we head for the release of United 93 and the five-year anniversary of September 11.
Alongside its other virtues, art can fuzzify fear, taking the edge off the badness and making demons into friends. With whimsical birds and silly planes, we’re creating a cuter version of the fallen world (that could be a description of Bjork, too). Martin McDonagh, let’s say, distills humans’ obvious debasement into an even bloodier one, and I admire the artistry and honesty. On the other hand, there are the ostriches in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, sticking their heads into everything and getting feathers everywhere, totally mortal and still heedlessly gawky in their enthusiasm. I like things with feathers, I confess.
From a LiveJournal blog:
all nighter – Salinger & Seymour – 1948 – update within the update
4am – I’m here and will be here all night writing a six-page paper about this…
J. D. Salinger
A Perfect Day for Bananafish
The New Yorker, January 31, 1948, pages 21-25I realized I shouldn’t spoil anything, so just read it, and you’ll understand why I find it ironic that I’m wearing a Puma shirt that uses “Puma Since 1948” to monet a bigger picture. Arg. How things work out.
lol.
****
update with the update
I finished my paper, the rough draft, and the reflection. This was ISA all over again. Unforunately, I can’t fully extend my left leg, and I haven’t felt it hurt this much in a while. ERG!
I’ve been thinking about Changes all night- The Bruce Hornsby and Tupac version. I think I know why. Read Teddy and Bananfish by J.D. Salinger. Why didn’t Teddy resist? Why did Seymour do what he did unemotionally? Vedanta Hinduism?