A wrapup of last week’s issue! (As you know, I get the new New Yorker on Tuesdays at best, Thursdays at worst, so it’s still this week’s issue as far as I’m concerned.)

A review of the brand-new book The New Yorker Book of Cartoon Puzzles and Games! (Update: Review coming soon. Jury duty called, and I’m spending quite a bit of my time down at the Kings County Supreme Court building these days. The good news: They have snap peas at the farmers’ market outside the courthouse! Tuesdays and Thursdays.)

And an announcement!

Meanwhile, at The Lady Killigrew Cafe in Montague, Mass., there are only two programs on the TV at the counter where you order: a live feed of two eagles in their nest, or the Sox game. Below the cafe is a rushing stream and a used bookstore with a spectacular collection of stuff found in books (letters, tickets, maps, photos), now pasted on the bathroom walls. Can you think of a better setup? Apparently, John “I’m a PC” Hodgman composed some of The Areas of My Expertise there, but it’s not known whether he had the long-brewed iced coffee and the grilled Nutella sandwich. For his sake, I hope he did.

It would be ludicrous (Ludacris?) for me to take sides—I mean, I’m against racism, what a controversial opinion—but I do support Sasha Frere-Jones in most things, although we might disagree about a few things, musically. (That’s probably because I generally have the musical taste of someone’s grandfather, not even your grandfather; maybe your great-grandfather. The you I’m addressing here would be hard to pigeonhole.) I like Sasha a whole lot. I love the Magnetic Fields, too; they’re part of my soundtrack. The songs are sad and some are indelibly so, and “Strange Powers” is big in my life again thanks to the Shins. I know some people in the band and I like them a whole lot, too, although Stephin Merritt’s dog once bit me pretty hard, but it was just tired of being fondled by strangers, I think. I just mean: Sasha is good-hearted and big-hearted, and he’s not just concerned with justice but urgently preoccupied with it. I don’t second everything he says, but I believe he’s for good, for truth, for illumination. One thing he’s definitely not is a sycophant who shuns controversy. Neither is Merritt. They celebrate the undercelebrated, and want good music to be appreciated more. They disagree about what that music is, in part. (The list of music they both consider great would be substantial, I suspect.) As Sasha points out, there’s obviously an opportunity for reflection and thoughtful debate here, and the internet isn’t always the best place to have it—it’s a panel of animals speaking (or screeching) in many tongues, all at once, and the panelists’ table is infinitely long.

Being a critic-blogger, and being a dark-bar-dwelling grouchy-wary sort, have their advantages. You get to write and talk in dim lighting, and it helps with shyness. Someone smart would immediately plan a conversation between Sasha and Stephin, and publish it. Whatever this conversation ends up being about, these quips and links and footnotes aren’t doing it justice. Remind me to put up a transcript of Zadie Smith’s remarks at the recent PEN World Voices Festival about what she finds inspiring in hip-hop, when they’re available. She should be at the roundtable, too.

In other New Yorkerish news, there’s a brand-new blog called Candy Is Dandy, But Liquor Is Quicker. All hail Parker! If you haven’t bought The Portable Dorothy Parker (laudably well edited by Marion Meade) yet, you’re not in your right mind. It’s gorgeous, and the stories will knock your socks off. They really will. I’d never read “Big Blonde,” and I’m still recovering from it.

I didn’t intend to get all promotional, but I didn’t realize that there were so many original cover images for sale at the Cartoon Bank, mostly from the ’80s, ’90s, and today, as the radio DJs say. (I may have the musical taste of your great-grandfather, but I do know about radio DJs. Also, podjockeys! PJs? Maybe Pajamas Media could popularize it.) Some from other decades, too (an October 17, 1931 image by Adolph K. Kronengold, for instance), like this September 1, 1956, cover by Charles E. Martin.

Another Martin cover I like, published on May 27, 1967:

Big news to come on the blog, as soon as next week.

After a fashion. The always fantastic Go Fug Yourself has some stern words for the Renaissance fellow, who, here, is wearing something he maybe should have left in the ’60s. Actually, I don’t mind it, because he seems to be wearing it humorously, but I certainly see Jessica’s point. She writes (and you’ll obviously need to see the picture to appreciate it):

WALLACE SHAWN, WHAT ARE YOU WEARING? No! No! Althought I admire the sentiment behind your plea for peace, DON’T WEAR THAT SHIRT WITH A SUIT! No! No! Again, I say no!

And why is this so painful for me? Because I LOVE Wallace Shawn. How can you look at that face and not love this man (albeit not in a Tom Cruise I LOVE THIS WOMAN kind of way, at least not in my experience)? First of all, he was, of course, Mr Hall, the lovable hapless teacher in Clueless — which, hello, who doesn’t love Clueless? It’s the first movie I ever walked out of with the reaction, “That was hilarious! I need to go buy some clothes immediately,” a reaction which basically informed the rest of my life — and, then, of course, in The Princess Bride [now out in a special-edition DVD, I notice], he taught us all both never to get involved in a land war in Asia, and, more importantly, to never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Those are important life lessons, people. Which is why it is almost INCONCEIVABLE that I have to say something mean about him…but Wally! Oh, Wally. I don’t know what Cher Horowitz would have said about this get-up, but I suspect it would not have been super-complimentary.

Speaking of the riotous Eugene Mirman, I’d like to add that I might not have discovered him at all without my new co-favorite American podcast, The Sound of Young America. Jesse Thorn has a big future, a big past, and a big present—at least, he deserves a big present, so someone get him one!

My other co-favorite American podcast (I listen to several swell British ones) is Biddycast, produced by the cutest band around, The Lascivious Biddies. The Biddies’ ace guitarist, Amanda Monaco, was diagnosed with the disease last year. I’ll be walking quite a ways with Amanda, the Biddies, and a whole slew of other people this Sunday in the MS Walk, and it would be really great if emdashes readers helped out. Even five or ten bucks would make a difference, for real. If you can, please kick in a little something—or even a big something—for the valiant, lovely, and tuneful Team Biddy.

If, after you listen to a few of the Biddies’ sparkling songs, you want to get even closer to them, I don’t blame you. You’ll have a swell opportunity at their DVD release party, this Thursday, April 20, at Joe’s Pub. Bring some moolah for the MS Walk and they’ll be so happy, they might even sing a song just for you.

From The Beachwood Reporter, which I just discovered, a sweet song list from a 1991 mix tape, made by then-13-year-old writer Michael Brett. Brett makes himself sound like a pinup for Pathetic Geek Stories (“The year before, two eighth-graders threw me in the dumpster, and the principal yelled at me because my clothes were too filthy for class”), and is thoroughly lovable. Samples:

You’re Crazy (Guns N’ Roses, from Appetite for Destruction)
I ripped off Columbia House for the first time at 10 and started my music collection. I peeled the wrapper off this cassette with my teeth when it finally arrived. I played this cassette so much over the next three years, the mechanism snapped. I grew up with six sisters, and other girls were not my forte. I wanted to run down 95th Street singing this song at every woman I met, shouting them down. I had some misogyny issues to resolve.
…
The Warmth of the Sun (The Beach Boys, from Endless Summer)
My sisters listened to crappy music. Phil Collins. Huey Lewis and the News. The Outfield. But they owned a ton of Beach Boys–records, 8-tracks, cassettes–nearly everything. This was my blues. Get cut from the team? Listen to Brian Wilson. Not get a girl to skate with you? Listen to Brian Wilson. Friends ditch you? Listen to Brian Wilson. Guy always knew what to say and empathized with you like crazy. The opening harmony of this song is a straight out music taste scythe for me to this day. Either you get goose bumps, or you just don’t get it.
…
Alison (Elvis Costello, from My Aim Is True)
First, the cover. It was me, looking back at me! Then this song. Almost Chuck Berry wedded to the Beach Boys. I could have sworn Elvis ripped it out of my heart’s teletype. And my sisters loved him, so I knew he eventually got the girl. Elvis still gives me that faith.

4th of July, Asbury Park (Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, from Live/1975-85)
If you are a Brett, you wear Chuck Taylors and have a complete devotion to Bruce. I don’t remember life before him, because to me it didn’t exist. 1978, he was already the Boss. Bruce was sui generis, all eventual music I held dear to this day derives from him. And this song, well, it was nothing but electric. It’s West Side Story mated to S.E. Hinton. I hung on every recycled word of it, because new to me then didn’t matter. When you’re 13, everything is new and most of it absolutely sucks. You want warm blankets. Bruce is still mine.

I’d love to see a scan of the tape-case insert (which my friend Darren reminds me is called a J-card) to see Brett’s handwriting, and maybe even some Led Zep iconography.

Image above borrowed from this lament about the unromantic nature of mix CDs: “So, music technology industry, go screw yourself. I blame it solely on you. My amazing then-boyfriend slipped up and fell prey to your evil futuristic ways. While the future is pretty cool and all, it’s significantly less amorous. I’ve never seen someone look sexy in something that is silver, shiny and round. But put that same person in a little black number with holes cut out for the nipples and you’ve got something.”

Looking for the Jonathan Rosenbaum review of Eyes Wide Shut that Philip Lopate praises on today’s Leonard Lopate Show, I found this provocative statement from Rosenbaum’s 1999 roundup:

Nineteen ninety-nine was a pivotal year in movies, clarifying where a lot of people stood and who they were. This kind of definition was encouraged by the existential stocktaking that came with the end of the millennium—the compiling of more best-film lists than usual (of the 90s, of the century) and more generalized meditating on the state of the art and the medium. (After finishing my own best-of-the-90s list for the last issue of the year, I discovered that all but one of the movies had an interesting trait in common: they hadn’t been reviewed in the New Yorker. The sole exception, Eyes Wide Shut, was treated with a dismissive contempt the reviewer would never have dreamed of heaping on a James Bond adventure.)

Here’s the magazine’s condensed Eyes Wide Shut review, and Rosenbaum’s longer story. Wonder what the great Chicagoan thinks of the New Yorker coverage in the past few years? And which NYer critics, besides Pauline Kael of course, show up in Lopate’s anthology? I can answer that one myself.

Philip Lopate is speaking about “The Art of Film Criticism” on a panel this Monday. From the WNYC website:

Phillip Lopate will be leading a panel with Kent Jones, Andrew Sarris, J. Hoberman, and Stanley Kauffmann
Monday, April 3 at 6:30 pm
The Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway
For tickets, call 212-496-3809 or visit filmlinc.org

In honor of Joan Acocella’s Playboy meditation, I give you my hastily constructed but sincere CanoScan homage to Nancy Jo Sales’ 2001 Vanity Fair profile of Hef and his harem, an article I found so mesmerizing I not only clipped and kept it but have actually reread it several times. I mean—a bevy of blondes having a pillow fight! A “wrigging, giggling mass of matching pink-pajama-clad girlfriends,” what’s more! I love the twinkie blandness of the American sexual imagination that isn’t quite the same as the American sexual imagination that counted down till the Olsen twins were legal or the one furiously bittorrenting Japanese mind-bogglement. No, this particular imagination gets off on this stuff, pinup cuteness that’s predicated on the girls being dumb as feather pillow and so happy—because Hef (think of him as Hugh for a second and it’s all the more ridiculous) is their dad, they’re all taken care of, and seven “girlfriends” or not, even with Viagra you’ve got to be kidding. I applaud him!

And roll my eyes, and feel a little bad for the silly centerfolds. Still, I love wholesome American porn. Getting back to Acocella, I was happily reading along till I reached this: “This whole ‘bachelor’ world, with the brandy snifters and the attractive guest arriving for the night: did it ever exist? Yes, as a fantasy. Now, however, it is the property of homosexuals.” Eh? I’m pretty sure she’s just being dry, but it’s a little creepy, especially in an issue that insists on calling David Furnish Elton John’s “companion.” Shall we ease into the new century with a little all-around sophistication, o Style Issue? Also a surprise not to see any mention of Gloria Steinem’s glorious Bunny experiment, subject of the very fine ’80s TV movie A Bunny’s Tale. Anyway, if you find yourself unsated after gawping at the ladies on p. 3, I mean 145, take Richard Brody’s advice and buy the Busby Berkeley boxed set:

The sexual allusions in Berkeley’s choreography are startling even today. He transformed the costumed bodies and shining faces of his chorus girls into suggestively biomorphic shapes: slits that open and close, undulating canals, and expanding and contracting holes. He frequently organized his dancing girls into enormous V-shaped phalanxes, one of which, in “Don’t Say Goodnight,” from “Wonder Bar,” is besieged by huge moving pillars. “By a Waterfall,” from “Footlight Parade,” suggests a fertility rite, as water nymphs stand with their legs spread on wedding-cake-like turntables while jets of water spurt around them.

Busby was great, for sure. Makes little Elizabeth look like an amateur.

Speaking of sex, “Well, that was abominable” is one of the funniest captions in ages, contest or no contest. Give Carl Gable your vote or I’ll sic Tobias Meyer on your entire collection. You know which one I mean.

Old? Uncool? Live in a cave? If you’re unable to decipher “Hollaback Girl” or haven’t a clue why people guffaw every time you say your baby’s name, Slang City can help. What’s more, they have the inside scoop on all the mushy—but mysterious—stuff Jake and Heath say to each other in that one cowboy movie. A sampling, original first, translation second:

Ennis: I figure we got a one-shot deal going on here.
Jack: It’s nobody’s business but ours.
Ennis: You know I ain’t queer.
Jack: Neither am I.

Ennis: I think this is something that will only happen once.
Jack: It’s nobody’s business but ours.
Ennis: You know I’m not homosexual.
Jack: Neither am I.

Another newly revealed exchange:

Jack: Swear I didn’t know we were gonna get into this again. Hell, yes I did, redlined it all the way, couldn’t get here fast enough.

Jack: Honestly, I didn’t know we were going to be romantic partners again. Oh, that’s a big lie! I knew it and I was speeding all the way and couldn’t get here fast enough.

Not to mention “I can’t survive on making love to you up here on the mountain once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you horrible person (‘you sonofawhoreson bitch’)! I wish I knew how to leave you.” There’s lots more here; you’ll eat it up like a freshly fired-up can o’ beans on a sheepy, lonely mountaintop.

I’ve been meaning to mention that I got to interview the first-rate screenwriter-playwright-lyricist-novelist Joe Keenan recently, and here’s my story (or just look at the previous post). On Monday I saw a staged reading of his show The Times, and every audience member I talked to felt the way I did: shattered, spooked, satisfied. We laughed a whole lot, too. It’s time for this to be re-staged.

Here’s how My Lucky Star, Keenan’s swell new novel, begins:

It is never a happy moment in the life of a struggling artist when some fresh assault on his fragile dignity compels him finally and painfully to concede that Failure has lost its charm. He has up until this point soldiered bravely along, managing to persuade himself that there’s something not merely noble but downright jolly about Struggle, about demeaning temp jobs, day-old baked goods, and pitchers of beer nursed like dying pets into the night. He would, of course, grant that la vie Bohème with its myriad deprivations and anxieties was not an unalloyed delight. But whenever its indignities rankled unduly he could console himself with his certainty that Bohemia was not, after all, his permanent address. Oh, no. His present charmingly scruffy existence was a mere preamble to his real life, a larval stage from which he would soon gloriously emerge into the sunshine of success. Its small embarrassments were, if anything, to be prized, not only for their lessons in humility but for the many droll, self-deprecatory anecdotes they would later provide, stories he’d polish and trot out for parties, interviews, and—why be pessimistic?—talk shows.

Then one day he is faced with some final affront, minor perhaps, but so symbolically freighted as to land on him with the force of an inadequately cabled Steinway. He reels, stunned, and dark speculations, long and successfully repressed, rampage through his mind. For the first time he allows himself to wonder if his life twenty years hence will be any different than his present existence. “Of course it will be different,” coos the voice in his head. “You’ll be old.” Here’s the whole excerpt.

From Hendrik Hertzberg’s amusing Talk of the Town about Cheney-haters and the stalwarts who love him:

Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign—not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.

And from Slate ‘s review of the new FX show about “race-swapping”:

If Black. White.—the title of which is annoyingly punctuated, by the way—were a drama, the network would be sending producers’ notes about Bruno’s lack of character development.

I’d like lots more of this sort of journalism; I could talk about hyphens and annoying punctuation all day.

Which reminds me, I’ve gotten some letters about the magazine’s dogged allegiance to spelling certain words as though we were not in New Amsterdam but in Olde England. I’ve started a collection (a list, that is, not a bucket of quarters for the copy dept.’s re-brainwashing), so send them in if you see them.