I came across Jeremy Paskell’s altered t-shirts at the corner of Bedford and Grand, and you can see more of them here. Paskell tags and re-cuts t-shirts (and designs new stuff) under his Fragile New York Clothing label. He’s also a photographer. Here’s the original of this shirt; as far as I can tell, it’s one of a kind. Model: the lovely and cooperative Mie.

More Paskell designs:

Shooting With Jeremy [Short Quicktime video of Paskell at work and answering questions from model Jillian Ann]
Two-Bedroom Apartment in Prewar Brick Building [Paskell in 2000 Shelter column, VV]

Categories: Magazines, Design

The festive Robert Benchley Society’s 2005 Summer Reading List is out: ten pithy pieces (by Benchley and others, including Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse, Jean Shepherd. Henry Alford, S. J. Perelman, etc.), and why to read them. The Benchley Society notes, “This year’s list includes some old favorites and some of the newer humor the kids enjoy these days—where you laugh at the thought of laughing.” Start your Amazon engines!

Categories: Benchley

Even conservatives like Robert Benchley—very sensible of them, too. Case in point: S.T. Karnick (why do so many right-wingers use their initials?) in National Review Online, a hearty appreciation:

Benchley was in many ways the dean of American humorists until his death in 1945 at the height of his fame. Perelman was often funnier, Parker was sharper, White more respected as a thinker, and Thurber more widely loved, but Benchley was the most consistently delightful. Where Benchley was perhaps most notable was in the unfailingly cheerful nature of his writing. As confusing and silly as modern American life could be, Benchley never became bitter or despaired—at least not in his writing.
…
In his frequently assumed persona of scientific investigator, Benchley was the clear model for later humorist Dave Barry’s style of writing, in which the author comically tries (and fails) to explain how various things work in the baffling contemporary world. Christopher Buckley’s puckish view of the absurdities of America’s elites is another clear descendant of Benchley’s work. To this day, Benchley remains a model of concise, literate, intelligent, humor writing.

Good links, too. And hold onto your bowler hats: As Karnick reports, Love Conquers All, Benchley’s 1922 collection of humor pieces, is online. Read it all, from “The Benchley-Whittier Correspondence” to “Do Insects Think?” to “Polyp With a Past” to “Those Dangerously Dynamic British Girls.” Then rent A Night at the Opera. If you’re still in the dark, read more about Benchley on Nat Benchley’s homepage. Your day will then have been exceedingly well spent.

Categories: Benchley

I’m supporting NPR this week by having it on a lot. So yesterday Terry Gross interviewed Nick Hornby about A Long Way Down, his new novel of dark-comedic suicidal contemplation, which I’m reviewing in this Sunday’s Newsday. I happen to have just started reading Curtis White’s The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, which includes the lambasting of Gross’ show that was that bombastic Harper’s Reading a few years ago. White writes: “Terry Gross’s interest in books and writers is too often morbid, perverse and voyeuristic.” I don’t listen to Fresh Air very often since it’s not at a convenient time, so I hadn’t felt the force of his critique—in fact, suspected it was overblown—till yesterday, when she proved him right in almost every moment of her excruciatingly unpleasant interview. Pointlessly sadistic? Prurient? Unrelenting? Check, check, check. Say, Nick, did you ever have someone close to you kill himself? Uh-huh, so how did he do it? Gas, huh? Hmm; were you surprised?

Were you surprised? No, Terry, we were all relieved actually. One less thing to worry about. She also managed to discuss Hornby’s autistic son—a character in A Long Way Down has a severely disabled child, though not autistic—in the most tasteless possible way, and I’m surprised Hornby didn’t throw something at her. She pursued the following question with gruesome zeal: You know how your character Maureen, the middle-aged Catholic woman who’s the mother of the disabled son, puts up posters that she’s only guessing her son might have liked if he could? Well, do you do that? Like dress your son in music or movie t-shirts that maybe he wouldn’t really like? Hornby was aghast but answered her questions in increasingly staccato and downbeat tones. Gross didn’t seem to notice but kept sniffing, hunting, sniffing. Down, Cujo!

Indeed, Hornby was a trouper, and got through the interview politely and even cheerfully, if you discounted the trapped and miserable edge to his voice each time she did this. Gross also insisted on discussing this nuance of fiction technique: Which suicide method hurts the most, and since jumping off a building (“not that I’ve ever experienced this!”—yes, that explains why you’re live on the radio right now) hurts the most, probably, why would you have your characters consider killing themselves that way? “Well,” Hornby said (paraphrasing), “it wouldn’t be as dramatic if they were all sitting separately in their cars. I had to get them to meet somehow, so I put them all on this rooftop so they could have a conversation.” Here’s White:

[T]here was a program in which Terry interviewed an author who had written a novel in which a woman says, “Drop dead,” to her husband and the next day he does drop dead. Before the novel was published, the author’s own real-life husband dropped dead on a tennis court. This was the point at which the book became interesting for Terry. If her poor husband hadn’t dropped dead, Terry would never have been interested in her or her book for this Show of Shows. “What did it feel like to suspect you’d killed your own husband with your art?” Fresh Air? How about Lurid Speculations? It’s like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content.

Hence, this examination in the tradition of Dwight Macdonald: Which of the characters, asked Gross, is actually Hornby in disguise, and how so, and then why ever did he put in a character that doesn’t share his background and personality? (Meaning Maureen.) You’d think, in Gross’ capacity as regular interviewer of fiction writers, she’d have read enough fiction by now to guess that maybe he made some of it up. Like a cheap TV prosecutor, she really, really wanted Hornby to admit that the failed rock guitarist, J.J., was modeled on himself. But all her questons were both wheedling and insinuating: We both know I know the answer. I’m just giving you a chance to say it first.

Call me middle-minded—and I’d say it’d be narrow-minded to do so on the basis of a radio station—but I like NPR a whole lot. (Witness the last few posts about excellent shows.) But after reading White’s Harper’s screed, which is a few years old now, wouldn’t Terry Gross have responded by toning down the more irrelevant (and, more to the point, dull) prying and concentrating on her subjects’ work? I don’t think she’s stupid; she just can’t seem to let go of this very poor interview technique. Oh well. Read A Long Way Down anyway. It’s a damn good novel.

The Middle Mind [Original piece; Context]

Categories: Hornby, Radio

There’s a lot of air conditioning in town, but which dark chilly room to choose for two hours of blissful coolness? It’s easy. Before you do anything else, including lunch, dinner, sleeping, work, or lemonade (you can bring the lemonade into the theater), immediately go to:

1. Crash. (Or why America needs Valium in its drinking water and a lot fewer guns. Not to mention that Don Cheadle and Matt Dillon [!] are big, craft-focused actors plus hot movie stars who make you say “And why does Brat Pitt matter again?” And Sandra Bullock will surprise you.) Link: Review by David Denby, New Yorker.

2. Mad Hot Ballroom. (Or how the foxtrot of fifth-graders will make you laugh till you cry, the kids in Tribeca are like tiny psychiatrists, and the teachers in Bensonhurst and Tribeca know how to get things done.) Link: Review by Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post.

3. Howl’s Moving Castle. (Or why Disney has become the Gaston of American animation—all vanity, no wild beastlike beauty. Lucky them that they could ride Hayao Miyazaki’s magnificent house into town.) Link: Review by Gene Seymour, Newsday.

It’s easy! See you in six hours, and you’ll have forgotten all about this steamy carnival of smells. When you get out, perhaps after a waffle at Petite Abeille to get into the spirit of Belgium, which according to Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer is an “industrious, honest” country unfortunately damned by idol-worship, it’ll be time for Clumsiest People in the World author Todd Pruzan, at the Chelsea B&N at 7. That’s air-conditioned, too.

Categories: Movies, NYer, Denby, Critics, Pruzan

A snappy review of the new Nash bio, from Carl Schoettler in the Baltimore Sun:

Ogden Nash: The Life and Works of America’s Laureate of Light Verse

By Douglas M. Parker. Ivan R. Dee, Publisher. 316 pages. $27.50.

Ogden Nash certainly remains our most-read purveyor of light verse. Who doesn’t know Candy is Dandy/But liquor is quicker?

But he was also a literary gentleman of the old school, a species that, if not extinct, is as rarely seen as the ivory-billed woodpecker. Douglas Parker, a lawyer writing with the “encouragement” of the family, depicts Nash as man of polished civility—witty, sophisticated, and perhaps above all, kind and gentle. He could trace his ancestry to Welsh nobility, wore extremely well-tailored suits and lunched at the Algonquin with ancient literary types such as Christopher Morley (Parnassus on Wheels, et al), Franklin P. Adams (The Conning Tower) and Dorothy Parker, although she was no gentleman.

He wooed Frances Leonard with adoring love letters, which he continued to write until the end of his life. (His dying words, after 40 years of marriage, were “I love you, Frances.”) After they married, he continued to call his in-laws “Mr. and Mrs. Leonard.” The Nash family lived with the Leonards for years in their rambling manse on Rugby Road in Guilford, where everyone seemed to dress for dinner.

Endlessly inventive in English, he could make puns in Latin and French as well, although he had completed only one year at Harvard when his father’s business collapsed and he ran out of money. He had had three years at St. George’s School, in Newport, R.I., which may have been the equivalent of today’s diluted college eduction.

The New Yorker published 353 of his poems: the first in 1930, the last ten days after his death in May 1971. He seemed to embody the smart, insouciant, urbane style of the magazine in the 1930s and 1940s.

And he rarely expressed anger or even irritation, except when The New Yorker rejected a poem, or his publishers mishandled his publicity. He did, after all, basically support his family with his poetry. He tried Hollywood unsuccessfully. He hoped for triumph on Broadway and had one splendid success, One Touch of Venus, a musical for which he wrote the lyrics, including one great song, Speak Low, a standard for cabaret singers to this day.

Hard life of Billie Holiday; smart verse of Ogden Nash; kicking the war habit [Baltimore Sun]
Poems by Ogden Nash [Plagiarist.com]

Review of Oh the Glory by John Freeman in the Houston Chronicle:

Like Dave Eggers’ memoir, which it resembles without being derivative, Oh the Glory of It All is a triumph of tone over tribulation. Other young men have perhaps suffered more, but what this book does—and does brilliantly—is give us the illusion of being inside Wilsey’s head as he experiences this family turmoil. His prose is headlong and rich without betraying the age he is supposed to be at the time…. More.

Surely one of the SF papers, who are covering every toenail of this story, has been here before, but I couldn’t resist: a Wilsey cameo on the website of the late California interior decorator Michael Taylor, “Media” section. Taylor’s signature touches, according to Papercity, included:

* Boldly overscaled furniture with plump, geometric cushions
* Rusticity played against glamour
* Concrete, wicker, timber, geodes—all used indoors
* Large, sculptural plants
* Mirrors everywhere
* Slate floors, twig scultpures, river rocks
* Juxtaposition: an 18th-century French chair played against a table made from the stone mill wheel

And that’s just the guest bathroom! It’s logical that Dede Wilsey might, given all accounts, be attracted to such overscaled juxtapositions. From a 1991 feature on Taylor in House & Garden by Dorothea Walker:

More than two decades later Michael was still working in traditional styles as well as his own—and often combining the two with refreshing results, as in the house he decorated for Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Wilsey in San Francisco. At her first meeting with Michael, Dede Wilsey told him, “I want to work with you, but I don’t want a typical Michael Taylor house.” Michael’s back immediately went up. “And what exactly,” he demanded, “is a typical Michael Taylor house?” “Oh, you know,” explained Dede Wilsey. “White on white, wicker everywhere, huge over-stuffed chairs. My feet wouldn’t touch the floor. I’d feel like a pygmy.” Fortunately, Michael thought that was very funny, and he and his clients became great friends. And he gave her beautiful rooms, all in Dede Wilsey’s favorite colors. He was disconcerted to hear that she wanted a pink living room, but he followed her lead, draping the room’s three sets of French doors and two windows in striped pink taffeta. To keep it from looking too sweet, he added two stone cocktail tables shaped like elephants. A sofa from a Syrie Maugham design was covered in green hand-cut velvet.

At a party in the Wilsey’s garden room, which Michael had decorated in his characteristic palette of whites, another of his clients spotted a terrazzo table and rushed up to him, almost weeping. “That’s my table,” she said. “Exactly the same as mine. How could you do this to me?” Michael always laughed when he told this story. “These ladies think nothing of wearing the same dress to a party, and they have their pictures taken in it for Women’s Wear Daily. The dress looks different on each of them. Why wouldn’t this table look different in different rooms?”

Now you’ve got to see the room; click on the House & Garden story. I’m actually starting to love this style. If only Taylor were here to join the fray!

Categories: Wilsey

Update: Listen to it now. There’s also an excerpt here—the useful and engaging introduction—which Pruzan expanded into that great New Yorker piece that wasn’t online. Ah, I see, a vast left-wing conspiracy! Not to mention a great picture of ol’ Favell, poor old soul. (A bit more about her here.)

Why would you miss that? You wouldn’t. If you’re lucky, the shade of Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer will join them. Either she’ll be touched to be rediscovered or she’ll be very, very indignant and hurl ethnocentric epithets (read aloud from the book). Tune in at 5:50 (or your local time) and wait for the signal. Then break out the nasty ethnic food of your choice.

Don’t miss this riveting piece by Tony Valenzuela in the L.A. Times about gay men and crystal meth. An HIV-positive man who’s pretty much done it all and lived to tell the sometimes frightful, sometimes troublingly thrilling tale, Valenzuela dramatically and thoughtfully expands the context of why talking about how to kick the habit isn’t enough:

But it is worth noting that in the gay community, the sky is always falling—because it did once, because we fear it might again, and so we shouldn’t be shocked when an alarming number of us respond to endemic fatalism by practicing nihilism by rote.

One doesn’t have to have a problem with drugs or be infected with HIV to feel the painful legacy of AIDS or to know the slow suffocation of homophobia. These cataclysms reside beneath the surface of our skins and come up as boils every time another state writes anti-gay discrimination into its constitution, another school board erases us from textbooks, or more parents teach their children to revile us. The future of drug addiction is all but guaranteed in a population of gay kids growing up in today’s savagely anti-gay, Constitution-hating age of hyperbole.

In case you missed it, here’s Michael Specter’s story in similar territory for The New Yorker.

Love the radio! We’ve been having a happy reunion these past few days.

Here’s the archived show. Wilsey’s a charming speaker—great voice, self-deprecating. He clearly has a highly developed sense of humor (it’s in the book, but it’s revealing to hear these stories told aloud) about the over-the-topness of his family drama. This is not an ungrateful child.

Wilsey on his mother, whose memoir he quotes extensively in Oh the Glory: “She would love to have her book get published!”

Lopate to Wilsey: “You do not dress like the child of wealthy parents,” indicating his T-shirt, and Wilsey laughs. “Yes, well, I was thinking since I was doing a radio show…” and notes that Lopate isn’t wearing a tie.

Lopate: “My brother [Philip] and I often have this argument—should you open yourself up to people slowly, like a rose, or rip off big chunks of yourself at a time, like a loaf of French bread?”

Wilsey on readers outside San Francisco: “Who am I, who are they, to your average reader?”

On book-party-location kerfuffle: “The U.S. miliary ultimately sponsored the party, which is kind of ironic considering my mother’s efforts for peace.”

On his father: “He had a huge file on me in his office.”

On Eggers and McSweeney’s: “I was very lucky—I met Dave out at a bar and we just really hit it off.”

On whether his own young son might someday write a memoir: “I’m being SO nice to him.” Laughs heartily. “He’s got every right to his own opinion, but I’m going to try to be as good a father as I possibly can be.”

Wilsey’s at the Chelsea B&N tonight at 7.