I always brighten up when I see there’s a Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon in the new issue, as there is, in fact, in this new issue. In the cartoon anthology, Bob Mankoff (I assume; the essays aren’t credited) writes, “Kaplan’s people bicker and kvetch in a spare, Beckett-like universe whose ontological principle seems to be ‘Life Sucks’…. The action, such as it is, is confined within carefully outlined rectangles, lit by the kind of blinding light that precedes alien encounters in science-fiction shows.”

Kaplan’s also in the current L.A. Weekly—if you aren’t signed up for their weekly update, it’s really worth it. Terrific writers, smart reviews, and just enough but not too much of that exotic “Californian” perspective. Here’s the cartoon.

As soon as I got my second-class issue today (actually, a Manhattan friend told me that her magazine fails to arrive three weeks out of four), I went to my favorite diner and surveyed the table of contents. Which I did with some difficulty, considering the Ralph Lauren model on the opposite page and his stripey paisley chainy kerchiefy outfit, which I almost forgave due to his arresting eyes and unplucked brows, then reconsidered in light of his slightly mean-looking mouth. Here’s what I looked forward to most:

—Nancy Franklin on Fat Actress. I don’t watch very much TV except with my cherished and cabled-up friends who know all there is to know about reality shows, but I read whatever Franklin writes anyway because it’s so damn smart. I’ve been fond of Alley ever since 1985 when I saw her play Gloria Steinem infiltrating the New York Playboy Club in the TV movie A Bunny’s Tale, which was a mind-blowing moment for me at age 13. (I’ve read the piece now; very satisfying.)

—A Mark Strand poem!

—Anthony Lane on Sin City, because I loved the preview. (Review features an electrifying description of watching a film at a film festival—”in a cinema of eight hundred and thirty-two seats, every one of them occupied”!)

—Sasha Frere-Jones on Slint. (Dense; good. Cameo by the Pyramid, where I used to go dance, and which permanently hurt my left eardrum, and on whose steep stairs I once slipped and fell, causing deep and unsightly bruises. I miss that place!)

—Sean Wilsey on his unorthodox SF upbringing, as outlined earlier. (Fantastic pictures. Saving the piece for a treat tomorrow.)

— Hilton Als on Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar. (Not much of a review; he’s much more interested in Jeffrey Wright and Ben Stiller in This Is How It Goes. I think I’ve had enough of reading about Neil LaBute and his “part Pinter, part ‘Jackass,’ ” sensibility for a while.)

—Cartoons by Roz Chast (Back Page; funny but not up to her usual standard), Bruce Eric Kaplan (have I mentioned I like Bruce Eric Kaplan? His three-square signature rocks), Victoria Roberts, William Hamilton (after many years of loathing him, I’ve come around to seeing how brilliantly silly his cartoons are, and what loving attention he pays to the firmness of the breasts in his drawings), Leo Cullum, and, last but hardly least, Charles Barsotti, creator of startling squiggles about cruelty and noodles.

—The Mail, all about Peter Boyer’s “Jesus in the Classroom.”

—Richard Preston on mathematicians and the unicorn tapestries.

There’s more, obviously. I’m quietly pleased because I’ve been playing a little game with myself to see if I can guess the Talk writer before the byline (since they’re often cleverly placed on the following page), and I’ve gotten the Ben McGrath entry right for several weeks in a row now. It’s partly the subject matter (in this case, the Daily News/New York Post dustup), partly the jaunty tone. Anyway, I’m getting better. Now if only I could apply that to all those back issues with no signatures…

Because Brooklynites get their magazine the same day as Bostonians (confirmed this evening after a rejuvenatingly traumatic screening of Oldboy), we can’t actually read this yet, but it sounds like a dilly: an excerpt from McSwoobah Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All, a memoir about his famous, messed-up San Francisco family. From the San Francisco Chronicle piece about the local furor rising higher than the hills:

The 475-page memoir, to be published by Penguin Press, has it all, from sex, drugs and marital infidelity to famous names, lavish parties and conspicuous consumption. It also has Wilsey’s painful quest for love, understanding and acceptance from his mother, former San Francisco Examiner society columnist Pat Montandon; his late father, philanthropist and food magnate Al Wilsey; and in particular, his stepmother, Diane “Dede” Wilsey, one of the city’s most powerful and admired arts patrons, who led the 10-year effort to build the $202 million new de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.
…
In his book, 34-year-old Sean Wilsey blames his stepmother for the breakup of his parents’ marriage, and, in part, for his spiral into delinquency. His parents, he writes, were so narcissistic they didn’t have time to nurture him.

Dede Wilsey said she has no intention of reading the memoir. “A fact checker from the New Yorker called the other day, and every fact they checked with me was wrong,” she said.

Can you imagine checking that? It almost trumps “Are You Completely Bald?” for subjectivity. Somehow this scandal seems more fun because it’s in San Francisco; everyone knows all the writers there by sight. Here scandals live about as long as a Gawker post before something else shoves it out of the way. Scandals should be chewed slowly and deliberately, then spat out with satisfaction. Moving to SF is so [insert date of your choice here], but you can’t deny it’s still awfully tempting.

Speaking of chewing, all I can do is quote David Denby’s review of Oldboy, mixed but absolutely accurate in at least this regard:

Made in South Korea, “Oldboy” has been causing a fuss since it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and finally it arrives here, trailing clouds of octopus. A man named Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) goes to a restaurant and orders “a living thing.” You or I would be content with a dozen oysters, but this fellow is handed an octopus on a plate, and he boldly goes for the complete eight-track experience, slotting the unfortunate creature into his mouth. It squirms around, looking understandably surprised by the experience, and one of its tentacles appears to be signalling for a cell phone, but down it goes.

This struck me as one of the better moments in the movie, and nothing that Russell Crowe, say, couldn’t handle in the event of an American version. (Has anybody green-lit such a project? Let’s hope so, if only for the solemn caution that we can expect in the end credits: “No cephalopods were chewed in the making of this film.”)

He’s dead right. And do I mean dead! This movie is all weirdly decorated apartments, funny hairstyles, lots of running around, and quick, stylish cuts. Like Amelie, but with killing. Glorious.

Afterthought: I knew Oldboy reminded me of something, and it was Akira Yoshimura’s On Parole, which I reviewed long ago. Guy is locked up for 15 years; guy is sprung; guy freaks out. The numbness is similar, and the reluctance to let go of certain prison habits and obsessions. Come to think of it, Oldboy vs. The Shawshank Redemption might make an interesting study…

Memoir by son of S.F. socialites should set tongues wagging—and other writers say it’s not just trash talk [SF Chronicle]
Q. & A.: The War at Home [New Yorker; Cressida Leyshon interview with Wilsey, online only]
The Current Cinema: Revenge [New Yorker; The Ring Two & Oldboy]

Categories: NYer, Issue, Wilsey, Movies, Denby, EG

How did I miss this the first time around? It’s very possible I didn’t, but 1998 seems so long ago I find myself startled that the web even existed then, though I know for a fact I was freebasing it with all my might. It’s

Alex Ross and David Denby on Movies Today,

and it goes something like this:

Dear Alex:

You seem to have taken my New Yorker article a little personally. But that, I suppose, is my fault—the result of indulging in generational typing. I played the generational card not because I was trying to get your goat—or anyone’s goat&#8212but only because I kept having the same experience over and over. I would be talking to someone around 30, complaining about the thinness and mediocrity of the movie scene in the ’90s, and I would be overcome by the sense that the other person had no idea what I was referring to. As I ranted, or mourned, or just mildly and softly groaned, my friend would grin at me as if I had turned into a fossil before his very eyes&#8212not exactly the most pleasant experience, I can tell you.

and like this:

Dear David,

Your diagnosis of younger filmgoers is still too dire. I simply don’t buy some of your anecdotes—the notion that no one in a Harvard film class has heard of Katharine Hepburn, or Scorsese’s idea that college kids haven’t heard of Fellini. What’s going to happen if a professor stands up in front of a college class and asks, “Do you know who Katharine Hepburn is?” There will be an embarrassed, amused, “ironic” silence, even if everyone in the room knows exactly who Hepburn is. And everyone does.

And Slate explains,

This dialogue grows out of an article in the April 6 issue of The New Yorker deploring the state of movies today. Denby argues that studios prefer cheap irony to real emotion and that young moviegoers don’t care about seeing good movies—they prefer mass-market schlock to complex films such as L.A. Confidential. Alex Ross demurs.

It’s all really good. Too bad we can only read Tuesday and Thursday, as in all these old Slate exchanges. I remember when we had to pay too, but we don’t have to now! I want my Slate TV, yes, even from 1998 when everything was worse or possibly better!

Media Watch [Women’s Freedom Network, March/April 1998]

Categories: A_Ross, Denby, Movies

Katha Pollitt’s recent column on the Susan Estrich/Michael Kinsley exchange about, as Katha puts it, “the lack of female talent on his op-ed pages,” is causing a stir; she writes:

Come April, the Times will have seven male op-ed columnists, plus Maureen Dowd. Not to worry though, Dowd writes, there are “plenty of brilliant women…. We just need to find and nurture them.”

Oh, nurture my eye.

That’s what I admire about Katha—she doesn’t buy into the thankfully fading nicey-nicey, flirt-and-obey school of female journalism. She goes on:

The tiny universe of political-opinion writers includes plenty of women who hold their own with men, who do not wilt at the prospect of an angry e-mail, who have written cover stories and bestsellers and won prizes—and whose phone numbers are likely already in the Rolodexes of the editors who wonder where the women are. How hard could it be to “find” Barbara Ehrenreich, who filled in for Thomas Friedman for one month last summer and wrote nine of the best columns the Times has seen in a decade? Or Dahlia Lithwick, legal correspondent for Slate, another Friedman fill-in, who actually possesses a deep grasp of the field she covers—which cannot always be said for John Tierney, who begins his Times column in April? What about Susan Faludi? The Village Voice‘s Sharon Lerner? Debra Dickerson? Wendy Kaminer? The Progressive‘s Ruth Conniff? Laura Flanders? Debbie Nathan? Ruth Rosen, veteran of the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle?…Natalie Angier, bestselling author and top New York Times science writer, would be a fabulous op-ed columnist. And, not to be one of those shrinking violets everyone’s suddenly so down on, What about me? Am I a potted plant?

You’ll note I’ve mostly named liberals and feminists—I’m sure there are good women writers on the right out there, too, and their job prospects are probably a lot rosier. A conservative woman who endlessly attacks feminists, like The New Yorker‘s Caitlin Flanagan or the Los Angeles Times‘s departed Norah Vincent or the Boston Globe’s Cathy Young—what could be hotter than that?

On the liberal side, I’d add Laurie Garrett, who’s a loudmouth in the best sense of the word. Enough with shrinking violets, potted plants, and delicate orchids—without endorsing (in full) the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, I say bring on the Venus Flytraps. Stay on the course of truth and justice, and nobody has to get hurt.

Media Bubble: Teen Spirit [Gawker]
Webstalker [New Yorker, via Wes Jones]

From the London Independent, the gaily contrary, always entertaining, and often off-base Camille Paglia:

English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in America, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust. From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated north-eastern industrial town), I recognised commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America. Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M&M’s chocolate candies. A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise longue, said in a twanging Southern drawl: “I’m an M&M peanut / Toasted to a golden brown / Dipped in creamy milk chocolate / And covered in a thin candy shell!” Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly towelled in her monogrammed candy wrap. I felt then, and still do, that the M&M peanut’s jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.

Would those be the same neglected souls even now lolling in their own kidney-shaped pools, flush with advertising awards whose value Paglia wouldn’t think of noting? If she wants sexy peanuts, she should try some poetry outside the limited arena she’s clearly sampling (and sampling is a generous term). Paglia also says, as usual putting herself in the position (“like Andy Warhol…”) as singular visionary of a fairly obvious point:

Another of my unfashionable precepts is that I revere the artist and the poet, who are so ruthlessly “exposed” by the sneering poststructuralists with their political agenda. There is no “death of the author” (that Parisian cliché) in my world view.

I think she’s giving theory too much power; in my experience, the new generation of poets isn’t corseted by it. If Paglia looked just a little harder (especially at the internet, which she claims to love even as she bemoans its promotion of sloppy language), she’d find that the author is thriving, breathing beautifully even without Camille Poetry Resuscitation.

Rhyme and Reason [Independent, via Arts & Letters Daily]
The Camille Paglia IMterview [Andrew Sullivan]
Bite Me, Camille Paglia! [American Politics; this is nauseating on many levels, but I include it because it reinforces my real affection for Paglia—I don’t like it when fools like this attack her—and demonstrates how reactionaries are constantly falling right into subversives’ traps, e.g. “Women like her are enough to turn straight men gay!” Paglia would beam.]

Engaging piece about John Ashbery by Meghan O’Rourke in Slate:

John Ashbery wrote his first poem when he was 8. It rhymed and made sense (“The tall haystacks are great sugar mounds/ These are the fairies’ camping grounds”) and the young writer—who had that touch of laziness that sometimes goes along with precocity—came to a realization: “I couldn’t go on from this pinnacle.” He went on, instead, to write poems that mostly didn’t rhyme, and didn’t make sense, either. His aim, as he later put it, was “to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about.” It worked. Early on, a frustrated detractor called him “the Doris Day of Modernism.” Even today a critic like Helen Vendler confesses that she’s often “mistaken” about what Ashbery is up to. You can see why: It simply may not be possible to render a sophisticated explication de texte of a poem that concludes “It was domestic thunder,/ The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched/ His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.”

No wonder Ashbery is widely thought of as dauntingly “difficult”—or, in some camps, as something of a literary hoaxster. It would be a shame, though, if this prevented curious readers from picking up his books. Being difficult, after all, is not the same thing as being incomprehensible.

Read the rest here.

For me, and for at least one other person I know, getting something out of Ashbery—getting a lot out of Ashbery—came with hearing him read. He stood there at the podium of the Morgan Library looking as genial and harmless as Ed McMahon, and his words were calm and paced, not the verbal whirlpool of someone who’s trying to put something over on you. It was something like a reading by the late Kenneth Koch, but not theatrical (Ken was theatrical in the best way—his presence was a French circus, like the entire cast of The Rules of the Game in one person). As Ashbery read, paused, and just barely accented certain phrases, I understood that his poems simply expressed states of mind in interestingly juxtaposed groups. And that made them more than not-baffling; it let me focus on the words instead of the structure, on reacting to those states of mind rather than being mad at Ashbery for being so elusive or worrying about metaphor. It was a simple but key change, and I’m now happy to see his poems both “narrative” (as if all stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and explainable characters) and not. I’m thinking about Andy Goldsworthy’s willed natural events and how they tell a story of sorts—he throws a fistful of red dirt into a creek and watches it rush with color, for example, or watches a cairn undo itself in the ocean over time—and how enough of those in close proximity might resemble an Ashbery poem (O’Rourke calls him a “radio transistor”). If this seems like so much red dirt, just read aloud one of his poems, or better yet, let him do it for you.

The Instruction Manual: How to read John Ashbery [Slate]
The Natural: The Poetry and Madness of John Clare [New Yorker; quotes Ashbery essay at length]
Nancy Drew’s Father: The Fiction Factory of Edward Stratemeyer [O’Rourke, New Yorker]

Steve Martin has pretty good taste (he’s not, as rumored, dating Kristin Davis, but plenty of people were willing to believe it), though not always in movie roles:

Steve Martin will reunite with “Bringing Down the House” director Adam Shankman for a sequel to 2003’s “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

Shankman—who directed the Jennifer Lopez-Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy “The Wedding Planner” and the Mandy Moore drama “A Walk to Remember”—has become one of the hottest comedy directors in Hollywood. “Bringing Down the House” grossed $132.5 million at the U.S. box office and his latest project—the Vin Diesel comedy “The Pacifier”—took in $30.5 million last weekend when it opened at No. 1.

Shankman told Daily Variety deals are being worked out for Martin and other cast members from “Cheaper by the Dozen,” including Bonnie Hunt and Piper Perabo, but he said it was questionable whether Hilary Duff would return for the sequel. The story for the new movie follows the family with 12 kids as they go on a vacation and run into trouble with another family from the neighborhood that has eight kids.

“Cheaper by the Dozen,” directed by Shawn Levy, grossed $138 million.

That’s the key sentence, I suppose. I didn’t see Cheaper because I was afraid of what those fluffballs would do to a children’s book I didn’t want to see stripped of its high weirdness. Critics and friends I trust confirmed the fear; even that wouldn’t ordinarily keep me away from a movie I was interested in, but I hate seeing Martin act like an idiot, and I don’t mean The Jerk. Anyway, this sequel sounds deadly. I guess it’ll fund the stuff it’s great to see him do—plays, art-patronage, novellas, time for New Yorker pieces. But nincompoop matinees? He’s got the clout to make good G films (Lord knows we need some) and spare us this nonsense. Just because he can make funny faces doesn’t mean he should give up his right to be a stylish/comic Cary Grant type; Stanley Kubrick considered him for the Tom Cruise role in Eyes Wide Shut, which would’ve been mind-blowing. My Steve Martin is the Steve Martin of both Roxanne and The Spanish Prisoner, but not generic popcorn-pushers. He’s better than that.

Steve Martin Ready for Another “Dozen” [UPI, via Pittsburgh Tribune-Review]
People in the News: Steve Martin is head over heels for “Sex” kitty Kristin Davis [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]
Biography for Steve Martin [IMDb]
Interview with Steve Martin [Banjo Newsletter, via SteveMartin.com]

Categories: Martin, Movies

Until the magazine’s promised archive CDs come out—please hurry!—Google’s the only game in town, and so when I read this look at firefighters’ helmets in the Arizona Republic, which cites a 1930 New Yorker piece, my Google bell (gongle?) went off. Sure enough, there it is, on the San Francisco Virtual Museum homepage. Here’s the June 14, 1930, article, which looks like a Talk of the Town:

The Eagle on the Helmet

In our simple, childish way, we always believed that the eagle adorning a fireman’s helmet meant something special—the spirit of American enterprise, maybe, or onward to victory. We were wrong. The eagle, it seems, just happened, and has no particular significance at all. Long, long, ago, around 1825 to be exact, an unknown sculptor did a commemorative figure for the grave of a volunteer fireman. You can see it in Trinity Churchyard today; it shows the hero issuing from the flames, his trumpet in one hand, a sleeping babe in the other, and, on his hat, an eagle. Now, nobody was wearing eagles at the time; it was a flight of pure fancy on the sculptor’s part, but as soon as the firemen saw it they thought it was a splendid idea, and since every fire company in those days designed its own uniforms, it was widely adopted at once. It has remained on firemen’s hats ever since, in spite of the fact that it has proved, frequently and conclusively, to be a dangerous and expensive ornament indeed. It sticks up in the air. It catches its beak in window sashes, on telephone wires. It is always getting dented, bent and knocked off. Every so often, some realist points out how much safer and cheaper it would be to do away with the eagle, but the firemen always refuse.

We learned all this about firemen’s hats in the course of a little talk we had the other day with Mr. John Arthur Olson, of 183 Grand Street. Mr. Olson’s father started making hats for firemen in 1867, and Mr. Olson himself has been at it all his life. Recently, he amalgamated with his only rivals, Cairns & Brothers, a few doors down the street; they comprise now the only firm in America in the business. Foreign firemen wear a metal helmet which weighs five pounds, but our fire laddies’ hats weigh only thirty ounces. Despite this they give even better protection against falling bricks than the European ones do. They are made of stout tanned Western cowhide, a quarter of an inch thick, hand-sewed, reinforced with leather strips which rise like Gothic arches inside the crown, padded with felt. The long duckbill, or beavertail, effect which sticks out at the rear is to keep water from running down firemen’s necks. Hats for battalion chiefs and higher officers, are white, everyone else’s black. Hook-and-ladder companies have red leather shields (attached just under the eagle), engine companies black with white numerals, the rescue squad blue.

According to Mr. Olson, there isn’t much money in making firemen’s hats. They sell for eight dollars and seventy-five cents, and as it is all handwork the profit is small. Besides, they last so long—about ten years, on the average. Matter of fact, the only thing that keeps the shop busy is the business of repairing the eagles, which are always coming in for regilding, refurbishing. For fixing eagles, the standard rate is one dollar, and has been for generations.

I love “little talk” and “foreign firemen.” I read a pile of books around the magazine’s 75th anniversary (a review I’ll post in the event I feel like typing in 1,500 words, which is a real possibility), but I can’t remember if civilians are allowed to know who wrote what of the unsigned Talks. It feels like lots of writers from the time—kind of Thurbery, sort of Whiteish, vaguely Benchley—but that’s the good and bad thing about adopting an institutional voice. There are things Google will likely never tell us, and that’s one.

Defensive Standout: Fire Helmet [Arizona Republic]
San Francisco Fire Department Leather Helmets [Museum of the City of San Francisco]
Old Firefighter Movies [Firefighter Central]
State of the Union: A Widow Reflects [New Yorker; firefighters’ families after Sept. 11]

In “Future Man: Tree or Mammal?” Robert Benchley writes that the top survival rate in the brutal future (like the Terminator movies, except just with regular cars and bright-color-phobic gunmen) will go to those who simply stay in. “This wise man stays right in his room and reads magazines all day, with an occasional look at the clock to see how late he would have been if he had kept that luncheon appointment. He has his meals brought in to him, and, when it is bedtime, he sends for a lot of friends and they play backgammon.” Thus endorsed over Richard’s Burrito (a theory of time travel advanced by Richard Norvick, of Peggy Sue Got Married; the Jim Carrey character says of him scorchingly, “He’s a nice guy. He’s writing a book”), I plan to do just that until further notice.

Today (this being Brooklyn, land of Walt Whitman, Jonathan Lethem, and second-class citizenship as far as the circulation dept. is concerned) will bring a new issue, of course, but I will also review Shooting New York: A Decade of Photography at The New Yorker, which you may remember as the lissome insert with the fab Richard McGuire cover slipped into one of the 2004 numbers of the magazine. Anyway, one of those weird Queen Mary 2 series takes up a lot of it, ad or no ad. It’s essentially a pictorial, if you get my meaning, just with (horrible, purple) clothes. But more about that later. For now, I’ll leave you with this question, from its final (symbolic-cigarette-lighting) page: “Will you ring the Pillow Concierge for one of nine fluffy choices?” Can’t you just feel the copywriter writhing? It’s a question for Donald Antrim, it’s a question for David Foster Wallace, it’s a question for the Pillow Concierge (he hopes not), it’s a question for the Princess and the Pea, and it’s a question for us. It’s good to know there are nine fluffy choices—nine!—and friends and backgammon, and the answer is yes.

Categories: Benchley, Movies, NYer, Inserts