Monthly Archives: March 2005

Topic A href= with Tina Brown

From the tireless David S. Hirschman at the essential MediaBistro Daily News Feed, this scoop by Greg Lindsay:

During the weblog’s transition from a variation of a personal homepage to a rival to the reporting and commentary of the mainstream media (MSM)—and occasional assassin of the media’s kings—I’ve been keeping an eye open for the announcement that would signal blogging’s entry into the mainstream and the end of its subversive, outsider reputation. As a canary-in-the-coal-mine sign, Tina Brown is the perfect bird. The British-born editor is the consummate MSM insider, who, just as the dotcom boom was peaking, was pouring her media-mogul hopes and dreams into Talk magazine. (Remember that it had the preliminary subtitle of “The American Conversation,” a mantle snatched away with gusto by the collective inhabitants of the blogosphere.)

The blogosphere seemed safe enough. These days Brown is busy with her cable-TV show, her Washington Post column, and the research for her seven-figure bio of Princess Diana. After a St. Patrick’s Day rant in her column in which she point-blank declared that snoopy bloggers “are the new Stasi,” I figured blogging would remain the hole-in-the-wall haven for journalistic outlaws.

But my sense of security was short-lived. Starting next month Brown is crashing the bloggers’ party, as Arianna Huffington’s guest.
Keep reading… [Links mine.]

It really does feel like one of those things that’s already happened. Let us pray that Martha Stewart is next. Remember how her ad slogan was “Every day…”? And how annoying that was? Remember how she scolded us to make our beds? And yet she’s thoroughly wormed herself into our consciousness—all right, I’ll speak for myself. I bought two things “she” designed at Kmart (of course, generally I eschew superstores), and I see and admire them, yes, every day. And I think of her, and am glad she’s out of jail, and understand that those are strange thoughts to be having, and enjoy having them anyway. That is why she will always win, and those who seek to topple her well-scrubbed queen will always lose. I’m ready for the blog. Every day.

When Will Tina Brown Blog? Scoop: Real Soon [Business 2.0, via MediaBistro]
Lunch at Martha’s: Problems with the perfect life [New Yorker]
A Bad Thing: Why Did Martha Stewart Lose? [New Yorker]
Star Witness [New Yorker]

Snippet

Rock on, Tony Scott. From his review of Beauty Shop:

The success of these pictures—Are We There Yet?,” “Hitch,” “Guess Who,” “Diary of a Mad Black Woman”—can no longer be described by the tired pop-cultural term crossover. This is what the mainstream looks like now.

I haven’t seen Beauty Shop yet, but Hitch is funny and good. Just see it. Don’t think about it. Just go. Jude Law will magically disappear from your mind as soon as you see Will Smith in a wetsuit. Or a regular suit. Or just talking.

Haircuts That Come With Fried Catfish and Sisterhood [NYT]
“Beauty Shop” Shows Latifah Can Cut It as a Star [LAT]
“Barbershop” review [Charles Taylor, Salon]
Will Smith interview [BBC]
“Hitch expert en séduction…” [Le Cinema; photos; fun French practice!]

Hef, Bob, doomed turkeys, banana boats

Reviews of the Cartoon Anthology are great—everyone’s got a different idea of what the cartoons are all about. Here’s a zippy new one by Jerome Weeks in the Dallas Morning News that’s also an interview with Bob Mankoff. It includes cool facts like the payment for each cartoon (about $1,300), how many cartoons come in a week (1,000 or so), the percentage the artists take from Cartoon Bank sales (40-50%), and the number of left-handed contributors, according to Mankoff (roughly half). Good stuff:

The New Yorker started publishing high-quality cartoons 80 years ago—”when you had a million different magazines doing it,” Mankoff says, “like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post.”

Simply put, The New Yorker is the one that survived. Today, a periodical such as Barron’s or Mother Jones prints the occasional panel, but only Playboy (started in 1953) still has a comparable commitment and a similar identification with them.

As for new magazines, Mankoff says, “they’ve gotten over-designed. There’s no place for a cartoon. Plus, they don’t have a real system. The entire system—it’s in our DNA. We have a cartoon editor, people filing them, we have fact-checkers checking them….”

This sets up a question too:

Many young people have undoubtedly picked up an issue, entranced by the comic images, only to find that they had to decipher whatever elusive bit of humor was coded in them.

True, Mankoff says. But not so much anymore.

“They have gotten funnier,” he says.

The thing is, there are also some only-semi-young people (for instance in My Age Group) who don’t find them that funny. Plus, as I learned many times over when I tried to explain the jokes to my frustrated grandparents in the ’90s, there are older people who don’t get them either. What’s to get? we say, though obviously there are always duds. But there seems to be an optimal age range for New Yorker cartoons. If anyone wants to venture a guess as to what that range might be, I’d be very interested to hear it.

And if your next thought is that there’s an optimal class demographic too, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A whole lot of people buy those golf and cat and lawyer books from Barnes & Noble, and the other day I saw several much-taped cartoons in the nurses’ room at my doctor’s office. The one that startled me, though, was a lush cover drawing of a Thanksgiving turkey at the fortuneteller’s by William Steig. As I sat in my paper shift, I contemplated the message: As the turkey waits, a single tear runs down the fortuneteller’s cheek as she looks into the ball. Oh dear! Now that’s an effective cartoon, especially in the right setting.

By the way, as you’ll see from the link below to the Steig cartoon, the good people over at the Cartoon Bank provide helpful descriptions for the uncaptioned cartoons; here, “(Turkey getting his fortune told as fortune teller sheds a tear.)” Sometimes, they add explanations—perhaps for those baffled folks of all generations addressed above? Take this one, for instance:
From www.cartoonbank.com
The caption underneath says, “(Rooster sings: ‘DAY-O! Day-ay-ay-o!!’ chorus of chickens sing, ‘Daylight come and me wan go home.’ Refers to ‘The Banana Boat Song’ by Harry Belafonte.)” I love that. If this ever gets beamed into space along with all those Craigslist ads, the aliens are totally going to get it. While they’re hanging around the ether, I hope they take a minute to explain it to my grandparents.

Collection of New Yorker cartoons a wry, dry way to look at America [Dallas Morning News, via Florida Sun-Sentinel]
Doomed turkey [William Steig, Cartoon Bank]
Shanahan chickens [Cartoon Bank]
Playboy: 50 Years: The Cartoons [Powell’s]

It’s a crime to fall in love

From www.cartoonbank.com
From Clive James’ review of the Camille Paglia poetry book in yesterday’s Times:

My own prescription for making poetry popular in the schools would be to ban it—with possession treated as a serious misdemeanor, and dealing as a felony—but failing that, a book like this is probably the next best thing.

A book like this—I agree wholeheartedly! So what’s it called?

‘Break, Blow, Burn’: Well Versed [NYT]
A Brief Autobiography of Camille Paglia, as Told Through Introductory Appositive Phrases in Her Online Column [McSweeney’s]
Out of Sight [James on Huxley, The New Yorker]
“It’s National Poetry Month…” [Cartoon Bank]

Fortunate reversal, part II

Better late than never&#8212from Gothamist reader Hamilton, this nifty illustration of a point of view obviously shared by more than me and Marty Markowitz:


Banished Redux


Actually, now that I think about the nudity part of Adam and Eve, the illustration done this way recalls a polymath typesetter I know who enjoys sunbathing naked in Brooklyn. In fact, he prefers border towns like Brooklyn Heights and the park in DUMBO for his breezy basks. Since (as of press time) no outsized digit is ordering him to take his towel to Wall Street and affix a button-down fig leaf, he can stay in Paradise, and his tan line will be forever even.

The Reverse New Yorker Cover [Gothamist]

(3.14.05 & 5.3.30 issues) Sniff

There’s much to celebrate about Chandler Burr’s recent piece on creating a new perfume for Hermes. My own favorite part is near the beginning:

Most perfume houses are based in France, and, as a result, the French dominate the industry. It is an insular and secretive business that remains governed by the solemn idea of the “purity of art.” This is spoken of with equal parts pride and cynicism. “French perfumers come from the Sixteenth Arrondissement, and they all have degrees in poetry and commerce from some chic school,” one Parisian perfume executive told me.

Why didn’t my chic poetry school have commerce classes? I knew I got fleeced there somehow. The accompanying archive piece from 1930, “Perfume and Politics” by Hippolyta (! if I once knew who this was, I’ve forgotten), is equally fascinating and pleasingly purple. For example:

Racial female taste furnishes quaint statistics; for instance, American women like middling-passionate fantasy odors and no posy smells, whereas the chillier, land-loving British dames require only the chastest invented odors and pure garden bouquets. Blunt amber and heliotrope, most passionate of beast and blossom odors, intoxicate all the Spanish-speaking senoritas. Amber and rose in their rarest forms, considered by perfumers to be the peak of their art, please the French.

Fantasy odors and posy smells pretty much sums up most fashion magazines, or The New Yorker during the Dark Ages of Tina. No longer, of course—scented issues are out with skeleton fashion layouts (it’s hard to say that without implying I’m talking about models, but remember that spread? Scarring). But wait, they’re still in the magazine, at least in words. On the penultimate page (just before “The Back Page”)—tucked within the Conde Nast information and the warning that the magazine is not responsible for damage “or any other injury” to your cowering unsolicited manuscripts and artwork—is this notice: “To receive your issues without scent strips, please e-mail scentfree[@]newyorker.com.” Hey, may I request my issues without the beastly whiff of Caitlin Flanagan or poems by John Updike? And may I have double the pure garden bouquet of contributions by Nancy Franklin, Donald Antrim, Lorrie Moore, Steve Martin, Wislawa Szymborska, and John Lahr? Hooray!

I’m not against perfume in magazines—I usually find a way to use it—but those pages are too often that overthick paper that gets in the way of efficient page-turning. Since ad inserts insist on annoying and interrupting us, I prefer those that have a present as a reward: beauty magazines’ tiny foundation samples, the real silk scarves and Christmas cards that used to come in Interview. Imagine a nearly flat vial of spring water or liqueur somehow tucked into the pages, or a tiny new candy. (I’m finally reading Hilary Liftin’s delightful Candy and Me: A Girl’s Tale of Life, Love, and Sugar.) I suggested to Paul Newman when I met him at the offices of The Nation years ago that he find a way to include samples of his popcorn and salad dressing within the magazine. It hasn’t happened yet, but who can deny the power of a bit of flavor?

The Scent of the Nile [New Yorker]
Perfume and Politics [New Yorker, 1930]
More perfume reading from the New Yorker [Now Smell This]

Fossils & Hepburn (who?)

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: , ,

Molto piano

A story about sour notes in Australia’s Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra—

The TSO lacks entrepreneurial vision, has a mediocre marketing strategy, dull programming, a greying audience and a chief conductor who fails to excite the broader community. Furthermore, Ms Giddings and Mr Heyward just don’t seem to get one simple fact: around the world, orchestras are being reduced and are having to reinvent themselves and use innovative strategies to attract new audiences.

—quotes Alex Ross with hopeful news and a nifty marketing idea:

Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, described the future of classical music and orchestras superbly in a speech in January this year. “I wish that for every story in the media about troubled orchestras there was a matching story about a new composer-led ensemble, a new chamber series, a new program of professional musicians working in schools and so on,” he said. “There are more professional musicians than ever before. More people are going to live concerts of classical music than ever before. There are far more composers writing music—10, maybe 20 times as many as 100 years ago.

“But musical life lacks a centre. It exists off the radar screen of the major media. It’s actually kind of exciting when you think about it. If I were in the business of marketing classical music to younger audiences, I’d make a virtue of this. Classical music is the new underground.”

Change of tune needed for the TSO and all state orchestras [On Line Opinion]
Listen to This [Ross, The New Yorker, via his blog: “When people hear ‘classical,’ they think ‘dead.’]
Kafka Sings [Ross, The New Yorker]
March 6, 1989, cover (strings) [John O’Brien, Cartoon Bank]
Life Without Mozart [Mick Stevens, Cartoon Bank]
Andante Sostenuto [William Steig, Cartoon Bank]
Culchah Cornah: My least favorite kind of music review [Blue Mass. Group]

Why the future hasn’t (quite) happened

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

What’s a Yale-educated, certified member of the East Coast media elite doing in California talking uber-tech about the potential, and limitations, of the great electronic future?

“I was working with Tina Brown at the New Yorker in 1993, when the Internet was reaching this amazing corporeal explosion,” said Katrina Heron, sitting casually at a Chez Panisse table as she sought to explain her professional and personal transformation. “Except that it wasn’t reaching New York, which can be one of the most parochial places on earth.

“I said, ‘Here we are, trying to rejuvenate this magazine, and we’ve got this new communications revolution occurring,’ ” she recalled. “I told her we could have a searchable Web site, where we take all of the New Yorker archives, put them online, and people could actually come to buy them from us. I used to spend a lot of time at the New Yorker library, which, just like you would imagine, is this very cramped, small room, filled floor to ceiling with gray metal filing drawers. You’d open them, and inside there would be this beautiful yellowed paper with the works of all these wonderful writers that could become available.”

Brown, understandably preoccupied by the cultural wars being waged within the magazine, as well as its financial misfortunes, said she didn’t have the resources to follow up on the suggestion….

Read the rest of the piece about Heron, Wired, and the fate of the Web here.

So, twelve years on, where are those downloadable, searchable archives? I know a set of CD-ROMs is in the works, but it would be even better online. I know you have a plan, folks. I just want to know what it is. What do you need—cookies, pedicures, daily balloon-grams? Name it; it’s done.

Pointing to the Future: Former Wired editor casts a light on the perils—and promise—of technology [SF Chronicle]
The New Yorker Finally Goes Online [Craig Saila]
For Position Only: The New Yorker’s Dot Bomb [CreativePro. The site is considerably improved since this and the above review, though it could be even better; the tiny illustrations, however, are top-notch.]

Keep the aspidistra flying

Reasonable creature?
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]