Monthly Archives: March 2005

Too pure to be Pink

Pink Ladies--Grease 2, of course.
From the smart cookies at Beatrice, an essay by guest author Meg Wolitzer about chick-lit novels, which she (winningly) calls Pink Ladies:

The Pink Ladies are completely apolitical. Yet beneath their manicured, high-gloss surfaces is a depiction of a certain kind of urban female life at this point in time. If these books were placed in a time capsule and opened up at a much later date, people would get to see what these post-post-post-feminist women were like. They’d see how sexual freedom played a big part in their lives, as big a part as, say, finding the right handbag or the right man to marry. Marriage certainly has a big role in these books, but it isn’t contradictory to autonomy. In fact, autonomy here is about choosing the right man, and not settling for the dullish Lord or Viscount or advertising executive waiting in the wings. It’s not groundbreaking or powerful, but it speaks to many women, even, weirdly, a woman like me, a long-married feminist and novelist. Chick lit is a damning term, one that brings to mind tight skirts and empty heads. But there’s an irony and self-awareness at work in some of these books, hiding inside a blaze of pink.

Sure, why not? I never liked the term “chick lit” and its segregation from the rest of popular fiction. Like Wolitzer, I like Marian Keyes and the original Bridget Jones, as well as other novels that get promoted into the bad-pastel-cover ghetto. Even Cathleen Schine—who, despite the oprahtic film made from The Love Letter, can’t be accused of tailoring her stuff to the mass market—got chicklitized with She Is Me, whose lowercase letters and coy design got her placed on that loathsomely perky B&N rack near the front of the store, but undoubtedly kept serious readers away from discovering the book.

Wolitzer herself has done a comfortably swerving walk along the line between mainstream and hard-to-place; her early novels Sleepwalking and This Is My Life are about women and girls, and they’re dark as hell. Though I like the 1992 movie Nora Ephron made of the latter (starring Julie Kavner, and see it before you roll your eyes), it’s more of the same—all the really hard stuff is gone, leaving mostly laughs and flapjacks, with the exception of the best virginity-losing scene on film I know.

There’s plenty of light (more likely, deceptively light) reading out there that doesn’t get smooshed into a category, and besides, I’m sure there are dozens of absolute treasures buried in the African-American popular fiction section, say, or the gay-fiction shelf. Have you read Joe Keenan (who also wrote a lot of Frasier) or Stephen McCauley? If not, you’re really missing out. I hate to think who else is hiding behind some idiot superstore’s idea of a genre. Come out, come out, wherever you are, and let the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds—and all combinations therein—get it on.

In Praise of Pink Ladies [Beatrice]
Why Grease? [Zulkey]

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(6.14.30 issue) Hats off

A splendid idea (courtesy SF Museum)
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]

Pander in the wind

Let it not be said that I don’t read the wires! From Reuters:

Former New Yorker editor Tina Brown said on Wednesday she had signed a deal to write a book about Diana, Princess of Wales, and her impact on the British monarchy and media.

“Diana hit the royal family like a meteor and destabilized it,” Brown told Reuters.

She declined to comment on reports the deal with Random House was worth $2 million but said the book would be published in 2007 to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the princess’s death in a car crash in Paris.

“It gives me a chance in a way to recall Diana, who I did know and I covered over a number of years,” said Brown, a former editor of the London society magazine Tatler, recalling a lunch with the princess a few months before she died.

Diana’s death in August 1997 was followed by an unprecedented outpouring of grief in Britain and a backlash against the royal family, which was accused of being aloof and out of touch.

A string of books have already been written about the princess, most of them crammed with personal details about her unhappy marriage to Prince Charles.

Brown brushed off suggestions that the world did not need another book about Diana, particularly one written by somebody based in New York.

“I feel I’m coming at it from a different angle. I’m not writing it as an inside royal journalist,” she said.

“I’m writing as much about the press and the impact of Diana, as about Diana. I want to write about the impact of celebrity on royalty so a lot of my book will also be cultural commentary. It’s not going to be a straight biography.”

Brown became a media celebrity when she moved from Britain to New York, taking over as editor at Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker. But her star waned after she left The New Yorker in 1998 to start Talk magazine with Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein. The magazine folded in 2002.

She turned to a cable television talk show in May 2003 and has said she plans to cover the marriage of Prince Charles and his longtime lover Camilla Parker Bowles in April for NBC’s “Today Show.”

Let it also not be said that I didn’t appreciate Diana, and not just as kitsch, either; half my family is from Canada, where my mother grew up memorizing long lists of kings. I stayed up late to watch the royal wedding as a wee thing, and fell asleep to CNN many years later to be awoken by the sounds of her death. I stayed up then, too, mesmerized by the 24/7 gibberish that followed: “Diana was a great contributor…she made a difference…well, she was a pioneer in hat-wearing.” That’s basically a quote; I wrote it down. Then, I’m afraid, the Elton John song—already hanging way over the edge of bad taste as it was, but a poignant enough picture the first time (young Elton, yearning; poor Marilyn, burning) that I forgave him—ended it all. I couldn’t think of her as separate from those murderous chords.

Still, when I see a picture of her with that perfectly feathered hair that I could quite achieve (only my much-missed aunt Pam could top her for ’80s glamour), I am sad. I’m sorry she can’t work on landmines anymore, though might-as-well-be-royal Heather Mills seems to be doing a decent enough job, considering (although, according to my de-miner source, plenty in the activist community aren’t fans). Any lingering concern for William and Harry disappeared entirely with one of those articles about drinking and girls (they’re obviously fine). As for Camilla, who cares? Though I admired a pair of parrot brooches she wore in a picture I saw in the Sun. Forget our flaccid counterparts—now that’s a fun newspaper!

On the other hand, one can still get choked up at the very idea of a leader, even a pretend one, who could say this—as Charles did recently to the, um, Royal Albatross Centre in New Zealand, after tossing off a few sentences in Maori:

I find it incredible that we live in a world which is so comprehensively industrialised that we can allow the kind of intensive fishing methods that slaughter countless thousands of dolphins and porpoises, let alone all sorts of other species which have no means of escape, and that cause untold damage to fragile ecosystems on the floor of the oceans…. Do you not feel the sheer unmentionable waste of it all to be so obscene?

Well, yes, Your Highness, we do. As for the ocean, get back on your throne and fix it!

Former New Yorker Editor Brown Signs Diana Book Deal [Reuters]
Royal Wedding Day Schedule for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth [Paul Rudnick, New Yorker]
Tina Brown: Diana, Still Full of Surprises [WaPo, sign in]
A New Yorker to Di for [Salon]
HRH visits the Royal Albatross Centre near Dunedin, New Zealand [The Prince of Wales, official site]
Princess Diana – Premonitions, Dreams, Spirit Return and Conspiracy Theories [Psychics.co.uk network; prepare yourself]

Greg him on

Une grande chat
Une grande chat, originally uploaded by emdashes.

Because I know that information wants to be free—free as the wind blows, free as the grass grows, where no walls divide it, free as the roaring tide—and because I never said I was the only petunia in the flowerbox, I share with you the blog of a brother in arms who posts a weekly update on the New Yorker contents. Greg Allen (I know this from his bio) is a filmmaker and writer, and sometimes he even posts commentary. Check it out! (Seems the March 14 issue isn’t up yet—go over there and poke him. And while you’re at it, get on me to post my updates on this week’s mag, of which I have a bunch. Thanks, Darren!)

Paulette Does Dallas

Susie Bright lives up to her name:

We [at the Good Vibrations store in the early ’80s, which made a collection of erotic fiction] had a great, insightful group of authors, and it became this massive hit. That got me into all kinds of things: I started a sex magazine called On Our Backs, I got asked to do Best American Erotica, then one day I got a phone call from Penthouse Forum, and they said, “Would you like to be our new erotic-movie reviewer?” And I said, “You mean your porn critic?” And they said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Do you have any idea what I do? Like, what my opinions are? I’m not going to be writing stories about, Debbie’s Double D is just the hottest thing ever. I’m going to be real. Are you ready for the Pauline Kael of pornography? Because that’s what I want to do.” And this editor was very open-minded. He wanted something new. He just said, “Yeah. Go for it.”

In the meantime, I wasn’t a complete nerd! I mean, I did have lovers! I learned a lot from personal experience, and I’m glad I had entrée into a counterculture where you could experiment, and you could really dispel the romantic headlock in your own personal life. And by romantic—that word can have so many meanings. I am romantic when it comes to flowers and chocolates and valentines and kittens and being sentimental and crying easily. But when it comes to “You’re going to wear a white dress and get married and then everything’s going to be perfect”—ooh. I still want to smash that with a hammer.

Bright Ideas [Boston Phoenix]
The gay attacks on Pauline Kael [Salon; excerpt from Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me]

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(3.7.05 issue) Balk

The cows are to be slaughtered
And the sheep, too, of course.
The same for the hogs sighing in their pens—
And as for the chickens…

“On the Farm,” the typically worried Charles Simic poem in the magazine this week, seems especially ominous in light of last week’s terrifying bird-flu story by Michael Specter, which is one of those pieces you read and immediately, gratefully, forget. Or else it comes back to you in uneasy pieces, clucking “Do something!” But what? Ben Greenman wonders the same thing:

[BG:] What can be done to stop the next big pandemic from starting?
[MS:] Nothing. At least, nothing can be done to prevent a virus from taking on new characteristics. But by closely monitoring the spread, and by examining the genetic structure of the virus, we can get a sense of how to develop a vaccine and how to make better drugs. Then we would need to actually spend money to make the vaccines and the drugs, and this is something the world puts little priority on. There are many competing health problems in most countries. So it is difficult to tell a political leader or a pharmaceutical company that makes vaccines that they should invest hundreds of millions of dollars on something that may happen, when there are so many other problems that already exist.

Greenman also asks “What does it take for a virus to cross the species barrier?” which bears a funny if probably unintended resemblance to another common question about poultry motivation.

Fighting the Flu [Michael Specter interview, New Yorker]
Watching for the Next Pandemic [On Point; radio inteview with Specter, Laurie Garrett, etc.]
Talking to the Little Birdies [Simic, American Poems]

(3.7.05 issue) Pennies from heaven

Steve Martin’s Shouts & Murmurs this week, “C.I.A. Unveils Old Bin Laden Tape”: risky, good.

Soldier: Glory! We’re off on Thursday! Let me give you the phone number where I’ll be.
Osama: Great, give it to me.
Soldier: You don’t have a pen.
Osama: I can remember it.
Solider: You don’t want to write it down?
Osama: No, I can remember.
Soldier: O.K., you would dial zero zero six nine five three eight four twelve twelve six two fourteen ten four seven seven one eight nineteen eight six seven.
Osama: O.K., I got it.
Soldier: You’re sure? You want to say it back to me?
Osama; No, not necessary; I got it. Regular bunch of numbers. Now go! Virgins!

What do you bet that number was fact-checked?

About Steve: Romance: Anne Stringfield [The Compleat Steve]
Steve Martin on Life on the Stage and the Page [NPR interview]

Box-office antidote

Good news for Benchley-short fans, not to mention short Benchley fans, fans of short Benchleys, and all corresponding Friendster networks—oh, and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant admirers, too. Warner Home Video just released two-disc special editions of Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story. That’s fine, as Kate would say. But are they yar? The special features sound first-rate, and what’s more, “Along with the Hepburn documentary, the [Philadelphia Story] edition includes a full-length documentary on director George Cukor, a humorous short from Robert Benchley and a cartoon.” High society, indeed! By the way, how stupendous is it that Grant made Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday in the same year? Jude Law is a tower of eyefuls (as Gene Shalit once said of Jurassic Park, but he’s still a wee pebble beside the great cairn of Grant’s 1940 perfection. (Pauline Kael called him The Man From Dream City.) Even after you’ve consumed those many hours of goodness, you won’t run out of quality cinema. Warner’s also rereleasing these, continues Joe Holleman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

—”To Be or Not To Be” (1942): Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, shortly before her death, star in Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi tale of a Polish acting troupe putting on Hamlet.
—”Libeled Lady” (1936): Talk about star-studded. This screwball comedy features Spencer Tracy, William Powell, Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow.
—”Stage Door” (1937): This story, based on an Edna Ferber-George S. Kaufman play, is about life at a theatrical boarding house. The cast includes Hepburn, Lucille Ball and Ginger Rogers.
—”Dinner at Eight” (1933): Also a Ferber-Kaufman stage hit, Harlow and Wallace Beery lead the cast in a story about New York socialites.

Oh DVD, you make my heart sing: you make everything groovy.

Born for the Part: Roles that Katharine Hepburn played [New Yorker]
Hepburn and Grant are timeless in Warner gems [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
The Philadelphia Story Play Notes [Court Theatre]
100 Greatest Films [Tim Dirks, Greatest Films]

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(3.7.05 issue) Eh, the coffee was overrated


…To Affordable Eden, originally uploaded by emdashes.

In 1999, James Poniewozik in Salon lectured Remnick’s new New Yorker for being a little too safe, too obviously trying to “sell a certain mid-to-highbrow New York to honorary Upper West Siders throughout Saul Steinberg flyover country.” The ’99 Remnick, “who is young and good-looking and well-spoken and well-liked and who, hell, can probably catch bullets between his teeth,” was—writes Poniewozik—also in danger of being, like the covers, “militantly cautious”:

Remnick may not mean to promise Tilleyphiles a soothing snifter of brandy after Brown’s fizzy cocktail, but that’s the message he’s sending…. And this picture leaves out the New York that people who live here see. You’d think a New York issue might acknowledge, for example, that the four outer boroughs are where [Nancy] Franklin’s “people (who) come to New York because they’re looking for something” tend to land nowadays. But Manhattan’s satellites, in the “New York” issue, are simply where one finds exotics (Philip Gourevitch’s excellent profile of a young Indian-American woman resisting an arranged marriage) and Serious Urban Problems (Hilton Als’ affecting Brooklyn “Dope Show”), where Joseph Mitchell (profiled by Mark Singer) went prospecting for characters.

The magazine of 2005 isn’t nearly as provincial-Manhattan, I’m happy to say. So why is this week’s cover? Marcellus Hall’s “Unaffordable Eden” is well done and funny, but for a moment I thought the Pilates-buffed A&E were leaving Brooklyn, forced into Manhattan (or “the City” to those who haven’t figured out yet that the subways cross the river—the taxis, too!) for their daily wages. That’s how it often feels to me, at least. I can see the Chrysler Building from here, and the pizza down the street was voted best in New York City. That’s right, I said City. Drop in—we won’t bite! We also have lattes. Iced, skim, mocha, soy, chai, raw, done.

An earlier version of the famous 1976 Steinberg cover, “A View of the World From 9th Avenue,” was titled “New York vs. the World.” The finished drawing, with its emphasis on subjectivity, makes more sense. It’s folly, especially these days, to insist there’s anything second-rate about living outside those Disneyland animatronic suggestions that are Manhattan’s plum neighborhoods. Even Olmstead said his park here was better.

It was in that same Salon story, by the way, that (Park Slope resident) Poniewozik wrote the snappy line “Likewise, even if you don’t edit the New Yorker, if you read it, you fancy yourself its editor.” Well, sure.

Under the Covers: Steady Hand on the Tilley [Salon]
A New Yorker’s View of the World [Barry Popik]
A Funny Map Is Again the Best Defense [NYT, via Cartome]
Going Verical [Columbia]

“I’m not a proselytizer”

The always painfully honest Seymour Hersh talks with The Louisville Eccentric Observer‘s Elizabeth Kramer:

“I’m always a journalist. I read the papers. I usually play off what’s going on today to make the points about where we are, which is not a good place. But, of course, I take questions. I’m dying to hear questions. And when you get out of the East Coast it’s always much more interesting because the questions are more open or sometimes more challenging. But the thing is, in general … there are a lot of people who really support and have every right to support this president down the line. They think he saved us from terrorism. And it’s hard to, often people don’t deal well with the facts. They resist certain facts.”
…
EK: What has it meant to have that forum, The New Yorker, and having sources talk to you?

SH: I don’t think they’re talking to me because I’m working for The New Yorker. I think that The New Yorker is one great advantage for people. They have a thorough [fact] checking system so that people know it’s never adversary. We’re never sandbagging people. We’re always up front about what we’re doing. That helps a lot.

Thanks to David S. Hirschman and the essential MediaBistro News Feed. If anyone deserves press credentials, they do.

Stream-of-consciousness Seymour Hersh blues [LEO]
Chucking the Checkers [Liza Featherstone, CJR]