Monthly Archives: June 2005

Listen!

Good news! Now you can read The New Yorker in the dark. Sort of a sexy scenario, actually.

Digital Audio Edition of The New Yorker Now Available from Audible; Audible Provides Exclusive Subscriptions to the Digital Audio Version of the Legendary Magazine at www.audible.com/newyorker

WAYNE, N.J. & NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 28, 2005–Audible, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBL, www.audible.com), the leader in spoken audio information and entertainment on the Internet, and The New Yorker magazine today announced an exclusive agreement that brings The New Yorker‘s award-winning reporting, commentary, criticism, and fiction into the world of downloadable digital audio.

Every Wednesday Audible exclusively delivers select articles from The Talk of the Town, Fiction, Critics, and other sections of the magazine to Audible’s hundreds of thousands of digital audio listeners. Each article is read in its entirety and selected in collaboration with the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

In addition, Audible will become the exclusive digital audio provider of “The New Yorker Festival”—an annual celebration of arts and ideas—which features an eclectic lineup of discussions, talks, and readings with some of today’s most gifted and provocative writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, and politicians.

“The New Yorker is not only one of our culture’s richest sources of literature and profound discourse on issues of the day, it is a true American icon. We couldn’t be more pleased to translate this thought-provoking content into the digital audio experience,” said Beth Anderson, senior vice president and publisher of Audible, Inc. “And with our recent launch of RSS delivery, our listeners are now able to bring this extraordinary audio into their lives seamlessly.”

“We are very excited to be working with Audible to bring millions of loyal readers a new way to experience The New Yorker,” said Pamela Maffei McCarthy, Deputy Editor, The New Yorker. “And the partnership between the magazine and Audible will allow us to reach out to a new group of potential subscribers.”

From Audible’s website: “The site offers a powerful collection of audiobook best sellers and classics by authors such as Tom Clancy, Stephen King, John Grisham, Janet Evanovich, James Patterson, the Dalai Lama, David McCullough, Stephen Hawking, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Austen.” Hmm…that might not be the order I would use. A one-month subscription costs $12.95. Shame it arrives Wednesday, though at the current circulation speed that’s only one day behind Brooklyn. (I hear Brooklyn Heights gets special Monday treatment; figures.)

Update: I’m listening to it now (I bought the June 27 issue for cheap), and it’s a painless procedure. I recommend not using the 6 MB “AM radio” size; it sounds like AM radio after the radio has been dropped a couple of times and placed in the closet. But it’s not at all bad if you want that old-time radio feeling, as I often do. 11 MB is much crisper. I could swear it’s a young Rick Dees doing the introduction to the issue contents. Comforting! Then he becomes NPR-ish Voiceover Guy (no ladies for the lady pieces?), with friendly Elevated or Classical American Diction of which David Alan Stern would no doubt approve, but I think he’s from the South somewhere. He says phrases like “bong hits” and “big gummint” (Hendrik Hertzberg’s Talk about medical marijuana) and “pissed” and “get the hots” (Anthony Lane’s doggerel in his review of Yes) with admirable gentility. Our voice man seems to relish “simulacra,” “wargasm,” and “usurpation.” You know, I’ve done this stuff (for the blind, following my far more disciplined late grandmother’s example), and it’s damn hard. Very nice end Ts.

After the official program is over, the old song (in really old-time audio) “Caught Us Doin’ It” by The Hokum Boys begins! But don’t worry, it’s just iTunes, being alphabetical; it’s what comes after Hertzberg (who’s listed first as “Artist” on the download), after all. That Holiday’s dreamy cover of the Go-Gos’ “Vacation” is just after, followed by “We Like Bananas, Because They Have No Bones” (that’s the Hoosier Hot Shots, as you know), is one of those many happy iTunes moments. Sure, I don’t really need New Yorker audio. But it’s good that it exists, and it would have come in handy when I was a temporary pirate.

Digital Audio Edition of The New Yorker Now Available from Audible… [Business Wire]

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Oh, what a revue it is

Newsday’s review, by my classy former colleague Blake Green, of the play The Talk of the Town (currently playing at the Algonquin’s Oak Room):

Featured are characterizations of Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Edna Ferber, Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman, well-known writers and personalities whose facile intelligence seems astounding compared with today’s celebrity culture.

In Act 1, the Round Table members are pleased with themselves, giddy—and witty—with anticipation, slinging familiar bons mots at each other, some spoken, some sung. Some things they actually said, some are crafted “to sound like they did,” Redington said the other day.

In Act 2, toward the end of the conclave’s decade, familiarity has bred contempt, cynicism has crept into the mix. Benchley, the humorist and critic, played by Jared Bradshaw, sings “The Man I Could Have Been.” “They’re moving away from each other, going their separate ways,” Dawes said.
…
The show’s creators, themselves Gotham denizens married 27 years, met in another life as jingle writers. Though successful (“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz”; “We’re American Airlines”), “we didn’t want to be old people in the jingle business,” Redington said.

Veterans of the music industry, they went back to writing and performing songs and, in the early ’90s, amused by a literary collection titled “The Algonquin Wits” (edited by Robert Drennan), decided they’d hit upon a good subject for a musical…. More.

The Orchidaceae

Just in case you haven’t noticed it on the sidebar there along with other sites by or about various New Yorker contributors of yesterday and today, Susan Orlean has a blog, and it’s nice-looking and snappily written, too. In fact, the part about Adaptation is written by the esteemed Jason Kottke, who is a brave man and a good one, too, at least from all available evidence. Read all of the above. If you have links to contribute to my list, please send them.

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Count your blessings instead of sheep

(Or being sheep.)

“Sometimes the reason I pick up something is completely random. I take a lot of chances with things. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Bing Crosby.”
—Beck, The Believer, June/July 2005 Music Issue

I like the enclosed CD quite a bit so far. I leave musical coolhunting to the experts, not to mention S/FJ, but Karla Schickele of Ida (“My Fair, My Dark”) is someone I can say I saw and recognized as uncommonly amazing early on. She opened for my multitalented friends VPN many years ago, and everyone was in awe.

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Cartoon Caption Contest: Sweet Koren

As predicted, Robert Cafrelli’s hilariously almost-kinky caption, “It’s me, ‘9,’ from yoga class,” has won Contest #6. As for #7, a Danny Shanahan drawing that almost needs no caption (here, with others—the new contest-history interface, though generally convenient, still isn’t perfect), I don’t think I can resist entering it, since as my friends are happy to remind me in gleeful detail, I dated two registered clowns in my less circumspect days. One was a famed polyamorist with a very small bicycle, the other a sozzled tunesmith well ahead of his time (he said). Both perfectly acceptable people at the end of the day, but I don’t think I’ll go for three. As for the current contest (the Victoria Roberts drawing of a woman on the phone and a tiny man in a fishbowl), it’s a toss-up. I like the second, “We decided on separate vacations this year,” by Ronald Katz of Potomac, Md., but I’m going to go for “He’s the cutest little thing, and when you get tired of him you just flush him down the toilet,” by Jan Richardson of Ridgeland, Miss. If you pick the first, you’ll probably also be wanting some of my clown contact info. I won’t give you the satisfaction, though.

Update: The information superhighway never sleeps, so there are already some clown-cartoon caption ideas ideas forming out there. Squeeze into the funny car, but be sure to submit under the Big Top too.

(7.04.05 issue) Oh, Say, Can You See/This Week’s TOC?

Three cheers for Slate and people who get the new issue as soon as Barnes & Noble does, or even before! Bidisha Banerjee (“In Other Magazines”) on the Lonely Uncle Sam issue:

Jeffrey Goldberg [my link] has a piece about Steve Rosen, a former top lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who faces indictment for spilling classified information about Iraq to an Israeli diplomat. In his first interview since leaving AIPAC, Rosen denies that he was spying for Israel; if he’d been given information that might help save the lives of British or Australian soldiers, he says, “I’d have tried to warn them by calling friends at those embassies.” … Agonizing about whether to tell his daughter about the death of her pet fish prompts Adam Gopnik to ruminate about consciousness and the plot of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. He writes, “We begin as small children imagining that everything could have consciousness—fish, dolls, toy soldiers, even parents—and spend the rest of our lives paring the list down, until we are left alone in bed, the only mind left.”—B.B.

In the Magazine [New Yorker; copy ‘n’ paste TK]
‘Oh Say, Can You See’ in Navajo? [Gallup, NM, Independent]
Vertigo [Filmsite.org; always worth the popups, which you should be blocking, anyway]

Two points

1. If you live in New York or somewhere near it, see As You Like It in the park. Done straight (as it were), minimal bits of business/moving parts, funny fool, doublets and hose, feathered caps, the works. And a remarkably beautiful set (remember the giant Julius Caesar head?). Prithee, make haste! I gladly adventure my discretion.

2. Thanks in great part to the brilliance of this man, there are now deli.cio.us categories on emdashes. Since they require re-editing by hand, it’s a gradual process. It’s fun, and it’ll keep evolving. As always, please send suggestions for emdashes features (recent contribution: archive all the online book reviews into one post) and things you want to know more about (writers, artists, enigmatic advertisers, people/places/things mentioned in New Yorker pieces, Papua New Guinea penis gourds, etc.), and I’ll do my best to get on the case. As you know, this is not a gossip sheet (other people do that so unmatchably well, and I try to have a certain amount of discretion), but a way to fill those fidgety moments between issue-reading with posts that help, question, amuse, and even, sometimes, Shed Light.

Saul Right, Ma

A pleasing review by Marc Vincent in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the elegant new book Steinberg at The New Yorker:

Like many other readers of The New Yorker, I look at all the cartoons before reading the articles. And no other artist in this genre left such an indelible mark on the magazine as Saul Steinberg, who is justly celebrated in this handsome volume.

It is perhaps an exaggeration (but Steinberg would have loved its cheeky irreverence) to state that just as Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel are irrevocably linked, so are Saul Steinberg and The New Yorker. Joel Smith, a curator at Vassar College, tells the enthralling story of the artist and the magazine, and of their symbiotic relationship.

Steinberg’s long career at The New Yorker (1941-1999) coincided with the magazine’s increasing cultural influence and visibility. It also ran parallel to America’s embrace of modernity with its concomitant social, political and cultural dislocation.

Born in Romania in 1914, Steinberg left for Milan, Italy, in 1933 to study architecture. In 1941, shortly after receiving his degree, Steinberg escaped war-torn Europe for the United States.

From then until his death in 1999, Steinberg’s drawings regularly graced the pages of The New Yorker. For the magazine alone, his output was prodigious: 89 covers (all fully reproduced in color at the back of the book), more than 650 solo cartoons and drawings, and almost 500 drawings connected to articles.

The book is divided into two parts: a 35-page critical essay followed by drawings grouped according to theme. The highly informative essay, with well-chosen supporting illustrations, examines Steinberg’s life and career at The New Yorker. It elucidates his artistic goals and style, while placing the artist in the broader context of American art and culture. Unique among major postwar American artists, Steinberg reached his audience not via the gallery or museum wall but through the printed page, which arrived weekly on the newsstand or in the mailbox. His astute commentary on American life made him an eagerly awaited guest every week for six decades.

The thematically arranged drawings focus more narrowly on Steinberg’s favorite themes, with titles such as At War, American Allegories, Cat People, The Sexes, On a Pedestal, and Mean Streets. Both his art and his nation were wrestling with issues such as materialism, bureaucracy and power. Steinberg’s favorite subject, close to the heart of an immigrant like himself, was what it meant to be an American or, more specifically, a New Yorker.

His most famous—and most often parodied and misunderstood—drawing, the March 29, 1976, New Yorker cover, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” is typical of Steinberg’s irreverent, mischievous and ambiguous homage to his adopted home. Far from celebrating Manhattan, which appears without its canonical skyscrapers and bridges, Steinberg portrays an ordinary neighborhood of people going about their everyday tasks. To be smug about any locale —even New York City—is itself a mark of provinciality and bad taste. The joke is, of course, that New Yorker magazine readers would never fall into that trap.

But there was a gentler and less piquant side to Steinberg, who also celebrated the joys of reading, love, gossip and gardening, or delved into the mysteries of language, memory, or reason. Thus his drawings are populated by an array of improbable characters such as cats, pedestals, rubber stamps, buildings, letters and numbers, all of which come in various artistic garbs ranging from the exuberant and colorful to the sparing and austere.

Steinberg’s drawings in “Steinberg at The New Yorker” will reward the eye for their visually arresting lines, colors, and shapes, as well as provoke the mind with an array of intellectual and mental gymnastics. Laughter, wonderment and puzzlement are sure to emanate from the reader—and that is exactly what Steinberg would have wanted.

Vincent is a professor of art history at Baldwin-Wallace College.

To reach Marc Vincent: books@plaind.com

Update: Here’s an example of the kind of misunderstanding Vincent is talking about, by Ed Lasky writing in The American Thinker about “Seinfeld liberals”:

For those who have been away on religious missions to the South Seas for the last 15 years or so, the series featured a core cast of 4 characters: Elaine, George, Kramer and the eponymous Jerry Seinfeld. All were single New Yorkers with checkered job histories, who seemed incapable of developing lasting and caring relationships with others, either in their careers or their romantic lives. While different on the margins, they all shared certain attributes around which much of the humor of the show pivoted.

They were, to use the term now in vogue, Metrosexuals. Their perspective as Manhattanite city dwellers was expressed by the famed New Yorker cartoon by Saul Steinberg, in which everything beyond the Hudson looks tiny and insignificant. They never evinced any desire to travel or live elsewhere. They all lived in rented apartments and never expressed any home-owning desires.

When they did take excursions outside of Manhattan, they often used these trips to belittle and alienate the rural or suburban people they met. George’s trips to the outer boroughs were usually to visit his parents, and what usually transpired was an argument. Other trips lead to the Bubble Boy episode, cabins being burned down, accusations of lobster stealing, and parking garage travails in a suburban shopping center.

Celebrating New Yorker’s Star Artist [Plain Dealer]
Seinfeld Liberals [The American Thinker]

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