Monthly Archives: February 2006

Never Ask a Magazine Its Age


OK, this one won’t mind telling you: The New Yorker was first published on February 21, 1925. Wonder how that guy who bought the rare copy of the first-ever issue is doing? He’d better be reeeeally enjoying it.

By the way, I’m sad to see that my logo isn’t appearing on every archive page. (Later: fixed!) I assume it’s a problem with the host…hmmm. Soon I plan to move to emdashes.com for good; donations from .25 to $1.00 welcome! If you can afford more than that, give it to the MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund—lots of displaced New Orleans musicians still don’t have instruments to play, or houses to play them in.

In the meantime, why not revisit the story of Rea Irvin and Eustace Tilley? From a Whitney Lawson story on cover philosophies:

When Harold Ross put out the first issue of The New Yorker, in 1925, photography was commonplace in magazines. The second thing the magazine’s readers ever saw in its pages, on the reverse side of the first, February 21, 1925, cover, was an advertisement for Parfums Caron which showed two gleaming French perfume bottles in all their photogenic splendor. The cover, on the other hand, opted for Rea Irvin’s hand-drawn rendering of Eustace Tilley. “As compared to the newspaper, The New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic,” Harold Ross wrote in his mission statement, in 1924.

Here’s Francoise Mouly on the subject. And here, the blogger Literary Kicks reprints a long bit from a Talk of the Town from the inaugural issue. Between the Squibs, what do you make of Issue One? Like it or loathe it, I Hate The New Yorker? I love that blog name, by the way. It still makes me grin.

Gladwell Goes to the Dogs

Entirely unfair; I had a long conversation with my sister last week about Gladwell and she convinced me to give his writing another look. And look I shall! Anyway, The Toronto Star responded to Gladwell’s shaggy naughty dog story with an editorial that keeps blinky theory on a short leash:

Rather than banning this class of dog, Gladwell’s solution is to subject bad owners to extra rules and attention. People who are irresponsible should have their dangerous dogs neutered, or subject to mandatory muzzling, he says. And bylaw control officers should “track down” and monitor these owners to ensure they are obeying the rules.

In short, Gladwell wants to “profile” bad owners with violence-prone dogs. The problem here is that it’s hard to establish the combination of aggressive dog and irresponsible owner until tragedy strikes. And it’s hard to keep long-term track of bad owners and their pets.

Ontario’s pit bull ban is a far more effective way to proceed. All animals deemed pit bulls are required to be neutered, and muzzled in public. Bad owners are held responsible for the abuses done by their dogs. And owners who deliberately seek bellicose dogs are hampered by the ban on breeding or importing pit bulls.

Still, as I noted before, the cost and bother of fixing animals is still a deterrent for too many people. Maybe owners could even be rewarded for bringing in their pets—with a free leash or a catnip carrot, perhaps.

Beetles Seem to Knock About in Crowds

Hyperbolics
Even if the lion was English

And finally, episode 12. More mashups of “I Could Eat a Knob at Night” come in all the time. I love that my British readership has eclipsed the U.S. and Canada combined; that island has Karl Pilkington fever. As do I. And, again, let’s cheer Stephen Merchant, who gets neglected in this hullaballoo, I fear. I think he’s a great comic mind who always nails the delivery of his small but excellent jokes, and I hope he can talk a bit more in the next series of podcasts. As Karl says, “I suppose you’ve got to have an end for a beginning.”

At Least We Have Both Benchleys’ Movies

My pal Gene Seymour writes, as a postscript to his Lady and the Tramp 50th/51st anniversary reissue review:

Also being released this week:

ROBERT BENCHLEY AND THE KNIGHTS OF THE ALGONQUIN (Kino Video). A collection of Paramount comedy shorts, most of them from the 1940s, featuring the venerated New Yorker writer and humorist in varying stages of befuddlement.

Later: And Logan Hill writes in New York:

OUR PICK: Modern-day mythmaking about the Algonquin Round Table tends to depict the twenties literary wits—including Harold Ross and Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber—as a debauched and vicious circle. But watch The Paramount Comedy Shorts 1928–1941: Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin and you get an altogether sillier vision that’s so sweet it makes you wonder if all the contemporary scandalmongering says more about us than them. This set collects a batch of apt comic shorts by Benchley—a co-founder of the Table, drama critic, and contributor to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker—plus a few by Donald Ogden Stewart and a marvelously snide Alexander Woollcott. The best are comedy sketches that Benchley narrates in the tongue-in-cheek persona of domestic scientist Joe Doakes, poking wry fun at husbands, wives, and sundry household annoyances—including, worst of all, an item that was once the bane of every author: the tangled typewriter ribbon. NR; $29.95.

Peter Benchley, 1940-2006

Sad news from the Robert Benchley Society:

With sadness the Robert Benchley Society notes the passing, at age 65, of Peter Benchley, author of the novel Jaws (1974) The Deep (1976), Beast (1991), and White Shark (1994). He is survived by his wife, Wendy.
Peter Benchley was the son of writer Nathaniel Goddard Benchley, grandson of humorist, theatre critic, and actor Robert Benchley, and brother of actor Nat Benchley.
We send our condolences to the family of Peter Benchley.

Here’s a list of Benchley’s publications and a little more about his career.
Update: Here’s the Times Online story:

Mr Benchley later expressed regret for portraying sharks as creatures that target human beings. Thanks to the book and Spielberg’s film, which remains one of the ten highest-grossing movies after being adjusted for inflation, millions of beachgoers thought twice before venturing into the ocean.

I was pretty young when the movie came out, but I saw the TV trailer and that was it—no swimming in the small lake near our house for the rest of the summer. Sure, there were mostly carp in there, and algae, but one couldn’t take any chances. Now I know sharks are lovely creatures (most of the time), and freshwater Wisconsin sharks are fairly rare. R.I.P., P.B.
Update: Here’s my pal Morgan at Watershed on shark attack rules, courtesy of the best shark B-movies.

Dept. of Blogs We’re Delighted to Welcome

to the New Yorkerphile-osphere: Between the Squibs, a brand-new review of The Complete New Yorker and, well, everything in it, just as Squib (I made that up, but it sounds very Conning Tower) discovers it. More often than not, he goes looking for things that illuminate, or deepen, a new story or event. As the author writes in his modest manifesto:

I think we can safely say that it was a good day when I heard that the New Yorker was going to release all of its issues in DVD format. In the autumn of 2005, I bought the Complete New Yorker (CNY) set, and I’ve been enjoying it with gusto ever since.

Most of the reviewers who praised the CNY made reference to the futility of actually trying to read all of it. The number of issues (4,109) was often mentioned. It is certainly a daunting number. If you spend every single evening reading one issue, you will be nearing the end in the year 2016. (Once you finished that, you’d still have to continue the exercise for another year and a half to catch up with the issues released since autumn 2005.)

As I eagerly consumed my fill of the excellent articles, I often wished for some sort of online directory, blog, wiki, or catalog containing the favorite finds of some industrious person. Of course, this worked in two directions: after reading a particularly satisfying article in the CNY, I also wished that there were an obvious place where I could post the find.

Strangely enough, I never found any such directory, and Amazon’s comments page for the product wasn’t exactly doing it for me. So I’m starting my own.

This blog is herewith dedicated to the collection of discerning recommendations of treasures to be found in the CNY. Articles, Talk of the Town pieces, Cartoons, Advertisements, Squibs, you name it. If you stumbled on it in the CNY, and you think people should know about it, drop me a line. I promise to do my share of the recommending.

This will also be a place where people can discuss and debate the DVD collection itself. I am aware that there has already been considerable annoyance expressed in some quarters about various technical quirks and legal ambiguities concerning the collection, and — provided that the tone remains civil — I would like consumers of the DVD to consider this blog a potential resource for such topics. Having said that, I should state that I am relatively not very bothered by such matters, and I will not allow this blog to become a place for wholesale trashing of the project.

Eventually I would like to see this blog (should it find palpable response) turn into a collective enterprise, but for the time being I will be in charge of it.

So onward! I have plenty of articles I want to pass on, and I sincerely hope you do as well. This blog will never work if it remains a one-way street. Welcome!

It’s a grand idea, and I plan to read BTS avidly as a guide to the shiniest Easter eggs in the Great Lawn of my eight discs. In a new post, he gives the current Mohammad cartoon controversy context:

But the importance of Muhammad in the Muslim world, in and of itself, cannot be underestimated. Consider Ved Mehta’s 1968 article about the massive turmoil sparked by the theft of a single strand of the Prophet’s hair, an event that occurred in December 1963 in the contentious region of Kashmir. There, too, other factors played a role: the intractable politics of Kashmir, the larger context of India-Pakistan relations. Mehta relies a little too much on lengthy excerpts for my taste, but it is still a valuable piece of background to the current cartoon furor.

There’s already much more. I must express my relief, too, that there’s now someone else besides Greg.org, my pal I Hate the New Yorker, and me to cover this rather large beat. Welcome to New Yorker blogdom, honored Squib!

Steve, Albert, and Woody: Why, Why, Why?

Echoing Frank Harrell‘s impassioned letter to Steve Martin asking him to make movies that don’t suck so much, my favorite Salon critic and party conversationalist, Stephanie Zacharek, considers Why Good Comedians Go Bad. As the subhed yearns to know, “Remember when Steve Martin, Albert Brooks and Woody Allen were funny? What on earth happened to our favorite funnymen?” Stephanie writes:

In Shawn Levy’s gaspingly unfunny “The Pink Panther” — not a remake of the Blake Edwards original, but a version of some vague idea of the original — Steve Martin may play Inspector Clouseau. But at least he’s smart enough to know that he can’t play Peter Sellers. In the movie’s production notes, Martin says, “I bent it a little bit because I am a different person. When I looked at those movies, I understood that Peter Sellers could ad-lib all day within the context of the character.” Martin knew he had to reinvent the role, which he did mostly by devising an identifiably Martinesque faux-French accent that sounds like a speech impediment.

Martin’s Clouseau is a performance draped precariously on a thumbtack of a gimmick. “The Pink Panther” is lousy for many reasons: For one thing, its rhythms wobble and weave drunkenly, and even the potentially funny jokes hang in the stratosphere, twinkling dimly with far too much space around them, before crashing to earth. But because “The Pink Panther” is a star vehicle, Martin has to bear most of the blame. Like another recent disappointment from a comedian many of us long ago came to love, Albert Brooks’ “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” “The Pink Panther” cements the idea that, no matter how much faith we place in our favorite comedians, their presence alone is never enough to guarantee laughs. Brooks’ and Martin’s recent failures carry a particularly potent sting: How can comedians we’ve come to trust so much let us down so hard? Cont’d.

In Slate, Dana Stevens writes:

Let us now ponder the mystery of Steve Martin’s career. In the past decade or so, it’s diverged into two discrete and contradictory channels: There’s Steve Martin the auteur (of three novels, a collection of plays, and “serious” film scripts like Shopgirl or the upcoming Picasso at the Lapin Agile, both based on his own work); and Steve Martin the lowbrow, the shameless purveyor of crap like Cheaper by the Dozen, Parts 1 and 2, Father of the Bride, Parts 1 and 2, or Bringing Down the House, the Martin/Queen Latifah race comedy, which has mercifully stopped at Part 1 (so far.) Cont’d.

Ever the optimist, I’d like to end this by saying I didn’t know they were making Picasso at the Lapin Agile into a film! I saw the play and liked it a lot. I’m looking forward to that. In the meantime, Steve, if you must remake silly ’50s comedies, how about The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (’48 and ’47, but you know what I mean)? Or a new His Girl Friday with, say, Geena Davis? There are so many others. We could make you a list.

I Salute Fellow Pro-Pigeon New Yorkers

Like this one:

I witnessed a very strange phenomenon today while on a break from work. It was cold outside, so I stood against the loading docks of a largely uninhabited office on 41st street to get away from the wind. Naturally, a small group of pigeons were there first…. Cont’d.

Of course, I’m linking to this because it has a timely connection to “Little Wing,” Susan Orlean’s nicely written piece about homing pigeons and their admirers from this week’s magazine. As I read I envisioned a Charlie Kaufman screenplay with pigeon fanciers standing in for orchid thieves, and mentorship of the long-haired little girl from Boston replacing clandestine romance with wild John Laroche. Meanwhile, remember the pigeon-themed caption-contest cartoon? “And tomorrow I’ll teach you to build a nest.” See, there’s a benevolent pigeon right there. Before you judge the next pigeon you see, take a minute to admire its coloring, its placidity, its iridescent feathers. You’ll be impressed.

The Modest Rock Stars of Human Rights

In FAIR’s excellent summary of 20 Stories That Made a Difference (“20 news stories published since FAIR’s 1986 debut that had a major impact on society—for good or for ill”), this recap of Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman’s brave and honorable campaign to spread the word about the outrages in East Timor:

7. The Dili Massacre

Following the U.S.-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, U.S. news media maintained a virtual blackout for over 15 years about the occupation and the atrocities occurring in the tiny island country (Extra!, 11/12/93). But in 1991, three journalists forced East Timor back on the media map and into the public consciousness.

On November 12, Allan Nairn of the New Yorker, Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio and British filmmaker Max Stahl attended a peaceful funeral procession in the East Timorese capital of Dili that turned deadly when Indonesian military opened fire on the crowd and killed more than 250. Nairn and Goodman were beaten but managed to escape, as did Stahl, and their eyewitness reports and video of the massacre alerted the Western world to the dire situation in East Timor, sparking a grassroots movement opposing U.S. support for the Indonesian occupation.

Though the mainstream media’s newfound attention to East Timor was initially slight, Goodman and Nairn continued to doggedly pursue the story throughout the ’90s, with Nairn repeatedly returning to East Timor to file reports despite an Indonesian order barring his entry. His reporting helped to keep the story on the radar, and in 1999, the U.S. finally suspended all military ties with Indonesia, which promptly pulled out from East Timor.

Here’s their 2005 update. Nairn is one handsome journalist, incidentally. Even more so because he’s so damn full of integrity.