Monthly Archives: March 2006

The Internet Isn’t for Porn

…the Internet is porn. Besides, these days you can get porn in The New Yorker. This week, anyway. Just a few days ago I’d been thinking, if only there were more smutty stories in the magazine (Nicholson Baker will do just fine)! Full-page photos of nude-ish dancers in black and white are usually the best it gets, but this issue’s not fit to read on the subway unless you aren’t a blusher, and I am. I love that I had to hurriedly skip a page as I read on the F train this morning. More of that, please! No girlies on the web link, sorry.

Anyway, this is a link dump. Like a regular dump, it’s a goldmine; unlike a regular dump, it’s not whiffy and there are no vermin. Although some film-critic critics (see below) might beg to differ.

First, I’ve recently become a contributing editor at the fabulous new blogher, where I’ll be writing about movies. I just posted about Annie Proulx’s bitching about boring old Crash winning the Oscar when Brokeback could’ve nabbed it.

Speaking of movies, or perhaps Films, various people are pissed at David Denby about his V for Vendetta review. For instance, Edrants calls for his resignation. Movie City Indie revisits James Wolcott’s fears: “James Wolcott offers a tart aside to the most goombah of early reviews, with the New Yorker’s august David Denby partaking in the aborning controversy over the movie’s mere existence.” New City Chicago employs the summery adjective as well:

Longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn supposedly said that a good review offers voice and viewpoint but also enough information that you would feel like you’d learned enough about the movie to feel comfortable participating in a dinner-table conversation about the work at hand. While working to digest “V from Vendetta” from a distance of only twelve hours or so, I pick up the august David Denby’s review in the March 20 issue of the New Yorker: “`V for Vendetta,’ a dunderheaded pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction, is perhaps the ultimate example of how a project with modest origins becomes a media monster.” Do you want to see a movie after reading a lead like that? Do you want to finish the review or change the subject over drinks?

It’s all just making me more excited to see V for V, of course. Then I’ll be able to read the review and properly assess. As a rule, I’m a Denbyhead, not a Laneiac, but Lane has been terrific on a few serious movies lately; they should let Denby make the jokes. Meanwhile, all those boobies in the magazine inspired me to do some creative scanning, to be revealed shortly. PW Daily led me to the news, coincidentally, that “Playboy Enterprises announced the launch of Playboy Press as part of a joint publishing venture with Hanover, N.H.-based Steerforth Press.” My, they’re getting lit’rary! Now we’re going to say we read it for the books.

So (that’s my effort at a transition, but when you’re getting out the news, you can’t always be stressing about the segues), here’s Marc Weingarten on Truman Capote’s newly re-famous martyr-man Jack Dunphy: “This is a tragic story about what happens when a fine writer’s reputation is obscured by the very public persona of a genius, and how literary fame always trumps solid literary grunt work.”

In other NYer-figure news, it’s blogger Dave Chase‘s opinion, expressed in his review of Jim Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, that

Surowiecki aims to be the next New Yorker contributor to have a mass appeal book, ala Malcolm Gladwell. He clearly wants to position this book as the next “The Tipping Point” — combining cognitive science and other disciplines into a book addressing business, politics, society and economies. The bookâ€™s relevance to marketing may not be as obvious as The Tipping Point, although there are examples from our industry….

Finally—because, like millions of other happy lambs, I’m Gervais-mad or at least Gervais-fixated—there’s a little Salon archive of Office, XFM, interview, and podcast stuff I just landed on, and the interview with an unusually relaxed Terry Gross is a hoot, surprisingly enough. Maybe she’s better talking to people who won’t show their vulnerable sides, or whose vulnerable sides aren’t the most interesting part of the story. Listening to the XFM clip after yesterday’s disappointing Gervais podcast made me a little sad, since the boys are having about 50% more fun on the old show. I hope the fame of the podcast isn’t burning them out; perhaps they should let Stephen talk a bit more.

And if you’re not listening to the Comedy 365 podcast Big Squeeze yet, I simply can’t help you. You’re clearly determined never to laugh like a complete fool again.

If I Want You, With All Your Charms

Since I learned that Jim Donahue regularly dreams about celebrities, I’ve been thinking of Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger, the hypertext project by Michael Blitz and Louise Krasniewicz that, of course, documented dreams about Arnold Schwarzenegger. While researching their book about “Arnoldness,” Why Arnold Matters, the authors found themselves having dream after dream of the lumpy grunter, and encouraged the webby (before or during the book-writing process, I forget) to share their stories with the known universe. From a summary of Blitz and Krasniewicz’s creation:

The content asks questions about American popular culture and the nature of dreams (including American ones). Numerous hyperlinks spin off into various essays and web sites, a number of which are only tenuously connected to the central theme of the project. Apparently, Mr. Schwarzenegger was not directly involved in the production of this site.

I imagine not. Arnold may have wandered through a snooze or two of Connie Bruck’s, for all we know. What’s confounding is that I can’t seem to find the subconcious-anthology online anymore, though I admit I haven’t googled with my usual fire in the browser. What kind of vast right-wing Hollywood-liberal Kennedy-compound Mr. Universe media-elite ivory-tower California-utilities Bain de Soleil conspiracy might be at work here, I wonder?

“That’s a hell of a bit of pillow talk, that”

Post a comment with your own celebrity dreams, if they don’t make you too shy. So far, only my daydreams are about Stephen Merchant—a man of intense and glad appreciation who laughs with delighted daring and little malice, and who should be properly appreciated himself by a girl who knows how—but I know (and like) the way I let things take over. It’s a tall tail I’m chasing in my head.

Speaking of celebrities, in case you’ve somehow missed this, I read How to Dress Like the Pope (which has a faint to strong connection with baby mixologists/fry cooks and Lemony Snicket) today and it’s pretty damn funny. There’s still more commentary on Pope-onography in this no doubt offensive series, “Pope vs. Gays: SMACKDOWN!”

It Takes a Worried Man, Pt. 2

James Wolcott is a little concerned about his neighbor David Denby after reading Denby’s V for Vendetta review.

Chain-Smoking Is Probably Post-Irony

Robin Cembalest reviews a recent event in which Alex Melamid (of the elephant paintings and Art Poll, on which I worked in a lowly capacity many years ago), Art Spiegelman, et al. talked about Neosincerity, the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest, Tom and Jerry, etc.:

Later, at home, I wondered if the panelists were right. “Is irony over?” Typing it into my computer, I felt like Carrie Bradshaw. I continued. “Is it possible to develop antibodies? And if we are finally resistant to irony, is Neosincerity the new zeitgeist?” I thought about the success of Jon Stewart, who has become hugely popular by making a comic show the most honest news broadcast on TVâ€”and even managed to make a Munich joke at the Oscars. Maybe we’re on the cusp of a new age of shtick.

The Da Brokeback Code

Old? Uncool? Live in a cave? If you’re unable to decipher “Hollaback Girl” or haven’t a clue why people guffaw every time you say your baby’s name, Slang City can help. What’s more, they have the inside scoop on all the mushy—but mysterious—stuff Jake and Heath say to each other in that one cowboy movie. A sampling, original first, translation second:

Ennis: I figure we got a one-shot deal going on here.
Jack: It’s nobody’s business but ours.
Ennis: You know I ain’t queer.
Jack: Neither am I.

Ennis: I think this is something that will only happen once.
Jack: It’s nobody’s business but ours.
Ennis: You know I’m not homosexual.
Jack: Neither am I.

Another newly revealed exchange:

Jack: Swear I didn’t know we were gonna get into this again. Hell, yes I did, redlined it all the way, couldn’t get here fast enough.

Jack: Honestly, I didn’t know we were going to be romantic partners again. Oh, that’s a big lie! I knew it and I was speeding all the way and couldn’t get here fast enough.

Not to mention “I can’t survive on making love to you up here on the mountain once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you horrible person (‘you sonofawhoreson bitch’)! I wish I knew how to leave you.” There’s lots more here; you’ll eat it up like a freshly fired-up can o’ beans on a sheepy, lonely mountaintop.

Naturally, Pilkington’s on eBay…

but the Sydney-based seller, however A++++ he may be, clearly didn’t do enough advance publicity, since his item, a limited-edition “Knob at Night” button, sold for just 50 p. If the Pilkington hordes get hold of this, I predict the bidding war will be fierce for the seller’s other items—an “I Could Eat A Knob At Night” t-shirt (ends March 10), the already famous Karl clock (ends April 3), the above heartfelt button (ends March 10), and, my favorite and the first time I’ve seen it, a t-shirt that says “A Knob A Day Keeps Gervais Away.” That ends March 10 as well. You can also Buy It Now. As Ricky would say, sarcastically-sincerely, Brilliant.

Joe Keenan: Frolics to Frasier and Back

I’ve been meaning to mention that I got to interview the first-rate screenwriter-playwright-lyricist-novelist Joe Keenan recently, and here’s my story (or just look at the previous post). On Monday I saw a staged reading of his show The Times, and every audience member I talked to felt the way I did: shattered, spooked, satisfied. We laughed a whole lot, too. It’s time for this to be re-staged.

Here’s how My Lucky Star, Keenan’s swell new novel, begins:

It is never a happy moment in the life of a struggling artist when some fresh assault on his fragile dignity compels him finally and painfully to concede that Failure has lost its charm. He has up until this point soldiered bravely along, managing to persuade himself that there’s something not merely noble but downright jolly about Struggle, about demeaning temp jobs, day-old baked goods, and pitchers of beer nursed like dying pets into the night. He would, of course, grant that la vie BohÃ¨me with its myriad deprivations and anxieties was not an unalloyed delight. But whenever its indignities rankled unduly he could console himself with his certainty that Bohemia was not, after all, his permanent address. Oh, no. His present charmingly scruffy existence was a mere preamble to his real life, a larval stage from which he would soon gloriously emerge into the sunshine of success. Its small embarrassments were, if anything, to be prized, not only for their lessons in humility but for the many droll, self-deprecatory anecdotes they would later provide, stories he’d polish and trot out for parties, interviews, and—why be pessimistic?—talk shows.

Then one day he is faced with some final affront, minor perhaps, but so symbolically freighted as to land on him with the force of an inadequately cabled Steinway. He reels, stunned, and dark speculations, long and successfully repressed, rampage through his mind. For the first time he allows himself to wonder if his life twenty years hence will be any different than his present existence. “Of course it will be different,” coos the voice in his head. “You’ll be old.” Here’s the whole excerpt.

Keeping on the Sunny Side: Interview with Joe Keenan

Talking With Joe Keenan:
A Sitcom Writer Moonlights as a Comic Novelist

Keeping on the Sunny Side

By Emily Gordon

If you’ve admired a writer for nearly two decades, is it polite to bemoan his career moves? Possibly, if that writer is the debonair novelist-screenwriter Joe Keenan, who disappeared from fiction for 15 years into the sunny abyss of Los Angeles to write and produce television shows. It complicates matters that the siren show was “Frasier,” which is about notably suave and articulate people, and for which Keenan won an Emmy and numerous other honors. His new CBS sitcom, “Out of Practice,” is also disconcertingly witty.

Given those circumstances, perhaps it’s all right for Keenan to have waited a bit to finish “My Lucky Star” (Little, Brown, $24.95), the third in a trio of novels about the capers of a smart songwriting duo and their charming troublemaker pal. It’s also hard to stay grouchy when that novel is actually in bookstores, a New York performance of a Keenan musical is on the way and the author is cooking up a fourth in what can now be referred to as a series.

Keenan grew up in Boston, then moved to New York for college, an MFA in musical theater writing and his share of bleak uncertainty. While struggling, he wrote the two novels that I’ve given to nearly everyone I know: “Blue Heaven” and “Putting on the Ritz.” All three books star a trio – Philip Cavanaugh, Gilbert Sel- wyn and Claire Simmons, two childhood friends/ex-lovers and their more sensible female friend – who make Keenan’s novels part high satire, part “Will & Grace” and part clue-sniffing Nick, Nora and Nick.

In love with trouble, Gilbert creates escapades (get-rich, get-married, get-produced, and frequently get-fired and get-arrested schemes) for the three; the escapades quickly turn into debacles, and the comic drama begins. “I’m not at all like Gilbert myself,” says Keenan, obviously hugely fond of the character most likely to make unwise decisions. “I don’t have his indestructible, albeit misplaced, self-confidence and unwavering faith that the next scheme will work out brilliantly no matter how disastrously all its predecessors have.”

Gilbert’s ancestor may well be Bertie Wooster, and Keenan is aware of how often he’s compared to P.G. Wodehouse. Of course, he’s pleased by the comparison, but demurs: “I just wanted to apply some of the techniques he mastered – the elaborate farce-plotting and the comic diction – to characters and situations that interested me. As a gay man, I wanted to employ a gay narrator [Philip], a young man whose naive and hopeless crushes often serve to propel the plotlines.”

Philip and Claire, broke but safe in New York until California convert Gilbert shows up, are this time nearly done in by his machinations in the newest book. The fortune, reasons Gilbert, lies with a family of Hollywood legends, the Malenfants, who are bad seeds indeed. The chief attraction for Philip, and the chief problem, takes the magnificent form of Stephen Donato, a Malenfant and leading man who’s gay, married and full of secrets. Once Gilbert arrives somewhere, however, nothing remains as it was. Enter shady masseurs, self-inventing divas, new levels of naughty business, an Amish teenager hungry for knowledge (not precisely in the plot, but referred to quite a bit), serious criminal activity, risible scripts and – as always – a very disgruntled Claire.

That “My Lucky Star” exists at last can be credited to Keenan’s yearly vacations. In the opening sentence of the novel, Philip makes a dark observation that for the struggling artist, “a short road leads to panic, and from panic to despair, self-pity, desperation and, finally, to Los Angeles.” Thanks to a lucky break that landed him in sitcomland instead of aspiring-screenwriter hell, Keenan’s L.A. has been far from that. But the book kept calling, and for the few weeks he had off from TV each year, he wrote.

Or rather, walked. “I did a lot of the book on vacations, walking around Central Park all day, stopping on benches to scribble it down in little notebooks,” he recalls. “One year we went to Paris. My partner, Gerry [Bernardi], saw everything while I wandered the streets all day with a voice recorder and wrote chapter eight.” Keenan notes that mapping out his endlessly twisty plots is the biggest challenge. “The actual writing’s a lot more fun.”

Happily, there’s more of it. Years ago in New York, Keenan – like Philip between Gilbert schemes – worked “a variety of demeaning clerical jobs, most of which required no more than a scholar’s mastery of alphabetical order.” He drew on those days for another project: a musical comedy with a dark side called “The Times,” about an aspiring actress and writer couple in New York who either follow or compromise their original dreams. (There will be a concert reading of “The Times” March 6 at the Collaborative Arts Project at 18 W. 18th St.)

His lifelong passions for theater and literature notwithstanding, the possibilities for good TV delight Keenan; he says of the “Frasier” finale, a particular high point, “I felt going into it like we were running an egg-and-spoon race with a FabergÃ© egg – we just wanted to get it over the finish line without dropping it.” As for “Out of Practice,” which returns from a hiatus on March 22, it’s about a family of comically overachieving doctors (including Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler as exes). Still, what about beloved Philip, Claire and Gilbert? “I’m kicking around a few notions involving a new sort of scam Gilbert might be perpetrating, but it’s all very preliminary since ‘Out of Practice’ has been the priority this year,” he says. “But vacation’s coming up.” He’d better have a great pair of walking shoes.

(Published in Newsday, February 26, 2006)

The Hyphen Is Deceitful Above All Things

From Hendrik Hertzberg’s amusing Talk of the Town about Cheney-haters and the stalwarts who love him:

Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal signâ€”not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.

And from Slate ‘s review of the new FX show about “race-swapping”:

If Black. White.â€”the title of which is annoyingly punctuated, by the wayâ€”were a drama, the network would be sending producers’ notes about Bruno’s lack of character development.

I’d like lots more of this sort of journalism; I could talk about hyphens and annoying punctuation all day.

Which reminds me, I’ve gotten some letters about the magazine’s dogged allegiance to spelling certain words as though we were not in New Amsterdam but in Olde England. I’ve started a collection (a list, that is, not a bucket of quarters for the copy dept.’s re-brainwashing), so send them in if you see them.

More About Megachurches

Googling for the Talk of the Town about Cheney’s ratings, I happened on this provocative and revealing comments page, in which Atlanta Journal-Constitution readers responded to the query “Why do you attend a megachurch?” The paper had just run a story on the subject (site asks for registration), and the commenters respond to it and to each other. It reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s good profile of Rick Warren and his Saddleback Church back in September. Here’s one of the 96 often long and thoughtful comments on the AJC page:

By Darrell

February 15, 2006 07:12 AM

Iâ€™m an African-American male and I attend a â€œmegachurchâ€. Iâ€™ve been a member of First Baptist Atlanta (FBA), where Dr. Charles Stanley is senior pastor, since February 1986.

However, prior to joining FBA I was a member at a small, all-black church which had been in my family for at least two generations. Why did I leave? Because there was nothing of any substance for my heart to hold on to once I walked out the doors of the church each Sunday. The services were all emotion with no concrete teaching. Another reason is that all the members were old enough to either be my parents or grandparents, so there was no â€œcommon groundâ€ from which I could build relationships with others my age.

At FBA Iâ€™ve learned how to study the Bible in-depth (even learning to read some Greek and Hebrew), build relationships with others through small group Bible studies and â€˜life-applicationâ€ classes, and just recently, I became director of the single-parents ministry at the church.

Iâ€™m a testament to the fact that being a member of a megachurch isnâ€™t all that bad.

Here’s another:

By Rudy

February 15, 2006 09:46 AM

The article mentions that megachurches know how to make worship entertaining. That is not a compliment but an indictment. Our culture has become so used to being entertained that even churches aspire to have huge audiences of spectators, not congregations of worshippers. There is a big difference.

And:

By Lina

February 15, 2006 08:46 AM

Iâ€™m not really sure what makes a megachurch mega, but I assume that the ones on TV would fit the profile. And I honestly believe thatâ€™s why some people attend. It makes them look good to say they are part of a church that is so great and famous that itâ€™s on TV. So they must be the perfect followers. I think the mega churches lose that personal connection and people arenâ€™t as touched emotionally by the sermons because itâ€™s like…well, watching someone on TV. Smaller churches make me feel more comfortable and more willing to talk about my problems and ask for guidance. The Long Dollar churches seem to be out for just that â€“ the long dollar.