Monthly Archives: October 2006

Festival Spy Report: Where the Brits Were

This just in, a dispatch from a correspondent we shall call C.R.B.D. Special to Emdashes! With photos after the jump.
Anyone wondering where all the British guys in New York were Saturday night, wonder no more: All of them were at the Cedar Lake Dance studio basking in the reflected funniness of Steve Coogan (as interviewed by the equally smart and funny George Saunders). Saunders introduced Coogan sweetly, saying Coogan shares his feeling that “comedy is not just fun, but important” and, incidentally, that he and his wife had to turn off a Coogan DVD recently because they were “laughing so hard that we had stopped breathing.” Then Coogan himself was with us, and did impressions. “There’s a lot of people who think they can do Michael Caine,” he said, before doing Caine to a T. He said his French teacher used to order him up to the front of the class to imitate other teachers at the school; the guy would go sit at the back of the class with the students and yell out people for him to do.

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Lots of clips followed—Alan Partridge, 24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy, and his latest show, Saxondale, about a former Jethro Tull roadie-turned-pest-controller. (If you haven’t seen any of these, please, Netflix them all immediately. Really, do it now. Don’t even read the rest of this!) Coogan had already perfected cringe-inducing character-based comedy when Ricky Gervais was still cleaning toilets, or whatever he did before The Office. And Coogan has this to say about the form: “You have to be careful, otherwise it’s partly creative sadism.”
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The usual Q & A session followed, with the usual questions: “Do you think American comedy is doomed?” asked an American. The answer was sort of no, but Coogan did say it seemed like “the sofa in the middle of the living room and the wacky neighbor isn’t working anymore.” Also, apparently NBC is pumping him for ideas; expect more pond-hopper shows from them shortly. Meanwhile…are you still here? What did I tell you about the Netflixing? Go!
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Very Sparkly

I may skip Pick of the Issue till next Monday, if that doesn’t cause too much turbulence in your mental waters, but of course there were a few standouts last week, so I’ll probably come back and note them here. This week there’ll be scads of New Yorker Festival wrapups—look forward to challenging bouts of Guess Which Crowd This Was? and Match the Quotation in days to come.
Meanwhile, this was one of my favorite festival moments; as Lillian Ross, Robin Williams, and Barry Levinson practically skipped offstage after a preview screening of Man of the Year, Williams sang an homage to the Foley page scandal that was also a riff on the event’s being at the Alliance Française (he became a fast-talking, pompous French emcee several times, and about thirty other people), “Sank Heaven for Little Boys.” Giddy photo after the jump. Williams live was better than I’ve ever seen him on TV, and that means he was phenomenally good. Meanwhile, the movie itself brought up a few disturbing thoughts for me about the so-called liberal spirit of dissent, specifically in contrast to the Stephen Breyer event the day before. I’ll explain.

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A Reason to Buy the Wall St. Journal Today

Garry Kimovich Kasparov
Garry Kaspaov at the New Yorker Festival

From the Wall Street Journal:

COMMENTARY
Anna Politkovskaya
By GARRY KASPAROV
NEW YORK — The news came when I was getting ready to sit down in front of an audience with the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, at the New Yorker Festival on Saturday. Suddenly we had a tragic new topic for our talk about the crisis in Russia today. Anna Politkovskaya was dead, shot down in cold blood in her apartment building. One of the few remaining voices of independent journalism in Russia, Anna was a fearless journalist best known for her reporting on the government’s atrocities in Chechnya.
To know Anna was to know how profoundly she cared. She felt the pain of others deeply and communicated that passion in her work. She documented the illegal acts of the Russian security forces in the Northern Caucasus and the brutality of Ramzan Kadyrov and other Kremlin proxies in the region. She tenaciously investigated the government cover-ups around the Beslan and the Nord-Ost theater terrorist attacks, in which hundreds of civilians were killed. She took on the most sensitive stories and the most painful subjects. She was an inspiration because she was never intimidated, because she never wrote a line she didn’t believe in passionately.
And on Saturday — President Vladimir Putin’s 54th birthday — Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. Her killers made no attempt to disguise what their act was, no attempt to make it look like anything other than a politically motivated assassination. Even Russian politicians who always worked to contradict and downplay her reports are calling it a political murder.
But what does that mean in a country where one person is in control of everything? This brutal episode cannot be taken outside the context of recent events in Russia. The forces in control here are facing an impending crisis and fault lines are beginning to appear in the Kremlin’s vertical power structure. The authoritarian structure that Mr. Putin has built in Russia has been very profitable for his circle of friends and supporters. Income is siphoned off from every region of the country. Business and politics have been combined into a streamlined process for bleeding the nation dry. Now, however, Mr. Putin and his associates are approaching a dilemma. The president’s term of office ends in 2008 and this efficient machine is threatening to explode. Should Mr. Putin stay or should he go?
The chaos that will surely occur if Mr. Putin leaves office is relatively easy to understand. Any mafia-like structure is based on the authority of the top man. If he leaves, or appears weak, there is a bloody scramble for his position. Whoever wins that battle must then eliminate the others to consolidate his grip, so the fighting is fierce. Perhaps only 10% of the combatants will pay in blood or incarceration and ruin, but nobody knows who will be in that 10%.
To avoid that dangerous uncertainty, some of Mr. Putin’s closest lieutenants are dedicated to making sure the top man stays right where he is. The problem with this plan is that Mr. Putin is constitutionally prevented from staying in office beyond the end of his term in 2008. The main obstacle is not the Constitution, which can be easily adjusted to the Kremlin’s requirements; the obstacle is that, after he has made so many statements about his intent to step down in 2008, Mr. Putin would lose almost all his legitimacy in the West if he exercised this option. Of course, his regime has never shown concern for the voices of America and Europe, and feeble indeed those voices have been. But the money his associates have become so adept at squeezing from Russian assets resides almost entirely in Western banks. If the Russian government loses its veneer of legitimacy, these accounts could begin to receive an unpleasant amount of scrutiny.
So what can the ruling elite do to avoid both the chaos of succession and the loss of easy relations with Europe and the U.S.? The answer is becoming clearer every day if you read the headlines and look at the big picture. The Kremlin is exaggerating and fabricating one crisis after another, all combining to create an image of imminent peril. Those who believe they have burned every bridge and cannot afford to see Mr. Putin step down are trying to build a case that he is the only alternative to anarchy.
The political showdown with Georgia has led to a government-sponsored racist campaign against Georgians living in Russia. Mr. Putin’s latest statement on this issue was trumpeted as a major victory by Russian ultranationalists, who were delighted to hear his unequivocal endorsement of their platform. Inflammatory language of this sort is, of course, prohibited by our Constitution, which the president is sworn to protect. But what of that!
I am not even certain whether or not Mr. Putin himself desires to stay on. It’s a stressful job and he certainly will not lack for material comforts when he retires, unless of course the next government finds itself in need of a scapegoat.
There is little to be gained from speculating about who exactly ordered the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. The system that encouraged the crime, the logic that made it politically expedient for some of those in power, that is the true face of Mr. Putin’s Russia. This is the same Russia that chairs the G-8 and the same Russian leader who received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor from Jacques Chirac. With the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, the forces of corruption and repression in Russia have now made it plain that there is nothing they won’t do to stay in power. This is obviously bad news for my country. But it is catastrophic for every nation that these forces continue to receive the approval of the leaders of the free world.
Mr. Kasparov, former world chess champion, is chairman of the United Civil Front in Russia.

“Mr. Stoppard? I’m Steve Martin, an actor.”

I was there, and heard that actual sentence being spoken. Isn’t that wild?
Jump to the photo (all the festival posts will share this feature) to recreate the moment for yourself. I spoke to Martin today and he was a gent, and furthermore was wearing a bicycle garter (modern and nonchalantly sporty) all through today’s superlative Editing Master Class with Dorothy Wickenden, Roger Angell, and the humbling Daniel Zalewski. Humbling because Zalewski’s description of his editing and collaboration process is instantly recognizable: It’s that of the great editors, great capital G great, editors to submit to gratefully, to emulate, and to follow. I’ve known one or two, and here was another sitting there explaining his greatness without being in the least stuck-up. (A word that cartoonist C. Covert Darbyshire suggested bringing back into the discourse when we were on the subway down to Barnes & Noble on Saturday.)
Anyway, Martin, who’d just finished the Saturday crossword with a satisfied snap of the downloaded paper, also carried a bicycle helmet. That’s good to know, because there’s a brain we’d be bereft without.

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Zadie Smith and Jane Austen

Photo after the jump—I love my fancy new template, but am still experimenting with images on the homepage. Smith’s in the foreground and Austen in the background, in the form of glass flowers from a Cambridge, Mass., museum collection. That’s how Smith reads her, anyway, enviably beautiful and well formed though “cold to the touch.” Not quite how I’d characterize Austen’s writing, but that’s precisely Smith’s point, or one of many of them. Gorgeous, engaging, challenging, galvanizing lecture. A mighty event, worth repeating as a Dickensian tour of North America, not that Smith doesn’t have other things to attend to. Her PowerPoint presentation was as charming as a PowerPoint presentation can get, with uncentered pixely Courier intertitles an appropriately low-tech complement to her armchair-reader aria. And it kept the listeners lively, also appropriate to her warnings against sleepwalking through either one’s sentences or one’s entire life.

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Star Bodies

Steve Martin to the New Pornographers in twelve hours. Hold on, Roz Chast to Jim Surowiecki in twelve hours. Or both? I’m delirious. The pull between form and freedom and Classicism and Romanticism kept coming up with everyone today—Milos Forman, Tom Stoppard, Justice Breyer, Chast, the jokey Pornographers, the Rejection Collection cartoonists, even Tim the genial, Jovian (Jon Bon, I mean) actor diligently impersonating a tech-support maven in a transparent box in Barnes & Noble for roughly those same twelve hours. (They had to boot the handsome guy to reboot the computer when it broke down.)

Tim in the box, Union Square B&N

It’s either in the air in the bottles of water they were handing out at the techno party Friday night. Techno, structure and improvisation. It’s probably just as well that Stoppard wasn’t available to sway meditatively under the smoke machines; it might have caused an inner-earth molten-core disruption, though I have a hunch the man can dance. (See expressive photo after the jump.)
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Tonight’s post, unlike last night’s, sponsored neither by Grey Goose vodka nor Amstel Light, though not for lack of available beverages. Note to youth: Sleeplessness is an inexpensive alternate substance, and Breyer would be the first to tell you it’s unimpeachably legal.
Atmosphere

Steve Martin,Roz Chast

Can The New Yorker Throw a Dance Party?

Well, it’s four in the morning and I’ve just closed out the place with Victoria Roberts (startlingly pretty, incidentally, and smart as a whip), so I’d say yes, they can indeed. Overheard on the genuinely pulsing (d.j. Michael Mayer was enjoying himself, visibly), smoke-machine-enchanced dance floor: “You’re too old for me, I gotta go” (twiggy twentysomething to beanstalkish thirtysomething); a festival helper told me the crowd earlier on had been “21 to 80.” I didn’t see any 80-year-olds dancing, but there were a lot of jubilant people of uncertain provanance jumping up on things and shaking whatever would shake, as well as New Yorker staffers aplenty, some seeking quieter corners to talk in. These people know how to have a good time, that’s clear. Sasha Frere-Jones was a generous host with an admirable amount of stamina, and he should do this every year.
Also, Donald Antrim was an even better reader than I expected, and I always have high expectations of him. Shivers.

Festival: This Is How It’s Gonna Be

If you have any interest in doing surveillance on me, here are my whereabouts for the next two and a half days. I’ll be posting as often as possible throughout the festival—and if you see me, please come say hello. The delicious illustration to the left is by Newyorkette, a.k.a. Carolita Johnson, and the much lusher and more detailed version (with trademark CAJ) is here.
Friday, October 6:
7 p.m.: Donald Antrim and Tobias Wolff
9:30 p.m.: Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders
10 p.m.-2 a.m.: New Yorker Dance Party, hosted by Sasha Frere-Jones, with special guest d.j. Michael Mayer
Saturday, October 7:
10 a.m.: Steve Martin and Roz Chast
12 p.m.: Andy Borowitz and Matt Diffee & co. (The Rejection Collection) book signing
1 p.m. Tom Stoppard and John Lahr
4 p.m. Justice Breyer and Jeffrey Toobin
4 p.m. If I can manage to split into two like a planarium: David Remnick signs Reporting at Union Square B&N
7:30 p.m.: Milos Forman and David Denby
10 p.m. New Pornographers and Jim Surowiecki
Sunday, October 8:
10 a.m.: Editing Master Class
11 a.m., planarium duty: Trillin signs books at Union Square B&N, Barry Lyndon screening
12 p.m.: Man of the Year screening with Lillian Ross
3 p.m.: Donald Antrim and George Saunders sign books at Union Square B&N
4 p.m.: Zadie Smith

Letter From a Pregnant Person on Atul Gawande

My friend Hillery Stone, waiting to go into labor in the spring, found herself reading the May 1 New Yorker with Daniel Raeburn’s harrowing memoir about his and his wife’s stillborn baby. She left the magazine in the hospital while otherwise occupied, then tracked it down weeks later after her (healthy, luckily) baby was born so she could finish the story she’d been so mesermerized and moved by. Another pregnant person I know—my sister Kate, like whom I wish I could shimmy—found it hard to avoid Atul Gawande’s story about modern childbirth this week:

Was that NYer story on childbirth scary or what? I’m trying to block it out, now that I’ve read it and obsessed over it for 24 hours. When it comes to public discussion about the possible perils of childbirth, we’re not much further than we were in Jane Austen days, where women just disappeared upstairs for a few months and came back down with a baby. Now there’s WAY more discussion of the pregnancy itself (weight gain, nutrition, whether to have your baby listen to Mozart in the womb, etc.) but still almost no conversation—even private conversation—about the scary parts, the high miscarriage rates and the multiplying C-sections and the childbirth mishaps. It’s almost a taboo subject, and when you do try to bring it up wtih other pregnant women, they become offended and upset.
 
So it was nice to read something that actually lays it all out there in an honest way, saying both that there are dangers and also that medical science has countered many of them through increased C-sections. Also to read the detailed description of the C-section, which everyone talks about as no big deal, but which is actually serious surgery!!! Still, as a pregnant woman intent on a vaginal, no-drugs delivery, it was scary to think about how little I know about what will actually happen when I go in, and how few options remain for modern doctors other than cutting me open. Eep.