Monthly Archives: October 2006

Spit Takes and Turf Wars!

It’s going to be a great festival. From the NY Post:

The seventh annual weekend festival, which opens tomorrow night and comprises more than 50 events, will include an encore interview of Jon Stewart by New Yorker Editor David Remnick to benefit the U.S.O.
When he signed up for last year’s chat with Stewart, Remnick says, “I didn’t know people still did a spit take. But I asked him some idiotic questions, and I ended up with water all over my shirt.” Which sounds less disturbing than another event, in which food writer Bill Buford “practically burned down a kitchen.”
…
Remnick says the festival (which is “much better,” he says, than the similar program offered by The New York Times next weekend – your turn to throw down, Pinch!) is profitable and will be around at least as long as he is. “These things sell out at a rate that continues to astonish us,” Remnick adds.

To deal with that, the magazine will for the first time present Webcasts on newyorker.com, though they won’t be posted until next week. The Chast-Martin discussion will be streamed along with four other events, including Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on secrets.

Will Gladwell really be there, or will he amp up the secrecy by having someone else pretend to be him, while he in turn assumes other identities? I think instead there should be multiple Gladwells, like in Shall We Dance, when Fred Astaire dances with dozens of bemasked Gingers. I always wondered how they could keep their balance while holding those masks steady, not to mention how that swan-backed lady could dance upside down like that; she must have had a few tipping points in her time.
The Post piece ends, amusingly:

The festival extends the magazine’s carefully nurtured brand, which is venturing in directions that might have disgruntled the editors Tom Wolfe dubbed “tiny mummies” in 1965. There’s a new board game, for instance. Can a John Updike action figure be far behind?
“It’s not a religion here,” says Remnick, who personally approves every coaster and shower curtain. “It’s meant to be fun as well as serious. So if there’s a great cover and somebody makes a poster of it and it’s done well, I don’t see how that stuff stops us from breaking the Abu Ghraib story.” The board game is based on a new feature that’s already become an institution: the back-page cartoon caption contest, whose fans are delirious bordering on psychotic. Just ask Mike Bloomberg.
“Mayor Bloomberg came up to me once,” Remnick recalls, “and he had a slightly accusatory look on his face, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ He said, ‘I keep sending in these cartoon captions and I never get in, and it’s starting to p – – – me off.’ ”

Introducing The Squib Report

Martin Schneider, the man behind the admirably focused and semi-extant Between the Squibs, has kindly agreed to contribute an occasional column, in which he’ll spelunk into The Complete New Yorker archives and tell us what he’s uncovered. Here’s Squib’s first dispatch, to which he adds a thoughtful email note: “It’s not so much that the piece is bad as much as it’s just curious, and positively screams ‘early Tina.’ I’ve always felt that Tina was necessary in 1992, and excesses in this direction (brevity, breeziness) are not to be scolded too much.”
We know what The New Yorker can do. We know what The New Yorker cannot do, and usually for that reason doesn’t indulge in the endeavor. The New Yorker can cover tennis—excuse me, “lawn tennis.” Herbert Warren Wind did it for decades—and golf too. What The New Yorker cannot do is make tennis cool, hip, exciting.
Does anyone but me remember when Martin Amis used to write tennis reports? He only actually did it three times over three years, just enough to make you think it might be a permanent feature, but infrequently enough that you didn’t notice the absence.
The first tennis piece Amis ever did remains a fascinating shard from the past. July 1993, not even a year into Tina’s reign. And boy, does it show. At this distance it comes off like an experiment more than anything else. Amis does tennis! With drawings by Gerald Scarfe! An experiment. Yes. That must be it.
It must be one of the shortest serious articles the magazine ever ran, five quick pages dominated by Scarfe’s large drawings. It’s so short that it’s practically a statement, probably heaved in the general direction of the recently dispatched Mr. Wind. None of these endless disquisitions on the “immense diligence” of Mats Wilander, no.* None of that. It is the 1990s if you have not heard. People aren’t going to read all that.
Amis is a terrific writer, but his nonfiction stuff leaves me cold. I’m not sure if it’s how hard he seems to be trying (to be Saul Bellow?), or if it’s that his unlikeable authorial persona is just so much more effective in his novels. The first few paragraphs of this particular piece are devoted to Jim Courier’s tendency to sweat a lot.
Gerald Scarfe isn’t my cup of tea, but I can see his appeal; even his staunchest defenders would have to concede that the 1993 Wimbledon tournament was probably not the best match of artist and subject.
But Amis is such a good writer that the piece is still worthwhile. Curiously, just three years later, another serious novelist, David Foster Wallace, would write one of the greatest sports articles ever written, about little-known journeyman Michael Joyce, for Esquire. That experiment may have worked out a little better.
* October 17, 1988, p. 91.

Lucky Peking Ducks

Last night I met a guy, namely The Amateur Gourmet, who was languishing in bed with his folks and both sets of grandparents, wanly peeling back the wrapper of the only chocolate bar he and his family could manage to scrounge together the pence to buy, when he discovered that he, Charlie Bucket, had won the Golden Ticket!
OK, it didn’t happen exactly like that, but the A.G. did score tickets to “Come Hungry,” this Sunday’s completely un-get-into-able Calvin Trillin walking tour, perhaps the jewel in the crown of the New Yorker Festival each year for its utter exclusivity, its awarding of the longed-for jog beside Bud as he uncovers the secrets of Chinatown, and not in the Jack Nicholson way, for the Charlie Buckets of the world. I hope to interview this man, for he has about his pleasant foodie head a nimbus that will be envied and wept over for the entire year to come. Until next year, when each new Charlie in waiting will hold his breath, aching for that life-giving glint of gold.
Related on Emdashes:
Ecstatic reviews of Trillin’s ’02 and ’05 tours.
When Trillin talks, people listen.

Coliseum Books Is Closing, and R.I.P., R.W. Apple

I saw the news on my RSS feed last night but blocked out the doleful knowledge till now. It was my first New York bookstore—back then, it was across the street from my first New York job, fall semester of my freshman year, working (in a very roundabout way, believe me) for Sting, Trudie Styler, Lou Reed, Joan Baez, and the doomed Michael Hutchence, whom I saw in the elevator. (This is also the location of my first New York celebrity street sighting, and luckily for my enthusiasms at the time it was Paul Shaffer, who was a gent.) I’d go to Coliseum every lunch hour and after work, sometimes taking a side trip to Lee’s Art Shop on 57th St. and a peek at the longhairs who were always lounging on the steps of the Art Students League, sometimes petting the horses at Columbus Circle. Coliseum was the sturdy ship that was always in the harbor. It was depended upon. Then it closed. Then, miraculously, it resurfaced on 42nd St., where Condé Nast people and Nortonites and others frequented it and its superlative cafe.
So what happened? I know this is Barnes & Noble’s fault. I always meant to bring that place down. Perhaps it’s time to renew my efforts. Jurgen Habermas my elbow. Coliseum’s founder George S. Leibson blames Amazon in part, and that’s probably justified, too. Note that many of the links on Emdashes are to Powell’s Books and, when things are out of print, Alibris; I almost always buy books new when I know the writers need the money, which most writers do. Leibson says, and what a sad statement, “I believe we will simply disappear.” It’s more like the Simon & Garfunkel line, Coliseum; our love for you’s so overpowering I’m afraid that we will disappear.
In other news of life cycles coming to a close, the longtime Timesman R.W. Apple has died. From the NYT:

“I used to say that Johnny grew into the person he was pretending to be when we were young,” Joseph Lelyveld, a contemporary who rose to become The Times’s executive editor, told the writer Calvin Trillin in a 2003 profile of Mr. Apple in The New Yorker. “Now I wonder whether he actually was that person then, and the rest of us didn’t know enough to realize it.”

The New Yorker website now has this up: Calvin Trillin’s 2003 Profile of Apple, “Newshound: The triumphs, travels, and movable feasts of R. W. Apple, Jr.”

NYC: Caleb Crain, Melissa Plaut, and Brandon Stosuy, Oct. 17

Caleb wrote that excellent recent piece on the Mass-Observation movement that also inspired an observational haiku. Haiku has become awfully trendy again, it seems, what with the stacks of Craigslist box poetry. So I’m glad to see that Caleb will be speaking, in either free verse (the event is free) or in form in two weeks, along with two other writers I’m excited to see in person:

The Educational Alliance is pleased to announce that Caleb Crain, Melissa Plaut, and Brandon Stosuy will be appearing on Tuesday, October 17 at 7:00 pm as part of our series, Writers at the Alliance. The Educational Alliance is located at 197 East Broadway (F train to East Broadway, walk two blocks to Jefferson). Readings take place in the Mazer Theater. This is a free event. For further information, contact Liz Brown at readings@killfee.net or call the Educational Alliance at (212) 780-2300, ext. 378.

HERE IS NEW YORK: THEN AND NOW
Tuesday, October 17
7:00 pm
In his foreword to “Here is New York,” written in 1948, E.B. White asserted that “it is the reader’s, not the author’s, duty to bring New York down to date.” The Alliance has enlisted three very different writers with that task, beginning with Caleb Crain who chronicles the extravagances and vanities of New York’s upper class in the nineteenth
century. Next, Brandon Stosuy delves into the downtown music scene of the 1970s and continues through to 2006, noting outerborough shifts along the way. Finally, Melissa Plaut, a blogging cab driver, keeps us “down to date” with her present-day account of life behind the wheel in New York City.
CALEB CRAIN has written essays and criticism for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (Yale, 2001), and is at work on a history of the divorce of the nineteenth-century theatrical couple Edwin and Catharine Forrest.
MELISSA PLAUT was born in 1975 and grew up in the suburbs of New York City. After college, she held a series of office jobs until, at the age of 29, she began driving a yellow cab. A year later she started writing “New York Hack,” a blog about her experiences behind the wheel. Within a few months, the blog was receiving several thousand hits a day. She is currently working on a book based on “New York Hack” to be published in 2007 by Villard.
BRANDON STOSUY, a staff writer and columnist at Pitchfork, contributes regularly to The Believer and The Village Voice and has written for Arthur, BlackBook, Bookforum, LA Weekly, Seattle Weekly, and Slate, among other publications. His Danzig-heavy meditation on Sue de Beer appears in her EMERGE monograph (Downtown Arts Projects, 2005) and an essay he co-authored with Lawrence Brose is collected in Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper (FDU Press, 2006). He’s currently curating The Believer’s 2007 Music Issue Compilation CD while finishing a discussion with Matthew Barney and essays on Wayne Koestenbaum and Gordon Lish, also for The Believer. Up Is Up, But So Is Down, his anthology of Downtown New York literature, will be published in October by NYU Press.

Ladies and Gentlemen, John Lahr (and Your New Emdashes!)

Not for the first time, Lahr takes the cake; his Helen Mirren profile was typically compassionate, deeply layered, studiously researched, and written so skillfully that reading it isn’t really reading, it’s more like gently tapping the top of a crème brulée for the silky treat that’s finished far too soon. There were some other plums in the icebox—plum puddings, to stretch the metaphor—including David Denby’s deft mini-essay on the corruption of power in his review of All the King’s Men and The Last King of Scotland.
As for this week, here’s what I suspect I’ll be reading first in the magazine: Anthony Lane on Stephen Frears’s The Queen, to test my theory that the quip-addled Lane in fact writes best about serious films, and the studious Denby often shines when he gets to tell a joke or two. Next, Adam Kirsch on Hart Crane. And when I’ve got the time and the gumption, Atul Gawande’s piece about “How childbirth went industrial” is a must. I like the look of this, too: a “Dept. of Amplification” by Richard Preston: “Tall for Its Age: Getting to the top of a record-breaking tree.”
And speaking of rings of growth, this is Emdashes’ new bark; as before, there’s a bit of bite for those who like that sort of thing. Mostly, though, there’s the absolutely gorgeous work of web geniuses Pretty and the gifted illustrator Jesse Ewing, and any glitches you see in these early days—and you’ll see ’em—are entirely attributable to me. This may be because I haven’t yet snagged my ideal intern, Mlle. Emily Gordon of the Cornell Daily Sun, whose excellent articles I read so often via Google Alerts. E.G., you’ve got an internship waiting for you! Just drop me a line and I’ll get you started on all kinds of exciting projects. Free popcorn!
To paraphrase a witty Carolita Johnson cartoon, We may now begin our insane experiment! Loyal readers, thanks for nearly two years of Emdashes adventures, and newcomers, have some pudding. Or bark. Either way, you’re in safe hands.
Coming soon: a brand-new edition of Ask the Librarians, the column co-written by New Yorker librarians to the stars—and stars themselves—Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey. Send your questions for Jon and Erin to askthelibrarians@emdashes.com, and I’ll forward the best of them. In coming weeks, I’ll be introducing some excellent new contributors to Emdashes (even besides the promising young Ms. G). Best of all, it’s New Yorker Festival week, and that means I’ll be covering and commenting on everything from Steve Martin to the New Pornographers and—well, it’s going to be something else, so stick around, won’t you?