for The Sound of Young America Live, the live show of the radio show about things that are awesome (that’s their motto, and entirely true), and although the 8 p.m. show is sold out, you can still go at 10 and see these talented people, plus Jesse Thorn, who is like 20 (OK, he’s a little older now) and one of the most talented interviewers on the air anywhere. The guy’s got to be heard, and seen. He’s like the next John Hodgman, but with a squirrel.
10PM Show Lineup
Kurt Andersen is the host of Public Radio International’s “Studio 360,” public radio’s premier arts newsmagazine. He was also the co-founder of America’s last great satirical magazine, “Spy,” and is the co-editor of the new retrospective book, “Spy: The Funny Years.”
Jonathan Coulton is a comic singer-songwriter who has been heard on The Daily Show and National Public Radio. His sensitive and hilarious songs tell stories of computer programmers and evil robot warlords in love. And other, more normal stuff.Elephant Larry is a New York-based sketch comedy group who have been acclaimed thusly by El Tiempo de Nueva York: “A hilarious multimedia mix of the deadpan and the maniacal. The sketches call to mind, variously, Monty Python, Kids in the Hall and Second City, yet they don’t feel like knockoffs.”
Andres du Bouchet is a standout in the New York City standup scene. You may have seen him on “Tough Crowd,” or on Comedy Central’s “I Love the ’30s”.
Possibly special guests: We’ve got a little space in the late show for drop-in guests, and have a couple of maybes we can’t tell you about. Maybe we’ll just have Coulton stretch, but maybe you’ll get to see someone awesome.
Some People Love Galway Kinnell
—I do—and some people really love Galway Kinnell, like this woman here.
In other news, have you heard about the the Baby Daddy Theory of Poetic Influence?
Meanwhile, via Mike Lynch, a cartoonist named Roy Delgado has so far submitted 19,000 cartoons to The New Yorker (by his estimate), all rejected.See a Movie With Jonathan Lethem Tonight!
It’s a benefit for 826 Valencia, Lethem will be there, the movie is awesome, and it’s tonight at the IFC Center, one of the nicest movie theaters in town and independent (not to mention squeaky-clean), too:
Movie Night with Jonathan Lethem: SCARECROW
Tonight at 7:30 pm!
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude in person — along with his special guest, director Jerry Schatzberg — to present a personal favorite: Schatzberg’s 1973 Palme d’Or winner Scarecrow, starring Al Pacino and Gene Hackman.
“A 70s gem!” —Time Out New York
R. 112 minutes.
Purchase tickets onlineMore info (forgive the email carets, will remove soonish):
> Movie Night with
> JONATHAN LETHEM
>
> Acclaimed Author to Host Screening of 70s Road-Movie Classic
> SCARECROW as Part of IFC Center’s Special Guest-Curator Series,
> With Director Jerry Schatzberg,
> Thursday, November 9 at 7:30pm
>
> Award-winning author Jonathan Lethem will appear in person at the IFC
> Center Thursday, November 9 at 7:30pm to present a rare screening of
> SCARECROW, joined by his special guest, the film’s director, Jerry
> Schatzberg.
>
> A 70s road-movie classic shot by the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond,
> SCARECROW (1973) stars Gene Hackman and Al Pacino as two drifters, Max
> and Lion, who warily form a friendship as they hitchhike across the
> country. The film won the Palme d’Or for Best Film at the Cannes Film
> Festival.
>
> Jonathan Lethem published his first novel, Gun with Occasional Music,
> in 1994. He first garnered major critical and audience attention with
> Motherless Brooklyn (1999), a tale of a private detective with
> Tourette syndrome, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
> Among his recent works are The Fortress of Solitude (2003), a
> semi-autobiographical novel set in late-1970s Brooklyn, and a
> collection of essays, The Disappointment Artist (2005). In 2005,
> Lethem was named recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship grant. He lives
> in Brooklyn.
>
> Jerry Schatzberg was an established professional photographer, with
> work published in Vogue and McCall’s, before he turned to filmmaking.
> Among his credits as a director are The Panic in Needle Park (1971),
> The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) and Street Smart (1987)
>
> In the “Movie Night†program, the IFC Center turns over a theater to
> special guests and lets them call the shots. Audiences can discover
> what some of their favorite authors, musicians, artists and filmmakers
> would pick if it were Movie Night at their house. Participants appear
> in person to share why they made their selections: to acknowledge the
> brilliance of a timeless classic, spotlight an unsung gem, or defend a
> guilty pleasure. Past guests include the filmmaker David Gordon Green,
> Slovenian theorist and philosopher Slavoj Zizek,
> singer-songwriter-actor Will Oldham, director and Monty Python alum
> Terry Gilliam, and French auteur Gaspar Noé.
>
> A photo from SCARECROW is attached.
>
> Tickets for the evening are $12 general admission/$10 seniors.
>
> Proceeds from the “Movie Night with…†program benefit 826NYC, a
> nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students’ writing
> skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.
> Visit www.826nyc.org for more details and other programs.
>
> For press information, please contact Harris Dew, at 212 924-6789 or
> hdew@ifccenter.com
>
> IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at West 3rd Street, box
> office: 212 924-7771.
> For showtimes, advance tickets, and more information, visit
> ifccenter.com.You Shall Know Their Verbosity
Or at least their voluminousness: What with the elections, the issue close of the magazine where I work, the story I was writing for same, the reading of the Roz Chast compendium, candy corn, a family episode, getting all my shoes repaired, Heartbreak House, the world suddenly lousy with enraging words and phrases, and the Grey Gardens DVD extras, legitimately New Yorker-related links have been piling up like so many leaves in a drainpipe. But like the rains that swept the city today, taking care of the last few hangers-on among the branches, so shall the next few posts dispose of these links, which are kind of tormenting me with their unpostedness. Telltale heartthrobs, if you will.
While you’re waiting, my friend Lisa Levy, who’s working on a very impressive book, reviews Courtney Love’s scrapbooky memoir for Salon.Banned Words and Phrases Play On
12. “hehe” for “hee hee.” “Hee hee” has been a written representation of “If you could hear me, I’d be laughing” for some time (I’ll check the OED; I bet it’s centuries). You’re only saving two letters this way and it looks like the word “he” twice. What’s next, “sheshe” for goddess types?
13. “Let’s see, I need the tuna on whole wheat.” There are also available phrases for this, e.e. “I’d like…” and “May I have…?” You need a blood transfusion, or a scalpel, or a new hed and dek pronto because it’s press day. You might even need a drink or a slap in the face or a pinch. You probably don’t need a sandwich. Be nice to the poor deli people; all they hear all day is how much people need that thing, right now, hurry it up, I’m busy and important (and rude).
14. “Moreso” is not a word. It is two words: “more so.” If you’d like to be convinced further, since you have trust issues, here’s the Word Detective on the matter:Dear Evan: Is “moreso” a word? I can’t find it in my dictionaries; my spell-checker doesn’t like it, but I’ve been reading and hearing it everywhere recently. Two examples from the one page of the sports section: ” … and he is confident the ’96 Braves, moreso than the ’72 Braves will embrace a teenager.” “Shrouded this time by closer Mark Wohlers’ franchise-record 31st save moreso than John Smoltz’s seamless season, ….” —R. Duvall, via the Internet.
Your spell checker is not alone. I not only don’t like “moreso,” I don’t understand why anyone would write that way. If you had supplied only one example, I’d have said that it was almost certainly a typographical error, but if “moreso” is truly suddenly commonplace, I am deeply alarmed. Mutant words seem to be springing up in the sports section.
I should call a time-out at this point and mention that I am absolutely, utterly sports-illiterate, and have never read the sports section of any newspaper. Ever. Really. True, I did manage the baseball, hockey and soccer teams in high school, but my duties in each case had only a marginal relationship to the particular sport per se. My primary duty to the soccer team, for instance, seemed to be to warn our coach if I spotted the Headmaster coming, so he would have time to put away his flask. My role in the grand scheme of the hockey team, on the other hand, consisted largely of driving newly-toothless players to the Emergency Room. I became awesomely proficient in filling out hospital forms and calming distraught parents.
But I digress. You say that you have been reading and hearing “moreso” everywhere. Hearing it doesn’t bother me — after all, “more so” (two words) is a perfectly respectable construction meaning “to a greater extent than.” Radio and television “sportscasters” slurring the two words together doesn’t surprise me. Sportswriters jamming “more” and “so” together into one word repeatedly in print, however, is a bad idea. What about its opposite construction, “less so”? Are we now to glop these together into “lesso”? Soon we’ll be facing “inorderto” and “inspiteof,” not to mention “nottomention.” Welcome to Mars. Somebody hand me that flask.“Gays on a Plane”: Kenji Yoshino on the Canoodling Controversy
In the current issue of The Advocate, the Yale law professor comments on the galling story first recounted in Lauren Collins’s September 25 Talk:
I first encountered this story in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, a section to which I repeatedly turn for consolation after confirming that I have once again failed to win the Cartoon Caption Contest. I found the story oddly riveting. A spin through the blogosphere showed I was not alone. Why was the incident so compelling to so many? I came up with three answers.
First, the gays on the plane expected equal treatment. When Varnier was woken from his happy slumber on his boyfriend’s shoulder and told to “stop that,†he didn’t know what “that†meant. Before that rude awakening, he didn’t think of his “kissing†and “touching†as extraordinary. It was less like a gay kiss-in than a 1980s straight honeymoon.
The right to canoodle is not in the Constitution. The couple’s assumption that they had that right, however, marks a milestone in gay rights. When I teach gay history to my students I tell it as a history of weakening demands for conformity to straight norms—the demand to convert, the demand to pass, and the demand to cover. Through the middle decades of the 20th century gays were routinely pressured to convert to heterosexuality, whether through psychoanalysis, electroshock therapy, lobotomies, or even castration. After the rise of the gay rights movement the demand to convert shifted in emphasis toward the demand to pass—we were told that we would not be witch-hunted out of our closets so long as we spent our entire lives in them. And at the turn of the millennium the demand to pass is shifting toward the “demand to coverâ€â€”sociologist Erving Goffman’s phrase for how people experience pressure to downplay known stigmatized traits, even after we reveal them. Gays are increasingly told that we can be openly gay so long as we don’t “flaunt†our sexual orientation by being too “flamboyant,†too “militant,†or, as in this case, too “public†in our displays of affection for each other.In other news, Robert Gottlieb’s son, Nicky Gottlieb, is the star of a new movie about life with Asperger Syndrome, directed by daughter Lizzie Gottlieb; the true complexity of women in James Webb’s novels; Truman Capote’s stuff is being auctioned off by Johnny Carson’s second wife; Ved Mehta returns to Arkansas for a visit; and the late Art Schroeder of Walnut Creek once dazzled Dorothy Parker on the dance floor.
If you’re thinking of bidding in the Capote free-for-all:Among the other 337 lots is the tuxedo Capote wore to his famous Black and White Ball ($4,000 to $6,000), a 7.05-carat fancy colored diamond and emerald ring Joanne Carson received from Capote ($20,000 to $30,000); Capote’s passport ($1,000 to $1,500); a signed Richard Avedon portrait of Capote ($800 to $1,200) and a Courreges windbreaker he wore to Studio 54 with a “VIP complimentary drinks” ticket still in the pocket ($300 to $500).
Book Review: Two Tales of “Jeopardy!”
The competitive pursuit of trivia
By Emily Gordon
Special to Newsday
October 29, 2006
BRAINIAC: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, by Ken Jennings. Villard, 269 pp., $24.95.
PRISONER OF TREBEKISTAN: A Decade in “Jeopardy!,” by Bob Harris. Crown, 339 pp., $23.95.
The recital of known facts has often kept chaos at bay, but in a culture blanketed with “truthiness” and spin, Internet alter egos and reporters composing out-of-state bulletins from their living rooms, perhaps facts have become more important than ever. It seems wrong, then, to dismiss the precise naming of details from the world’s history of art, politics, science, technology, and so forth as mere “trivia,” a game as frivolous as Twister.
Bob Harris and Ken Jennings agree. Two high-profile stars of television’s “Jeopardy!,” they’ve each written about being on the show, but both books are really about the lives that went into the playing of this game—their own lives, certainly, but also the
millions of lives that made the games, the collation of facts and the facts themselves possible.
Ken Jennings is a name so revered (and feared) that there are several YouTube parodies of his 74-show winning streak; one animated short has mustachioed host Alex Trebek take him out with a handgun after a boyishly eager Jennings has gotten the question right one too many times. Jennings may have pummeled his opponents on the air with his clear head and quick thinking, but his tone throughout “Brainiac” is one of a properly humble guru, as well as that of a gentle investigator sharing his journey with his friend the reader.
Indeed, Jennings’ book – while it does include the tale of that famous winning streak—is much more concerned with how “Jeopardy!” and related tests came to be than in his personal journey, engaging as that turns out to be. He tracks trivia’s intellectual history back to 1691 and visits Stevens Point, Wis., host to the world’s biggest yearly trivia event. He also seeks out several quiz-show kings and queens, from “Jeopardy!” writers to champs of the past. A Mormon, Jennings and his unflaggingly supportive wife, Mindy, even brave a popular barstool video game he’s never encountered. As a bonus treat, every chapter’s end has the answers to all the footnoted, unanswered questions that have likely been stumping you as you read.
Jennings and computer programmer Bob Harris would likely never have met had they not both shared a “sponge-like brain” (as Jennings puts it); Harris, who’s worked in comedy, TV and radio and is an endearingly frank showman, may be a bit rough-and-tumble for Utah. Where Jennings’ storytelling is solid and focused, Harris’ is a jubilant Mexican jumping bean of digressions and asides. He seems to conceal nothing from us: his mad mental leaps of faith during a question, the books he’s never read whose key details he nonetheless knows by heart, the things that are worrying him even as he’s thumbing the buzzer, while the maddening “Think usic”—composed by Trebek himself—ominously ticks off the seconds.
Still, larger life events are never far from Harris’ thoughts, in particular his sister Connie’s frustratingly undiagnosed illnesses and the scary period in which Jane, by far the most serious of his girlfriends, undergoes breast cancer treatment. We even stop with him at his father’s grave; there are no simple relationships here, and perhaps the reliability of facts, if not always of memory (Harris won and lost and won again), was a good counterbalance to the rockiness of illness and family life.
Harris’ book has other pleasures to recommend it, like playful typographical representations of his digressive thought process (the letters get very, very small) and evocations of the trademark “Jeopardy!” screens both real and fanciful. Everything in Harris’ memoir is lighthearted and fast-paced, even when it isn’t. The revelation of his many mnemonic tricks will be a valuable addition to the “starter kit” of trivia-related books he includes, the bibles of hopeful future Harrises and Jenningses around the world.
“Jeopardy!” may be just a TV game show, but what do college kids doing Quiz Bowl, political bloggers fact-checking the hours away, stats-mad baseball fans, Supreme Court clerks and librarians have in common anyway? Love for truth is clearly one of the answers. Jennings puts it well: “As I stand behind a ‘Jeopardy!’ podium and answer question after question on cancer drugs and the civil rights movement and the
lives of Einstein and Gandhi and Mozart, I realize why the word ‘trivia’ is so inappropriate. It’s actually important to know who history’s great geniuses were, that some cancer is treatable, or that the civil rights movement happened.”
The waterfall of facts in “Brainiac” and “Prisoner of Trebekistan” may exhaust you, but it’s more likely to send you to an atlas, a newspaper, or a play. Trivia is the world we’ve been given, the one we want to hold on to, and it’s as precious as the water we drink.
Incidentally, by both accounts, Trebek is a lovely guy.I Reviewed Those Two “Jeopardy!” Books
…and here’s the review. Note that I do not make light of the breast cancer diagnosis of one author’s girlfriend, which is more than the Times Book Review can say. Isn’t it odd that Jeopardy! winner-loser-winner Bob Harris has the same name as the hero of Lost in Translation? Or was that on purpose, Sofia? Should we be reading something into this about the search for answers in a Babel of mixed signals and missed connections?
William Styron, 1925-2006
William Styron died yesterday. This makes me sad. From the NYT:
The reaction to “The Confessions of Nat Turner†was at first enthusiastic. Reviewers were sympathetic to Mr. Styron’s right to inhabit his subject’s mind, to speak in a version of Nat Turner’s voice and to weave a fiction around the few facts known about the uprising. George Steiner, in The New Yorker, called the book “a fiction of complex relationship, of the relationship between a present-day white man of deep Southern roots and the Negro in today’s whirlwind.â€
…
When the Styrons settled in their Connecticut farmhouse and began a family, his life became the ideal of any aspiring writer: productive yet relaxed, sociable yet protected. On the door frame outside his workroom, he tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.â€
The precept seemed to work for him, but it was an unconventional routine he stuck to: sleep until noon; read and think in bed for another hour or so; lunch with Rose around 1:30; run errands, deal with the mail, listen to music, daydream and generally ease into work until 4. Then up to the workroom to write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph until 200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and dinner with the family and friends at 8 or 9; and stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music.He woke to sleep, and took his waking slow.
Signature Rea Irvin
…well, Rea Irvin’s signature. That’s a chiasmus you can take to the bank!