What’s that? You say you wouldn’t be able to pick David Denby out of a police lineup? Don’t know what Peter Schjeldahl looks like either? Friend, I hear you.
How fortunate that the Charlie Rose program, which is probably the closest thing to The New Yorker on television (nothing closer comes to mind), has suddenly decided to slap most of its past shows onto its website. There’s so much great stuff! (I love Charlie, but he does talk too much. Still, what mainstream show can boast such a high standard of discourse?)
See, in living color, audio tracks in full synchronization with the moving image, full of sound and fury, passion and reason, the following notable personages (many of them several times):
Roger Angell
Tina Brown
David Remnick
Malcolm Gladwell (Bonus: you can watch his hair expand with the years)
Adam Gopnik
Hendrik Hertzberg
Nicholas Lemann
Anthony Lane
David Denby
Jerome Groopman
Jeffrey Toobin
Atul Gawande
Seymour Hersh
John Seabrook
Nancy Franklin
John Lahr
Steve Martin
Dave Eggers
Peter Schjeldahl
Calvin Tomkins
John Updike
Brendan Gill
Calvin Trillin
Philip Gourevitch
Lawrence Wright
… as well as countless other writers and artists with a relationship to the magazine (e.g., Annie Proulx, Ian McEwan, Annie Leibovitz).
—Martin Schneider
Note: When I first posted this, I did not realize that on the show’s website itself, the user is apparently constricted in terms of screen size and also the ability to zip forward and backward (you can pause). The show’s partner in this archival effort is Google Video, where you can see the shows at a more normal size, can fast-forward, and so on. —MCS
Monthly Archives: August 2007
Book Notes for the Weekend
I had no idea about this memoir by Michael Gates Gill, Brendan Gill’s son and a celebrator of Starbucks, but I’m very keen to read it. Looks like it’s Gotham Books, September. I must get hold of one! I like how the subtitle can be read as a subtle nod to one of the best books I read last year.
And on Mediabistro, Neal Ungerleider posts an appreciation of a post by Sewell Chan on the City Room blog, all about Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould. My hat’s off (and I just inherited two large hatboxes full of hats) to both Joes. Read Chan’s tribute. Gould, too, had had a life of privilege, mostly. I respectfully disagree with Ungerleider and with Stephen Holden that Joe Gould’s Secret, the movie, is second-rate. One can’t have expectations like that for adaptations; it’s a beautiful movie, a West Village poem, unto itself.
Roz Chast Chicken and Mankoff KaBob: The Cartoonists’ Feast
On his blog, cartoonist (and occasional Emdashes advertiser) Mick Stevens continues to provide his poignant and entertaining insight into the nerve-wracking process of submitting New Yorker cartoons and waiting fraught days for the magic OK (or the Steinbergian No).
Having just witnessed Carolita Johnson faxing off her batch and observing the fax machine’s temper tantrums as it tried to reject the wavy sheets of well-drawn-on paper—and that was before cartoon editor Bob Mankoff could see them—I have some inkling of what these extremely productive, slightly paranoid artists go through week after week.
Two of Stevens’s recent treats: a batch of witty “recipes” for cartooning à la Chast & co., and a sampling of his comrades’ first OKs. The respondents so far: Kim Warp (“I actually called my friend after we hung up to make sure it wasn’t a cruel cruel joke”), Tom Cheney (“Wisely, Lee had selected a drawing that he was sure I could handle with my fledgling drawing style”), and Gahan Wilson (“There was also a never-opened door painted with the same paint and a small, barred window looking in on a tiny room”).
Carolita, Drew, Matt, Eric, and all the rest of you, I hope you’ll take a moment and post yours! And dare we hope for Barsotti and BEK?
James Wood on Move to New Yorker in the New York Observer
Brooke Astor, 1902-2007
Ariella Budick writes in Newsday:
Brooke Astor, who died at 105 Monday of pneumonia at Holly Hill, her Westchester County estate, was perhaps New York City’s last grande dame, an all-but-extinct breed. Socialite, philanthropist, self-confessed flirt and expert charmer, she enriched the city she lived in with wit, style, and unstinting largesse.
…
She was the only child of Gen. John Henry Russell Jr., a Marine Corps officer whose work took him around the globe. Brooke passed her childhood in a range of foreign locales: China, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Hawaii. She briefly attended the Madeira School in McLean, Va., before dropping out to pursue her social life full-time.
“My mother was afraid I would learn too much and become a bluestocking,” she told her friend, the late New Yorker writer Brendan Gill. Cont’d.
In a 1999 Talk, John Cassidy described an awards-gala appearance in which Astor, “a sprightly flyweight going on ninety-seven,” appeared alongside Hillary Clinton:
In truth, though, Mrs. Clinton was no match for Mrs. Astor, a hardy dowager who has honed her technique at thousands of such occasions. Clambering onto the stage, she held the audience rapt as she told of her thirty-nine years as head of the Astor Foundation—a period during which the foundation distributed two hundred million dollars to causes that ranged from the public-library system and the Metropolitan Museum to low-income housing in Queens. “I’ve given it all to New York, and I’ve never given anything to anything I haven’t seen,” she declared, in her plummy English accent, the likes of which is rarely heard outside Buckingham Palace these days.
Gill wrote in his 1997 piece: “She always speaks at ease, without preparation, phrases springing to her lips with the unguardedness of someone who has long known exactly who she is.”
It’s Not TMI When Somebody Asks For It
From my Gmail inbox (which, mainly because of Emdashes-related alerts and correspondence, contains more messages than you can probably absorb without an abacus):
Dear New Yorker Compass Member,
The New Yorker Compass wants to learn more about your personal relationship with the magazine. We invite you to share your thoughts and opinions.
Please take a few moments to complete this survey. In thanks for your participation, your name will be entered into a drawing for the chance to win a copy of The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw and Never Will See in The New Yorker. The book, edited by New Yorker contributor Matthew Diffee, is a hilarious look at the lost gems that have never seen the light of day. Thirty winners will be chosen at random and notified a few weeks after the survey has been completed.
One of the questions: “How interested would you be in receiving a digital edition of The New Yorker magazine? This would be a digital version that looks exactly like your printed issue, but you could access it online.” A mind-blowing concept. I know some Californians and Canadians (not to mention Austrians) who will find this especially appealing! But will they sacrifice their print copy? And: “How much would you be willing to pay on top of the regular subscription price for full access to The Complete New Yorker?” Now this is going to sell.
I’ve filled out these surveys before (they combine two of my favorite things, questionnaires and The New Yorker), but so far have never won any prizes. That’s all right, because I already own The Rejection Collection. But did you know there’s a second book of rejected cartoons coming out this fall? Yes: The Rejection Collection Vol. II: The Cream of the Crap. I’ve seen an early portion of the book, and it’s ripe, all right! It has all the satisfying offensiveness of the previous edition, with even more amusingly ridiculous cartoonist questionnaires, plus the incomparable Roz Chast, who refuses to answer many of the questions. This is a series I can live with.
Meanwhile, unrelated: I liked Leon Wieseltier’s column on the Times’ giddy “glorification of the grotesquely rich” and the latter-day Walter Benjamins of commerce, who so treasure their book collections that they even bring them on vacation: “Another CEO ‘has stocked his cabin in the woods with the collected works of Aristotle,’ which is very nice for Aristotle, especially in the summer.” Shades of Woody Allen’s zingiest prose. Best bit:
No doubt this latest bath of pluto-porn at the Times will be partly justified as an interest in the philanthropic consequences of the new fortunes; and while it is true that the generosity of some of the new rich is extraordinary, it is also true that charity is not economic justice. (It is the absence of economic justice that makes charity necessary.)
Breaking: Ghost Orchid, Co-Star of Orlean Book and Jonze Film, Blooming Again
From the Tampa Bay blog at the St. Petersburg Times:
A rare ghost orchid, first spotted in July in Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, is blooming again, the Miami Herald reports. The plant is believed to grow naturally only in Cuba, the Bahamas and Southwest Florida. The blossom is white and has thin, spindly stems that virtually disappear against the dark backdrop of the swamps in which it thrives, giving it the appearance of being suspended in midair.
The plant is a central character in Susan Orlean’s celebrated The Orchid Thief [link mine], a 1998 book about a rogue plant dealer in Southwest Florida who is arrested for taking the rare orchid and other species from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve southwest of Naples.
In a 1995 article in The New Yorker magazine that was the basis for the book, Orlean described plant dealer John Laroche as “a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all of his front teeth.” Orlean’s book tells Laroche’s story as an orchid enthusiast who hatches a plan with the cooperation of the Seminole tribe to build a nursery and orchid greenhouse.
…
A 2002 film, Adaptation, was based more or less on Orlean’s book but was really more about adapting a book to a screenplay than it was about the Orlean book.
For more about Adaptation, check out a mini-blog that Jason Kottke kept about the movie at Susan Orlean’s site, which he developed. (Click around; it’s a nice site.)
Also, California olive-oil producers, chuffed by the Tom Mueller exposé, “Slippery Business,” are declaring their oil squeaky clean.
Letter From Saalfelden: The Phoenix
Emdashes contributing editor and Squib Reporter Martin Schneider files a welcome post from afar.
Emily has been careful to signal my absence from our weekly Pick of the Issue posts due to my spending a few weeks in a rural Alpine outpost in Austria. Unsurprisingly, its remoteness precludes any possibility of receiving new issues of The New Yorker, so the last issue I received before leaving was the issue of July 9/16. I return on August 17.
That’s about six weeks altogether (the dates don’t match up, but trust me, it is)—a long stretch to be separated from the grist for this particular mill, but I had resigned myself to it. My connectivity combines extreme slowness and great expense, making proper perusal of even the online contents impractical; with a pang, I’ve watched the Picks of the Issue come and go.
Then a friend passed through for the weekend, a journalist in Vienna who’s a voracious consumer of fine American periodicals. On Sunday, he placed a small pile of printed matter on my table, indicating that I could take them or consign them to the Kachelofen.
In that pile were the two most recent issues of The New Yorker: July 28 and August 6.
And I can testify that absence really does make the heart grow fonder. —Martin Schneider
If You’re Going to Target, Be Sure to Put Some Caption Contest Games in Your Cart
I’ve been pelted with emails about this today. I still haven’t played the game, but whenever Emdashes contributing editor Martin, the mysterious but ever-closer ZP Alabasium, David Marc Fischer, and newyorkette want to get together for a bottle of wine and a round of caption-mangling, I’m ready. From the L.A. Times:
In the latest expansion of its brand name into the retail market, the board game version of the New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest has just gone on sale at Target stores nationwide.
And although it may seem like an incongruous match between the discount store’s unapologetically mass appeal and the magazine’s upscale cachet, the people involved don’t find it strange at all.
When the New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, talks about the deal, he sounds more like an MBA candidate than an editorial staffer at the august literary weekly.
“These cartoons are accessible to people, and they’re an exportable part of the magazine for its brand identity,” Mankoff said.
…
As for the sale of the cartoon game at Target, Remnick was unruffled.
“With all due respect to the New York Times and the Washington Post, the last time I looked I could get a coffee mug, all kinds of doodads ancillary to those newspapers, and I don’t think it compromises their news columns,” he said.
“Once we had a great cover dividing New York into faux Yiddish and Afghani neighborhoods,” [David] Remnick said. “It became a shower curtain and a poster, and it brought in a lot of money. . . . I don’t think it undermined Western civilization, much less the standards of the New Yorker.”
…
Mankoff imagined Eustace Tilley sitting behind an information desk at a Target store, pointing to the Target motto and dryly advising a shopper: “If you’d like to expect more, and pay less for sophisticated laughs, I’d recommend the New Yorker cartoon caption game.”
Dorothy Parker the Cat and Bonobo the Sexy Monkey
A few nights ago, I stopped by the Algonquin for Matilda the hotel cat’s kind sponsorship of a North Shore Animal League benefit. Hairless cats! Cunning costumes! Drinks! Pistachio cake! My favorite waiter! The place was packed, and I took some really blurry pictures with my phone, but Kevin Fitzpatrick, fearless leader of the Dorothy Parker Society, took far better ones, so take a look (Elvis has not left the building). Two Dorothy Parker Society members even adopted a cat, which they named…can you guess?
In other news, there is some debate among those with the opposable thumbs, tools, religion, and/or blogs to conduct it, about Ian Parker’s look at the myth of the bisexual, benevolent bonobo. You say alliteration isn’t evolved? It’s primal, man.
Some fuzzy but affectionately snapped cell-phone photos of the Algonquin bash follow. Kevin’s, again, are far better, especially of Matilda; by the time I got around to my arbitrary photo session, she had retreated behind her mini-door. I’m compensating by throwing in a picture of my own furry pal, who does not live in a hotel, but seems pretty contented, but I can’t say for sure since I’m never home.