Monthly Archives: August 2009

Blind Items from the New Yorker Festival Blog, Part 2

Martin Schneider writes:
More Festival blind items from the New Yorker Festival blog (here’s the first one):

Which television personality got her big break when she won a contest to be a radio host on WRNX, in Holyoke, Massachusetts?

What actor and playwright once played a New Yorker theatre critic in a movie?

Which singer-songwriter once said, “I’m one of those people that will probably look better and better as I get older—until I drop dead of beauty”?

Any guesses?

What’s in This Week’s New Yorker: 08.31.09

Martin Schneider writes:
A new issue of The New Yorker comes out tomorrow. A preview of its contents, adapted from the magazine’s press release:
In “The Rubber Room,” Steven Brill goes inside a facility where New York City teachers who have been accused of misconduct, or, in some cases, incompetence are required to spend each day—for which they receive full pay—while they await arbitration. Under the terms of the city’s contract with the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, teachers with more than three years’ seniority are guaranteed a job for life and cannot be fired unless they are “charged with an offense and lose in the arduous arbitration hearing,” Brill writes. Teachers can sit idle in these facilities, commonly referred to as “Rubber Rooms,” for as many as five years.
In “Perfect Match,” Burkhard Bilger profiles tennis’s Bob and Mike Bryan, “the best doubles team of their generation,” and examines the evolution of doubles tennis.
In “Useless Beauty,” Nick Paumgarten visits Governors Island in New York Harbor and explores the battle over how to develop it now that it is back under New York’s control.
In Comment, Laura Secor looks at the history of coerced confessions and show trials in Iran, and explains why such tactics are ineffectual today.
James Surowiecki asks if the public’s resistance to Obama’s health-care-reform plan is psychological.
Paul Simms sends a corporate memo about restructuring in one’s personal life.
Elif Batuman chronicles the rise of comedy traffic schools.
Elizabeth Kolbert explores extreme experiments in low-impact living.
James Wood examines attempts to defend God from the new atheists.
Alex Ross notes a recent return to improvisation in bel-canto opera.
Anthony Lane reviews Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock and The Baader Meinhof Complex.
There is a short story by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Sneak Peek: Tasty Previews of the New Yorker Festival

Martin Schneider writes:
I see that the New Yorker Festival blog has posted a few blind items pertaining to the featured personalities who will be appearing at the 2009 Festival in October. Here they are:

Which author said that her most famous short story took twice as long to write as a novel “because I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men”?

Which young movie actor pretended to have different accents—”Italian, Russian, Irish”—when he worked at a McDonald’s drive-thru?

This creator of an Emmy Award-winning drama was once a contestant on “Jeopardy!” (Answer in the form of a question, please.)

Any guesses? I figured out a couple of them, but I’d like to hear what you think. We’re hearing that there’ll be several more of these blind posts before the schedule is announced in September. Exciting!

Sempé Fi (On Covers): South of the Highway

8-17-09 Bruce McCall The Hamptons.jpg
_Pollux writes_:
A new themed restaurant has opened in town: _The Hamptons_! Come for the atmosphere without dealing with all the hassles of the real place. When you visit the restaurant, there’s no need to get stuck in traffic on the narrow rural road that materializes after the bridge over the Shinnecock Canal.
There’s also no need to find a place to stay during the crowded summer months. Walk or take a taxi to the restaurant. No muss, no fuss. The scene at the actual place has been “dampened”:http://www.observer.com/2009/daily-transom/checking-georgica-restaurant-and-lounge somewhat by the recession, anyway.
Yes, The Hamptons Restaurant has all the social charms of the real thing and none of the natural charms. There’s no view of Lake Agawam or the hamlets of Water Mill, Sagaponack and Wainscott, but you can settle in for “the season” for just a few pleasant hours. The restaurant has no off-season. Come with friends, come alone. You’re at “The Hamptons,” not The Hamptons.
“Bruce McCall’s”:http://www.brucemccall.com/ restaurant provides access to a social scene–and access to a name. “The Hamptons,” after all, is a name that evokes affluence, expensive zip codes, and plutocratic privilege. To attach the name to a decidedly unspectacular location on an ordinary city street is to attempt to rub a patina of exclusivity on an otherwise ordinary eatery.
McCall thus detaches the name from the place, and challenges us to think of what “The Hamptons” really means. Would the name mean the same to us if it were not associated with the 30-mile string of resorts along the South Fork of Long Island? Does the restaurant retain any of the glamour of the place after which it was named?
As the great American toponymist “George R. Stewart”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Stewart writes in his landmark _Names on the Globe_, “Though a place may be conceived as existing in itself or as standing in the consciousness of an animal, a place-name exists only with men, being a part of language…”
Thus, the wide sandy beaches and cornfields and salty air that make up the geographic region of The Hamptons exist in themselves, with or without this famous name. But “The Hamptons” is a name that exists only in the minds of men and women, especially in the minds of the good people of New York.
The people who patronize this restaurant seem happy enough. McCall creates a cheery, convivial atmosphere. The restaurant literally glows with gentle yellow light, casting a beam of happy radiance onto a gray, lonely street. Maybe the customers are happier there than they would have ever been in Long Island, with no traffic, no snobbery, and no distance with which to contend.
As always, McCall creates a quietly detailed scene, making a comment without overstating his point. With McCall’s artwork, one drinks in the scene little by little, as if taking in the layout of a model train set.
Yes, a new themed restaurant has opened in town. The food’s okay. But don’t come for the butter-bathed lobster, stay for the name.