Monthly Archives: December 2009

I’ll Sing You Five-O, Green Grow the Rushes-O!

Five years ago today, I sat in the appropriately named Williamsburg bar The Lucky Cat (now Bruar Falls), enjoying tea and free wifi, and began this blog. One was far from a lonely number; from the beginning, Emdashes had friends, commenters (though as a readership, dear readership, you tend to be shy, preferring to send me thoughtfully composed emails rather than shout to the public square), supporters, and exactly one member of the peanut gallery, whose small legumes haven’t scarred.
But Emdashes today is a lot more than a gal in a bar feeling warm toward a heartbreakingly flawless Donald Antrim essay. It’s an honest-to-Irvin team, a clan of kindred spirits, a gathering place for like-minded New Yorker-philes for whom a casual read and a quick look will never be enough. It’s the blog’s core group of friends and collaborators, Martin Schneider and Pollux and Jonathan Taylor and Benjamin Chambers, about whom I can’t say enough, and I hope they know how thoroughly I treasure their winsome and steady posts, essential ideas, and intercontinental companionship. It’s the many excellent guest writers and artists, and smart and generous interns, who’ve contributed to the blog over the past five years.
I’m almost too emotional to write this, and it’s almost New Year’s Eve, so, for once, I’m at a loss for words. What can I say but thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you? To Patric King and Su from House of Pretty, illustrators Jesse Ewing and (righteously lupine) Carolita Johnson, and the New Yorker librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, whose clever minds are only outdone by their open hearts, and who have taken their fabulous Emdashes Ask the Librarians column all the way to The Big Show. To David Remnick and the New Yorker staff, from 1925 on out, for being there week in and week out, in the best and worst of times–proving that the life of the mind, the world of the page, and the shimmering pixels of the screen can be noble, beautiful, truthful, and funny causes to which to dedicate oneself. To you, reader. Stay with us; we’ll be here.

The Big Plenty: An End-of-Year Message

_Pollux writes_:
For the economist Paul Krugman, the years 2000 to 2009 may have been “The Big Zero”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html, but for me, thanks to Emdashes, the last couple of years have been an Era of Plenty. I mean the kind of “Plenty” that matters, the kind that is less about material acquisition and more about gaining access to new thoughts and ideas.
To be a part of Emdashes is truly a great privilege and honor, and to work with Emily, Martin, Benjamin, and Jonathan is to be amongst intelligent and congenial company.
2009 marked the first year that I was able to attend The New Yorker Festival, and I hope to attend many more.
2009 was also the year I began writing my “Sempé Fi column”:http://emdashes.com/sempe-fi/, which covers _New Yorker_ covers, and which has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience. And I continue to enjoy drawing “The Wavy Rule.”:http://emdashes.com/the-wavy-rule/
Not only do we celebrate the beginning of a new year and new decade, we also celebrate the anniversary of Emdashes. Five years of Emdashes!
I often wonder how Harold Ross, _The New Yorker’s_ first editor, would have reacted to the existence of our little website. Probably in this manner:
rossnyear.jpg
In any case, once blogging, the Internet, and computers had been explained to Mr. Ross, perhaps by either a patient E.B. White, Katherine White, or Rea Irvin, I think the editor would have been tickled pink by our online offering.
Ross would have encouraged us to move forward and do more, more, more. And so we shall. Here’s to a prosperous and productive 2010!
Thank you all! And drive safely tonight! The Internet Superhighway is a dangerous place (“Internet Superhighway” is a term you don’t hear much anymore).
pollucnewyear.jpg

Lorrie Moore’s Latest Novel: Alternate Covers, New Yorker-Style

Emily Gordon writes:
Our friend and Print contributing editor Peter Terzian showcases some of the unused covers for Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs (which I reviewed not long ago). And there’s a double New Yorker connection! Peter writes:

Barbara de Wilde, associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf, has designed the jackets of Lorrie Moore’s novels and story collections dating back to Like Life, in 1990. For the cover of A Gate at the Stairs, Moore’s first book in a decade, de Wilde initially contacted Daniel Hertzberg, whose illustrations she had seen in The New Yorker. “I loved the high-contrast quality of his drawings,” she says. “It reminded me of Robert McCloskey books. I wanted all those remarkable colors from Blueberries for Sal and Make Way for Ducklings–those mustards and odd greens and quirky blues.”

Go to the post to see the parallel-universe covers!

David Levine, 1926-2009

Martin Schneider writes:
Some people, you figure they will just always be there. David Levine was drawing caricatures for The New York Review of Books well before my birth, and it was only reasonable to suppose he’d be at it years after my death, too. It’s difficult to imagine a world without a steady succession of new Levine drawings in it; it’s not merely perverse fancy to wonder whether Levine’s death makes it impossible for The New York Review of Books to keep publishing articles. That is how strong that association was.
You may have guessed that I grew up in a household with The New York Review of Books in it. Has there ever been a connection between an illustrator and a periodical as strong as that between Levine and The New York Review of Books? Norman Rockwell and The Saturday Evening Post, I guess. I can’t think of another one. His drawings meant as much to the identity of that journal as—if not more than—Rea Irvin’s typeface and monocled fop have meant to the image of The New Yorker.
How do these things happen? It’s not just that the drawings synecdochally came to represent the high quality of the articles in The New York Review of Books; the transferral of associations very nearly worked the other direction, too. I guess it’s just a long-winded way of saying, the artist and the periodical were made for each other.
Maybe the highest compliment one can pay Levine’s work (at least the caricatures; he was also a painter) is that the work lies in some realm beyond which the word “witty” really has no meaning. They were not “witty,” and they were not lacking in wit, either. Many of the drawings contain the kind of visual puns that constitute the most basic elements of the caricaturist’s trade. And the drawings could have dispensed with them altogether, without any loss of quality. The drawings rewarded the intelligent and informed reader who is in a mood to be serious but also engaged. In short, the New York Review of Books kind of reader.
Levine’s art appeared in The New Yorker many, many times, but it would be folly for me to celebrate him as a New Yorker contributor, impressive though those contributions surely were. It would be like celebrating Michael Jordan’s exploits for the Washington Wizards.
Earlier this year, I was obliged to empty out the house in which I grew up. Thirty-five years of living had accumulated in its corners, and I was forced to throw much of it away. During that process I came across a faded sheaf of twelve prints by Levine, presumably distributed to subscribers (in this case, my dad) a decade or three ago. I threw away so much, but I kept this, because reading means something to me, because ideas mean something to me, because The New York Review of Books means something to me, because David Levine means something to me. I’m looking at the prints as I write this.

What Gives? Village Voice Poll Cineastes Commit Critical Malpractice

Martin Schneider writes:
The Village Voice has been publishing that year-end film poll combining the assessments of a few dozen critics since 1999. I enjoy it every year, because I’m a dorky cultural maven type, and it pleases me to see these aesthetic preferences totted up in a list for people to argue over. They love Claire Denis, I love Claire Denis, everybody wins.
This year the big winner was The Hurt Locker, which I enjoyed very much but maybe not as much as these critics. That’s fine, The Hurt Locker was terrific.
The list that has me steamed is the list of the best movies of the decade. After I had studied the list for a little bit, I couldn’t decide whether to conclude that cinema had died during the “Noughts” or that movie critics are stupid—or both.
Here is a list of the top ten finishers:

Mulholland Dr. (10)
In the Mood for Love (5)
The 25th Hour (5)
La Commune (Paris, 1871) (4)
Zodiac (4)
Yi Yi (4)
Dogville (3)
The New World (3)
There Will Be Blood (3)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (3)

That’s a pretty depressing list, if you ask me, and the other 40 finishers really aren’t any better (which makes sense, if you think about it—they did finish lower). Among those 40 movies are Brian De Palma’s preposterous Femme Fatale and the third Star Wars movie; I’ll let you judge from that how seriously these critics were taking this task.
Let’s go through the top ten, quickly. Mulholland Drive is all kinds of awesome, and it’s not possible to overpraise it; no problem there. Ditto In the Mood for Love, but even there, it may be a bit too “pat” an arthouse fave—it’s great but a little studied. I’ll return to the other second-place winner in a moment. Zodiac was a very impressive movie indeed, and I regard myself as its champion to some degree, but, well, it’s got some problems. Yi Yi was wonderful. There Will Be Blood is a bit like Zodiac, awfully powerful but with serious flaws. The other four movies I haven’t seen, which in itself is fine.
I have to take a moment to address The 25th Hour. That this movie can finish tied for second in a poll of this sort is a terrible condemnation of the current state of film criticism in this country. The 25th Hour came out in 2002, and was directed by Spike Lee. It starred Edward Norton, maybe you remember it. I feel strange directing such ire at the movie, because I really like Spike Lee’s movies, I think he’s a highly underappreciated presence in our film culture, too often damned or derided as “political” or “tendentious” when he’s actually a pretty original and canny director who has few peers.
But The 25th Hour is not very good. It is overlong, overwrought, turgid, and self-important. I’m looking now at Lee’s filmography, and I think I would put it about eighth, of his movies. It’s not a terrible movie, it’s not a mess, it’s an honest attempt to make something powerful. But it doesn’t work, and has little of the panache, lightness, wit, or visual flair that come to mind when you are considering a list of the ten best movies of the past one year or ten years. Having The 25th Man finish second for the 2000-2009 period is quite a bit like stating that Martin Scorsese’s greatest movie is Bringing Out the Dead.
To his credit, J. Hoberman (my favorite film critic of all time), in his introduction to the poll, appears to recognize this ridiculous result when he writes:

The Voice poll, which queries film critics throughout the country, had The Hurt Locker on 54 out of 94 ballots; its margin of victory surpassed the runner-up…by the poll’s largest percentage since David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive swamped Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love back in 2001. (These two movies get a rematch in our film of the decade category, with Mulholland Drive defeating runner-up In the Mood even more decisively this time around; the big news there is that Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour, a weak 25th in the 2002 poll, ties for second place.)

So that’s just baffling.
But more to the point, the list, the full list, is just a disgrace. There are certainly some splendid movies in there, but the overall package is lacking in zest. It is a list that confirms the wisdom of my decision to decrease my movie intake during the decade, and what kind of message is that to send?
After stewing about the list for a spell, I spent a quarter-hour brainstorming to create a list of fun, inventive, interesting, amusing, worthwhile movies that did not make the Voice‘s list at all, and which might—might—elicit a smile from a movie-lover somewhere. I’m not a film critic, I don’t do this for a living, and it took me the time to make a plate of grits (hat tip to My Cousin Vinny, 1992) to slap it together. It’s amazing to me that the people who do do it for a living, given many weeks to think about their opportunity to spread their delight in the medium they so love, are this unable to produce a list that does anything like that.
What follows is not my top-anything list, it’s more like the larval form of one. It is merely a list of movies that would make me want to safeguard the decade’s cinematic treasures rather than throw them in the Gowanus Canal, as the Voice‘s list does. To repeat: not a single one of the poll’s critics saw fit to mention any of these movies.

A History of Violence
Adaptation
Amelie
American Splendor
Beau Travail
Borat
Brokeback Mountain
Donnie Darko
Eastern Promises
Ghost World
In Bruges
Inglourious Basterds
Lost in Translation
Milk
Monsoon Wedding
Munich
No Man’s Land
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Primer
Rachel Getting Married
Sideways
Syriana
Talk to Her
The Assassination of Jesse James Etc.
The Departed
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The International
The Motorcycle Diaries
The Prestige
The Queen
The Savages
The Squid and the Whale
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
The Triplets of Bellville
The Visitor
This is England
Training Day
Watchmen
Y Tu Mama También

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I have something queued up to watch on Netflix. Catch you later!