Author Archives: Emdashes

Who First Said “Print Is Dead,” Dr. Venkman?

A rewatch of the original Ghostbusters prompted an urgent Google search, with these satisfying Metafilter results. The asker’s question (also my question):

Print is dead? I was watching Ghostbusters (1984) this weekend, and at one point the character Egon Spengler is asked a question, to which he responds: ‘Print is dead.” What is the earliest recorded use of this phrase?

Among the satisfying replies:

I found a reference in the Antioch Review (1967) that uses “print is dead” as the characterization for Marshall McLuhan’s scholarship, which make a lot of sense to me in this context. This previously is also pertinent.

And:

Someone else in that group also mentions that the “print is dead” line actually gained some popularity in the early 80s in tech circles as the personal computer gained prominence. It likely wasn’t the earliest recorded use, but Egon’s quote may have just been a result of the growing sentiment of the time.

Meanwhile, a recent post on Movies.com answers the question I somehow didn’t think to ask, which is what the various Ghostbusters would look like if they were cartoon ghosts. Now you know.

Best of all, I learned from the Metafilter thread above that Harold Ramis went to the high school three blocks from my new home in Chicago! This must be why I keep watching his movies. Anita O’Day went there, too, which gives me shivers. So did Shecky Greene and Sidney Sheldon, but not all at the same time.

Related: The Contested Number of Years That Bill Murray Is Stuck in “Groundhog Day”

The Contested Number of Years That Bill Murray Is Stuck in Groundhog Day

Harold Ramis says ten. (The screenwriter, Danny Rubin, invites you to pony up to find out what he thinks.) These folks say eight years, eight months, and sixteen days. My favorite estimate comes from this brilliant breakdown, which gives it as 12,403 days of Sonny and Cher and sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist, or almost 34 years. Poor Phil. He really earned that happy ending.
–Emily Gordon

Happy New Year, and Happy Seven Years of Emdashes

We haven’t been posting much, you say? We know it. We’ve all been busy doing other things, including Martin Schneider’s stylish new project, Box Office Boffo. In his words, he’s “blogging every #1 movie in America from 1970 to the present day.” Even better: “Every week there’s a #1 movie at the box office, and I’m going to watch them all.” Not only do you get close inspections of movies like The Owl and the Pussycat and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and whole years in review, you get the original posters, which will make you nostalgic in all kinds of ways.
Meanwhile, Pollux, our favorite painter/cartoonist/New Yorker cover critic/Renaissance man, just had a show at Artlife South Bay. Jonathan Taylor went back to grad school, proving once again that he’s both a gentleman and a scholar, and I’ve been working on a relaunch of The Washington Spectator‘s website and writing theater reviews for Time Out Chicago.
So our collective focus has been elsewhere. But speaking for myself, I’m feeling emdashy again. There’s work to be done and punctuation marks to be shepherded, shorn, and protected from the elements.
–Emily Gordon

Guest Review: Alan Rickman’s Trenchant “Seminar”

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Lee Alexander writes:
It’s hard not to think of Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, curl-lipped and leering behind a smoking cauldron as Harry Potter’s ambiguously evil Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor. In Thersea Rebeck’s new comedy, Seminar (which opened on Sunday at the Golden Theatre), Rickman is once again in command of the classroom, abandoning his robe and wand for a somewhat more mundane task: instructing four twentysomethings on the craft of writing a novel.
Though Rickman’s character, the famous writer Leonard, snidely remarks that “the novel has fallen on hard times,” the audience is secure in the knowledge that the play has not. During the show–which gives us a sense of what highbrow reality television would be like if it existed–we watch with delight as the four hopefuls are eviscerated, one by one, under the cutting critiques of their fiercely disparaging instructor.
_Seminar_ isn’t just a play about writing; it’s also a play about power. Director Sam Gold has a firm grasp on its subtleties in his staging and highlighting of the shifting power dynamics of this highly contentious and incestuous writing circle.
This is ensemble acting at its best, though there are two actors whose performances rise to Rickman’s star power. Kate (played skillfully by the talented Lily Rabe), an affluent young woman whose beautifully designed Upper West Side apartment serves as the group’s meeting spot, is dismissed by Leonard as a rich-girl feminist with an Emily Dickson complex (he dismisses Dickinson’s poetry as “words like lumps of shit”). Rabe has an expert sense of comedic timing, and is a joy to watch as she proves the ultimate literary cliché: Never judge a book–or, in this case, character–by its cover.
As Martin, Hamish Linklater perfectly captures the intensity and undeniable charm of a character whose self-doubt and lack of confidence make him a natural underdog in this cadre of big personalities and oversized egos.
Not everyone in the audience will share the dream of writing the great American novel, but we all face criticism in the pursuit of our own endeavors. Often, of course, the critical figure in the way of our dreams is not a dismissive authority but our own insecurity. After all the vicious insults and all the bruised egos, _Seminar_ reminds us, it’s how we respond to criticism that informs our success. As Leonard warns: “If it gets in, you’re doomed.”
Lee Alexander has an MA in Text and Performance Studies from King’s College/RADA and currently lives in Brooklyn.

The Great Kate Beaton on Drawing for The New Yorker

From a recent A.V. Club interview about Kate Beaton‘s essential new book, Hark! A Vagrant. The as-close-to-universally-beloved-as-it’s-possible-to-get-without-being-a-baby-panda Beaton and cartoonist Sam Means had a cartoon in the June 28 issue of the magazine (as “Beans,” which is a great combi-name). Are more forthcoming? Only Bob Mankoff knows for sure.

AVC: How did you get involved with _The New Yorker_? Did they come to you, or did you go to them?

**KB**: No, you have to submit to them. You give them packages. _The New Yorker_ doesn’t come to anybody, not even the people who’ve been published there for 20 years. You have to submit, and you just keep doing it until they buy one.

**AVC: What’s it like doing comics for them?**

**KB**: It’s just a different audience–and by “audience,” I mean the _New Yorker_ editor who buys your comic or doesn’t, and he’s the guy you want to really impress. I could do anything I wanted on my site, but I just wanted to get in somewhere where an editor said, “This is good enough,” or, “This is not good enough.” There’s a certain _New Yorker_ sensibility, style, sense of humor, that I thought about when I was making them, like, “I want this to look like a _New Yorker_ cartoon.” And I thought that’s how I should go about it. I didn’t write them, Sam Means wrote them, and I drew them. We had a partnership. But recently, I was on a panel with Roz Chast. She’s amazing, and she was like, “You shouldn’t adhere to any style, you should just do what you wanna do. You shouldn’t make it look like a New Yorker cartoon, you should make it look like yours.” Which I never really considered. [Laughs.] I mean, _The New Yorker_’s kind of an institution. But she probably is right. I enjoyed doing it, but maybe I would enjoy it more if I had stuck to my own sensibilities more. I don’t know.

See, we do sometimes still write about The New Yorker!


–Emily Gordon

Shakespeare: For Mature Teens Only

Emily Gordon writes:
Readdle‘s free Shakespeare app include’s Shakespeare’s complete works, “including doubtful works,” and a searchable concordance. It also has this advisory:
Rated 12+ for the following:
Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity
Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence
Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
Infrequent/Mild Horror/Fear Themes
Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence

“Let’s Once and for All Dismiss the Notion that the Memoir is a Lesser Form.”

Emily Gordon writes to recommend:
An affectionate, persuasive, sensible defense of the memoir by Deb Olin Unferth. (Guernica magazine)
Another inventive chronicler of our time: an interview with Jesse Thorn, impresario of the radio show and podcast “The Sound of Young America.” (Nieman Journalism Lab)
Two pieces about the meaning of bed bugs, which erode both sanity and civilization: in Guernica again and in the Utne Reader, which excerpted the piece from California magazine. As we know from Atul Gawande, these pieces will probably make you feel itchy, and hearing that the problem is getting you worse will probably make you anxious. But believe me, an uncontrollable but temporary phantom itch and a fleeting bout of anxiety (and the useful knowledge that you should put your suitcase in your hotel bathtub) is a thousand times better than having actual bed bugs. So long, Brooklyn!