You know Malcolm Gladwell has become fully tippy, or should I say pointy, when Sports Illustrated is tossing off references to him as if they were so many dodgeballs. In a piece about Shaquille O’Neal and how he’s “single-handedly changed the culture of the franchise” (as a carrier, as it were, ha), Chris Ballad muses:

Call it the Shaq Effect, or, in honor of author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, the Shaq-ing Point—that precise point in time at which a decent NBA player becomes a good one, perhaps identifiable as the first moment when O’Neal draws a double team that creates an eight-foot halo of wide open space for his teammates.

The Shaq Effect [Sports Illustrated]
Can You Buy an NBA Championship? [Gladwell, Slate]
Q. & A.: The Ming Dynasty [Ben Greenman and Peter Hessler on the Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming, New Yorker]
Sports Dept.: The Floor Moved [Ben McGrath on Madison Squ. Garden moving to Radio City during the Republican Convention, New Yorker]
Women in sports: New Yorker cartoon sends wrong message [Stephanie Salter, ASNE]

”It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people,” wrote E.B. White in Charlotte’s Web. Today’s Times reports that two New Yorker types did just that (the first hed seems to have wandered over from Highlights for Children):

Just for Fun

Steve Martin was named yesterday to receive this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Mr. Martin walked away from a successful career as a comic in the late 1970’s to broaden his repertory. Since then, he has written plays and films and starred in offbeat movies like “Pennies From Heaven,” “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “The Man with Two Brains,” as well as box-office successes like “Parenthood” and “Father of the Bride” (and its sequel). Mr. Martin, 59, has also published two novellas and a collection of comic pieces. The center said that Mr. Martin, learning that he had won the prize, which will be awarded on Oct. 23, responded, “I think Mark Twain is a great guy, and I can’t wait to meet him.” JOHN FILES

PEN Drama Awards

The playwrights Wallace Shawn and Dael Orlandersmith have been named winners of 2005 PEN Literary Awards. Mr. Shawn, the author of “Aunt Dan and Lemon” and “The Designated Mourner,” and Ms. Orlandersmith, whose works include “Yellowman” and “Monster,” are recipients of the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama, which honor a master American dramatist (Mr. Shawn) and an American playwright in midcareer (Ms. Orlandersmith).

Arts, Briefly [NYT]

Peace maven Pat Montandon, otherwise known as Sean Wilsey’s mother—a principal subject of Wilsey’s memoir, which was recently excerpted in The New Yorker—tells it like it is in an interview with Merla Zellerbach at The Nob Hill Gazette:

Was writing the book a sort of catharsis for him?

I hope so! He had a horrible childhood. I did some things that I’m not proud of, that I read about—things that contributed. It was a tough time for both of us. It’s hard for people to understand, because in our divorce culture, people think, “Oh well, get over it!” But if you care about someone and you’re really in pain, it’s not easy. And Sean had to deal with all of that at a vulnerable age.
…
What was your reaction when you first read it?

I was on the floor for two weeks!

Good on the floor or bad on the floor—or just floored?

I was so shocked I couldn’t move. I thought, “Oh, my God!” Sean has been through hell, and I, as his mother, should have known about it—and I didn’t. I was in deep grief for him, for (his father) Al and for all concerned. I felt enormous compassion for Sean—and for myself, for that matter. But I couldn’t talk to Sean about it even though I knew he was very eager to find out what I thought.

What did you do?

I sent him an email saying I totally supported him, but I wasn’t able to talk about it just yet. I needed time to digest it—to put it in perspective.

How long did that take?

(Laughs) I’m still doing it! Well, I am and I’m not. I know that at this stage of life to have a son like Sean and to have a grandson and a daughter-in-law whom I love very much—and to have Sean be honest with me is a gift—a true gift. So many mothers and sons hide what they’re really feeling and when this happens they become empty shells—shell people, I call them.

Were there statements in the book you disagree with?

Yes, we’ve gotten into big arguments about the part where he says I had a temper tantrum when I didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize. It didn’t happen. And the part where he says we discussed how to kill ourselves didn’t happen that way either…. You’ve got to read the whole thing.

A Mom Speaks [Nob Hill Gazette]

Categories: Wilsey, NYer

Dana Stevens in Slate on Laura Bush’s recent burst of hilarity and the speechwriter who made it happen:

In an interview with The New Yorker last year, [Landon] Parvin told Elizabeth Kolbert, “A politician will be in trouble and he’ll say, ‘Will you do me some lines on it?’, because he’s heard that humor can get him out of trouble. I tell them, depending on the situation, ‘No, this is trouble. You should not make fun of this.’ ” Apparently Parvin’s instincts were off at last year’s Radio and Television Correspondents dinner, where a slide show he co-wrote of Bush poking around the White House, looking for WMD’s under the furniture, drew a strong backlash the next day. A lot of people, including some war veterans, didn’t double over in mirth at the idea that over 500 American troops (the number has since more than tripled) had lost their lives in a war over … what again?

It’s being said that Laura Bush is always joking around, is in fact a wicked fountain of wit. It makes sense; if it helps her get through her absurd spectacle of a life, it’s probably saved her from losing it entirely. I say let her keep going until she brings down the whole administration.

Take My President, Please [Slate]
Stooping to Conquer: Why candidates need to make fun of themselves [New Yorker]
From Peek-a-boo to Sarcasm: Women’s Humor as a Means of Both Connection and Resistance [Feminism and Nonviolence Studies]

John Lahr is a genius, but I think he’s wrong about John C. Reilly, whom he says “has a pushed-in face and a strapping soft body [and] is not particularly comfortable in his own flesh,” making him unfit to play Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. I can’t agree. I’ve always thought Reilly was full of an appealing and barely checked fierceness at his core, which is what made his performance in Chicago so good—sure, he (as Amos Hart) felt sorry for himself, but what kept him from punching everyone in the nose was a sense of the moral superiority of the rules (which are meaningless amid so much corruption, but that doesn’t make Amos less noble for refusing to cave in). And his “Mr. Cellophane” solo, and dance, are enough to prove he’s comfortable in his own skin, if not always happy in it. Maybe Reilly isn’t playing Stanley right (I haven’t seen it yet), or he hasn’t been directed well, but I don’t think he’s inherently wrong for the part. The overlooked, martyred type can be sexy; the slow scheming of the melancholy can be deadlier than the outburst of the easily provoked.

Not related but amusing: this anecdote from John Lahr, related by David Aaronovitch in the Guardian:

…Americans (the snobbish Frasier notwithstanding) seem to be less worried about ostentation [than the British]. In fact, they like it. A writer friend of mine, John Lahr, recalls going as a child to the Californian mansion of the inventor of car radio, one Earl Muntz. Muntz, a famous huckster, was by now into television (he named one of his daughters Tee Vee), and had installed a television at the bottom of his swimming pool…. The people around the pool that day didn’t sigh and whisper ‘vulgar’ under their breaths. They just enjoyed Muntz’s eccentricity.

It’s a fun piece, all about tacky footballers and their frightful wives, and Shaquille O’Neal. Here’s the rest of “Are we just jealous of Wayne’s world?”

The Theatre: Survivors: “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” return to Broadway [New Yorker]

Say what you will about former New Yorker staff writer Garrison Keillor—I find that my fellow displaced Midwesterners often turn against him with particular vehemence—but his Saturday sermon (there’s no other word for it) on the spiritual thrill of lawnmowing was an ecstatic and impish pitch worthy of Professor Harold Hill or Tom Sawyer. Poetry, and nothing less. But NPR’s sooooo bourgeooooooois, you whine. Fine, when Air America’s arts and culture coverage catches up to its political commentary, we’ll talk again.

Speaking of religious quests, go see The Holy Girl, a film about a pair of lips stung by a whole hive of honeybees, a theremin, ghost stories, a really great-looking heated pool, ear problems, and girls with long hair. In Argentina. Someone from the showing before me complained fruitlessly to the manager that it was “slow-moving.” If the days you remember lounging around with your high school squeeze seem slow-moving to you, don’t see this movie. If they seem hot and sweet in retrospect, then see it pronto before it leaves the theater. You want these lips to be larger than life. (Not yet reviewed by The New Yorker, but when it is, I hope it’s by David Denby—I can’t bear for teenage star María Alché to get the Kirsten Dunst treatment by Anthony Lane. “If I were Mr. or Mrs. Alché, I would be slightly worried that my radiant daughter is able to feign the effects of reciting religious texts and embracing her best friend with quite such convincing ease…”)

Parodies of “Ya Got Trouble” [Forbidden Broadway 2001; The Simpsons, etc.; via Endresnet]

Categories: Keillor, Movies, Lane

A swell story by Subir Roy that begins with parental suspicion and ends with New Yorker cartoons:

Our daughter is up to no good, I told my wife. She was also getting worried, she confessed. It was not as if our daughter was openly up to some mischief, defiantly joining the spoilt generation.

Even that would have been a relief. What had got the two of us into a huddle was she wouldn’t say what exactly she was up to.

There were these mysterious goings on between her and different groups of friends, sometimes big and sometimes small, with one or two boys thrown in. Of course, we were broad-minded.
…
Will you buy us a New Yorker so that we can get some ideas? [She said.] I was impressed they had heard the name and went and got her a copy from Premier bookstore, poorer by Rs 400, courtesy the owner who gave me a Rs 50 discount.

Then a couple of days later when I asked our daughter what she and her friends thought of the magazine, she grinned from ear to ear…. Find out what happens to this errant youth here.

Perhaps Roy would have been safer steering her toward The New York Times Upfront instead, marketed by Scholastic, which claims it’s “more current than textbooks and more appropriate for teen readers than newsstand magazines.” Because Time and Newsweek print so many photos of ill-behaved celebrities?

A view of the New Yorker: The little magazine romances every generation [Business Standard (India)]
Letter From Tokyo: Shopping Rebellion: What the Kids Want [Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker]
Nineteenth-Century American Children & What They Read: Some of Their Magazines [Merry Coz. A joke from the June 1836 issue of Parley’s: “A couple of jolly sailors just landed in New York, saw a couple of men employed in pumping the water out of a cellar. Halloo, Tom, says one of them. What is’t, says Tom. Why, said he, New York has sprung a leak, and they are pumping her out.”]

There are many places on the Internet for reading bad news, and I salute them. At emdashes, you can often (though not always) read good news instead. And news doesn’t get much better than this:

Universal Home Video has announced it will release 25th, no, a 26th Anniversary Edition of The Jerk, starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and Jackie Mason on July 26 for a suggested price of $19.98.

The film will be presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. Extras will include two featurettes: Learn How to Play Tonight You Belong to Me [it’s one thing to have the ukulele tabs, quite another to play it properly] and The Lost Filmstrips of Father Carlos Las Vegas de Cordova, along with production notes.

A Jerk of a DVD [IGN DVD]
The Jerk—The Script [A Movie Script Archive]
Be a Cat Juggler! [Diamond Jim Productions Magical Entertainment]

Categories: Movies, Martin

Fawaz Turki on the fisticuffs at the recent PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature:

And, yes, participants exchanged political ideas as well—or hurled them at each other. There was that heated debate between Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley who had filed repeatedly from Baghdad and authored the book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror. and the Iraq-born commentator, Kanan Makiya. Danner opposed the invasion of Iraq, but Makiya supported it, claiming improbably “this is a country that now has a hope it never had before.”

The Iraqi, however, was outmatched intellectually by Danner, who had all the pertinent facts and figures at his fingertips, facts and figures that he proceeded to throw at Makiya like a boxer in the ring—a right to the midsection followed by an upper cut here and a left hook there. There was nothing that our pro-war Iraqi activist could do, as the blows rained down on him, than cover up. It was a classic case of an overmatched fighter trapped in the corner of the ring waiting for it to be over.

This is, of course, not the first time the two have taken opposite sides. Michael Massing reflected on the November 2002 forum on Iraq at NYU a few weeks afterward (this has a sort of Sondheim quality, doesn’t it?):

The son of a prominent Iraqi architect who came to this country in the late 1960s to attend MIT and never left, Makiya has spent the past fifteen years publicizing the horrors taking place in his native land. In Republic of Fear (1989) and Cruelty and Silence (1993) he chronicled the instruments of repression used by Saddam Hussein to brutalize his people and to suppress the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings after the Gulf War.

Now Makiya warned the audience of 200 that he would be striking a “discordant note” with the rest of the panel. “When you look at this coming war from the point of view of the people who are going to pay the greatest price—the people of Iraq—they overwhelmingly want it,” Makiya declared. He discussed the steps he and other Iraqi exiles were taking to convince the Bush Administration to make the installation of a democratic government in Baghdad one of its chief war aims. And he urged those in attendance to support that goal. A war to overthrow Saddam, he said, “could have enormous transformative power throughout the Middle East.” If there is even a “sliver of a chance—even 5 to 10 percent—that what I’m talking about might happen,” Makiya said, those committed to bringing democracy and justice to the world have a “moral obligation” to support military action in Iraq. Amid applause from the audience, the other panelists shifted uncomfortably.
…
“If we’re going to invade, the President has a responsibility to make his case—to explain how long it will take, and what resources we’ll have to put in,” says Mark Danner, who has written extensively about Haiti and Bosnia. “He’s not doing that. We have to read about postwar plans in the New York Times. It’s remarkable.” Danner, who in early October joined such other liberals as Derek Bok, Aryeh Neier and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in signing an ad in the Times opposing the war, says, “The most forceful argument for going to war is helping the Iraqi people. But that’s not the reason for this war. I don’t remember anybody in the Administration talking about the Iraqi people before August. Rather, it’s about America’s larger strategic goals in the region. They’re going to get rid of this guy, then get out. During the 2000 campaign, George Bush was totally against nation-building. And I don’t see any sign of change in that.”

Word and World in New York [Arab News]
The Moral Quandary: Anti-imperialism vs. Humanitarianism [The Nation]
New Yorker pieces by Mark Danner
Kanan Makiya interview [Frontline, 2002]

Intellectuals are supposedly moving from Boston to Washington. I’m skeptical. Says the Times:

Louis Menand, the New Yorker writer and Harvard literature professor, who has also worked in Washington, said that while the capital has “this reputation of being wonky and boring,” this can be appealing for practitioners of ideas. Washington journalists especially “become suddenly interesting in a way they might not be in New York,” where they are competing with artists, actors, restaurateurs, advertising executives and Wall Street moguls for prestige, he said.

As is often the case, there’s no trend in this Times trend piece, since The Atlantic‘s move from Boston to Washington “was driven by economics, not symbolism or a desire for cachet.” Saying Boston’s no longer “trying”—as if this were a performance review—is pure silliness. Even if what Menand says is true, there’s something defeatist about it—it’s like giving up on New York men and moving to Alaska to find a husband (or dialing up a faraway mail-order bride). Sure, tired people starved for conversation not about tax cuts will find your monograph riveting, but will that satisfy after the first few heady conversations? Of course there are smart folks who read in Washington, but you can’t convince me that Boston still doesn’t have more big thinkers, block for block and bar for bar, than D.C. I’m very fond of the proud northern city myself, though I lived there for only six days before moving to blizzardy Buffalo, NY. On the seventh day, I nested.

Washington’s Egghead Quotient Keeps Growing [NYT]