Category Archives: On the Spot

San Francisco Event: Liza Donnelly at the Cartoon Art Museum

This Thursday, March 27, cartoonist Liza Donnelly will be appearing at San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum to talk about her brand-new book, Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love…in 200 Cartoons. Who are the ten women? I’m glad to say that they’re Donnelly, Roz Chast, Carolita Johnson, Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Victoria Roberts, Barbara Smaller, Julia Suits, Ann Telnaes, Kim Warp, and Signe Wilkinson, all of whose drawings will also be featured at the museum through June 8. I’ll be in S.F. this weekend and am definitely planning to go. If you’re a reader in the Bay Area, email me and we’ll go together!

Go See Steinberg, and These April Readings at McNally Robinson

The energizingly clear-eyed James Wolcott writes:

Try not to miss the William Steig exhibition “From The New Yorker to Shrek” at the Jewish Museum before it vacates the premises on March 16. Not only are the drawings marvels of rumpled, urban-folk buoyancy and dyspepsia (Bernard Malamud stories reduced to a squiggly essence), but how many shows feature letters from Henry Miller, William Shawn, and Wilhelm Reich?

He also gives high praise (and with Wolcott, that means something) to The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg, by Iain Topliss, which he calls “superlative.” I reviewed the book for Newsday and recommend it often; it provides further benefits in that every day, some jughead googles “topliss ladies,” only to arrive right here on my site. Bonjour, seekers of toplissness! I hope you like highbrow/abstruse humor; va-va-voom.

(If you haven’t read Wolcott’s novel, The Catsitters, I can assure you you’ll enjoy it. If you’re reading this site, if you have any interest in city life and sex and drama and the mysteries of human contact, you’re bound to lap it up. As Amazon likes to say, Look Inside.)

Also, these April readings at New York’s McNally Robinson bookstore look particularly enticing to me:

Wednesday, April 2, 7:00 PM
Meg Wolitzer, author of The Ten-Year Nap (Riverhead)
Meg Wolitzer laid bare the gender politics of the pre-feminist era in The Wife and wittily plumbed the aftermath of the sexual revolution in The Position. Now one of our funniest and most perceptive social observers turns her own forty-something generation in The Ten-Year Nap as she examines what happens when educated women “opt out” of the work force for a few years in order to be full-time mothers, and then somehow don’t find their way back. Join us for a reading and discussion with the author.

Thursday, April 3, 7:00 PM
Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology (Dalkey Archive Press)
With authors Evgeny Bunimovich, Elena Fanailova, and Yuli Gugolev
And contributing translators John High, Margarita Shalina, and Matvei Yankelevich
Please note: This event requires an RSVP. To celebrate the release of the comprehensive anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry, three Russian poets visit New York courtesy of Dalkey Archive Press, CEC ArtsLink and the National Endowment for the Arts. Join us for a special bilingual event as visiting poets Bunimovich, Fanailova, and Gugolev read from their own work and selections from the anthology, with English translations presented by contributing translators High, Shalina, and Yankelevich. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and a reception with the poets and translators. Please RSVP by Tuesday April 1st to chartblay@cecartslink.org.

Saturday, April 5, 1:00 PM
George Packer, author of Betrayed (Faber & Faber) and Assassin’s Gate (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In early 2007, writer George Packer published an article in The New Yorker about Iraqi interpreters who jeopardized their lives on behalf of the American invasion, with little or no U.S. protection. Betrayed is a new play at Culture Project based on Packer’s interviews with interpreters in Iraq and around the Middle East. This afternoon at McNally Robinson, Packer will talk about his reporting experience, his comprehensive indictment of the Iraq War in his book The Assassin’s Gate, and the experience of creating a play from real experiences. Attendees will then be invited to attend the matinee showing of Betrayed at Culture Project at 3:00 (discounted tickets may be available). Join us for an exclusive conversation co-hosted by Culture Project.

George Packer Successfully Attains Hyphenate-dom

Martin Schneider writes:
It’s difficult to contemplate George Packer’s first play, Betrayed, without using the word authenticity, which aspect does not exhaust its virtues. I went into the performance imagining that it might be something of a chore, but it was far from that. Derived from Packer’s lengthy article of the same name, which ran in the March 26, 2007, issue of The New Yorker, the play is about two Iraqis whose well-nigh bottomless idealism towards the occupying/liberating Americans is put to the test.
Americophiles from way back, Laith, a Shiite, and Adnan, a Sunni, start working as translators in the Green Zone only to find themselves in a remorseless no man’s land, blithely treated as potential suicide bombers by their well-meaning but ultimately apathetic employers and reviled as traitors by their neighbors outside the Green Zone.
Chief among the charms of the evening, play and production alike, is the nuanced portrait of the duo at its heart. Likeable and fundamentally apolitical, Laith and Adnan gamely put up with a welter of indignities from the Americans, most of whom (with one notable exception) are content to do their jobs and not entertain the consequences of the fear-driven system in which they are operating.
The betrayal of the title recalls the myopia we showed in letting Hungary twist in the wind in 1956—not to mention the empty promises of 1991 so vividly portrayed in David O. Russell’s Three Kings, a movie with a somewhat similar agenda to Betrayed. Packer is, of course, first and foremost a reporter, and he lends the material a depth of observational detail that no ordinary playwright can match.
In recent times we have seen Tim Robbins’ play Embedded, Brian DePalma’s movie Redacted, Robert Baer’s movie Uncovered … it’s easy to get mixed up. I hope the conflation of title confusion and outrage fatigue prevents no engaged theater devotee from seeing Betrayed. It runs until April 13, so there’s plenty of time, and tickets are as low as $25 in a small room in which even the last row is a decent seat.

Tonight! See Gahan Wilson, David Remnick, Hugh Hefner, Stephen Colbert, Francoise Mouly, Stan Lee, Roz Chast, and More All in One Place…

…at the IFC Center in New York at 323 Sixth Avenue at 8 p.m., in the new documentary Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird, directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe.
If you love Wilson’s cartoons, covers, and comics for The New Yorker, Playboy, and countless other publications over the decades; or if you’ve always wondered how the cartoons get chosen for The New Yorker; or want to see Stephen Colbert at his most startlingly and movingly sincere, or dig custom skateboard decks, cats, ghosts, monsters, headless fish, or the Sag Harbor jitney; or love hearing celebrity comics gods talking about art, you must attend this screening. (Here’s still more temptation, from John Donohue on the Goings On blog.)
And here’s a serious treat—afterward there’s a Q & A with both Wilson and Jaffe. It’s $15 and, I assure you, very much worth it. Buy tickets here or call the box office at 212-924-7771. See you there!

Get Post-Apocalyptic on Valentine’s Day

A friend forwards this heartening bulletin from Brooklyn’s indie bookstore Freebird:

Just a reminder that this Thursday, Feb 14, at 7:30 pm, Freebird is kicking off our monthly Post-Apocalyptic discussion group with a special A/V presentation of Ray Bradbury’s classic short science fiction, “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Come listen to the ’50s radio play version, watch a 9-minute Soviet animated adaptation, and hear about the forthcoming months’ book and film selections. And if you’d like to read it beforehand, check out this site.

That reminds me of “War of the Worlds,” not surprisingly; if you haven’t heard it for yourself, listen—laugh, but it’ll spook you. Here’s an incredible old-radio site I just discovered, which includes the Orson Welles classic. One of these days, I want to hunt down my great-grandmother’s recordings. She was a pip, from what I’ve heard!

While we’re on the subject of radio, I’d be denying you the pleasure of hearing this if I didn’t mention the BBC Radio 2 documentary on the Jackson Five that my friend and Scrabulous opponent Chris Skinner produced. It’s not stuff you’ve heard before, and it’s really about the music.

Meanwhile, I went to a merry event today for Andre Dubus III’s new book The Garden of Last Days, at which the charmingly persuasive Dubus urged me (a group of us were talking about classics we haven’t read yet, including The Sun Also Rises, for which he provided a very un-Cliffs Notes synopsis; wonder if Freebird has any in stock?) to read Joyce Carol Oates’s short stories, especially “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” So I’m about to do that, right here on Oates’s website. They made a movie from the story in 1985, Smooth Talk. Move to top of queue?

Fellow Travelers

It’s funny what can cheer you up. I hadn’t done this feature in a long time—I had the notion to record the moments when I noticed people on a means of transportation reading The New Yorker—but this morning on the L train to Manhattan, there was a perfect triangle—or, give the cherries shiny red apples on this issue’s back cover, a winning slot-machine combination—of three of us reading the magazine (me and the guy next to me reading Susan Orlean’s nimble story on the umbrella inventor—in which she quotes my esteemed umbrella-critiquing colleague Julie Lasky!—and a cute blonde chick, if you like that sort of thing, reading Anthony Lane and the Critic’s Notebook), all of us standing coat-to-coat, since it was rush hour.
Then I looked down the car and saw a tall guy reading the David Owen Personal History on nicknames and grinning like crazy, then laughing outright. When I changed to the 6 at Union Square, I noticed three more readers in quick succession, then four. All were under 40 and had iPods in their ears (except me—my Shuffle’s busted). It made me smile. Maybe, just maybe, print culture’s going to survive in style and life will be halfway livable, even if they don’t throw paper like they used to.

There’s a Reason These Cartoons Weren’t in The New Yorker

Or is that multiple reasons? Sometimes it’s hilariously obvious; other times, it’s so ineffable and multilayered you could write a dissertation on it. Someone probably is, and I hope that chlorophyll-deprived Ph.D. student will send it to me as soon as he or she has handed it in and fainted away from lack of sleep and sustenance. Anyway, there were Gawker folks at last night’s extremely fun, if nonswimming, pool party for The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap (“More cartoons you’ve never seen, and never will see, in The New Yorker“), and they have nice digital cameras, so I don’t know how much point there is in boldface names. But it was warm (and not just in temperature terms, though it was that, too) and crowded and high-energy and, dare I say it, kind of hip. Nobody there looked a bit rejected.
I recommend both Rejection Collection books, which have—alongside those ineffably or effably rejected cartoons—photos of and highly whimsical, illustrated interviews with the cartoonists you know only from their cryptic signatures, and there’s also a chance to have your copy/ies signed this Wednesday, 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue. Whiz kid and pigeon enthusiast Matt Diffee will be there with cartoonist and moonlighting impresario David Sipress; they’re both funny and friendly guys. Swimsuits encouraged. Transgressions are the order of the day!

If Jonathan Schell Doesn’t Speak to You, You Haven’t Seen Jonathan Schell Speak

Buy tickets and get more information here. From the General Society website:
The Nation: Is Peace Possible?
Jonathan Schell, Nation Correspondent
Tuesday, October 9, 6:00 p.m.
20 West 44th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues)
Known for his empathy, humor and hope, Jonathan Schell is The Nation‘s peace and disarmament correspondent. His latest book, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, will be published in November. The book examines threats posed to the world by nuclear power and continuing arms development. Mr. Schell will share excerpts from the book and discuss disarmament, the promise of peace and the state of the anti-war movement today.
And speaking of war and peace, here’s an excellent report, from HuffPo’s Rachel Sklar and Glynnis MacNicol, on the Seymour Hersh and David Remnick discussion at the New Yorker Festival.

Ira Glass and the Nonfictioners of Nonfiction

The youngsters of Chicago, city of kickass editors, could probably use a bit of sound instruction on whether the term is properly styled e-mail email e-mail, and we think that 826 Chicago is just the outfit to provide some solid guidance on that subject as well as “their creative and expository writing skills,” as they put it.
Think of it as the New Yorker Festival afterparty. On Monday, October 8, Ira Glass is hosting a benefit for 826Chi at Town Hall. The event is called “The New Kings of Nonfiction,” and showcases such New Yorker-affiliated lights as Malcolm Gladwell and Susan Orlean, not to mention Chuck Klosterman. Ira may be the finest “so wait” clarifier in the history of spoken utterance (listen for it on This American Life), and to see him do it live is surely the equivalent of watching Roger Federer hit a backhand or something.
Be diverted, help Chicago’s youth—not a bad combination. Our only complaint is that Maria Bamford, genius Comedian of Comedy, isn’t part of the lineup; she adds such goofy, nervy pizazz to every stage she’s on. —Martin Schneider