“Copacabana. There’s music in the word.”
—Paul Henreid, Now, Voyager (1942)

I’m off to Canada for a few days, land of cool nights (hooray!), wry humor (ha!), and beaver tails (yum). If anyone who normally reaches me by my Verizon email address would like to correspond, I’ll be checking gmail sporadically in between dips in the lake, above. Back to our regularly scheduled New Yorker gluttony. Oh, and speaking of Canada, I’m interviewed in the Toronto Globe and Mail this Saturday, most likely, about the digital archive. Very honored, too, I mean honoured.

Hmm…

Off to D.C. for the weekend, after a euphoric day in which I interviewed the game and delightful Sean Wilsey, walked across the Williamsburg Bridge and took not-bad photos of the Brooklyn waterfront with the rest of my film, spotted Ted from Queer Eye on 8th Avenue in a lighthearted striped shirt, saw the stirring Murderball with my old pal and trusted adviser Gene Seymour, met Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz (!), and took a bouncy Jack Russell pup around a West Village mellowed by the heat. This is what New York was supposed to be like, and sometimes, just on lucky days like this, it actually is.

1. If you live in New York or somewhere near it, see As You Like It in the park. Done straight (as it were), minimal bits of business/moving parts, funny fool, doublets and hose, feathered caps, the works. And a remarkably beautiful set (remember the giant Julius Caesar head?). Prithee, make haste! I gladly adventure my discretion.

2. Thanks in great part to the brilliance of this man, there are now deli.cio.us categories on emdashes. Since they require re-editing by hand, it’s a gradual process. It’s fun, and it’ll keep evolving. As always, please send suggestions for emdashes features (recent contribution: archive all the online book reviews into one post) and things you want to know more about (writers, artists, enigmatic advertisers, people/places/things mentioned in New Yorker pieces, Papua New Guinea penis gourds, etc.), and I’ll do my best to get on the case. As you know, this is not a gossip sheet (other people do that so unmatchably well, and I try to have a certain amount of discretion), but a way to fill those fidgety moments between issue-reading with posts that help, question, amuse, and even, sometimes, Shed Light.

—released overseas as Mr. and Mrs. Mushmouth-Bigmouth? I implore you, don’t! Go rent The Big Sleep, The Incredibles, and as many Avengers episodes as you can carry instead.

Categories: Movies

I’m celebrating my new Snazzatron 5000 with a scan of part of my favorite artwork: the 2005 calendar by collagist Kate Gordon, my sister and role model. It just happened that the June page coincided with the theme of my then-new blog. Mind link, I suspect.

It’s actually very simple. Listen.

That’s a headline on the website of the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary (which recently saved my life, or at least my sanity). I’m all in favor. Now they need special goggles for other kinds of dizziness. Britney, common. Kevin, common. Paris, definitely uncommon.

Britney, Kevin Need Viewers [Wires, via China Daily]

I might do this today, among many other things (coffee, salmon).

This just in: a swell poem by my friend Damian Fallon, who just happens to have written about my favorite subject (no, not marzipan, Donald Antrim, or the still-nonexistent Hipster Express, which would run 24/7 from Bedford to Smith to 7th Ave. to Long Island City to Dumbo to Astoria to [fill in the blanks], not necessarily in that order; DJ changes nightly).

—

Merely a line,
a clip of an hypotenuse,
a snippet of the horizon.
A fallen l,
a tired I,
dash, emdash—
for being the width of m;
a symbol to indicate a break
in thought or sentence structure.
Or used to mark
absence, what is there
when something is not
there, as in “G—dammit,”
implying that God is there
when God isn’t there at all.
Or to symbolize time passing,
to stand in for your life,
the year of your birth holding
it out like a plank.
How it waits for you,
offering its hand,
knowing
it will be complete—

So tell me, why do I live in New York again?