Since I continue not to have 8.08, how convenient that I’m still reading 8.01! Standouts: Sasha Frere-Jones’s jaunty, groovy essay on d.j.s Diplo and Marlboro, in which he manages to fold in the relevant (and considerable) cross-cultural music history as easily as if he were swirling dulce de leche into melting ice cream. Sorta funny that copy (I’m assuming) insists on sentences like “When ‘Planet Rock’ and Miami bass records reached Rio, in the mid-nineteen-eighties…” If it were anything but the nineteen eighties, Frere-Jones wouldn’t be writing about it, would he? Oh well, it’s a swell piece, and I’m going to do my best to Eustace Google me a few of these sound clips. Legal ones, yes, sure. But even without the sound the story sings. Nice music writing, this.
And John Cassidy on Grover Norquist (“As we talked in his cluttered office…he paced back and forth, opening and closing his briefcase, rearranging books on his shelves, moving pens and papers around on his desk, and, finally, bending down to pick up bits of dust”) and stings-like-a-bee Nancy Franklin (“And there’s the inevitable thinky college man…”), of course. Not to mention David Sedaris’ startling revelations about the ants in his pants. But just because there are lots of sexy rock stars around, don’t overlook Steven Shapin’s sprightly, pleasantly Trilliny review of Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses. The whole story is taut and juicy as a ripe peach, but I liked “We’re all ‘drinking men,’ because we’re all mainly squishy bags of water.” That has a slightly Benchley note to it, too. Put this man on staff! Oh, they can’t; he teaches at Harvard. Well, I’m sure they can spare him.
Does that emdashes like everything? some might say, throwing up their hands as if doing a foreshortened Wave. As it happens, I do not. Two things I did not particularly like in this issue: Jeffrey Toobin on John Roberts, gay rights cases, and the Solomon Amendment, which seemed inadequate to the scope of the subject; this is a riveting issue with plenty of eloquent spokespeople, but Toobin could’ve fooled me. It could be that Annals of Law is just supposed to chronicle a narrow range of developments in the field, but surely if these cases have the potential to be civil rights landmarks, Toobin could get a little more excited about civil rights?
And Anthony Lane—oh, Anthony Lane, have you lost your air conditioning? This review of Last Days, The Edukators, and 9 Songs is rather snappish, and I think you must come to accept that there are generations below yours that enjoy both great cinema and their own pop culture. They might well be interested in a Gus Van Sant movie loosely about Kurt Cobain even if they, ahem, “smell like stewed tea.” It’s not only “Kurt Cobain groupies” who’ll be reading about and maybe even lining up for Last Days, it’s a good deal of Generation X (we hate the name too), a sizeable group. Stop worrying about whether Kirsten Dunst knows how to roll a joint and why the youth listen to music that “sounds like a cow giving birth in a wind tunnel.” You don’t have to hang with the emo boys to feel the thing through the alienating noise (music, style, slang, hero-icons) that makes the characters love and need it. Isn’t that a constant through all these generations of film? I suggest this with all respect.
More scratch-and-sniff “Good Work!”s: Jonathan Rosen’s consideration of Henry Roth and his big bad block is full of little stars and curvy brackets (what my ninth-grade algebra teacher used to call “Bob Hopes”—draw one and you’ll see) from my pen. Not to mention a genuine phonetic chiasmus: “The Roth mythology suggests that, having turned his back on writing, he immediately buries himself alive in menial work and rural Maine.” (Even better when you remember that the abbreviation for Maine is ME.)
From Talk, Nick Paumgarten’s “Bag Check” is nicely pitched and practically poetic, and it’s impressive that he has another good one in the same section; Adam Green artfully stretches a tiny factlet into a charming piece (I keep laughing at “One night, after hours of leaving messages on answering machines, being asked to call back later, and getting trapped in long conversations with lonely radicals in the Midwest…”); and Lauren Collins neatly twists a welcome sinister hook onto the end of an otherwise benign story about Deep Roy, the man who plays all the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Harry Bliss’s “Son of Kong” cover is just right, not only for all heatstroked readers but for jittery New Yorkers who would indeed cheer for a benevolent ape standing taller than the Chrysler Building, if he were blasting us with cool water. A fine idea, to fill the sky with a furry relief-giver like the firefighters in the Mermaid Parade with their lavish squirts on the grateful crowd. (It’s you who’s making that sentence dirty, not me.) Anyway, it’s a soothing image, and it makes me wonder if city officials shouldn’t stage celebratory events in the subways and sky from time to time. Well, do you want to flinch every time you see a low-flying plane or hear a beep from a phone in the train, forevermore? I didn’t think so.
By the way, if you’re living in the past as I am, here’s the indispensable Greg’s TOC from the week under discussion. Handy when the mailman loses his way. Could my magazine be burning in a warehouse somewhere? I was wearing a Chicago shirt today.
