BEK is what they call him over at The New Yorker. One name, one vision. Like Prince. Like Marilyn. Like Oribe. Like Cyrano. Here’s Bruce Eric Kaplan’s great new L.A. Weekly cartoon.

Categories: BEK, Extracurriculars

Is it random or link-dumpy? Not a bit! The theme is varieties of appreciation. Here’s what I mean:

In The Baltimore Sun, the whole story of the cartoon caption contest, by Rob Hiaasen; I know you’re eager to snack on that one. More about that later. Meanwhile, breaking news! Was last week’s contest winner channeling The Far Side, and if so, was that bad? The Times finally acknowledges the caption-contest beat and even provides a graphic comparing the two cartoons. “The winning entry, for an illustration showing two monster-movie dinosaurs speaking while devouring a city, was ‘Remember that time you made me laugh and people came out of my nose?’ The punch line bore a marked similarity to a ‘Far Side’ quip from 1985, although in the original, it was lions with antlers coming out of their noses.” Read all about it: Mankoff reacts! Larsen legions rumble!

Although the Times still hasn’t made the switch to the more modern “punchline,” the piece is a fine demonstration of the paper’s groovitude on the popular culture: “The incident does bear strong resemblance to a 1998 episode of ‘Seinfeld’ in which Elaine submits a caption to The New Yorker only to learn to her great horror that she had cribbed it from ‘Ziggy.’ The episode was written by Bruce Eric Kaplan, a New Yorker cartoonist and executive producer of the HBO drama ‘Six Feet Under.'”

Prince Charles Simic reviews the magnificent coffee-table book Steinberg at the New Yorker. Plus a slide show of Steinberg drawings with the ad-bizzy announcement “Interactive will begin shortly.” Get me rewrite, please.

I just happened on this engaging “brief autobiography in the third person” by Harrison Kinney, who wrote James Thurber: His Life & Times, the massive and definitive 1992 biography that I covered for The Nation in my book-review debut. I was positive but, I fear, sort of presumptuous; the big finish was a clever-ish, super-stretched metaphor. Ah, the follies of youth. Anyway, to make up for all that, here’s Kinney’s first chapter, “Those Clocks of Columbus.” Kinney also edited, with Rosemary Thurber, the fabulous collection The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom and Surprising Life of James Thurber, which everybody ought to own. Surprising is absolutely right.

Finally (last bite for now), U.S. News interviews Todd Pruzan, deft author of The Clumsiest People in Europe. The Globe and Mail reviews it. Critic Martin Levin—who had me at “I have always scorned the manufactured distinction between summer reading and reading per se, a division that allows you to read Dan Brown in July, but Norman O. Brown in January”—calls Clumsiest People “my favourite summer read this year.” Pruzan’s reading and signing in NYC this Wednesday the 15th, at 7 p.m. at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble.

Back to our regularly scheduled considerations, not necessarily about iPods.

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest, BEK, Steinberg, Simic, Thurber, Pruzan

The quality of the entries goes way up, Victoria Roberts does a fun new drawing, and the winner, David Markham’s “Remember that time you made me laugh and people came out of my nose?”, is a real winner. It was also, she said modestly, my pick. I’m off to the OTB!

Just because it’s rare to get a big cover image with any detail (I’d scan them, but I don’t want the Annals of Law on my kneecaps), here’s a post from Leander Kahney’s Wired blog Cult of Mac about the May 30 cover, which you can look at either on your sofa or in full glory here.

IPod Makes New Yorker Cover
Topic: iPod

It’s an auspicious moment, I guess, when the iPod makes the cover of the august New Yorker magazine for the first time.

“The Song of Spring,” by Peter de Sève, shows a birdie tweeting in a tree while a gent sits nearby, his ears plugged with the famous white buds.

The deep-blue iPod ad with the breakdancer has been running on newyorker.com (in duplicate on the same page, no less, which looks sort of cool if they’re on slightly different rhythms) for at least a few days now, so there’s a nice balance of appreciation. The marriage of cadmium and harmony, as it were.

It occurs to me that maybe they should have saved this idea for the Tilley cover, where the iPod, with white feelers, could have posed as the butterfly. (In Seattle at the gallery showing covers through the years, the 75th anniversary photo cover by William Wegman—where both Tilley and the butterfly are weimaraners—is pretty perfect.) But that may still come. Some guy in the record industry once claimed he had a pretty green iPod waiting for me in his desk, but guys will say anything, won’t they?

Ruffing it with the Weimaraner family: Photographer’s kin learn to live among canines [NYT, 1999. I was actually in this studio once with my friend Katherine and Wegman’s then-assistant, but neither Wegman nor any dogs were there. This safely protects me from name-dropping, or even dropping-dropping, because the place was quite immaculate. There was a pleasant balcony with a picnic table. We had sandwiches.]
New Yorker covers [a pleasingly organized gallery of 45 covers, not including Wegman’s, which seems to be ungoogleable.]

I can’t say I’m tickled with this week’s choices, but that’s not because I’m sore that my own executive-surfer caption wasn’t picked for the team. (It was something like “Sorry I’m late, but tell the wave I’m stoked!” or possibly “Tell the West Coast I’m ready for the telecon”—next time I’ll copy it for posterity.) No, my beef is with big winner Miriam Steinberg’s caption for bedraggled-man-and-shouting-lady: “Neither the time nor the place, Doug!” It’s not that it’s terrible. It’s just that it seems like such a schoolmarmish thing to say in anger, especially since the lady in question looks sort of like a schoolmarm; this is partly the joke, I guess, but it seems hollow to me, unless of course (as I noted earlier) Ms. Anger Management and Wretched Doug are playing out a kinky little game in public, which would be pretty funny. OK, I’ll choose to take it that way.

The other thing I find slightly odd is the new cartoon’s startlingly close resemblance to another recent one, from the May 16 issue and by Bob Mankoff himself: A man, working the complaint desk at a department store, says to the peeved woman first in line, “Look, I’m not denying the validity of your grievances. I just think they’d be better addressed at home, Helen.” It’s a funnier cartoon overall—it’s absurd and yet somehow plausible, and Mr. Complaint Desk is Thurberishly whipped rather than Kathleen Turnerishly psycho—but look at how alike the two gags are. The wit rests on juxtaposing formal disapproval (“Neither the time nor the place” and “I’m not denying the validity of your grievances”) at the beginning of the sentence, the familiarity/first-name address at the end (“Doug” and “at home, Helen”). Both disapprovers work under official signs (Complaint, Emergency Hotline); in both scenes three or four others are looking on. And so on. Anyway, not to belabor this, but it is peculiar. In any case, if you put the new winning Ziegler/Steinberg cartoon next to Mankoff’s and decide that Doug and Helen actually star in both cartoons and regularly show up at each other’s workplaces in a state, then it all seems much sillier and I can more than live with it.

As for the striped-suit surfer, the captions—by Eric Slade of Portland, Mary L. Tabor (whose name sounds familiar but I’m not up to googling it tonight) of D.C., and Lee Radsch of Summit, N.J.—are fine. Slade’s is “Tell my one-thirty things got way gnarly”; Tabor’s is “Hold my calls, cancel my appointments, and find my Speedo!”; Radsch’s is “Gotta reschedule. Water-main break on Seventh!” I know Slade is from Portland and they have an ocean out there, but “way gnarly” feels off to me, and what’s the fun of the exec’s coming back from surfing, rather than being about to succumb to surfing lust? Tabor’s doesn’t do it—too wordy (it barely fits, and why do you need both kinds of cancellation?), and I don’t want to think about Speedos. I’ll have to go with Radsch, since the caption has made me smile a couple of times now. It’s goofy and fun, it gives New Yorkers a nice break from worrying that every routine city mess signifies the End Times, and I like that the guy is talking to his secretary/assistant/colleague/boss in a friendly, cool way, not in a grandiose imperative. Go now, and vote.

Finally, here’s the new drawing, of a startled woman (and her admirably perky breasts) waking up next to a guy (remember, don’t assume anything, especially after Desperate Housewives—he could be her husband, he could be the Eagle Scouts leader, he could be a Tupperware-party host, he could be Christian Slater) only to realize…what? I know they get kazillions of entries, because the cartoonists I recently tormented with questions said so. I know you, emdashes reader, can outdo these good but unsatisfactory efforts. Remember, it’s not about who moved your cheese, but about how much more cheese you want, and how jealous the other mice will be that your entry was published, and the revenge you can ultimately win by outdoing whoever it was who did move your cheese, by writing the best caption ever.

Have you voted? At midnight tonight (that’s really soon), EST, it turns into a—it’s too horrible to say. To give Jennifer “Would it kill you to use a few of your roaming minutes?” Cain her rightful prize (see below), click here. To make the corporate surfer speak in your unforgettably droll voice, click here. And what will Jennifer, and you if you’re lucky someday, win?

The Qualified Winner of each Cartoon Caption Contest will receive a print of the cartoon, with the caption, signed by the artist who drew the cartoon (the “Prize”). If the winner cannot be contacted or does not respond within three (3) days, an alternate winner may be selected, at the sole discretion of the Judge(s). The approximate retail value of the Prize is $250. Income and other taxes, if any, are the sole responsibility of the winner.

Jennifer is Qualified, and therefore will win the “Prize.” You may or not be Qualified, but you are Qualified to Vote. Do so. Ask not what your magazine can do for you, but what you can do for your caption-writing career!

Postscript: I put my money where my fingers were (hmm) and I entered. Yes, I submitted a caption. If it places, you’ll be the first to know. If not, I will still have Participated. You know what they say: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Ramalama ham-jam!

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest

First talented cartoonist Matthew Diffee’s photo is posted on the information superhighway, and now the city of Scranton is mad at him for this cartoon (“Scranton the Ride”):

That bastion of literary excellence and urbane sophistication, The New Yorker magazine, has picked a fight with down-to-earth Scranton.

Yes, it’s true. Scranton has suffered yet another pop culture rebuke, this time at the hands of one of the most respected magazines in America. In The New Yorker‘s May 16 issue, Matthew Diffee, one of the magazine’s stable of freelance “gag” cartoonists, made the city the unflattering focus of a single-panel strip.

Turn to page 79 and you’ll find the cartoon in the top right corner — a neatly drawn sketch of a futuristic-looking mechanical contraption sitting next to a sign that blares, “Scranton The Ride.” Beneath that, in smaller type, reads: “Experience the sights, sounds, and smells of Scranton.”

Then, underneath that, the punchline: “Warning: May cause nausea.”

Get it? The gist seems to be that those who visit Scranton run the risk of becoming violently ill.

Right, Mr. Diffee?

Reached Friday at his home in Brooklyn, Mr. Diffee remained coy with the cartoon’s full intent, saying it was “open to interpretation.” However, he admitted it was “unfair” of him to make Scranton “an object of ridicule.”

Mr. Diffee was initially inspired to do the cartoon when he took the “Ride the Big Apple” virtual reality ride at the Empire State Building.

“It made me a bit queasy, as these things tend to do,” he said.

He figured the ride would be perfect fodder for parody. However, because of The New Yorker‘s somewhat “honey-tinted vision” of the Big Apple, he’d have to pick another place to make fun of.

First, he thought New Jersey. But that seemed “too overdone.”

Then he landed on Scranton, which he’s never actually set foot in, but once drove through while traveling on Interstate 81 a few years back.

During that trip, he got stuck in traffic, caught a view of a landfill and saw several deer carcasses on the side of the road.

“I suppose through that I developed a slightly negative impression of the place,” said Mr. Diffee, a native of Denton, Texas. “All those things together made me unfairly target Scranton.”

Besides his one and only Scranton experience, Mr. Diffee said he was partially inspired by the name itself.

“It’s just a funny-sounding name,” he said. “Say it to the side of your mouth, it will make you giggle.”

The cartoon has elicited interesting responses from locals who’ve seen it.

Friends of Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce president Austin Burke inundated him with copies of the cartoon in the days following its publication.

“Generally speaking,” said Mr. Burke, who subscribes to the magazine, “the cartoons in The New Yorker are wonderful.”

“I kind of missed the point on this one. I do think they were trying to be derogatory,” he said. “It’s totally appropriate for them to be snobbish, but I’d rather them not to be mean.”

Monsignor Joseph G. Quinn responded with a chuckle of disbelief upon seeing the cartoon.

“Don’t you wonder what prompts such cartoons and such timing?” Monsignor Quinn asked, noting how unfortunate it is to see Scranton portrayed in a negative light given all the positive strides he believes the city has made in recent years.

Still, Mr. Burke was able to put some positive spin on the dig, citing an old axiom that any publicity is good publicity so long as “they keep spelling your name right.”

Monsignor Quinn, meanwhile, managed to come up with a witty retort of his own.

“On the upside, we’re no longer being portrayed as a coal mining community, but rather at least in the spaceship motif. So, maybe we are making progress,” he quipped, before imploring Mr. Diffee to check out the city for himself.

To his credit, Mr. Diffee said he’d be happy to visit Scranton at some point. In the meantime, he thinks Scranton will survive the insult just fine.

“I get the feeling Scranton can take it,” he said. “It seems like a tough town.”

Nice phrase, “honey-tinted vision”; it reminds me of that Salon piece about the magazine’s still-limited view of the city, which I’ll go back and link to soon. I think Josh McAuliffe, the Scranton Times Tribune writer, is just a tiny bit mean himself to refer to anyone as a mere trick Clydesdale in a “stable of freelance ‘gag’ cartoonists.” And I’m not at all sure what Monsignor Quinn means by “such timing.” In any case, do as Diffee suggests and say “Scranton” out of the side of your mouth a couple of times. It sounds like Bogie telling off a paperboy. Even the Scrantonians would giggle.

New Yorker cartoonist takes jab at city in recent issue [Scranton Times Tribune]

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Diffee

Fun as it’s been, even the pie was nothing compared to the churning outrage over Anthony Lane’s review of Star Wars—Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. In brief, he doesn’t care for it. Yoda should be ground up in a blender. Natalie Portman’s football helmet makes no sense. “Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue.” (Not so Lane’s, which I found rather jarring.) The film “is a zoo of rampant storyboards.” Others disagree, however, so Anakins are gonna roll:

Everyone’s talking about Anthony Lane’s review of Revenge of the Sith in this week’s New Yorker. With its mix of death-defying vivisectional logic (“how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes“), and low-blow stand-up comedy (“Sith. What kind of a word is that? … It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other”), this is the battlecry we’ve been waiting for…. Jump into the controversy! (Ewok Babes is just crying out for an Andrew Hearst cover.)

By the way, emdashers, it’s come to my attention (through studying my own RSS feed, after a pleasant email exchange with Renaissance man Matt Shobe of both FeedBurner and a recent cartoon caption contest) that my—horrors!—em dashes don’t always come through as such, but as alphanumerical soup. Please, for the love of all that is typographical, tell me if your browser or feed can’t read a character I’ve used. I know you have the same gentle forgiving nature as me (OK, me on a good day), so it’s hard for you to bring yourself to criticize, but it’s so much worse not to know. Think of bad HTML as spinach in my teeth, and tell me as a friend. That’s what the email link is for. And although I say this on my profile (thataway==>), it’s worth repeating for the skittery-jittery types among you that I never, ever quote anything without permission. Letters are private; interviews are interviews. I may not have gone to j-school (if I had, I’d be in even more debt than I already am from p-school), but I know how to mind my t’s and k’s.

Tomorrow: some pain-easing methadone for all of you Sean Wilsey addicts, who need more and more about him every day to calm the shakes. I understand, and I’m here to help.

Space Case [Anthony Lane, New Yorker]
Anthony Lane and the Sith Backlash [Cinematical]
Top 99 Actual Star Wars Lines You Might Hear In A Porno [Keepers of Lists, via Cinematical. Why do men say “porno” and women say “porn movie”? Take-home exam is due in 48 hours under my office door.]
Metaphysics of a Magazine [NY Observer on Radar, as fresh out of the oven as Kogepan!]

Once again, an obvious choice: “Would it kill you to use a few of your roaming minutes?” by Jennifer Cain of—hooray!—Brooklyn, N.Y. And again, I’m a little shocked at the choices here. #1 is a poor efffort, and not realistically worded either. #3 is good in that (as Bob Mankoff has emphasized) one of the best things you can do with a caption is turn the obvious assumption about the drawing’s players on its head. So, here, yes, maybe the emergency-hotline woman yelling down to the bedraggled guy actually knows him. But is this the funniest thing one can think of for her to say? It’s almost funny if you stretch it in your head—Doug the wretch always looks like this and this is their weird erotic ritual, perhaps—but if that’s the case I’m still not amused, just sort of vaguely interested. That’s not enough to win a contest. Jennifer, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got it. If you win, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee at the Brooklyn diner of your choice.

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest