Another article deflating Bill Keller’s “more elevated” argument from USA Today: “For the first six months of the year, celebrity and gossip magazines such as Us Weekly posted double-digit newsstand gains while newsweeklies such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report saw single-copy sales dip 3.4% to 16.6%.”
Month / August 2005
Six Feet Under Finale
Just saw the finale. For a while, everything was rocking. The eyes were getting a-misty. The heart was still involved. There was the promise of some sense of finality, some ultimate message about existence that Alan Ball (who did, after all write and direct this send-off), hoped to provide for us. But what did we get in the final ten minutes?
Saccharaine moments that were, amazingly enough, more unconvincing than the Xmas future seen in the Richard Donner-Bill Murray version of Scrooged. (And that takes some doing.) Actors under really bad makeup living out their final moments in the future. A cheap finale. The overall message of living, so eloquently portrayed in the first hour, disrupted by some of the silliest moments ever seen in Six Feet Under‘s history. What Ms Chicha deservedly referred to as the most emotional car commercial ever. I don’t think so. Let’s try “most expensive car commercial ever.”
And it’s all thanks to Alan Ball that these characters were cheapened for an unconvincing future and, most likely, an unconvincing present.
Ah well. Go figure. The series went out with a bang and once again proved that, all along, this was an audacious yet flawed series. I have to agree with my good friend Beck that this series certainly did well, all things considered. And it certainly did me in because I’m an emotional fellow.
But I would argue that it was Jill Soloway and Kate Robin who knew how to write for this show and that contributed to the show’s convincing narrative, not Ball. Without these fantastic talents, the show would have quickly turned absurd and hackneyed. So here’s thanks to them or possibly Ball for hiring them.
Even so, the other thing that strikes me as false about the Six Feet Under solution is that salvation comes from a trust fund. This is about as realistic as D.W. Griffith’s shameless melodramas of blind women finding miraculous cures through generous scientists. In short, it just doesn’t happen. Which begs the question: how can anyone here be sad when the financial realities are out of scope with a sizable percentage of the population?
In the meantime, what does the man forever jaded against television have to look forward to? Why, Battlestar, of course!
Quick Roundup
- We’re very sorry to learn that George Fasel of A Girl and a Gun has passed away. Our condolences to his friends and family.
- Dan Wickett talks with more literary journal editors. At this rate, Mr. Wickett will have chatted with everyone in the literary world by June 2006.
- Bad Librarian’s chronicles continue, with remarks on the Patriot Act and a shocking personal revelation.
- Amazon will begin offering short story downloads. The stories will be 49 cents a pop. Presumably, each user who signs up for this service will have every known purchasing histroy detail logged and will be recommended tales that have nothing whatsoever to do with their literary interests. (Example: If you liked “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” you might like “The Snows of Central Park West” by Bret Easton Ellis.)
- You have to love the way some folks jump to conclusions. The speculation continues with this latest press release (PDF) now making the rounds. The APA is now calling for the video game industry to reduce violence. Even if we accept the idea that video game violence is a major influence upon patterned behavior (and the resolution itself corrals this in with several other studies relating to “the media,” rather than “video games” explicitly), it apparently hasn’t occurred to these psychiatrists that parents might be the ones responsible for exposing their children to violent content and that the choice is theirs. As much as I would welcome the idea of preventing McDonald’s from operating, you wouldn’t, for example, see the AMA demand that the fast food industry stop selling hamburgers.
Bill Keller: Chickenhead of the Month
It’s been a while since we awarded anyone the Chickenhead of the Month. We like to reserve this special prize for a person making truly astounding leaps in logic.
Lo and behold! While we may be on hiatus from the Brownie Watch, we opened the NYTBR‘s pages yesterday and found a fantastic dollop of silliness from none other than Bill Keller himself!
In a letter, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responds to the Posner media essay that appeared a few weeks ago in the NYTBR. Keller has made a fantastic claim: namely, that the New York Times is in the business of providing something “more elevated and consequential.” If this is the case, how does this explain the continued ridiculousness of the Style Section? Or last week’s amazing devotion of Times resources to Bridget Jones? Or yesterday’s slipshod cover story in the Magazine, where an alternative source was served up by a bogus claim of “technological advances” and, as Mr. Birnbaum noted in the comments section, a wholesale refusal to reference Hubbert’s Peak?
If this is what Keller calls “more elevated and consequential,” then I shudder to think about what he considers conventional. What business does Keller have talking about a professional code when he has hordes of Times staffers devoting precious time and resources to distinguishing between a salwar kameez and a sari? How dare Keller pull this stunt within his own pages when, by his own admission a few months ago, his paper failed to cut the mustard in covering Iraq? When I think about professional code, I think of a a newspaper that dares to question anybody and anything — whether the Bush Administration or Hilary Clinton. It is not, as Keller suggests in his interpretation of Posner’s article, a matter of being either “liberal” or “supine,” but of being regularly active and constantly probing any and all subjects, where others would fall asleep at the wheel. That is, in a nutshell, journalism. And believe it or not, it is not nearly as partisan in the blogosphere as Keller would suggest.
Additionally, one wonders if Keller’s letter is a desperate ploy to give the NYTBR the illusion of intellectual debate. Despite a few brownie shipments sent to Mr. Tanenhaus and some successes, it has been clear to us that the Keller-Tanenhaus experiment has, for the most part, failed. Today’s NYTBR is more concerned with providing column inches to John Irving and Nora Roberts, giving odious reviewers like Leon Wieseltier and Joe Queenan more paychecks than they deserve, rather than reflecting culture and literature, much less providing an “elevated ” place to talk about it.
We suspect that the onus falls more on Keller than on Tanenhaus. We therefore grant Mr. Keller our “Chickenhead of the Month” award.
RIP Robert Moog
Is It Possible to Kneel In the Voting Booth?
Forget Christopher Walken. The real choice for 2008 is none other than General Zod, who apparently has recovered from his failed 2004 campaign and begun another quest to become “eternal ruler.” Like the White House, there’s a kid’s page, which features such math problems as “If each person on the Planet Houston knows five informants, and it takes ten minutes to relay a report, how quickly will General Zod learn about his picture being defaced in a town of 500 people?”
It’s the Statement, Stupid
This morning’s New York Times features some disingenuous reporting about the oil crisis from Peter Maass:
One of the industry’s most prominent consultants, Daniel Yergin, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about petroleum, dismisses the doomsday visions. ”This is not the first time that the world has ‘run out of oil,”’ he wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion essay. ”It’s more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry.” Yergin says that a number of oil projects that are under construction will increase the supply by 20 percent in five years and that technological advances will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from existing reservoirs. (Typically, with today’s technology, only about 40 percent of a reservoir’s oil can be pumped to the surface.)
As Paul Roberts argued in The End of Oil and James Howard Kunstler railed against with jaded fury in The Long Emergency, what technological advances? Where will these come from? What are they? Do we pull these out of the hat and get a crummy raffle prize?
I particularly like the way that Maass not only allows Yergin to get away with this criminally general statement (thus underplaying the oil crisis), but prefaces the statement with “one of the industry’s most prominent consultants” and “author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book,” failing to point out that Yergin never singled out any tech specifics in his article.
So what was the point of this ridiculousness? To provide “fair and balanced” journalism? To throw in a credentialed naysayer without actually calling up Yergin and ask him to elaborate on his views? That’s lazy journalism — the kind of misleading context that I expect from some priapic warblogger.
No, Ari, It’s What Called Thinking Outside a Unilateral Political Paradigm
Ari Fleischer: “If you allow those who are the most vocal and most antagonistic to get a meeting with the president for fear that publicity will hurt you if you don’t, you’re creating incentives for your critics to become even more antagonistic and more vocal.”
This is the uncivilized and inflexible approach to diplomacy that these goons specialize in. The truth is that they won’t meet with Cindy Sheehan because they’re scared and they know of no other way to communicate other than silently nodding their heads with all the humanity of a gunmetal grade school bookshelf.
[UPDATE: And while we’re on the subject, only a real president would actually visit my beautiful city. Certainly not this bozo.]
But He Can Still Be Seen Wearing Six Gallon Hats, Go Figure
James Tata does indeed like more than the Boss. Oh yes, he does.
Memo to USPS: Where’s the Dick Cavett DVD Set That We Ordered Last Week? We’re SO Jonesing For This
Chicago Sun-Times: “In July 1970, for instance, ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ featured a chat session with Sly and the Family Stone, Debbie Reynolds and tennis great Pancho Gonzales. Equally weird, a month earlier, was the joint appearance of Janis Joplin, Raquel Welch, news anchor Chet Huntley and the terminally suave Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The elderly Huntley was visibly sweet on Welch, and — while taking hits from a long cigarette holder — Joplin lectured Welch about underground cartoonist R. Crumb.”
[RELATED: Newsday talks with Cavett and Cavett reveals he unintentionally interviewed Howard Hesseman. Further Cavett trivia: You know that he underwent shock treatments for bipolar disorder, but did you know that he appeared on not one, but two soap operas?]
If I Was a Girl Back in 1966, I’d Be Bad for Airline Hostess, Ballet Dancer, Model and Nurse
The Exciting Game of Career Girls (1966): “Speaking Clearly: Good for Actress and Teacher.”
And I should point out that this was less than forty years ago.
New Yorker Hits a New Low
Earlier this week, Maud Newton voiced her concerns about the direction that the New Yorker was heading, specifically focusing on the August 22, 2005 issue, which features a sole sponsor — Target.
While Maud has already pointed to the waning editorial content (perhaps best recently represented by Ken Auletta’s uncritical puff piece on morning talk shows, “The Dawn Patrol,” which appeared in the August 8/15, 2005 issue.), I’d instead like to dwell upon the insidiuous design.
I’ve been a subscriber to the New Yorker for years, but I have never seen advertising that has gone out of its way to blare out editorial content like this. Below are three samples from the latest issue. Note the way that the red in the advertising is of a brighter hue than the red in the headlines. Note also the way that Target has appropriated the New Yorker’s classic art deco look for its advertisement, only to invade this design motif with its odious red targets.
I think, between this and the Auletta piece, this is a clear signal that a magazine which once prided itself on sophistication, lengthy articles addressing multiple sides of an issue and clean design is now more concerned with whoring itself out to publicists and advertisers.
David Remnick oughta be ashamed of himself.
[RELATED: Advertising columnist Lewis Lazare weighs in and he isn’t happy. He calls this issue “[a] 90-page publication where it is almost impossible to discern any line of demarcation between Target’s advertising and the New Yorker editorial product.”]
Escape from New York
She has worked at the Haight branch of Escape from New York Pizza for at least four years. So my best calculations dictate. I’ve seen her working there in some capacity since 2001. And frankly I’m a bit worried.
Escape from New York, if you don’t know San Francisco, is a two-branch outlet, specializing in pizza-by-the-slice. You’ll find one in the Haight and you’ll find one in the Castro. You can have yourself a slice of pizza as late as midnight — anything from a slice of pepperoni to the special potato slice. But this is not specifically “New York pizza” — rather, it is some approximation of the same, with considerably less tomato sauce. Walk inside an Escape from New York outlet and you’ll bear witness to pizza-themed records hanging on the walls, as well as autographed photos from the likes of Leonard Nimoy and Matt Groening. In short, the joint serves its purpose. But what makes the Haight street place curious to me is her.
You’ll find her on the evening shift — generally on Fridays and Saturdays. Her hair has been blonde, black and is now currently brown. I get the sense that most of her twenties have been spent at this place. And in the past year, she’s gained quite a bit of weight. I worry and I hope to hell she’s okay. In the past year, I have seen her mouth contort into a vacuous ellipitical shape every time she slides the spatula underneath a full disc of pizza, then transfering a slice of pizza into the oven, where the slice will stay for about 3-5 minutes, and then be transferred to the customer for swift and delectable consumption. I don’t know if this is a method of coping with such a mundane task or whether this is the inevitable conclusion. I don’t think that even a genius can truly intellectualize this pizza-warming process.
I have asked this young lady several times if she will talk with me outside work. She’s said no. I am careful to spell out to her that I am not a pervert or a maladjusted freak or someone looking for a date. Rather, I am curious. I will even confess that I’m a bit concerned. Every time I order a slice of pizza from her, her slipshod hair and her hangdog eyes resembles the telltale sign of one who has had too many hits of pot. Like many working in the service sector, she is going through the motions. One suspects she is trying to survive.
Is this pizza world all that she knows? And if so, how much am I responsible every time I order a slice of pizza?
Is this all she can ever know? Is this all she ever dares to know?
She can’t make much, which is why I always tip generously. But I wonder what keeps someone in a position in which they are clearly miserable. I wonder if there are sidelines, whether ephemeral or addictive I cannot say, that encourage her to remain in this position. I wonder what she’s truly capable of and what her true passions are. And I feel like a bit of a con. Because, after all, she will not speak with me and, even if she did, there is nothing I can say or do to steer her off the track. In short, there’s nothing to contribute.
And every time I order a slice of pizza from this place, I feel somehow as if I am committing my energies towards denying someone a moment. And yet I order the slice anyway, somehow corralling this concern with my hunger. I feel hypocritial. I feel helpless. And I feel irrelevant. I feel as if I somehow commiting all pockets of decency to her demise. Yet Escape from New York is not a Round Table. It’s an independent business. Can I justify this? Or am I just as hypocritical as the rest? Or has this pizza-slinger truly accepted this horrible fate?
Count Chocula Was Our Second Choice
We’re pretty much all tapped out in the synapses department. It’s quite likely that we’ll spend some small portion of this weekend sitting in an emotionally precarious position with a bowl of corn flakes, watching the first season of The Muppet Show on DVD. Which is not really all that different from days that we clearly recall several decades ago. Yes, that’s how bad it’s gotten, folks. Even our vernacular has been reduced to such genius assessments as, “It’s a nice day. I like it when the sun comes out.”
We need to recover. From what, we’re not quite sure.
So instead, we’ll point to Our Pal the Rake‘s review of Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park. Also check out Patricia Storm’s latest comic, offering inventions for authors on a book tour.
Also of note: Roger Ebert seems to be hitting the snark these days. Check out this week’s thoughtful evisceration of a letter sent by the producers of Chaos and last week’s zero-star review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.
For those of you who’ve emailed about the explosion, I assure you it’s not Beirut here in San Francisco. It’s really quite simple: our local utility company here is notoriously incompetent. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Future Posts from Radiohead’s Blog
Radiohead has started a blog. What follows are future entries that will appear on this exciting new experiment:
is anybody in there?
hello? mom? will somebdy hold me?
hving difficultees splling
with all the poundz i threw in the lift
can only afford dialllup
u think they caught on to our scam?
releasing same albumm
again & again
ed’s getting sik of the same old liks
wants me to whine less
will post more late
Thom
studio
wea regoing in tomorrow
record company says produce same
but keep edgy enough to avoid coldplay sound
colin going for more funk
to throw listner core off
make ’em think hail was an aberration
what do you think, phil? does “kid b” work?
Thom
fuckin thom
i’m getting sick of his shit
so we start the blog and guess who’s the one rambling incoherently?
why, thom, of course
i keep telling him that we need to do another “ok computer”
more strange transitions three minutes in
he says more songs
we need a retirement fund
back in oxford, it wasn’t like this
fucker…I’m going to beat the shit out of him if he goes for that falsetto again
why does he have to expose his vocal limitations so blatantly?
colin
GUITAR
Look, I’m just the other guy who plays guitar. If they want to believe that we’re the next Beatles or the next U2, let them dream their little dream. At least we make thirtysomethings happy, finding the common ground between totally selling out and providing enough of a mellow sound not to frighten the yuppies who are afraid of a little edge.
Jonny
Ames Update
Earlier this year, in March, I signed a contract not with Faust, but with someone far more pleasant. I believe his name was First. Mr. First was dressed in a dark oxford shirt, a pair of wrinkle-free Dockers, and had very polished shoes. He said, “Son, can you play me a memory. I’m not really sure how it goes. But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I know it’s complete. When I wore a younger man’s clothes.” I sat at the piano and played the only two things I know outside of “Chopsticks” — the riff for “Lady Madonna” and Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor. Mr. First told me that this wasn’t acceptable and that the two half-songs I played weren’t really memories, but melodies. I didn’t argue with him. Jonathan Ames’ name was brought up and well, you know the rest.
Or perhaps I’m getting my last karaoke experience confused with the papers that I’m sure that I signed — if I did indeed sign papers. (Was it the apartment lease?)
Either way, I’ve made it my duty to report any and all Jonathan Ames developments. And right now there are two: first, this Slate piece whereby Mr. Ames chronicles his midlife situation and this piece from The Stranger, whereby The Extra Man and Wake Up, Sir! are both used as cases against suicide.
David Mitchell — Red Alert
There are now galleys of it — it being David Mitchell’s new novel.
Since we’re repeatedly on record her as being major David Mitchell fans, since a character devised by Mr. Mitchell did, in fact, inspire our podcast, we’re wondering who we have to blow to get a copy of this.
Mitchell’s next novel is Black Swan Green. It reportedly tells the tale of a 13 year old English boy in 1982. In this interview, we have this information:
In one of the 13 chapters of ‘Black Swan Green’, a major character is a woman in her sixties called Eva van Outryve de Crommmelynck, now an old lady. She’s the daughter of Madam Crommmelynck, wife of Vyvyan Ayrs, who the composer Robert Frobisher, went to stay with in ‘Cloud Atlas’.
In the same section, there’s a very minor character, called Gwendolin Bendincks, who appears in the old folks home in the Timothy Cavendish section, about fifteen, twenty years before Timothy Cavendish meets her. She’s a waspish vicars’ wife in Black Swan Green.
So we have some carryover from Cloud Atlas. Black Swan Green will be composed of 13 chapters, one for each month. The Falklands war factors in. Interestingly enough, each chapter is a short story that Mitchell tried to write independently. In the selfsame interview, the very humble Mitchell remarks that it’s the best thing he’s written.
Some more info on Black Swan Green can be found here from the Oxford Literary Festival, where Mitchell is described as reading two segments from the book for the first time. One was a sex scene and Mitchell, in fact, got a bit embarassed when reading it. But he also asked the audience which version of a sentence they preferred during this reading.
Needless to say, we’re having someone hose us down with cold water tonight.
If Only They Can Reshelve Certain Goons From 1600 Penn to Penn Block 1600
The Ministry of Reshelving has a fun and mischevious project on their hands. They hope to redistribute copies of 1984 from the fiction section to various nonfiction sections. (via MeFi)
NYT = People-Style Profiles Can’t Be Too Far Away
LA Weekly reports on a development that may kill two mediums with one stone. Apparently, movie studios plan to kill their full-page advertising for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. (At $100,000 per full-page ad, that adds up to a lot of dough.) The justification? The studios want to attract younger, lowbrow moviegoers and they view these two newspapers as “older and elitist.”
This is a fascinating development for several reasons: (1) This only confirms the notion that Hollywood is uninterested in making adult films (or at least appealing to adult audiences). (2) Studios have previously thrown so much money at publicity that their lavish spreads have seemed almost inconsequential. Is this a sign that they’re starting to tighten their belts? (3) That entities as slow-moving as movie studios recognize the declining readership of newspapers suggests that, at least on the entertainment front, we’re about to see a real transformation in entertainment journalism and related media. I sincerely hope that online outlets aren’t co-opted, along the lines of the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Of course, since this isn’t yet a fait accompli, expect to see Bill Keller promote more entertainment-oriented junk on the front page in a last-minute effort to woo back Hollywood.
Media Overload
We’re still sitting on two more Bat Segundo shows, all to come in the next few weeks. If podcast interviews aren’t you’re thing and you’re hoping to hear some steady reading, the incomparable Gerard Jones has, rather amazingly, kept quite busy. He’s put up podcasts for the first sixteen chapters of Ginny Good and he’s even managed to squeeze some Joan Baez into his introduction.
The Bat Segundo Show #5
Approximate Date: A sunny afternoon in early August, 2005
Author: Paula Kamen
Condition of Mr. Segundo: More of a complainer than usual, but feeling either paternal or pathological.
Subjects Discussed: Balancing memoir and microhistory, Chronic Daily Headache (CDH) and its recent medical classification, newspaper articles that perpetuate an unlived life, writing a book while suffering from CDH, the specific denomination value of Ms. Kamen’s marble system, throwing drugs at the problem, doctors who prejudge women patients based on appearance, Freud’s unfortunate legacy of “hysteria,” covert examinations, clarifying the “Not tonight honey, I’ve got a headache” myth, Oliver Sacks’ failure to expand his migraine definition, comorbidities, mortality as a motivating factor for medical focus, working-class CDH sufferers, the difficulties of getting disability, chronicbabe.com, being denied a major television appearance because the incurability of CDH was “too depressing” for viewers, the stigma of memoirs, the difference between physical and psychosomatic pain.
Esquire — Blowing the Same Old War Trumpet
The July 2005 issue of Esquire celebrated “10 Men” — presumably, ideal men that other men (read: that pivotal 18-34 male demographic) can look up to. What was perhaps most shocking about this dubious fete was Thomas P.M. Barnett’s masturbatory article, “Old Man in a Hurry,” a profile that set aside any and all criticisms of the Secretary of Defense for such passages as:
RUMSFELD POPS OUT of his chair with the speed of the weekly squash player he still is at age seventy-three and strides over to shake my hand with a big, welcoming smile on his face, employing the enthusiastic, familiar tone one associates with longtime acquaintances. “Hey, how are ya? Nice to see ya!” I’m surprised by how short he is, as I can look right over his head.
and
This is a room you smoke cigars in and decide the fate of the free world.
and, in describing a conversation with a general
Then the general clinches the deal. “So I’ve finally figured out why we get along so well,” he says. “We’ve both run with the bulls at Pamplona!” Rumsfeld shrieks in delight and then launches into a fifteen-minute reverie about the time he ran with the bulls. And for fifteen glorious minutes, he put away the goddamn wire brush.
This cuddly avuncular approach, which makes no reference to Abu Grhaib or Guantanmo Bay, is rather astonishing for a magazine that cut its teeth in the 1960s on hard-hitting journalism that dared to expose and penetrate. And I, for one, will soon be writing a letter canceling my subscription for such a disgraceful piece of journalism.
What’s particularly interesting is that the writer of this article, Thomas P.M. Barnett, has a blog. What’s interesting is that rather than atoning for his inability to throw a baseball faster than a amicable lob, Barnett (who, no surprise, has kids to feed, making dealing with the devil more justifiable) has written a post expressing surprise that his efforts would be greeted with such outrage. He concludes, “I wanted to write up Rumsfeld in the way I saw him in history for the transformation process he has unleashed, not simply replicate the hundreds of articles that blame him for Iraq. My choice? Yes. Don’t like it? Fine. But criticize the choice without implying that the only way the man can get a profile that doesn’t crucify him is for the journalist to be fooled.”
Fair enough. But as Norman Solomon has argued, the overall questions to Rumsfeld haven’t exactly been hardball. In fact, as FAIR reports, during a September 18, 2002 interview with Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Lehrer failed to call Rumsfeld on factually inaccurate statements. And as Salon reported last December, it took ordinary soldiers to ask the tough questions that journalists typically shied away from.
It would seem to me that Barnett, far from taking the hard alternative route, settled for the same old song. And if Barnett, with his continued fatherly references to “the old man,” genuinely believes that he wasn’t fooled, why the deliberate efforts to portray this seventy-three year old man as some virile squash player? Why the continued masculine assertions? Why nothing in the way of tough questions?
There’s an old Chinese proverb: “He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”
The “We Battled Insomnia with Gin Last Night and the Gin Won, But Heaven Help the Fallout” Roundup
- The fantastic Carrie Frye points to the Word Nerds, a podcast devoted to “the effect of Internet communication” and various language-related issues. I’ll definitely be checking it out, as soon as I finally finish the next installment of my own damn podcast.
- So according to the Associated Press, the book world “is still searching for this year’s great American novel,” eh? There are endless ways that I can answer this, but for now I’ll point again to Lee Martin’s The Bright Forever and Kirby Gann’s Our Napoleon in Rags as two books that I’ve enjoyed very much this year and, in my view, do indeed cut the mustard. Perhaps the key here is to stop thinking about the big boys and dare to delve into the little ones.
- Dan Wickett doesn’t read Playboy for the pictures or the articles. No, sir, he’s reading it for the literature. I knew about the four-bunny system for books, because I actually had a Playboy subscription at the age of sixteen, in which I would secretly run to the mailbox and grab the latest issue covered in black plastic. (Remind me sometime to tell you the tale of what happened when I was finally caught and how I talked my way out of it.) The nice thing about this was that it allowed me to outgrow a reliance upon visual prurience and apply my perverted sentiments to everyday discourse without shame and of course evolve my unabated interest in breasts. But if the likes of Robert Coover can be found within Playboy‘s pages, then I may have to pick up a subscription. I have to wonder, however, if Mr. Wickett is secretly on Hefner’s payroll.
- Dubya actually reads serious books? Apparently, some of the books that he’s taken on a five-week summer sojurn are Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History, Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar (which seems peculiarly apt) and John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza.
- The Gothamist talks with Foop! author Chris Genoa.
- Another celebrity reading slacker: Noel Gallagher, who only just started reading fiction with Angels and Demons (“my first ever book. Believe it or not, it is.”). In the same article, Hester Lacey suggests that to dismiss someone who hasn’t read “seems both sweeping and snobbish.” Oh come on, Hester. We’re talking Dan Brown here. If Victoria Beckham has not even read Green Eggs and Ham, should her raison d’etre not be suspect?
- The new China Miéville short story collection, Looking for Jake, gets an early look at SFF World.
- What the hell was I thinking with the gin? Head hurts. More later.
Circular Blogic
So what’s going on at Galleycat? Tao Lin offers the inside scoop of interviewing with Elizabeth Spiers, creating six sample posts that were never even read, and getting the patented “We’re still exploring our options” response rather than a firm no.
Sarah Boxer Must Be Replaced
Sarah Boxer: “But when it comes to the content of Web comics, Mr. Groth was right. The comics that use digital technology to break out of their frozen boxes are really more like animated cartoons. And those that don’t are just like the old, pre-digital ones, without the allure of the printed page and with a few added headaches for reader and creator alike.”
One can make the same case for Sarah Boxer’s columns. A healthy dose of skepticism is one thing. But Ms. Boxer’s columns are, for the most part, large dollops of bitter reactionary bullshit. She’s about as flexible to culture as hardened doss sticks. I’ve yet to see Ms. Boxer crack so much as a smile or let down her guard in any way. I suppose this is because, in the Boxer universe, all forms of DIY or independent culture are essentially bullshit. The people who try something different are no less than crazed dilletantes. Ideally, these upstarts should be mowed down by machine guns, lest they tango with the status quo or, even worse, disrupt Ms. Boxer from the west wing in her seculded estate. Damn these artists! They’ve deigned to force Ms. Boxer to actually think and write a column!
On the whole, Ms. Boxer’s snotty and inert columns are almost completely devoid of joy. One wonders why such a jaded glacier is on the Gray Lady’s payroll. After all, without going all Julavits here or condoning some phony 100% happy approach, if one is writing about culture, shouldn’t one actually enjoy the subject one is writing about?
Let’s take a look at a few choice examples from Ms. Boxer’s oeuvre.
July 11, 2005: “She is so bored by her job that she will even let you take control of one of the security cameras where she works. If this sounds intriguing, you might want to stop reading here and just go visit the site.”
Instead of trying to understand the approach, perhaps contextualizing the art with the heightened number of surveillance security cameras around us, what we have here is instant dismissal without thought.
June 28, 2005: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that kind of time. Which raises the question: what kind of art do you have time for?”
Never mind understanding the concept behind John Simon’s “Every Icon.” It’s either instant or it sucks!
May 12, 2005: “Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of these. It just means that you’re not cool. And now that you’ve learned about them in the mainstream media (known as MSM on the Web), they’re not all that cool, either.”
Why is this paragraph even necessary? And why should hipness even matter in describing messages that disseminate across the Web?
What is the purpose of all this negativity? For the Times reader to pick up the Wednesday newspaper and feel superior to the disheveled upstarts? For a stockbroker to read the Times on the way to his miserable and artless job and say to himself, “Boy, I’m glad I chose the right path. Unlike these foolish urchins, I’m rolling in the dough. The never of these nincompoops!”
It seems to me that if a critic is writing about culture for a major newspaper, the effort expended should not be made mocking it, but analyzing it, using primary and secondary quotes, to put the cultural effort into perspective. While Ms. Boxer is certainly offering a “Critic’s Notebook,” one would hope that lead articles from the Arts & Cultural Desk would be composed of something more substantial and less half-baked.
Well, That Didn’t Take Long
A San Francisco Chronicle article unearths what it styles “sexcasts”– podcasts that are designed for adult ears. “Sexcasts” include Gray Dancer
Personally, I find the term “sexcast” too clinical and not really all that fun. I submit the following terms for consideration: cockcast, knobcast, boffcast, rodcast, bodcast, or porncast.
Another Alt Weekly Goes Cold, Banal and Spineless
New York Sun: “The New York Press, a troubled alternative weekly with a bare-bones staff and budget and a streak of nasty humor, will soon be refashioning itself as a more sober-minded newspaper with longer essays, fiction, travelogues, and a centrist political voice, according to its new editor.”
[RELATED: Americans are fucking pussies. Canadians are not.]
Track List for New Madonna Album
This Used to Be My Stableground
Material Hurl
Like a Surgeon*
Another Broken Bone in Another Hall
Who’s That Roan?
Beautiful Ranger
Don’t Cry for Me Amygdala
Goodbye to Medicine
I’d Be Surprisingly Ill for You
Justify My Cast (Arm Within)
Open Your Body Part
X-Ray Process
What It Feels Like for a Patient
* — No relation to the Weird Al Yankovich song. This is a new version.
Like the Pestilence of Phil Collins and Sting, Help Spread the Dullness
So the Dave Matthew Band is encouraging people to bypass digital rights management on the latest album. That’s all noble and revolutionary of you, Dave, but your music still sucks.
So the Rereleased M. John Harrison’s a Must Read Then?
SF Site: “Read from cover-to-cover in a short amount of time, Anima feels less like a book than an assault, a wound, an onslaught of dream-killing mirrors, a battalion of bloodthirsty words, an epidemic of images that burrow into the readerly brain and claw their way through the murk of accumulated wistfulness and self-delusion until all that’s left is the petrified carcass of desire.”