Day / July 24, 2006

by Edward Champion

Tanenhaus: Just Say No to Podcasting

While I have given up the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch, did you know that Sam Tanenhaus is in the podcasting business? Every Friday, NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus releases a new installment through the New York Times website. And while you can’t access the podcast without iTunes and there doesn’t appear to be an archive of Tanenhaus’s past podcasts, you can, of course, listen to the latest installment.

I tried out the 7/22/06 podcast and, believe it or not, I actually felt a bit sad for Sammy Boy. He clearly doesn’t want to do this. He’s forcing himself to have fun. I can only imagine the initial meeting with Bill Keller.

“Sam, we need to be competitive. So we’re going to need you to do a podcast! It’s the latest thing with the kids.”

“Doesn’t my work for the Review stand on its own?”

“Oh absolutely, Sam! Keep those Leon Wieseltier hit pieces coming.”

“But why me?”

“Because you’re the Book Review editor! Who else would we approach?”

“Can’t Liesl do this instead? She’s down with this more than I am.”

“No, Sam. We need you! You’re the editor! You’re our voice. Do you need me to get the legal team on your ass?”

“Okay, fine. I’ll do it.”

Perhaps it’s a telling indicator of how he feels about being NYTBR editor. He’s getting by the best he can, but he really wants to go home and write a biography.

For those who don’t want to go to the trouble of listening to it, here’s a description:

A 1970s punk band, or perhaps, more accurately, a 1994 approximation of “alternative rock,” some local New York band that can be hired for a pittance, opens up the show, singing (I think; it’s hard to make out with all the poor man’s distortion) “I’m reading for the New York Times Book Review.” (No, I am not making this up.) Sammy Boy then introduces himself, thanking his audience for the letters, postcards and mail he’s received, only to attempt a gag in a dour tone, “Oops. My producer’s waving frantically.” He then remarks that the letters were to Dwight and, sounding as if he’s reading off of a script (written by somebody else?), he says, “But I told my mother-in-law to address those to me.”

Sammy T then introduces David Margolick, who wrote this week’s front page review. Then we get the NYTBR boosterism in evidence at the infamous BEA panel. “David, as soon as your review came in, it felt like a cover essay because of its narrative and emotional power. In fact, you begin with a rather chilling anecdote.” Now imagine these two sentences spoken in an opaque Brooklyn dialect, without any warmth or humor, without even the hint of a man letting down his guard. And you begin to see the sad scenario here. Bad enough that the podcast is devoted to propping up the Gray Lady’s dubious stature with questions and answers that feel scripted and possibly rehearsed, but Sammy Boy is so uptight (at least on air) that he’s incapable of maintaining even the illusion that he’s enjoying this.

Margolick, who is either terrifyingly articulate (in a troubling executive conference room kind of way) or reading from a script, responds to the questions in a banal flatline tone with such introductory phrases as “But I hadn’t thought about that, Sam..” and “I think the evidence is incontrovertible….” In short, Sammy Boy and the Times crew are terrified of the very human uhs and ahs that populate human conversation (have they edited these out?), the flawed tics that cause vernacular to take on that joie de vivre that causes others to give a damn about books. But why should they reveal their limitations? After all, this is the Times! The crown’s jewels! Not a single person can screw up here!

The human feel, however, does find a certain inroads with William Rhoden, who talks about his book Forty Million Dollar Slaves with some vigor and genuine interest. But I suspect it has more to do with the fact that Sammy Boy is away from the mike and gives most of the conversation to Rhoden. I suspect, in fact, that most of Sammy T’s segues and questions have been edited out, because Rhoden says, “You mention Joe Louis” midway through the conversation when Tanenhaus hasn’t even mentioned Louis. I listened to the Rhoden-Tanenhaus interview hoping that Tanenhaus would let down his guard, if only to bring a coherence to the conversational thread. But if Sammy T did, it’s certainly not presented on audio. And if Sammy Boy can’t reveal his faults, if he’s incapable of showing any warts or even a soupçon of humility or ignorance, what on earth is he doing podcasting?

Then Rachel Donadio talks about the bestsellers list and sounds suspiciously like a novice voiceover student doing her best to ape a FM radio news correspondent (I know this because I took a few voiceover classes in the late ’90s and recalled my own clumsy efforts, and I wondered if Times expenses were being siphoned Donadio’s way), clearly reading her words from a script and trying to offer a spontaneous inflection. And as if to impute that the Times podcast crew is having fun, some forced off-mike laughter is left in. I suspect that the crew was likely laughing over how absurd it was that journalists are now reduced to being radio or podcasting people.

Maybe it’s the fun-loving Californian in me, but I listened to this and wondered if Sammy Boy and his staff were trying to approximate fun, rather than approach any genuine threshold of excitement. Why couldn’t they let loose? Or is this how Manhattan faux intellectuals talk? Had I been the producer, I would have demanded that all the on air talent have a good glass of wine. Or perhaps I’d pass around a bong. After all, when you’re dealing with sticks wedged up orifices, desperate times call for desperate measures.

The lack of archival podcasts and the elaborate efforts one must take to listen to the sole podcast available (i.e., one must install iTunes) reveals just how ephemeral Sammy T’s crew hopes this podcasting fad will be. They’re humoring top brass for now, thinking that nobody will notice.

I wonder if he’d be so rigid if someone hugged him before each installment. If someone simply told Sammy T that letting one’s hair down is a peachy keen thing, then maybe the NYTBR podcast might be worth something.

But if Sam Tanenhaus didn’t feel up to the task, he could have easily said no. He didn’t have to go through with something so clearly odious to his sensibilities. The man clearly despises this part of the job, which makes me wonder how much he secretly hates turning out the Review on a weekly basis.

by Edward Champion

Gray Lady Deathwatch

Editor and Publisher: “Early last week the Times said it will consolidate production at its newer plant in the College Point section of the city’s borough of Queens, eliminate 240 jobs through various severance and buyout packages, and convert its printing equipment from the use of 54-inch-wide newsprint rolls to 48-inch rolls. The web-width reduction will occasion a redesign suitable for pages that will slim from 13.5 inches wide to 12 inches, but remain 22 inches long. The addition of more pages is expected to compensate for more than half the loss of printable page space, according to Executive Editor Bill Keller.”

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Lizzie Skurnick reviews Talk Talk.
  • This week at the LBC site, discussion for Edie Meidav’s Crawl Space begins. Scott and I had the great pleasure of sitting down for Indian food and (later) coffee with Meidav. A podcast of this conversation, which features Scott as a co-interviewer, horrible French mispronunciations from me, and perspicacious answers from Meidav, will be posted on Friday. In the meantime, jump in to the fray at the LBC.
  • Levi Asher uncovers another Tanenhaus naysayer and asks why so many bloggers are concerned with the NYTBR. I can’t speak for others, but since the NYTBR is often misconstrued as the flagship weekly newspaper book review supplement, it’s disconcerting to see the Review regularly come across as a particularly crass frat boy spilling a keg of beer over the upholstery of a Rolls Royce on his way home from a stag party.
  • John Updike takes a look at Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
  • Over at The Elegant Variation, Karen Palmer interviews John McNally. I like what little I’ve read of McNally so far. So it’s good to see a long-form interview help push me over the edge.
  • Attention Bittorrenters: Torchwood has an airdate of late autumn. A spinoff from Doctor Who, the show will feature Captain Jack, who may be the first flamboyantly bisexual action hero to star in a regular television series.
  • Bruce Campbell will have a cameo as Quentin Beck (aka Mysterio) in Spider-Man 3. The original source for this information (and more) is down, but Cinematical has the roundup.
  • Kathleen McGowan insists that her book, The Expected One, is not a The Da Vinci Code knockoff. Well, let’s see. Religious thriller, check. Controversial framing of text, check. Large first print run, check. Vatican conspiracy and hidden documents, check. Turgid writing (“Feeling momentarily dizzy, Maureen steadied herself with a hand against the cool stones of an ancient wall.”), check. At least McGowan, who claims to be the descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, has the consolation of being batshit crazy.
  • Will the iPod become an eBook reader? More importantly, can contemporary developers offer a tech product in which the second letter of their ware isn’t capitalized?
  • Danuta Kean suggests that cookbooks are for wimps. I’ll have you know, Danuta, that I perform calisthenics before cooking my chicken cordon bleu. The Galloping Gourmet has nothing on my ass. I slam down several shots of straight 100 proof bourbon while I’m preparing the fillets. The Dirty Dozen plays in the background. I can drink AND cook Graham Kerr under the table! You want to fuck with me? You want to fuck with my smoked salmon or my homemade biscotti? I’ll show you who the real man in the kitchen is! Have your boyfriend meet me in a five-star restaurant kitchen of your choice at 5:00 PM. Gloves off! There will be blood on the kitchen floor and a fine five-course dinner to boot!
  • I obtained McSweeney’s #19, the cigar box version, yesterday, because I was tempted by the excised novella component of Talk Talk. While I haven’t cracked the contents open yet, the blog I Am the Man Who Will Fight for Your Honor takes umbrage with it, disappointed that “an actual collection of short fiction takes a backseat to a collection of random junk posing as a collection of short fiction.” It awards the collection “one tiny Ludivine Sagnier” on a scale of one to five.
  • Porn star Mimi DeMayo is running for Nevada governor, but she’s concerned that she’s not being taken seriously. But can one really endorse a candidate who offers a slow-loading campaign site, replete with misspellings and not so much as a platform? (Unless, of course, you confuse platform heels with a list of positions.)
by Edward Champion

Clerks II

I am not certain what it is about manboy slacker books and films that attracts me, aside from the fact that my 32nd birthday’s coming up and I remain very much an adolescent, albeit one with a few irons in the fire of maturation. Irrespective of my personal standing, I am sad to report that Kevin Smith’s Clerks II is mostly a dud, a graceless return to territory that Smith himself has long outgrown. It is not so much that, aside from a very funny donkey show interlude, the jokes here are clunkers. (What can one say about a film whose funniest gag is an homage to Silence of the Lambs?) I suspect that Smith doesn’t trust his instincts as a writer, or perhaps lacks the discipline to whack down the melodramatic monologues he relies upon to maintain momentum. Say what you like about Jersey Girl (and I will go on record as saying that I enjoyed that film’s unexpected sweetness), but Smith’s heart is more attuned to sincere human behavior. But like his hero John Hughes, he’s reached a point in his career where he doesn’t know how to commingle the comedy with the sap and the results feel incongruous and rushed. (Part of me wonders if Smith writes a script over a weekend like Hughes.)

clerks2.jpgTake, for example, a scene between Dante (played again by Brian O’Halloran) and the manager he may be in love with (Roasrio Dawson, the only cast member here not mugging to the camera) on the rooftop of Mooby’s, the fast food joint where Dante and Randal now find themselves employed ten years later after their beloved Quik Stop has burned to the ground. The manager, inspired by the Jackson 5’s “ABC,” is teaching Dante how to dance for his upcoming wedding. It’s a moment in which O’Halloran’s eyes light up with wonder and we expect there to be any number of virulent emotions running under the surface: perhaps a lower brow raised in deference to Linklater’s Before Sunset. But Smith opts instead for cross-cutting to various people dancing inside Mooby’s, followed by an elaborate dance number with everyone toe-tapping outside the restaurant. The scene is a remarkable letdown, relying upon a hokey artifice that feels more at home in a 1986 episode of Moonlighting than a 2006 film.

It is Smith’s inability to pursue the import he clearly wants to depict that cripples his film. He certainly acknowledges his debts, giving Randal a David Wooderson-like panache for bedding seventeen year old girls. (Richard Linklater’s second film was Dazed and Confused.) There is an interesting twist on James Mason painting Lolita’s toes in an early scene where O’Halloran paints Dawson’s toes, implying that the two might be overgrown children in search of meaningful lives. But the cinematic riffs and the wry allusions stop there. The film feels tired. Jason Mewes, as Jay, lacks the hangdog stoner look of Smith’s first four films. There are clumsy references to blogs, indolently written comedy (Smith desperately tries to mine a gag involving Randal confusing Helen Keller with Anne Frank and it feels like a Saturday Night Live sketch gone five minutes too long), and the expected cultural fixations (this time, the Lord of the Rings trilogy).

The film is littered with MacGuffins. Jay and Silent Bob serve no purpose, other than as a deus ex machina. A nineteen year old Christian co-worker (Trevor Fehrman) is played for easy laughs. (He’s a Transformers geek, has a cell phone that he uses to call his mother in emergencies, and has a closeted side that is about as predictable as Smith once again employing static framing.) And in an act of nepotism as catastrophic as Ben Stiller casting his wife Christine Taylor in Zoolander, Smith has cast his own wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, as Dante’s fiancee. She’s left to offer doe-eyed entropy when not making out with O’Halloran. It doesn’t help that she wears a T-shirt reading, “Mrs. Hicks,” which further highlights her thespic incompetence.

It has been reported that Jeff Anderson returned to the role of Randal with reluctance. The performance shows. Anderson’s energy was one of the high points of the first Clerks film: a rush of staccato snark that formed a contrapuntal buttress to Dante’s neuroses. Here, Anderson lacks the vim to pull off the balance. There is the suggestion of a dark edge to Randal, but both Smith and Anderson are wary to pursue it.

Clerks II is a desperate retread and a colossal step backwards for Smith. The View Askew universe may have been fun for Smith once, but it’s clear with this film that the cash cow moos just as loudly as the door at Mooby’s.