The New Yorker, March 13, 2000Cover: Dreadful. A very old joke, drawn in an uninspired manner. No redeeming features whatsoever. Talk: Stunningly uninsightful piece by Hertzberg on isn't it wonderful how less racist we are now than we were a couple of generations ago. Thank you Hendrik. Very lightweight piece on Presidential dinners. Unfunny humor piece about Kathie Lee Gifford running for president of the Czech Republic, which fails to draw any connections to Madeleine Albright at all. Nice piece about a DJ. Bill Buford gets drunk with rich people. Overall: nothing must-read, nothing with buzz, although the DJ piece was of New Yorker standard. Joe Klein on how McCain has sabotaged Bush: Klein has good insights, but I think he's writing too many pieces for the New Yorker, and is dredging the barrel a bit. He started off fresh; I hope that now, post-Primaries, he can take a break before the election proper kicks in. Shouts & Murmurs: Funny piece on Fox programming, if not laugh-out-loud. Bruce McCall is suffering from the same overexposure and deadline pressure that Joe Klein is. Very long memoir by Dagoberto Gilb about his mother. Didn't read it. Fantastic Malcom Gladwell piece on menstruation and the pill, which is a must-read for any woman of childbearing age, and another tour-de-force on the part of Gladwell. The guy is certainly the best science writer around. In a nutshell: women simply weren't designed to menstruate 12 times a year for most of their lives, and when they do, it can cause them quite a bit of harm. The pill, of course, is designed to give them a week in every four to menstruate, but that doesn't serve any obvious good purpose. This one piece is definitely worth the cost of an issue, and possibly a whole subscription. In the middle of the Gladwell piece (why? I don't like pieces being broken up like that) is an excellent Martin Luther King photograph. I don't like the positioning across the centre of the spread, though. Profile of the main funny guy on the Simpsons scriptwriting team, which both benefits and suffers from the fact that the author and the subject have obviously been very close for a long time. I think I could have done with a bit more objectivity, but I did find the piece fascinating. Lovely little plus-ca-change piece on fashion from 1936, in the Takes column which has already become the best thing in the magazine. Didn't read the fiction; I rarely do. Anthony Lane on Walker Evans: Very good, proves himself capable of writing serious criticism without too many wisecracks. (Though the ones there are are good: "Agee toiled for four years on his prose, and you wish he hadn't.") Much better than his last attempt at non-movie cricism, some book review I had to give up halfway through. Nicholas Lemann on 3 books on New Orleans: A bit like the Talk pieces, I guess it's interesting, but I don't feel I really gained much from reading it, and it doesn't stand up as a great piece of criticism in its own right. Cartoon set in a gay bar: "My boyfriend is the son my parents always wanted." It is like a dog walking on his hind legs, in the immortal words of Samuel Johnson: it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. Peter Schjeldahl on Sol LeWitt: Schjeldahl has definitely improved since his days at the Village Voice and his early days at the New Yorker, although I still don't think I learned anything from his article, nor is it great criticism. Denby. Denby, Denby Denby. Someone fire this man. He spends virtually his whole column waxing lyrical about Boiler Room, of all movies, and treats this first feature's director like some kind of great auteur: he uses the word "Younger" (the name of the director) no fewer than 14 times. Yeah, right department: "Affleck utters a sentence that may become as emplematic of this period as Michael Douglas's "Greed is good" (from "Wall Street") was of the Reaganite eighties." Finishes off by describing the film as "the first fully alive movie of the millennium." Whatever. Good to see Feiffer on the back page, even if I don't really get it. Overall, mildly disappointing, but only by New Yorker standards, and the diamonds are breathtaking as ever. |