New Yorker, March 20, 2000So I got back from an excellent concert last night (Pierre Boulez conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, if you care, in works by Boulez, Benjamin, Schoenberg and Stravinsky) feeling rather tired (typical New York no-sleep syndrome) but just couldn't do the sensible thing and just go to sleep, because I'd found the new New Yorker in my mailbox, and it's a corker this week. I haven't even read it yet -- just leafed through some of it -- but already I'm in ecstasy, and it's not because it's the fashion issue. Usually I don't like the New Yorker fashion issue. But this time... The cover, by Michael Roberts, is just great. The standard New Yorker larger-than-life woman with hen-pecked husband, on a good-enough-to-eat pink background; she's bedecked in labels (Dior hat, Chanel shades, two scarves, one Chanel, one YSL, Vuitton coat, and no fewer than four handbags -- Vuitton, Fendi, Vuitton again and Dior). Husband has a tie saying "IRS", a hankerchief saying "IOU", and a stunned-mullet expression on his face. Genius. Open it up and check those ads: IFC DPS (that's inside front cover double-page spread) for Polo, Prada DPS, fashion-linked British Airways ad opposite the contents, Gucci DPS, Dolce & Gabbana opposite the contributors, flashing some serious cleavage, Fendi opposite the letters page, Vestimenta, a huge fold-out montrosity featuring Elle Macpherson, Michelle Yeoh, David Tang (who he?), Jerry Hall, Barry Humphries *and* Dame Edna Everage, from the Manadrin Oriental. In general, an issue bursting with ads; I can't remember ever seeing that in the New Yorker before, at least not in a single-week issue. Then we get to Talk of the Town, and it's like eating the most delicious confectionary: you can't help yourself, but you feel sad at the same time because you've done it now, and you can't save it for later. This is great writing. Adam Gopnik surpasses himself in full-on New Yorker Ironic -- he's back in New York City now, after a long time in Paris, and the writing is coming back with full Gotham throttle. I've always been a big Gopnik fan, and I wish he would go back to writing more about art, but this sort of stuff is good enough for anyone. Only gripe: it's interrupted by a DPS for some hotel. The New Yorker always prided itself on not breaking up pieces; it shouldn't start now. Then Jeffrey Toobin on Pat Moynihan, another small-but-perfectly-formed piece of light-yet-not-lightweight writing. The New Yorker is the only magazine I know where the editorial effortlessly outclasses the ads: this Toobin piece is opposite a Jaguar ad which says "Live vicariously through yourself" in capital letters over a ridiculously phallic shot of their new XK8. Five bucks to anybody who can discern any meaning in that phrase. And it just keeps on! I vaguely recognise the Michael Shapiro byline, but I won't forget his little study of a second-tier NBA player in a hurry. It's the sort of thing you want to read out loud to anyone in the room. The talk section continues with Rebecca Mead on the ironies involved in a very anal housewife being the wife of the executor of the famously slobby WH Auden's estate. It's too long, and a bit too heavy-handed: it has the best laugh-line in the whole front of the book, quoting this Cheryl Medelson's book as saying "you need not wash the freezer ever week," but the set-up is cumbersome ("Cheryl Mendelson takes neatnikness to a level that almost qualifies as camp") and then there's the explaining-the-joke bit afterwards ("as if doing such a thing had ever occurred to you") which just falls flat. Plus, there's a rare New Yorker misprint: she talks of "page 663," which is probably page 63 but might be page 66. Then Joe Klein gets a page to himself on the forthcoming election, which we really didn't need. As I said on Friday, Joe Klein is writing too much, needs to pace himself. Give me Michael Kinsley any day. (He's got a great piece in Slate this week: "Imagine the courage it would take to tell a pollster, 'No, actually politics as usual is fine with me.' People say they want politicians they can look up to, and they probably do want one or two of these, for show. But they also want a general class of politicians they can look down on.") I haven't read most of the rest of the issue yet -- after all, I only picked it up last night. But I have read the Michael Specter profile of Manolo Blahnik, complete with gorgeous Irving Penn portrait, which is well-written even if it does suffer from the standard fashion-writer's problem of being far too gushy. And then Helmut Newton sticks his oar in with some seriously not-in-front-of-the-children photos of models with very little on from the waist down, complete with nicely-turned prose from Susan Orlean. ("Nothing says springtime quite so much as a romp around Paris in your underpants.") Sandra Bernhard crops up with what must be the ultimate picture byline ever: a huge 1 1/3 page spread by Arthur Elgort of her at the Michael Kors show, dangling a perfect leg and scowling into the camera as though it had a picture of Madonna above the lens. She can write, too: "All told, it was a very sexy week. How could it not be, with companies like General Motors underwriting the proceedings?" And welcome back, Anthony Lane, to the film reviews where you belong. Hats off to David Remnick; keep up the good work. |