It’s my day off so I devoted the morning to reading The New Yorker. I went from back to front—starting with the film, music, and TV articles—but by the time I hit Dana Goodyear’s profile of James Cameron, I ran out of steam; I barely eked my way through. I’m not incredibly interested in politics to begin with but, being as exhausted and generally sick of reading this magazine as I was, I knew there was no way that I’d be able to tackle “Obama’s Predator War” even if it were about brutal interstellar trophy hunters.
Sections/Articles Read
Profiles—“Man of Extremes” By Dana Goodyear
(See Spotlight on “Man of Extremes”)
Fiction—“Procedure in Plain Air” By Jonathan Lethem
Why I read it:
I recently completed both The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn and I’m planning to go to a Jonathan Lethem book signing later this evening. He is a fantastic writer—I don’t think that I’ve ever encountered prose quite like his.
My one sentence gut reaction:
What just happened?
Best moment:
“The orange cone remained, like an ill-fitted condom stuck on its head.”
Pop Music—“The Life Span of Hip-Hop” By Sasha Frere-Jones
Why I read it:
I didn’t know that The New Yorker was into Jay-Z! I’m into Jay-Z!
My one sentence gut reaction:
I love you, Sasha Frere-Jones.
Best moment:
(There are so many choice quotes in this one, mainly due to Jones’s very intellectual and unironic analysis of illiterate sounding song titles.) “Wayne’s 2008 release, ‘The Carter III,’ which included ‘A Milli,’ a thick, psychedelic ramble tied to a thin metronomic canter, was the year’s biggest-selling album—and probably the last moment when hip-hop was both popular and improbably weird.”
On Television—“The Good Wife” By Nancy Franklin
Why I read it:
TV good. Me like TV. Yum.
My one sentence gut reaction:
Me like Josh Charles.
Best moment:
“Will Gardner (Josh Charles, who hasn’t been so well used since ‘Sports Night’ ended, nine years ago) balks at taking a case brought by a stripper . . .”
The Current Cinema—“Trouble in Eden: Antichrist” By Anthony Lane
Why I read it:
I’d been thinking about seeing this movie—I studied von Trier’s films in college and Charlotte Gainsbourg is just about my favorite actress—but I heard thatAntichrist was both graphic and horrible. So I wanted to see what Mr. Lane thought and then I also wanted to see if I liked him more than David Denby.
My one sentence gut reaction:
You gotta love a film review that gratuitously references D.H. Lawrence.
Best Moment:
(discussing Willem Dafoe) “First he had hot wax dripped onto his sternum by Madonna, in ‘Body of Evidence,’ then he suffered the intense humiliation of being beaten up by Tobey Maguire, in ‘Spider-Man,’ and now he has a log being used as a battering ram on his private parts.”
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