The New Yorker: Volume LXXXV, NO. 34, October 26, 2009

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.”

The New Yorker: Volume LXXXV, NO. 34, October 26, 2009

Spotlight on “Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron” By Dana Goodyear

It’s great that The New Yorker is devoting this much space to film. This James Cameron profile goes on for roughly 12 pages (and if you’ve ever read The New Yorker you’ll know that each page is comprised of 3 columns, so that’s a lot of teeny tiny text). But, and this is the important part, this is an article about James Cameron! As beloved as his tech-noir films are (and that’s The New Yorker’s term, not mine), this is the guy who made Titanic—a movie so unequivocally girly that it might as well have been called Fallopian Tubes. I understand that it was one of the hugest blockbusters in movie history, and yes, I did see it twice in the theater when I was a cornball 14-year-old girl, but I don’t need this much information about James Cameron, okay. I don’t need to know that he likes scuba diving or that his hair has grown over the course of a year or that he stopped drinking caffeine after Terminator 2. I mean, if this were a profile of Josh Charles, then yes, all of that stuff would be crucial. But James Cameron? C’mon.

Avatar may very well be the film that changes the way we understand 3D and movies in general, but this article is just too long. I know that the intended audience of this particular publication isn’t the sci-fi/fantasy nerd contingent. So who wanted this? We have a huge supply of James Cameron facts here, but was there really a demand? The answer is, no. No, there wasn’t.

Goodyear’s profile is superbly written (but what else would you expect, right?) and I want to read more of her work. Her writing is by far the most accessible of what I read this time around and the only reason I was able to finish the article was because of that accessibility. But jeez, the subject.

In the end James Cameron shows himself to be sort of douchey. I’ll probably seeAvatar, though.

Number of times scuba diving is mentioned: 6

Best moment:

“Hamilton was going to get scuba-certified, but the relationship unraveled too rapidly for that.”

Flotsam and Jetsam

•Cameron has been married five times.

•O.J. Simpson was in consideration for the role of the terminator.

•Cameron is a member of the Mars Society—an organization that advocates the human exploration and settlement of the planet.

•Cameron has a piece of shrapnel in his forearm, a souvenir from the Terminator 2 shoot.

The New Yorker: Volume LXXXV, NO. 34, October 26, 2009

atomize • v.tr. reduce to atoms or fine particles (break apart; fragment; separate; disperse; scatter).

“This may be a fine time for hip-hop to atomize.”

ejectives • n. voiceless consonants that are produced with simultaneous closure of the glottis.

“On cue, the actors began to make strange trilling sounds, ejectives and glottal stops and rolled ‘r’s: Na’vi.”

extremophiles • n. “organisms that thrive in environments toxic to most life forms.”

gnomic • adj. of, consisting of, or using aphorisms; sententious.

“Scruggly samples from soul records and rapid, gnomic bundles of rhymes about drug-selling and agitated encounters.”

hewing • v. conform, adhere.

“The hole was steep and accurate, hewing to the spray-painted plan still visible in two corners where the lines of paint, meeting, had pooled and blurred.”

intransigence • n. the quality or state of being intransigent. <--not helpful. (intransigent • adj. uncompromising; stubborn)

“She won’t leave, and the official finds himself increasingly respectful of her intransigence—and so does Kazan.”

irremediably • adv. that cannot be remedied.

“What he means isn’t just that that real-life case was a bad one but that it drew irremediably bad publicity.”

klaxon • n. a type of loud horn formerly used on motor vehicles.

“He signs his missives ‘Jim out,’ and, when he’s working, a deep mechanical roar, like a Navy klaxon, summons him to the stage.”

metonymy • n. a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated.

“Hollywood metonymy for female characters is ‘handbags,’ also known as ‘girlfriend parts’—in other words, incidental sidekicks.”

noisome • adj. 1 harmful; noxious 2 evil smelling.

“What is more, the savagery that has earned the film its noisome reputation begins only after she has announced, ‘I’m cured, I’m fine.’”

Pilobolus • n. a genus of fungi that commonly grows on herbivore dung.

“Zoe Saldana, who plays Neytiri stood among a group of actors wearing black unitards covered with reflective white dots : a retro vision of the computer age, Pilobolus style.”

preemption • n. acquisition by one person or party before the opportunity is offered to others.

“It made an effective preemption of any indigenous neighborhood protest, an easy trump.”

prelapsarian • adj. characteristic of or belong to the time or state before the fall of humankind.

“Call me fanciful, but I think the name is on the loaded side, for it is here that the fall of man and the collapse of woman take place, and where the landscape . . . looks anything but prelapsarian.”

turbid • adj. 1 muddy; thick; not clear 2 (of a style, etc.) confused; disordered.

“The director James Cameron is six feet two and fair, with paper-white hair and turbid blue-green eyes.”