5/25: Russ Smith - More
Muck
5/25: Jim Knipfel - Armageddon II
5/25: Andrey Slivka - Liberal Collaboration
5/24: Eva Neuberg - Another New Low
5/24: Andrey Slivka - Mall Mouse in the City
5/24: Jim Knipfel - What Your Parents Don't Know
5/23: Jim Knipfel - Take That, Steve Allen!
5/23: Spike Vrusho The Long, Hard Rails to Hell
5/22: Russ Smith - A Talented Journalist Shakes His Slump
5/22: Jim Knipfel - This Is News?
5/22: Andrey Slivka - Kauffmann Blew It
5/22: Russ Smith - Almost 10 Bucks Down the Drain
5/21: Andrey Slivka - Oil Crisis
5/21: Jim Knipfel - Lead Time's a Bitch
5/21: John Strausbaugh - What's the Word for Fear of Being
Imitated?
5/21: William Monahan - Defeat Death: Kill Someone
Jeffrey Frank, author of the horrid novel The Columnist, is a Master of the Cliche. Given his background as an editor at The Washington Post and, currently, The New Yorker, that's no surprise. That Simon & Schuster, once a respected publishing house, allowed Frank to release such drivel is a more disturbing assault on the English language. But I'll reserve further comment on The Columnist for Tuesday's "MUGGER"; sit tight, my pretties.
In the meantime, a few other examples of tortured journalism. In The Wall Street Journal's Opinion.com yesterday, Collin Levey led off her "Scene & Heard" article about the New Delhi "Monkey Man" with this inexcusable fit of laziness: "Be very afraid." While this cliche isn't quite as ancient as "The mother of all [fill in the blank]" or the all-purpose send-off "Enjoy!," Levey's a skilled writer and needn't have sullied her otherwise-intelligent piece.
Also on May 24, The Washington Post's Tim Page contributed to this week's count of linguistic wreckage with the worst rumination on Bob Dylan I've come across in, as he might say, many a moon. Page wrote: "Bob Dylan turns 60 today–a sobering thought for all who grew up with his songs and had planned to appropriate one of his titles and remain ‘Forever Young.' Still, the extraordinary revitalization that Dylan has enjoyed in the past few years should serve as comfort, if not inspiration."
Swell. Now, in addition to reading about "comfort food" in the reviews of subliterate restaurant critics, the populace is apparently blessed with "comfort" icons. It gets worse: "As usual, Dylan isn't offering any answers (when he grants his next interview, be sure to check for Halley's Comet in the sky). But it would seem that he stays in the game for the very best of reasons: because he still feels he has a contribution to make, something to say."
Page's assessment was so brilliant, The Boston Globe's arts editor reprinted the piece in today's paper. That the Globe chose to pick up a Post article on Dylan–you'd think New England, home to intellectuals like Patrick Leahy, James Jeffords and Ellen Goodman, would be teeming with experts on the subject–indicates a lack of confidence in its own staff, or maybe just bad taste. I'll opt for the latter.
Time Out New York, suffering a 10 percent decline in advertising linage compared to last year's figures (according to MediaWeek), continues to read like a mid-90s primer on the art of the cliche. The headline for a correction on page four was "Oops...our bad!" and in a short book supplement the reader is enticed by the come-on, "A Sampling of This Season's Best Eye Candy."
Finally, in A.O. Scott's review of Pearl Harbor in today's New York Times, there's the following savory: "‘Pearl Harbor' is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy. The United States military in 1941 was apparently a smoke-free (and virtually sex-free) environment... Racism in the military is mentioned, but neither witnessed nor explored. On a more encouraging note, while the term Jap is uttered from time to time, some effort has been made to acknowledge the humanity of the adversaries."
Why is this "encouraging"? Japan was the U.S.'s enemy; who gives a hoot about "the humanity of the adversaries"? I suppose Scott would applaud a film on the Holocaust that was careful to note that Hitler was a vegetarian. After all, we wouldn't want to upset the citizens of San Francisco and Vermont.
(5/25)
NASA announced yesterday that their next big project–scheduled at this point to lift off from Cape Canaveral in 2004–involves shooting a missile into a comet. They don't intend to destroy the comet–NASA scientists simply want to get a look at what's inside the damn thing.
It strikes me that NASA, whose successes in recent years have been small ones (landing a half-dead probe on an asteroid), and whose failures have been writ large (all those Mars disasters), and whose major ongoing mission (the space station) just seems to bore most people, needed to do something to secure their funding. They needed to grab the public's attention. Make them care about space research again. And what better way to do that than to recreate something that half the American people have seen in the movies? And not just one movie either–something they've seen in a whole slew of comet movies, from Armageddon and Deep Impact to Meteor, Asteroid and even an episode of The Simpsons. You got comet troubles? Shoot a missile into it! For those people who hadn't already made the connection, NASA's calling the project "Deep Impact." And to drive the "life-imitates-science fiction" point home even further, the missile is supposed to slam into the comet on July 4, 2005–Independence Day!
Granted, Comet Tempel 1 isn't on a collision course with Earth. It's just minding its own business, orbiting the sun. We have nothing to worry about. This whole thing is kind of a practice shot, just for fun.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of NASA and I'm all for space research. Thing is, though, while NASA officials may have seen a whole lot of comet movies–enough to give them the idea for a cheap publicity stunt–they've apparently never watched these movies through to the end. Because if they had, they'd realize that, with rare exception, the whole "blow it up with a missile" storyline never, ever works. Just ask Professor John Frink!
(5/25)
Andrey
Slivka
Liberal Collaboration
I just caught up with Paul Krugman's Wednesday New York Times column (I tend to clip my favorite Times columnists and save them for special moments, in the manner in which a child might hoard a particularly toothsome caramel or other sweetmeat), and have found it depressing in its mainstream liberalism.
The piece is called "My Beautiful Mansionette," and its pull quote reads, "Do immigrants cause sprawl?" When the corporations finally build a museum to celebrate, and trace the perfection of, their hegemony, one imagines that Krugman's column will be displayed prominently, possibly under the heading "Our Liberal Enablers," in that section of the institution dedicated to commemorating the secret accomplices of the voracious multinational capitalism the promulgation of which is now synonymous with our civilization.
Krugman's column starts out well enough. He discusses urban sprawl, which is the geographical expression of the contemporary corporate order–it's the physical reality that corporate capitalism constructs for us. Krugman: "For most of the past year my wife and I lived in a rented house in central New Jersey–a McMansion, also known as a mansionette. It was in a brand-new development, in what used to be a cornfield, that looks like a textbook illustration of turn-of-the-millennium urban sprawl. These days they aren't little boxes on a hillside, they're big boxes on flat ground. But they're still all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same."
And Krugman's capable at other points throughout the column of facing reality, as when he describes "what one sees everywhere in this country: farms and traditional towns submerged by a rising tide of malls, highways and McMansions."
But mainstream liberalism is a project of avoiding having to act on one's most radical and honest suspicions, to avoid having to change anything, even while making one feel better about oneself. Were we being less charitable, we might say it's a project of affirming the existing order of things. Thus, having come pretty close to acknowledging that the situation is intolerable, that change is needed, Krugman must tiptoe back from the precipice and into the comforting embrace of liberal dogma, where the air is soothing, moist and warm, and nothing has to be done.
In the end it's not really the corporations that are a problem in Krugman's opinion, it's not that we're in the midst of a destructive transformation of the American landscape. The problem, rather, is the existence on this planet of racists. "But they're all still made of ticky-tacky," Krugman writes, "and they all look just the same." But then, perhaps inevitably, he offers us this: "Our neighbors, however, didn't all look just the same. Most of them were immigrants, and most were nonwhite; the largest contingent came from India."
Having now equated urban sprawl with the well-being of colored people, Krugman has freed himself to equate opposition to it–which is the same as opposition to corporate capitalism–as racist and anti-immigrant. "Over the horizon new and possibly quite nasty political storms are brewing," he writes. "If you think people get angry and irrational when arguing about taxes, wait till you see them argue about immigration."
What you end up with is a column that might have been ghostwritten by a developer or in a corporate boardroom or in a White House office, a piece of writing that delegitimizes dissidence. It isn't that radical environmentalists and critics of the corporations are actually radical environmentalists and critics of the corporations. It's rather that they hate Indians, blacks, Puerto Ricans, gays and the other fetishized objects of boutique liberalism. The problem, finally, isn't a civilization that's growing ever more objectionable. It's that central New Jersey contains people who are insufficiently convivial to their Bangladeshi neighbors.
Obviously, Krugman's no fan of the corporations (although maybe I shouldn't be so sure about that), but he's prey to that liberal pathology that necessitates all sorts of intellectual contortions rather than actually facing the fact that things have to change, now.
(5/25)
Cynthia Cotts' "Press Clips" column in the Village Voice hit a new low this week. The piece is about an EEOC complaint of racial discrimination filed against the Daily News in March by News reporter Michael Allen.
It's worth quoting most of Cotts' lede, since that sets the overheated tone: "Michael O. Allen aspired to live in a color-blind world... Allen thought of himself as a reporter first and a black man second. But his race caught up with him at a Neo-Nazi rally in South Africa, where he was surrounded by a mob and beaten to a pulp." Next sentence: "Allen claims he felt the sting of racism again in November 1998, when Ed Kosner was named editor of the Daily News' Sunday edition."
And what, is it alleged, did Ed Kosner do to Michael Allen? He "systematically shut the black man out," ultimately transferring him from the Sunday edition to the Brooklyn beat.
Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that all concernedÐCotts, Allen, Allen's lawyer, the Daily News itselfÐseem to agree that no reporter in his or her right mind would want to cover Brooklyn. (Brooklyn's the hinterlands, you know. No important, high-profile stories have ever come out of that borough.) What's more ridiculous is the rhetoric equating a transfer to Brooklyn with a bloody beating. Cotts goes on to quote an unnamed source alleging that the Daily News favored Jews in its recent round of layoffs: "One axed reporter was told that Ôit had nothing to do with me. The problem is that I don't have a rabbi.'"
Read that last one again: it's not an anonymous axed reporter, it's an anonymous axed reporter attributing an inflammatory remark to some other anonymous person. Cotts probably couldn't even get away with that in an undergraduate journalism program, but apparently it passes muster at the Voice. Toward the end of the piece, she says that black Daily News columnists Karen Hunter, E.R. Shipp and Stanley Crouch essentially don't count as black people "because they're not in the newsroom and their views are not representative of most black readers."
Really? Want to bet whether either Cotts or the anonymous "black critics" she paraphrases are armed with detailed opinion profiles of the News' readership, broken down by race and ethnicity? I bet they just don't like what Shipp, Hunter, or Crouch have to sayÐremarkable since the three of them taken together are pretty much all over the ideological map. Cotts does manage to squeeze exactly one named source, other than Allen's attorney, into her story, and she does remind us that in 1987 the News had to shell out $3 million as the loser in an earlier racial-discrimination case. But the main accomplishment of her column is to make a mockery of the very notion of workplace discriminationÐnot to mention the notion of reporting a story. Imagine anyone thinking there's a difference between opinion and commentary on the one hand, reporting on the other. How terribly gauche.
(5/24)
Andrey
Slivka
Mall Mouse in the City
It happened again this morning: Howard Stern referred to Soho as a "gay" neighborhood. He made a similar allusion to "gay" Soho earlier this week, as I remember it.
This is interesting. "Artists," "lofts," "restaurants," "galleries," "tourism" and "shopping mall" are some of the words that flash through the heads of New Yorkers when they think of Soho. But they don't think "gay," as they do when, say, Chelsea or Christopher St. comes up in conversation. Soho's no gayer than any other upscale neighborhood full of expensive stores. Stern, who's recently moved to Manhattan full-time from Long Island after the dissolution of his marriage, and who shows continual evidence of not really getting where he now lives, should produce his own map of the city, with his favorite restaurants and nightspots highlighted, in the manner of the Zagat's restaurant map: A Mall-Guy's Map of Manhattan, with the area south of Houston and west of Broadway coded pink, the Lower East Side filled in ghetto-brown (news of that area's gentrification will reach Stern at some point during the next five to seven years) and Lot 61 marked with a big gold star.
(5/24)
Jim
Knipfel
What Your Parents
Don't Know
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not exactly "parental" material. I'm more like "weird uncle" materialÐand am quite comfortable with that.
Of course, take a look around these days, and I tend to think that most people are not parental materialÐand yesterday's report by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children pretty much bears that out. It seems that in answering a survey conducted by the Center, 34 percent of the parents questioned could not recall the height, weight and eye color of their children.
This means that investigators trying to track down missing children are being asked to go out there and find, you know, "a short person."
I tend to be suspicious of surveys on principle, but be that as it may, if there's anything to this one, I think it's mighty telling.
We're living in an ageÐthis is something my girlfriend pointed out to meÐwhere parental groups are demanding that the schools keep an eye on their kids, that the movie and record industries clean up their acts on account of the kids, that the government take care of their kids. It seems everyone except the parents is at fault when kids turn out wrong somehow. It wasn't the fact that the kids were never spoken to in a rational mannerÐit was that damned heavy-metal music. It wasn't the fact that they were plopped in front of the television when they were 18 months old and left there for the next 16 yearsÐit was that awful violent movie they saw. And their kids never would've brought a gun to school if the school administrators had been on top of things and installed more metal detectors by the front doors.
I guess with all the other people keeping an eye on their kids for them, parents don't really need to know what their offspring look like.
(5/24)
Jim
Knipfel
Take That, Steve Allen!
I know it's wrong, and I know it's bad, butÐto be honestÐI just never really loved Jack Kerouac's On the Road all that much. I respect and admire it, certainly. And I'd never deny that it's a fine and great novel. I just never loved it.
Maybe I read it at the wrong time, or in the wrong frame of mind. Maybe if I tried now, it would be differentÐthough about a year ago I listened to an audio version read by a drunken David CarradineÐconsider that for a secondÐand was still left lukewarm about it.
Maybe it's because I don't care that much for jazz.
Be that as it may, however, I was very happy to hear that the original, 120-foot long, single-spaced, single-paragraphed scroll of a manuscript brought in a record price at Christie's yesterdayÐa whopping $2.2 million. That topped the record set just last week (something around $1.5 million) for the original handwritten manuscript of a book I do love with all my heartÐLouis-Ferdinand CŽline's Journey to the End of the Night.
What made me even happier was that the man who bought itÐJim Irsay, who owns the Indianapolis Colts football teamÐhas no interest in squirreling it away in a vault someplace. He wants to display it, make it available to the public and to scholarsÐmaybe even send it on tour in 2007, in honor of the book's 50th anniversary. That sounds good to meÐit is, after all, a novel of the people, a profoundly American novelÐnot one to be hidden away in some rich guy's basement until he can sell it for more money to another rich guy.
I guess I'm just happy to see books, and the history of books, getting this sort of newfound respect in this wacky, plug-in, log-on, there-you-are, oh-no-you're-not hyperelectronic world of ours.
Some people may not understand that. You can't look at an old manuscript the way you can look at, say, a painting (though some people don't understand painting, either). Thing about old manuscripts, though, with their marginal notes and crossed-out lines and replaced words, is that you can actually watch the creative process take place right there on the page. You can see these things come into being. With the CŽline novel, for instance, it's said that no two lines in the original manuscript still existed by the time the book reached its final form.
Of course, there's always the argument that we should let these old things be, that these lines were scratched out for a reason, that the final version of a book was the one the author wanted to be made public.
Yes, well, there is that.
Thing is, in the publishing world as it is today, typed and handwritten manuscripts don't really happen that much anymore. Oh there are some exceptions, still, among old-timersÐKurt Vonnegut, I know, still writes his novels longhand before having a secretary type them up. He also still edits with scissors and tape. But he's an exceptionÐfor the most part, everything is done electronically. Words are deleted, not crossed out. Marginal notes no longer exist. I can't help but feel that when you lose things like that, you're losing a big partÐand one of the most interesting partsÐof a book's life.
Irsay, who also owns one of Elvis' old guitars, joked after the auction, "If you have some talent, don't throw anything away.''
Which makes me wonderÐ50 years from now, will Christie's be auctioning off some of Norman Mailer's old floppy discs?
(5/23)
Spike
Vrusho
The Long, Hard
Rails to Hell
The smoke and mirrors of Amtrak's Acela marketing ploy wears off the minute you board the "regional" service and see that it's the same old stainless-steel sausage link of a rail carrier with the same old staff still harboring the cliche of vintage 70s U.S. postal worker rage. It was, in fact, an Acela/Amtrak sewer-on-rails northbound train that got everyone's Mother's Day weekend started off all wrong.
It's all about seat selection. Anxious to bust through the early chapters of Mark Lane's outdated Jonestown apology The Strongest Poison, concentration was suddenly out the window as soon as a Chelsea gym queen flopped into the seat beside me. Fresh from a 3:30 p.m. exit from his marketing job at Calvin Klein, he was most upset that the 92-minute delay leaving Penn Station forced him to miss his dinner date in Boston. So of course he logged a good 70 minutes of shrill but dramatic complaining to his fabulous friends on his cellphone. He nixed one late-night party idea over the phone because he didn't want "to hang around with fat people eating fried food." His predictable detritus seatside: four giant bottles of Evian (I must have forgotten that we live in a desert climate), broken-in Barneys bag, one unread New York Times.
Directly behind me, not to be outdone, a midlevel editor from Mademoiselle was attempting to chat up a somnambulant fellow to her left. First, she set down the requisite layer of anti-flirt dragon floss by making four or five quick references to her boyfriend. "He works at The New Yorker," she says. This gets her seatmate's interest. He pauses from proofing a manuscript long enough to ask the right questions. She sounded like a Rhode Island bluebloodÐstorage space full of Talbots somewhere in Amherst. Even through filtered and courteous murmurs, the male voice sounded familiarÐmaybe a former WKCR DJ?
She sleuths her way into his particulars, first coaxing his profession (writer!), his work place (The New York Times!) and, with boyfriend comments now tucked away, she asks for his byline so she can "look for it." She didn't know she was talking to the Times' reviewer of pop music shows and a chronicler of skin-and-bones shock rockers. He either had work to do on the train or wanted to nap, because the next half hour was all miss Mademoiselle. Verbal resume outtakes spilled, the rancid brie of "going freelance" was picked over, dropped names rolled like Concord grapes along the carpet floor.
After delivering a cheap pun about Amtrak's poor "track" record, the Timesman seemed ready to call it a night. But that's when they discovered that they went to the same high school back in suburban Chicago.
Bound for a funeral in Providence still three stops away, I considered derailment scenarios. A young media Sadie Hawkins Night behind me, an overhydrated Miss Thing next to me, it was now obvious that failing to bring along a Discman and a few Rammstein CDs was indeed a huge mistake.
(5/23)
Russ
Smith
A Talented Journalist
Shakes His Slump
Tucker Carlson is back.
Maybe it was last week's CNN decision to jettison Spin Room, the embarrassing half-hour circus-like take on politics that Carlson cohosted with Bill Press, a liberal who makes Teddy Kennedy seem rational. Maybe it was the promise that Carlson would log more airtime on CNN's far more serious Crossfire, probably the best talk show on the flagging cable network's roster.
In any case, Carlson has returned to the journalistic form he exhibited for years at The Weekly Standard before being sidetracked by stints at the vacuous Talk and Spin Room. Now at New York, where his first couple of articles were phoned in, Carlson, in the May 28 issue, wrote the definitive article so far on the Democratic lynching of Theodore Olson, President Bush's nominee for U.S. solicitor general.
Olson's been attacked by never-say-die Clintonites like Joe Conason for his association with The American Spectator (and its "Arkansas Project"), as well as conservative-turned-bleeding-heart-liberal David Brock (once a celebrity Spectator reporter). Olson's nomination is in Senate-limbo right now because gullible legislators such as Patrick Leahy take the discredited Brock's word more seriously than those of proud Democrats like lawyers Floyd Abrams, Bob Bennett (a former Clinton attorney), Laurence Tribe (who lost the Bush vs. Gore Supreme Court case to Olson) and Walter Dellinger.
Carlson's first paragraph is the equivalent of a Manny Ramirez home run: "If you're a Salon.com reader, you may be wondering why Ted Olson isn't in jail by now. ÔDespite his evasive disavowals,' blared a recent headline in the on-line magazine, ÔSalon investigations showed the right-wing consigliere was deeply involved in a sordid plot to bring down President Clinton.' According to evidence assembled by an investigative team, for a time in the nineties, Ted Olson did legal work for The American SpectatorÐa magazine that published articles critical of Bill Clinton. And that's not all. On at least one occasion, Olson himself wrote a story hostile both to Clinton and to his wife."
Never mind that The Washington Post, whose Thomas Edsall poked this inconsequential hornet's nest last week by giving a forum to Brock, ran a May 18 editorial in favor of Olson's confirmation. While gratuitously slurring Republicans for their opposition to some of Clinton's nominees, the Post edit read: "The Senate fight over President Bush's nominee for solicitor general, Theodore Olson, involves two separate strands of issues, and they should be considered separately. One has to do with Olson's fitness for office. The other has to do with questions of fairness, partisanship and political payback in an ever more poisonous capital. For us, both strands lead to a recommendation to confirm."
Today, the Post's op-ed columnist Richard Cohen took a different view, siding with conspiracists like Conason and crybaby Brock. He said: "But what's wrong with paybackÐto put it more politely, accountability? After all, what's at issue is not Olson's masterful representation of Bush but his association in a squalid and destructive attempt to abort a presidency by almost any means."
I carry no water for The American Spectator, a once-absorbing magazine whose overzealous editor Bob Tyrrell let his animus toward the 42nd president compromise the magazine's veracity. Tyrrell's hysterical and dubiously sourced "investigations" into the past life of Clinton eventually made a laughingstock of the Spectator, leaving it a shell that conservative readers shunned in favor of National Review and The Weekly Standard. The Spectator's mission was always a mystery to me: it's not as if Clinton himself didn't forever destroy his reputation.
David Brock has put Olson square in the middle of the "Arkansas Project," and Democratic senators like Leahy and Joe Biden are lapping up every word.
But Tucker Carlson knows a lot more about the Spectator than Biden or Leahy does. He continues in New York: "There are two striking things about Ted Olson's recent experiences in the Senate. One is that so far, hardly anyone on Olson's sideÐor, for that matter, at the ACLU or on the Washington Post's editorial pageÐhas cried McCarthyism. Olson has not been charged with a crime. He stands accused of being in the company of journalists who dislike Bill Clinton. This shouldn't be enough to derail a nomination.
"The other thing is that Brock was able with a straight face to describe any dinner at Bob Tyrrell's house as an Ôeditorial planning session.' To anyone who has ever eaten dinner with Bob Tyrrell (and I have a number of times), this is ludicrous. A sober Tyrrell sitting at the table, sharing his editorial vision, listening as story ideas are batted around? Impossible to imagine. Perhaps Brock was using Ôeditorial planning session' as an amusing euphemism.
"But he almost certainly wasn't. Which is part of the reason the entire Ôsordid plot' theory is so ridiculously improbable. Bob Tyrrell was never at the center of a powerful conspiracy. He was a buffoon. The Arkansas Project never came close to bringing down the president... The Arkansas Project didn't destroy Clinton. It destroyed The American Spectator."
(5/22)
"TV sucks," wrote Tom Grant, an award-winning, well-respected investigative journalist who recently left his long career in television news behind him to take a job in print. According to the AP story concerning the shift, Grant was "disgusted by the push for higher ratings, greater profits and fluffier stories."
The 47-year-old reporter had been on television since 1986, spending much of the last decade in Spokane, WA. He's now taken a job at an alternative weekly in that town.
"We all follow the same recipeÐPut on puppies and babies and the ratings will go up," he said of his tv job. Then he went on to spout several other well-worn cliches: "That's not the news that people need... It may not be as entertaining as reruns of Drew Carey, but people need the news... If you give them the news day after day, people will trust you and come back to you."
And so forth.
Now, my question is this: Exactly how long did it take Mr. Grant to come to the startling conclusion that television news is only interested in ratings and money? Bucketful of prestigious awards or not, how slow is this man? I mean, why didn't he just do what the rest of us did and see Network when it came out? Or, having missed that, Broadcast News? Or, having missed that, why didn't he just take a long, hard look into Dan Rather's eyes?
And more importantlyÐwhat makes him think that working at an alternative weekly is going to be any different?
(5/22)
Andrey
Slivka
Kauffmann Blew It
The New Republic has bravely reprinted on its website Stanley Kauffmann's April 13, 1968, review of Mel Brooks' The Producers, and it's amazing how Kauffmann trashed one of the greatest movie comedies ever made. His uptight aversion to the glories of this classic film is so pronounced that it's easy to assume, at first, that the review's a joke.
"Brooks' Ôinterior' show is called Springtime for Hitler, and it doesn't even rise to the level of tastelessness," Kauffmann writes. And: "The character of the playwright, a patchily disguised ex-Nazi, is badly written, overextended, and poorly played by Kenneth Mars. And even within the loose ground rules of fantasy-farce, it seems odd that the Nazi is oblivious to the Jewishness of his producers."
And so onÐread the whole piece here. It appears under the hed "Classic Review."
(5/22)
Russ
Smith
Almost 10 Bucks Down the Drain
I was at a newsstand at San Francisco's airport on Sunday, killing time before a flight back to Newark. Bought a few keychains for my younger son, an Elsie the Cow piggy bank, a few lollipops and two tie-dyed, peace & love t-shirts for the kids, just so they'd realize how weird California really is.
In addition, I picked up the Sunday papersÐnational editions of The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and the godawful San Francisco ChronicleÐas well as Fast Company and a bimonthly I'd never seen before, MC2 ("Music/Computers/Culture"). Once aboard the Continental plane, I wheezed through the dailies and turned to the mags. I ripped out a blow-in subscription card from Fast Company and was mildly offended. It read: "Did you pay $4.95 for this issue? Subscribe now and save 60%!" Granted, hard times envelop tech pubs, but is it really necessary to insult readers who actually buy Fast Company for the full cover price? Bad form. The hourglass is almost empty for competitors The Industry Standard and Red Herring, but this jibe didn't fill me with the rah-rah spirit that'll help Fast Company survive the current media recession.
As for MC2, I didn't get past the second page after reading an "Oops, we blew it!" message from editor Kent Carmical. He wrote: "Mad props to all you who filled out our survey and returned them. Guess what? We forgot to include a space for you to write your return addressÐour bad. If you don't get your CD, e-mail us and we'll fix you up."
"Mad props"? "Our bad"? Was this written by a 15-year-old who just discovered tattoos and nose rings? I remember an incident from four years ago when I dressed down an editor for using the phrase "our bad" in a New York Press correction. It was an atrocious cliche back then; today, it's just an example of how some editors ought to find new lines of work.
(5/22)
I'm usually such a reliable supporter of extortionate lawsuits against multinational corporationsÐwhy shouldn't common citizens (if also their lawyers) enrich themselves at the expense of these voracious and at best amoral entities?Ðthat I'm surprised to find myself irritated by the suit recently filed in Seattle against McDonald's by Hindus and other vegetarians. The plaintiffs claim that the company misled its customers into believing that its french fries, which are treated with beef flavoring, are in fact vegetarian items. The crucial point in the whole affair is that in 1990, as The New York Times reported yesterday, "the fast-food chain announced with great fanfare that it was switching from beef fat to Ô100 percent vegetable oil' to cook its French fries.'" This announcement was apparently met with satisfaction by Hindus, who could now consume the same crap their fellow citizens shove compulsively into their mouths, and thus more completely immerse themselves in the glories of the Americanism they immigrated here to enjoy. The Times reports that after the announced change, "Mr. [Brij] Sharma joined the legions of Hindu Americans and vegetarians who began venturing into McDonald's to nibble what they believed were vegetarian fries. Mr. Sharma's teenage son even took a job at McDonald's last year, and drawn by the generous employee discount, the Sharma family consumed countless bags of fries."
Oops. Maybe it's because I work with words, and make my living interpreting them, but I'm annoyed by how so many people could take the junk-food monolith's claim as a guarantee that the fries would henceforth be suitable for vegetarians. It would seem to me that claiming that 100 percent vegetable oil is used to cook fries means exactly and only that. It doesn't mean that the fries aren't soaked in huge vats of beef fat before or after they're cooked. It doesn't even mean that McDonald's doesn't stick a tiny speck of beef into every single fry, consistent with some shady mission to ensure that Hindus are consigned upon dying to everlasting hell. It doesn't mean anything except what it says. I don't think McDonald's was actively trying to mislead anybody. They're guilty (in this instance, at least) of nothing more than not foreseeing and planning for the inevitable inability of the majority of human beings to pay proper attention to, to listen carefully to, what they're told. Most people aren't good at interpretation, aren't good at understanding. The plaintiffs in this case are no exception.
And by the way, why were the Sharmas, and others, so eager to eat stuff boiled in vegetable oil? Vegetable oil's no good for you either. If anyone's in possession of statistics that document the incidence of Hindu-American obesity after the 1990 McDonald's change in cooking methods, please forward them to me.
(5/21)
Jim
Knipfel
Lead Time's a Bitch
I never thought I'd say this, but The Weekly World News blew it.
The cover of the May 29 issue (grab it while you can!) features the banner headline, "DEAD McVEIGH ON MORGUE SLAB!" and the subhed, "Photo the govt. doesn't want you to see!" Filling the rest of the cover is a drawing (yes, a drawing) done by that hyperrealist they call upon whenever they want to pass something off as a "shocking photo"Ðdepicting an apparently dead, pasty-faced McVeigh, eyes closed. To be honest, it looks a bit more like Sean Penn than Tim McVeighÐbut maybe they plan to reuse it when Sean Penn kicks.
Inside, the same drawing is reproducedÐ"Exclusive Photo of Timothy McVeigh Will Rock America!"Ðand is accompanied by a six-paragraph story, which reads in part:
"The grisly photo is being circulated on the Internet by anonymous individuals who did not divulge
