New York, New Yorker

The DVD gets us hot

2005-07-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

Simon Houpt had a piece this weekend in the Globe and Mail about the New Yorker DVD collection in which he quoted Emdashes, the 'other' New Yorker blog. Why he hasn't sought comment from New York, New Yorker isn't clear, though we will have to get Sy Hersh to investigate this further.

New Yorker on NPR

2005-07-24T15:37:00.000-07:00

Check out this NPR program on New Yorker cartoons.

Reading List - July 25, 2005

2005-07-21T22:23:00.000-07:00

Sy Hersh's latest missive got all the press even before the issue went to print, but it's William Finnegan's monumental portrait of the NYPD's transformation into the finest counter-terrorism force in the country that is this week's must-read (the piece isn't online, but here's a Q&A with Finnegan).

Finnegan paints a picture that will make any New Yorker swoon with pride. Rather than idling as the federal government sends the city's counter-terrorism dollars to Wyoming, Ray Kelly has spared no effort, and seemingly no expense, gathering the most experienced guys, training hundreds of officers, investing millions in infrastructure, and building a force that is way ahead of the curve in scope and capability. The NYPD counter-terrorism effort is staffed by individuals with top credentials and a we-don't-sleep-for-days-on-end work ethic. In particular, the department's reliance on the linguistic abilities of New York's manifold immigrant communites is a shining example of how to turn American values of tolerance and diversity to our advantage, while delivering a giant fuck-you to the terrorists who see those same values as both an affront and an opportunity.

But as effective as Finnegan is in describing the heroic efforts of the NYPD, it's impossible not to see the gaps that remain. Take Nexus, the department's attempt to build a dynamic institutional knowledge of city businesses that might be of use to terrorists. The program sends officers to meet with 200 city businesses each week. It's an admirable effort, but an effective one only so long as terrorists buy their equipment in the five boroughs. Explosive materials acquired in New Jersey, flight training acquired in Arizona, a plane boarded at Logan -- all these are beyond the NYPD's radar. Only Washington has the resources and authority to police our far-flung frontiers. And judging from Chief Kelly's view of overall federal effectiveness on counter-terrorism, it's impossible to read this piece and sleep soundly afterwards.

New York has come through with a great piece about the Fulton Fish Market. In many respects, it's typical New York fare, reveling in the prodigious spending of the city elite. But this one also offers a glimpse into a fascinating subculture and a thorough rendering of the process by which the finest fish in the world make their way from remote waters to the tables of upscale eateries.

One morning, I visit Pierless Fish, another top-rated local wholesaler, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and find owner Robert DeMasco barking buy-and-sell orders into a phone while frantically clicking away on his computer. At a nearby desk, his partner haggles with a Maine fisherman over an order of striped bass. “How much does he want?” DeMasco asks.

“He wants $4.50.”

“Fuck him! Tell him $4.”

His partner shrugs. This fisherman’s a good source, so the partner doesn’t want to piss him off and risk losing the guy’s support if they need striped bass later in the month. DeMasco gives in and agrees to $4.50. “There’s a lot of deal-making,” he tells me.

The sheer value of an individual purchase can be astonishing. We wander over to a six-foot-long box, and DeMasco heaves off the cover. Inside is a massive bluefin tuna, as thick as a tree trunk. He’ll cut it up into some fish fillets and block-pieces of sushi. Bluefin costs $9 a pound, and this one weighs almost 500 pounds. It’s a $4,000 fish.

Also worth checking out is this interesting TOTT about the competition for a rare open spot in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Finally, my pick for the cartoon caption contest: #3

Case Study

2005-07-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

If you're one of those who think that the consensual relationships of politicians are newsworthy, or even that they are somehow relevant to their public lives, then this recent news report should be a case study in sweet vindication. Following the revelation in last week's New York that Jon Corzine had an "affair" with Carla Katz, the senator was forced to acknowledge the relationship. Craig Horowitz, the author of the New Yorker piece, claims that the item is of "public interest" because Katz is president of the union that represents half of New Jersey's government employees. The fact that they actually had SEX is apparently just a fringe benefit.

Reading List - July 18, 2005

2005-07-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

New York's cover story this week has all the elements of a classic New York tale. It covers the required territory – sex, money, blind ambition. It has the right cast – the sultry starlet trying to make it big, the sex-obsessed Jewish kid from Jersey trying to shed his borsht roots – with mobsters, cops and sleazy lawyers rounding out as extras. But the main character, sex impressario and world-class letch Jason Itzler, is so noxious that its impossible to muster up the investment necessary to care whether he gets anything other than what's coming to him - residency at Rikers Island.

As Jason doesn’t mind telling you, he has known many women since he lost his virginity not too long after his bar mitzvah at the Fort Lee Community Jewish Center, doing the deed with the captain of the Tenafly High School cheerleader squad. Since then, Jason, slight and five foot nine, says he’s slept with “over 700 women,” a figure he admits pales before the 20,000 women basketball star Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain claimed to have bedded. But, as Jason says, “you could say I am a little pickier than him.”
Of these 700 women, Jason has been engaged to nine, two of whom he married. “It was really only one and a half,” Itzler reports, saying that while living in Miami’s South Beach he married “this hot Greek girl. She was gorgeous. The first thing I did was buy her this great boob job, which immediately transformed her from a tremendous A/B look to an out-of-sight C/D look. But her parents totally freaked out. So I got the marriage annulled.”

The weekly nod to seriousness comes in the form of a promising profile of New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine. This being New York, they couldn't resist delving into Corzine's sex life, or otherwise trying to paint the guy as something other than the likable, reasonably successful Senate rookie he is.

If you've read any other major-label profile of Owen Wilson, feel free to skip this one. The writer has offered no new theories to explain the actor's harmless dweeb appeal. Ditto for the Lucinda Williams interview.

One bright spot - the review of Tucker Carlson's latest attempt to have something resembling a career spotlights Carlson's capable liberal foil, Rachel Maddow. I've never heard of her, but she's apparently the media pundit Jeannine Garofalo wishes she was.

Game on

2005-07-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

Sorry not to be on this sooner, but Gawker reported yesterday that our favorite weeklies faced off last night in a soccer match in Tribeca. According to today's update, the best mag prevailed.

Reading List - July 11, 2005

2005-07-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

It's summertime, and that can only mean that the weeklies are doing their double issue dance. New York was off last week, New Yorker is off this one, and I'm behind on everything.

But last week's New Yorker had some gems. Best in show was Nick Paumgarten's hysterical TOTT about the incident at the Mercer Hotel that got Russell Crowe busted for assault.

Margaret Talbot also has a lovely piece about the children's author Roald Dahl.

Also worth checking out is the profile of Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi, Beijing's most notorious developers (no link). There is a lack of serious journalism about China precisely at the moment when we should be paying close attention to developments there. China remains communist in name only, its domestic market is the world's largest, and in it is becoming increasingly assertive in its competition for global resources. The question remains whether the liberalization of its economy will spill over into politics. While this piece doesn't go there, it does offer some interesting nuggets about Chinese life:

In 1989, Pan made his way south to the backward island province of Hainan, which had just been declared a "special economic zone," exempt from many of the usual rules of state socialism. It was a "dirty, stinky mess," he recalled, largely without electricity. After sleeping on damp pillows in a moldy seaside establishment, Pan took a morning walk with a friend and discovered that the locals used the beach as a toilet. "A man's taking a shit over there, and here comes a guy trying to sell watches to us. He rolls up a sleeve, and all sorts of watches are strapped around his arm. My friend chooses one, but the watch guy says, 'No sale for you.' My friend says, 'Why not?' The watch guy says, 'Because your wallet has been stolen.' We turn around and the pickpocket is right there, squatting on his heels not far from us. We give chase, he runs. The islanders run much faster than us. And the moment we are out of wind and stop, the pickpocket stops, too, and squats again. That was my first Hainan experience."

The New Yorker DVD that almost wasn't

2005-07-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting story out of Kansas City this week by Charlie Anderson of the Kansas City Business Journal (Who said you couldn't do great journalism working for the trades? Oops, I think that was me.) Apparently, concerns over copyright violations almost scuttled the project before it got started. A 2001 Supreme Court decision against the New York Times disallowed the electronic distribution of archived stories done by freelancers who had copyrights on the material. Vince Pingel, managing director of Western Blue Print, the Kansas City company that produced the New Yorker DVD's after doing a similar job for National Geographic, was concerned his company might be sued for similar infringements. Fortunately (for us), it was not to be.

The courts were making a key distinction. The Kansas City firm had simply reproduced the entire contents of National Geographic. In contrast, The New York Times lifted text from its stories and reformatted them on the Web.

Pingel said this was a technical decision National Geographic made in 1997 to scan the entire page -- ads and all -- instead of lifting searchable text, which proved costly and error-prone. Had they gone down the latter road, the courts may have considered that reformatting like The New York Times.

Reading List - July 4, 2005

2005-06-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

New York continues its longstanding infatuation with the sexual liasions of the young and the wealthy. If you're seeking a glimpse into the private affairs of the children of Manhattan privelige, or wish to know where to pick up sexually eager young things, check out this piece by David Amsden.

Also in this issue, Tom Wolfe writes a very un-Tom Wolfe piece about the fate of 2 Columbus circle. Far more lively was Wolfe's two-part op-ed piece on the same subject that appeared in the Times in October, 2003 (links to the abstracts here and here).

The summer issue offers a few useful nuggets, like where to find a quiet stretch of beach and how to rent a car. Also helpful is the summer culture calendar.

The New Yorker has two must-reads this week.

The first is Jeffrey Goldberg's deconstruction of the scandal that engulfed AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, last summer. Goldberg is a star reporter. His two-part series on Hezbollah looms large in my mind as some of the finest journalism in recent memory. In this Goldberg variation, the facts of the case are not much in dispute: Steven Rosen, an AIPAC official, passed along top-secret U.S. intelligence that he recieved from Lawrence Franklin, a Pentagon analyst, to an official at the Israeli Embassy. The information concerned a plot to kidnap Israeli agents working clandestinely in northern Iraq. On the surface, the case is cut and dry. Rosen doesn't dispute that he passed the information: he denies "knowingly receiving classified information." Two stipulations are warranted, however. First, Rosen came into possession of the intelligence in the course of an FBI sting. The FBI, in collusion with Franklin, set Rosen up, tempting him with juicy information (whose veracity has never been established) in order to see what he would do with it. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds an awful lot like entrapment to me. Second, the information concerns threats to the agents of a friendly government. Though he clearly violated the letter of the law, I'm not sure I wouldn't have acted similarly.

Also this week, Adam Gopnik reminds us that, while he may be an arrogant Francophile, he remains one of the most astute chroniclers of contemporary New York foibles. Gopnik hasn't done a piece like this in some time (sorry, no link). We caught a glimpse of his brilliance a few months back when, in a fantastic TOTT piece lamenting the Californiazation of New York street signage, he compared the older signs to "two jazz piccolos trying to be heard above an electrified kazoo." Gopnik should do more pieces like this, rather than trying to burnish his intelligentsia credentials with peans to the virtues of Parisian life.

For a pet condemned to live in so many brackets of meta-meaning, a fish passing as a hamster hoping to be a dog, Bluie had a pretty good life. In the constant sturggle of parents of two chidlren – one obviously large and one (especially to herself) irrefutably, infuriatingly small – to even life up, we got Bluie a castly, a bigger objet for his tank than we got for Django. It sat on the gravel, and rose almost to the surface – a Disney-like princess's residence, with turrets and castellations and plastic pennants. There was even a route from the base of the castle to the top turret which Bluie could swim up. A second betta, won at a street fair, joined Bluie on Olivia's dresser, but this new guy, named Reddie, had only a bowl to swim in. Reddie, we thought, kep pressing to the edge of his bowl to stare at Bluie's real estate with a certain resentment, the way a guy who lives in a condo on Broadway and teaches at City College might regard a colleague who writes best-sellers and lives in a penthouse on Central Park West.

Sailing

2005-06-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

I left last week's issue at the office on Friday and just got around to finishing Alec Wilkinson's monumental portrait of a man who calls himself Poppa Neutrino and is currently trying to make his way across the Pacific in a ramshackle raft. It's a remarkable piece, and unfortunately not available on the site, but worth tracking down nonetheless.

Twenty-one years ago, David Pearlman decided that he should have a new name, and began calling himself by the first one that came to him: Poppa Neutrino. A neutrino is an itinerant particle so small that it can hardly be detected. Pearlman, who was fifty, incorrectly believed that its existence was theoretical. The name appealed to him because, being suppositional, the particle represented the elements of the hidden life that exert their influence discreetly. Also because of the particle's capacity for unremitting movement. Mr. Neutrino is nomadic. I once unfolded a map of the country and asked him to trace the routes he had travelled, and he hadn't completed the first twenty years of his life before the pen had worn through the paper.

A year ago, Neutrino and his dog, a female Boston terrier, left Key West for California in a van he had been given by some friends. Attached to the van was a trailer on which sat a crudely made raft that Neutrino had built from plywood. Some of the plywood he had bought and some he had found thrown away at construction sites. The raft was twelve feet long and four feet wide, and it had a small cabin. People who saw it did not usually conclude that it was a raft. It looked like a tree house, or possibly a shed for poultry. It did not look like anything that would float. Neutrino planned to sail across the Pacific by himself, something that had been accomplished on a raft only once, by William Willis, in 1964, when Willis was seventy-one years old. Thor Heyerdahl, the first modern man to sail some ways across the Pacific on a raft, sailed, in 1947, with five companions aboard the raft Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia. Neutrino regarded Heyerdahl and Willis as heroes.

...

The first teeth Neutrino lost were the front ones, in a fight when he was fifteen. He found the teeth on the ground. It was a very cold night, and he pressed them back into place and pinched the gums, and, perhaps because of the cold, when he took his hands away they stayed where they were, and they were fine for fifteen years. He looked funny, though, because he had reversed them.

...

Neutrino says he joined the Army at fifteen, having said he was eighteen. He was discharged at sixteen, and for the next several years he moved mainly along the track of Route 66, living the species of exalted life that Jack Kerouac later described in "On the Road." In Texas, he enrolled in a seminary and became a preacher. In Nevada, he gambled. When he was twenty-one, he arrived in San Francisco and met a group of bohemians that included Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Neal Cassady, the man on whom Kerouac based the character Dean Moriarty. With his third wife, he walked for months through the Mexican desert. In New Mexico, he tried selling life insurance. In New York, he built a canoe in the basement of an apartment building. He planned to launch the canoe in the East River and sail to Cuba and shake Castro's hand, but the canoe turned out to be too large to fit through the basement door. He started a church called the First Church of Fulfillment, the first church in history that didn't claim to know the way, and it thrived for several months. In California, he formed a group of roughly a dozen people who travelled around the country painting signs and called it the Salvation Navy. So as not to pay rent, the Navy lived on rafts, mainly on the Mississippi River. "Mind you, nobody's interested in repeating the experience-not my children, not anyone else who was with me-but it defined their lives," Neutrino says. "It made them self-reliant. It gave them the power to know that no material obstacle could defeat them." In the nineteen-eighties, Neutrino formed a band with Terrell, her daughter Marisa, and Ingrid. The girls were five and twelve. Marisa played drums, and Ingrid danced. The band also included a boy named Todd Londigan, who played trombone. Londigan was the child of a woman named Donna Londigan, who played accordion, and whom Neutrino had raised. They called themselves the Flying Neutrinos, and went to New Orleans to play music on the street. Eventually, Terrell and Neutrino's daughter, Jessica, joined the band, and so did a girl they had adopted named Esther.

...

By the time they entered the harbor at Castletownbere, word of the strange craft approaching had spread, and the shore was lined with people. Every room in the town's bed-and-breakfasts had been taken. They were not the first sailors to cross the North Atlantic on a raft. They were the second. A Canadian named Henri Beaudout had done it in 1956. They were the first to cross on a raft made from garbage. The crew were so exhausted that they had difficulty thinking straight. They accepted a tow. They sat on the deck in lawn chairs and waved to the people. Neutrino turned to Doncaster and said, "Give us a comment."

Doncaster looked off at the water, thinking, then he looked back at Neutrino and said, "We have done the impossible."

Neutrino told reporters that they had "broken the scrap barrier." They had been at sea for sixty days.

New Yorker softball last night!

2005-06-29T05:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry to be slow on this one ... I realize it would have been far more useful to post this yesterday, but thanks to this nugget on Gawker, the world was invited to a softball game between the New Yorker and Simon & Schuster in Central Park last night. Gawker has gotten itself in a fine twist over rumors that Adam Gopnik has inspired the wrath of his teammates by "insinuating" his son onto the magazine's team. Follow the links for that story as well.

The New Yorker Podcast

2005-06-29T05:08:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker has just signed an exclusive agreement with audible.com to provide downloadable digital recordings of selected articles from the magazine, according to a report in Business Wire. Though only select articles will be available each week, I think we're no longer safe to assume that those un-intellectual sorts who prefer bopping their heads to their iPod tracks on the subway are shunning the more sublime pleasures of "reading".

I was meant for the stage

2005-06-29T05:04:00.000-07:00

Newsday carries the first story about "Talk of the Town", a new play inspired by the New Yorker section of the same name. Famed New Yorker personalities like Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman are featured in the production that takes place in the Algonquin Hotel, their former stomping grounds.

For the man who has everything

2005-06-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

Now he can own the complete New Yorker. That's literally every page that has ever appeared in the magazine on 8 DVD's for only a hundred bucks.

Buy it at the New Yorker store. I mean, don't really buy it, cause that would be lame. But check it out for sure.

Cartooning

2005-06-27T19:57:00.000-07:00

Since the start of the New Yorker's cartoon caption contest, there's been endless items in the news about the magazine's art.

Rob Hiaasen has a piece in Newsday about the contest that originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun.

In the Orlando Sentinel, a piece about New Yorker cartoonists on cruises.

Direct Marketing News reports that Punchline Network, a New York company that owns the rights to licence New Yorker cartoons, will soon be delivering the cartoons online in an effort to boost corporate gift-giving during the holiday season. I don't even understand that one, but it seems momentous.

50 Best Magazines

2005-06-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

Newsday today published their list of the 50 best magazines in America. They rank New York #6 ("The style, the energy, the elbow in your side that says, Get outta my way.') and the New Yorker #20, citing its flat political coverage and the fact that Talk of the Town feels like talk of the block (whatever that means). I leave it to you to decide, dear readers, if the rankings are worth their salt (or their Dorothy Parker souvenir cocktail shakers, as the case may be) and if Armchair General and Birds & Bloom are worthy of their rankings of 25 and 37 respectively.

Not your grandmother's bible college - June 27, 2005

2005-06-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

It's a sturdy lineup in TOTT: Hertzberg deconstructs the Supreme Court's marijuanna ruling (three weeks after the fact), Remnick knocks out Mike Tyson, Rebecca Mead undresses Mr. Spock's photographs of fat naked women, and Nick Paumgarten examines what relevance Ry Cooder's latest album has for the controversy over stadium construction in New York. It's practically a quadfecta.

Hanna Rosin was positively frightening in her portrait of the Christian college that educates the minds and purifies the souls of the country's future Republican leaders. I found this excerpt from a pledge students sign upon enrolling to pretty much sum it up:

Still, when students enroll at Patrick Henry, they sign a ten-part statement of faith, agreeing that, among other things, Hell is a place where “all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.”

The Annotated New York - June 27, 2005

2005-06-21T22:11:00.000-07:00

New York is all about food this week. The cover story is about superchef Jean-Georges and there's another piece about the war against foie-gras. I've never had much sympathy for animal rights activists. It's not that I think it's ok to fatten up ducks with a feeding tube to make their livers more delectable to overindulgent New Yorkers. I just think there are enough people suffering in the world that I can't understand getting all worked up about the fate of a bunch of quacks.

Feel free to skip: the uninspiring bit on the travails of a mother-son con artist team and Amy Sohn's totally useless glimpse into the travails of finding a lesbian mate online.

Best bets: The strategist documents an attempt to furnish one's apartment with free shit found on the street, though somehow they neglected my own stomping grounds of Park Slope, which seems to have a near endless supply of household tidbits discarded by those foolish enough to move away. Also check out the closing of East Village gay bar The Cock (yes, yes, many puns to be made here). So far little else tickles this week.

Starting again

2005-06-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

Welcome to New York , New Yorker.

After much consideration, I've decided to start a new blog. Not that my last blog was lacking, or consuming insufficient amounts of my time, but I have felt for a while that it lacked direction and coherence. It will remain so. Anguswit was concieved as an outlet for my thoughts and frustrations, neither of which have abated. I will continue to post random ideas and links as the mood strikes.

New York, New Yorker will be a far more focused (and hopefully regular) blog, a running commentary on New York's two major weeklies, New York magazine and the New Yorker.

This should not be construed as evidence that I treat them equally. New York is a self-indulgent, narcissistic celebration of all that is shallow and insubstantive in city culture; the New Yorker is one of the finest journals in the country. The New Yorker is brutal in its criticism; New York is breathless with adulation. The New Yorker sees the world over the bridge of its raised nose; New York revels in the latest Paris Hilton sighting. The New Yorker is one of last holdouts in the media's race to the bottom, led by the likes of New York.

In other words, comparing the two is no contest. They will instead be treated each on its own terms.

I will aim to post several times a week on the current newstand issues, including a roundup of the best reads of the week. Submissions and tips are most welcome.