newyorkette

^{There’s a lot online in TNY this week. But it’s also in the paper magazine, so get outside and read it on the grass or the sand! I recommend a bit of both formats. Just because when you get to the Great Lawn it’s wiser to sit on your magazine than on your computer, once you’ve read it all. (image: carolita johnson)}

(Actually, I don’t have a MySpace profile, but you probably do!)

Anyway, check out this week’s Talk of the Town, online.
For one thing, I saw Charlotte Rampling’s naked thighs in my friend Jonathan Nossiter’s “Signs and Wonders,” when she climbs onto her lover looking more fit in her almost-60’s than I’ve ever looked. So if she’s talking about sexuality, I want to read about it. Read what she has to say in Judith Thurman’s “Ready, Set, Rample.”

Then read David Remnick’s “Nattering Nabobs,” so that you can see what Em is referring to in her post, Fly Continental. Apparently Scott Johnson at the Free-Market News Network and Hugh Hewitt from Town Hall didn’t like it, and Em shows us why. Me, I liked it, and I’m no “liberal hysteric.” I’m a socialist with an assassinated South American dictator in the family.

Ben McGrath’s piece is called “Where Hip-Hop Lives: Hot 97 is in the building.” But it’s not online. All I want to know is: why on earth not? I’ll bet Gravy, the rap artist featured in it (part of his claim to fame is having been shot in the buttocks in front of the Hot 97 building) would like to know, too. (UPDATE as of July 11th: the article has been put online in the week following this post! The reason it wasn’t online was because of the double issue, Blake Eskin tells me, and the need to spread material availability out over two weeks instead of just one. It can be found here). There are quite a few gems in it. My peronally favorite line, just because I know Ben from the softball team, is “Gravy and I were sitting in a spacious thirty-second-floor office,” because I could just imagine it.

But other memorable lines included Gravy’s delicate observation that:

If I died, or if I had to go through a shit bag—you know, where you get shot in the stomach and you can’t shit regular, got to wear the bag—they’d be playing me like crazy(...). You have to damn near die to be famous these days?”

And:

“If Your Honor may or may not be aware, as part of the culture of the artists, they travel with a great number of people who are called ‘posses.”

As well as Jay-Z’s reaction to the tepid reaction of the managing director of Cristal Champagne to all the free publicity his booze has been getting from him:

“Cristal is done—finished,” Jay-Z said, calling for a boycott. “How’s that for a slap in the face?... I know I bought about fifty-thousand cases in my lifetime, personally.”

The cherry on top is, of course, the last line, where Gravy asks:

“New Yorker? How many people see that shits? (...) Damn. Who needs Hot 97? I got New Yorker and MySpace.”

(Which brings me back to the first question: why wasn’t this article online?)

In the Fiction section (online as well as on your coffee table or on the subway), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Phone Call” reads a bit like a cross between Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana,” mixed with a bit of Gogol’s sad but loving take on humanity and it’s frailties.

Our main character is trying to rev himself up to denounce a military plot to the American Embassy, and is searching for a telephone booth. We see that no matter how frightened and paranoid a man can get, he never misses an opportunity to notice an attractive girl:

Innokentii walked on, erect and no longer hurrying. A girl eyed him as he passed.
And another one. Very pretty, too. Wish yourself well out of it!
How big the world is, and how full of opportunities!

Once he’s got the American Embassy on the phone, he’s managed to blurt out his purpose, only to encounter disbelief and a communication barrier which starts out as a language problem, and then turns into a technical difficulty:

“The atomic bomb?” he repeated dubiously. “But who are you? Tell me your name.”
There was a muffled click and then dead silence, unbroken by rustling or buzzing.
They had been cut off.

Which brings us, cinematic split-screen style to the other side of that moment. In the telephone surveillance office, we flip to a pathetic little man with a possibly gangrenous leg who is manning the tape recorder in the moments just before Innokentii’s call comes in. He’s been well instructed in his duties as a functionary/spy, and:

If you followed these instructions, mistakes would be impossible.
But such is the fatal incompatibility of officialdom’s perfectionism with man’s pitiful imperfection (...)

Kuleshov removed the tight headphones, which pressed on his ears, moved to a spot in the light, rolled up the left leg of his trousers and his long underwear, and began cautiously feeling and picking at the edges of the scabs. (...) So he did not immediately notice the bobbins start noiselessly spinning as the tape recorder automatically switched itself on.

Speaking of legs and the odd things that can happen because of them, Joan Acocella’s piece on American Ballet Theatre at the Met, “Secrets,” reviews Diana Vishneva’s reinterpretation of Giselle. Her review offers this line, about Vishneva’s fancy footwork, which for some reason I found funny:

This year, that working leg was clearly beckoning him: “Come to me, come up my leg.”

And Hilton Al’s review of Liev Schreiber’s Macbeth, “Unsexed“, features an interpretation of Lady Macbeth’s “Unsex me here” soliloquy that I had not run across or thought of before, not even in my most exaggerated attempts to shock my professors:

The blood that will stain her husband’s hands is less offensive to her than her own menstrual blood—the symbol of her femininity.

I don’t know, but I guess Hilton would be working on the (mostly correct) assumption that most women would prefer anyone else’s blood to their own period! His review certainly led me to believe that Schreiber (whose acting style seems a pefect fit for Shakespearean drama, from all I’ve seen, particularly in The Manchurian Candidate) had honed in on exactly what every Macbeth should express: “the whimper behind the swagger.” Perfect.

Happy Reading!

Ahem! It’s come to my attention that there’s another person calling herself (or possibly himself) “newyorkette” out there, often on craigslist.
I’d just like to affirm I am not that newyorkette, I am the newyorkette you see here!
Any similarity of name is purely coincidental!

I was getting wet, with several rainshowers punctuating the game (Serge, of La Esquina, kindly handed out several umbrellas and a tarp to the unequipped cupsters—the hipsters had umbrellas, or stood under the awning). And I was getting bored, all those sort-of-near-goals, nothing ever really getting too close or unblockable, the crowd seeming desperate to get excited over something, even the not so close shaves—Germany and Italy were that well matched.

And then came that first goal in the last ninety seconds! I slowly walked around the cheering crowd to the other side for a better view. By the time I arrived at the east corner, the second goal had just penetrated the now loosely knit, still stupefied Germans and basta!

I managed to get a shot of the crowd’s pleasure (even the German I was standing next to was happy for some reason). See it above. The hipsters do like sitting and cheering with the cupsters, I think it makes them feel authentic. (Nothing more important to a hipster.)

There was a guy there who I thought, “Hey, he looks like Moby,” and who I didn’t think was actually Moby till he acted skittish when I got my camera out to capture the crowd. Was it Moby? Who knows? Who cares? If it wasn’t, that guy should rethink his look.

I had two 4th of July BBQ’s to attend, so I walked around the corner and bought some wine at Wine Therapy (Elizabeth Street), where I found two excellent and not so common Italian wines to celebrate.

Tomorrow: Allez les bleus!

Related: newyorkette’s previous coverage of Cupsters at La Esquina.

Found well-mashed into 158th street at the southeast corner of Broadway: a toupé. Or perhaps the top of a whole person who sank into the asphalt?

^{(I once did several studies of my tape dispenser while my boss was lolling around the beach in Aruba. At least for an artist, that’s sort of like getting paid to do what you like. I also used his beautiful vintage sx-70 polaroid camera to do this photographic study of my little green kewpie doll on the Lucent phone.)}

I, too, used to look for employment in the classifieds, which is how I learned that the line in the job requirments that says, “must be a self-starter,” usually translates into, “must work harder than your boss, and for a lower salary.”

Well, it’s the July 4th weekend’s Monday morning today, and if you’re one of the poor souls that have to work, you’re probably not that happy about it. I can’t really relate, because I’m a freelancer and the two days that I didn’t work last week were vacation enough for me! I went to the beach. I’m rearing to get back in the saddle again.

Not so for you employees out there that didn’t have enough seniority to have the day off. Not that I want to make you feel worse, but all this working and overworking, the fear and trembling of the gainfully employed, well, it brings out my subversive tendencies. So, while your boss is in Sag Harbor, leaving you to toil at the computer and dally at the phones, why not let me share with you all my references on work, as well as what work was supposed to be like in the wake of the industrial revolution? Read the rest of this entry »

^{(This is just a fragment of one of my favorite Maakies. Please see his website, maakies.com, for more, or click on the links below!)}

From comic #m593, ” New Scuptures & A Wachtelian Moment.” To see the entire “New Sculptures, which holds the solution for making modern sculpture more palatable to the man on the street, ” click here. If it doesn’t work (you’ll know it if you get the “Inhuman Monsters!” guy), click the following link and scroll down to the bottom, and find the link that says “#m593 New Scuptures & A Wachtelian Moment,” about three lines up: Maakies Archives.

It was love at first sight for me, and a nice segué from my “breast week” into next week. Not sure what next week will bring. In the meantime, here’s a very striking Bernini sculpture, his “Anima Damnata.” (Maybe he’s screaming “Italia” while watching the World Cup.)

^{World Cup Hipsters at La Esquina}

I was on Prince Street Friday, with an hour to spare between my fitting and meeting a girlfriend to go to the beach, when I started hankering for some rice n’ beans. So I walked down to my favorite taqueria, La Esquina. As I approached the corner (la esquina), I observed a huge crowd gathered in front. No, I thought, they can’t all be lining up for tacos, my taste buds already bereft at the idea of not getting what they were expecting (the “Plato Julia,” with cochinita). But upon arrival, I was intrigued to see that the crowd was actually composed of a comely mix of hipsters and sports geeks gathered around a flat screen TV attached to the side wall, watching the last moments and penalties of the Argentina-Germany World Cup game.

I snapped a few pics, as you see above and below. Aren’t they cute, little hipsters, when they’re all full of suspense and praying? I didn’t think they had an earnest bone in their bodies till now.

Below is the moment just before Allemania scored their winning goal. Allemaaaaania! Allemaaania! Thank goodness, because the last game I saw Germany lose in the World cup (2002, I believe, I was in Paris watching Germany-Brazil), left the Germans so abject as to make me wonder if they warranted medical attention. One simply refused to come back out of the basement, and we left him there while we drank sangria. I don’t know if he ever came upstairs before I moved back to New York.

The view on the other side of my Mango juice:

I went back again today, but had just missed the French victory over Brazil (I was dawdling at home, gloating over the Mets vs. the Yankees in the 7th inning). “The French were beautiful!” said Serge, from La Esquina. “They played just like Brazilians!” said Michael, the photographer friend.

To watch the semi-finals (France-Portugal) (Germany-Italy) with the cupsters go to:
La Esquina
106 Kenmare St
New York, NY 10012
Cross Street: Lafayette Street and Cleveland Place
Directions: 6 at Spring St

Also, check out Austin Kelly’s World Cup Newsletter, complete with illustrations by the inimitable New Yorker cartoonist, Marshall Hopkins, here.

Look no further! He’s here, in a pile of garbage on Brighton Beach Avenue, by Ocean Parkway.

^{The New Yorker’s “Online Only” is only available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

This week I’ve discovered The New Yorker’s Hard Drive, a collection of “Online Only” TNY pieces.

After reading the “Letter from Washington: The Hidden Power,” by Jane Mayer, I was very happy to let the Online Only’s Q & A (questions posed this week by Blake Eskin, and answered by Jane Mayer, in Q. & A.: Cheney’s Cheney) make explicit all the questions that had been fluttering aimlessly through my mind for the duration of my subway reading from 157th street to my train change at Times Square.

Eleven pages to read provides me with plenty of opportunities to lose track of those questions, since I tend to want to keep forging through. To aggravate matters, five years of reading Proust, Latin, and Medieval French manuscripts (don’t ask!) have burned my attention span to a crisp (or should I say, to crambles?), reducing me to the treachery of skipping entire paragraphs, scanning them for key words as I fly over them, returning only for reconnaissance flights if I find myself in completely unfamiliar territory.

So imagine how pleased I was that TNY Online Only’s “Q & A: Cheney’s Cheney” conveniently separates the questions from the answers with bold type and plain type (instead of with the opening and closing of a subway door, as in most cases for me). For example, it asks this question (in bold type), which by had been going through my mind somewhere between 145th street and 113th street on the 1 train:

How did David Addington get to know Vice-President Cheney, and how long have they worked together?

And it is answered directly by Jane Mayer herself, immediately, without flourish, exactly the way I wanted it, as follows (just an exerpt):

They met on Capitol Hill in the mid-eighties, when Cheney was a Republican congressman from Wyoming and Addington was a young staff lawyer working for the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. So they have worked together for about two decades. Their partnership was cemented when they worked together on the Minority Report on the Iran-Contra affair. Both Addington and Cheney took the idiosyncratic position that it was Congress, not President Reagan, that was in the wrong. This view reflected the opinion, held by both men, that the executive branch should run foreign policy, to a great extent unimpeded by Congress. It’s a recurring theme—pushing the limits of executive power and sidestepping Congress—in their partnership. One example is their position that the President, as Commander-in-Chief in times of war, had the inherent authority to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress passed in an effort to make sure that Presidents don’t violate citizens’ right to privacy by spying on them without warrants.

Click here to read more from the Q & A. To see what else is on the Hard Drive, click here. It’s a bit like finding an hidden drawer in your roll-top desk, full of goodies, as well as intriguing, beribboned batches of correspondence, conversations and moments you didn’t know had occured while you were reading your paper magazine, such as “A Laughing Matter,” featuring Andy Borowitz on the “boundaries of humor,” or “Your Caption Here,” with Bob Mankoff, in which the cartoon caption contest is dissected to your heart’s content.