newyorkette

^{Angelina. (Photo by Jeff Berlin)}

The best time to be in Paris is in August. Why? Because almost everybody is on vacation, leaving the place wide open to tourists like you, or to the antisocial residents (like I once was) who love the desolation of their own little abandoned-by-the-neighbors neighborhoods, and who you’re not likely to run into at Angelina’s.

Angelina’s, on rue de Rivoli (metro Concorde, Tuilleries, or Palais Royal—they’re all so very close together) has the best hot chocolate, next to Les Deux Magots, on Boulevard St-Germain. The difference is in the clientele. If you want to see lots of fancy-shmancy tourists as well as whatever fashionistas are in town, Angelina is for you. If you’re in town during fashion week, you’ll wait a long time for a table, but you may see a celebrity, an overrated designer or photographer or two, and that’s always amusing. Best of all, nobody in their right mind ever feels awkward sitting alone in any café or restaurant in Paris. It’s done all the time, or as they say in France, ça se fait!

Look at that hot chocolate. It’s almost like melted chocolate pudding, nice and thick. My friend Jeff Berlin* took that photo while he was in Paris recently. He’s the kind of guy who can’t go anywhere that isn’t preapproved or potentially approvable by The Beautiful People I prefer to avoid because I know them too well. I call him “princess.” (He did used to call me “Apeface Johnson” in Junior High School, so I can be excused, can’t I?). To feel like you’re part of it all and mingle with the smart set, just because now and then one should, try Angelina. If you find the atmosphere too rarified and snooty, that hot chocolate will make you forget it.

Now, just so you don’t say I didn’t warn you, the above snack set Jeff back by about 10 euros. That’s the price you pay for being a princess! But who says you can’t be princess for a day?

Angelina
226, rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
01 42 60 82 00

*Stay tuned for Jeff’s guest appearances in “Tables for One: On the road special editions,” TK.

^{(Click on the image to see the original on Fenwick’s flikr page.)}

Now for something completely different. Ray Fenwick doesn’t really do your typical cartoon. It’s not a strip. It’s not Snoopy. Apparently he takes flack from “real cartoonists.” (Who would presume, I wonder?) It’s very personal, but even so, it’s somehow not annoying. (It’s very easy to annoy me by using cartoons as an excuse for banal personal disclosures, particularly because they’re as much in popular demand as toilet paper, and will never go away.) Fenwick manages to be personal, without being cute or deliberately pathetic, and his irony picks up where self-indulgence ends, as in “HA! I made fun of myself, and that means I am humble!” There’s something Mark Twain-ish about him that I can’t quite pin down.

Even better, his swirls, which frightened me at first glance, aren’t girly swirls. They’re not about expressing a glorified feminine outlook on life, the way most swirls and twirls do, lately. (Such curlicues in typeface seem to be the graphics incarnation of that most annoying creature, the “girly girl.”) None of that here: Fenwick’s flourishes and use of calligraphy and letters will bring to mind The New Yorker’s Saul Steinberg’s “No” and “Love” cartoons, among others. Ray Fenwick’s swirls refer to a long tradition of western calligraphy and pictorial calligraphy. In fact, if calligraphy were to become a cartoon, this is what it would be like:

^{The Calligrapals! (This frame is an excerpt from the complete cartoon, which you can view by clicking on the image, above.)}

Or maybe like “darkness cometh” guy.

The Hall of Best Knowledge is updated weekly, here. It appears in The Coast Weekly, “in which a nameless author provides weekly lessons on universal concepts.”

Patterns by Fenwick (including this medieval pulp one, which I’m dying to have on my next summer dress): here.
Excerpts from LL Cool J’s “I need love”: here.
The Truth Bear: here.

Ray Fenwick’s pleasantly brownish website: here.
Ray Fenwick’s flikr page (with even more): here.
And don’t forget his “Kill” shirt: here.

And now, goodbye!

This is for those of you only getting to your issue of The New Yorker now, either because it just arrived in the mail or because it’s been waiting patiently for you in your briefcase or online all week. (image: carolita johnson)

Once you get past the first few rather dense paragraphs about Edward W. Said’s late work, “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Updike’s Late Works shifts gears into Shakespeare’s last works, in which is perceived “a slackening, as if something had snapped.” It sounds eerily like the kind of post-mortem speculation that follows a suicide, or a bad end. This sets the tone for the rest of the authors speculated upon, on how their last works reflect how they fizzled out, burned up and crashed (in the fashion of a geriatric scooter speeding out of control at 15 miles an hour), skipped away, or simply lost their marbles, at the end of their lives. From this point on, the pleasure in reading is partly in being reminded of Edward Gorey’s macabre alphabet, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies.”

To sum it up:
S is for Shakespeare, who favored Spectacle (“the least of tragedy’s necessary parts” according to Aristotle, Updike reminds us) over “Plot, Character, Diction, and Thought,” in his later, pre-mortem works.
M is for Melville, who whittled down his style, but wrote with no less “bumptious bombast” than his previous works.
H is for Hawthorne, who smouldered till he smouldered no more.
G is for Graham Greene, who published his dreams.

Other writers in the alphabet include Henry James and Iris Murdoch, with Beethoven thrown in for good measure. Updike seems to feel whimsical and merciless at the same time, noting Melville’s slightly “arthritic and desiccated” sentences, while Henry James’ later style in”The Outcry” is described as a “cumbersome though finely painted charabanc (...) pulled swaying along by a frisky pony of a plot.” Being on the older side himself seems to give Updike a certain license (like the Jewish-convert dentist telling Jewish jokes in one famous Seinfeld episode) to write thus about the various aspects of old fartiness, and he doesn’t hold back, feeling free to say: “we feel on our faces (...) the breeze of the senile sublime, a creativity liberated from its usual, anxiety-producing ambitions.” And I felt like I was being gently poked in the ribs when he wrote about Melville’s “bumptious bombast.”

Now, back to the living!

The Shouts & Murmers “Bush Quiz,” also online, begins with a question whose answer seems to be Bush’s best Edward G. Robinson impersonation:

“That’s why I’m having this press conference, see?”

He’s a funny guy. You get the feeling you could go out and drink a beer with him, don’t you?

“Bad Neighbors“, by Edward P. Jones, in Fiction, is a hometown piece about some people in a neighborhood thinking they’re better—or striving to be better—than other people in their neighborhood, a human flaw so universal that the phrase, “there goes the neighborhood” shouldn’t surprise us no matter who says it. The line of fate that runs through it, unifying all the good and bad neighbors, brings to mind many other works about prejudice and destiny, like To Kill a Mockingbird, and Crash.

Online only, in Online Only, is Blake Eskin’s Q & A: Blueprints for disaster, in which he interviews Steve Coll as a follow-up (I like to see these Q&A’s as Cliff Notes) to the magazine’s “Atomic Emporium,” which is not online. I like these Q&A’s, and though they should be read after reading the article they follow up, they stand alone perfectly well, and are not bad for when you just want to know what the article is about before reading it, or not.

Now, get outside and enjoy this spectacularly reasonable weather!

^{137th and Broadway, on the hottest day of the latest (and hopefully last for this summer) heat wave.}

It was pretty friggin’ hot this week in New York. And it seems that Con Ed is living up to its first name. The cables are still exposed on my block, three weeks after they were laid out after an electrical explosion down the block. Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that we’re in Washington Heights, would it?

I saw them working on it the other day, with no apparent progress. I did not nag them, either. Instead, I smiled and wished them luck, and made them feel special. But to what avail?

(image: carolita johnson)

I’ve tried to force this one upon The New Yorker long enough. Of course this is one of those cartoons that I have personally chortled over many a time. Maybe they figure that’s pay enough for me. My friend Crawford is always reproaching me for laughing at my own jokes (like he doesn’t do the same! ha! double-ha!), and since he doesn’t appreciate my sense of humor, I see no harm in enjoying a little mirth on my own. He, after all, doesn’t have to pay for it, like The New Yorker does. (When they feel like buying a cartoon, that is!)

This one’s for all you birds and bird-watchers out there. Yes, I know, they’re not really anatomically correct mockingbirds, but they are mocking, and they’re birds!

^{I bet this model was really happy to get this career-starting gig.}

Wear these “underarm perspiration shields,” and no one will suspect you’re actually a living, breathing human being! (Found this, and the “Time-saving coin sorter wallet,” in a catalogue I got in the mail.)

Alternatively, for the more proudly human, I’d like to suggest wearing sleeveless tops and using a Sharpie to draw smiley faces in your armpits that will show when you reach for the handrail in the subway! Maybe a smiley face in one armpit, and a “hello, there!” or “hot enough for ya?” in the other. Like this:

^{(This is a quick sketch based on me and someone much more goodlooking! Asleep standing: that’s the part that’s based on me.)}

To fry an egg on the pavement, that is? I decided to give it a try. Brought a couple of expired eggs I found in the fridge this morning with me on the way to The New Yorker to drop off my batch, and in the company of Sam Gross and Marisa Acocella Marchetto (who also had nothing better to do, you may be thinking—but we’re a curious lot, we cartoonists, and indulging our curiosity is part of our job) and an intrigued onlooker, cracked an egg in front of O’Lunney’s Pub on West 45th street.

Well, it didn’t fry! In fact, the sun above it seems to have caused a slight congealing on top, but nothing from the pavement. I guess it’s just an expression.
Anyone else try it with any success?

^{Yes, I’ve used this before, but it does make me feel perky to look at it. (image: carolita johnson)}

Click here for Good Morning World! If you’re from my generation (well, I was really young when this Levi’s commercial came out), then it may make you feel so nostalgic as to bring a tear to the eye. For me, it brings back memories of Saturday Morning cartoons, Abbot & Costello, Get Smart (reruns, even back then)... sigh. But even if you’re not from my generation, I bet you’ll sing it all day if you listen to it! I think it was the original quirky Levi’s commercial.