An issue of the New Yorker, that is. It was either that or a damned Vanity Fair with Tony Blair's son Prince William posing on the cover.
I'd fallen asleep on the train slogging through the molasses of Karl Maier's book This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis, so I grabbed the NYer to keep me up.
Diagnosis: Someone call this magazine and tell it that it's dead. Like Doonesbury dead. Ye gads.
The August 8 "Talk of the Town" section had five stories, only one of which anybody could possibly be talking about (unless they were engaged in a conversation about what a snackheap the NYer has become).
First story: a piece about why there's no liberal talk radio. Explanation: because conservatives are slackjawed pinheads incapable of critical thought. Thanks for clearing that hume, Mr. Evil Opposite Twin of Brit Hume.
Second article: reporter follows around a pair for South Asian college kids who get to meet Bill Clinton. Would have gladly dispensed with the tired recitation of their NYC activities later that day to have heard how Clinton summed up these insufferable I've-got-a-hopelessly-reductive-solution-to-a-really-effing-complex-problem schmucks.
Third article: some rapscallion has put out a deck of cards just like the Saddam/Uday ones, but these feature Bush, Cheney, and Condi! NYer acts as if this is just an absolutely zany idea. The brains behind the operation is ID'd as "a native New Yorker with a background in independent media." Translation: credulous assrack of a reporter doesn't want to admit his subject is a wingnut.
Fourth article: more assrackery. Enough already.
Fifth: A completely readable mini-portrait of pianist Earl Wild, who is apparently crazy talented and who answered some questions after a recent concert and a during a seminar. He regretted the passing of many of his contemporaries because "You miss the old bitchery." He dismissed some young up and comer as "the J.Lo of the piano," and then he emberrassed everyone by making naughty old man comparisons between playing and making the beast with two backs. I wanted to have a drink with this man.
Spent the rest of the trip flipping through Jon Lee Anderson's long long long ambivalent ambivalent ambivalent piece about life in Iraq today. The article that would completely fall apart if it weren't done in first person. Anderson just talks about his day. He travels with a bunch of troops who don't get much done, but he still can't manage to paint a memorable portrait of any of them. He talks with a kid who's a little too excited about being targetted by pro-Saddam elements, and a few boring-as-hell upper class people of Baghdad. There's no message anywhere in the dang thing.
Nor is there a funny cartoon in the whole mag. Which is too bad. Giving the reader an easy chuckle for every page of dense text is a great idea. The NYer is just incapable of executing it.
But that's true most everywhere these days. You can count the number of funny/intelligent political cartoonists working today on one hand: Tom Toles, Tom Toles, Tom Toles, Tom Toles, and Tom Tomorrow.
This is why I have to watch more TV.
