In Remnick's rear-view mirror
The catch-up quest continues.
In the May 31 issue of the New Yorker, a blurb for the dance performance "Noir" sets it far apart from the rest. Writes the blurbist: "Like the films that inspired it, Noemie Lafrance's new work, set in a Lower East Side parking garage, is an exercise in style. Five men and five women perform in a sultry but disjointed manner on the ramp of the garage's fifth floor, as audience members, seated in parked cars, peer through steamy windows and crane their necks, trying to catch the action. From time to time, the dancers make smoldering eye contact with spectators. (Delancey and Essex Municipal Parking Garage, 105 Essex St. 212-868-4444. May 26-29 at 7:30 and 9:30.)"
In the July 12 and 19 issue, one granting a much needed reprieve from David Remnick and the United States Postal Service, writer Nick Flynn offers "The Button Man." The story is an excerpt from his upcoming book, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the story of his troubled father and his relationship with the man. The piece isn't online, and that's our loss because Flynn writes good stuff. He talks about life in his mid-20s: "Eventually I moved to a tiny apartment in the North End: two hundred and fifty dollars a month allowed me to lie in bed and contemplate the refrigerator."
Anthony Lane has better luck or at least shows more concern in getting his work from that same issue online. Lane's lead would nod heads in many circles: "Our first duty, with regard to 'Spider-Man 2,' is to congratulate the filmmakers on their refusal to elasticate the title. I am fed up with having to wrap my tongue around 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,' and, as for the forthcoming 'Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid,' why bother to see a picture whose name goes on even longer than its leading snake?"
Finally, for now, the Spring Humor Issue of April 16 and 26 draws my thoughts back and forth. The issue contains:
–a cartoon that makes me laugh out loud.
–the story that is the first in the New Yorker in a year that I can't stand to finish. The piece is one of movie critic Lane's, analyzing P.G. Wodehouse, the work of P.G. Wodehouse, his great-uncle's love of P.G. Wodehouse, and his own inherited love of P.G. Wodehouse. The magazine's editors haven't put the story online, and I really wish they could, just so you could attempt to experience how strongly the Wodehouse love burns there. As close as I can find to the text is an interview where Lane describes the project very accurately: "There is one big subject that I haven't written about which I have been meaning to do for about 10 years now. I finally will do it probably at the beginning of next year. Not a book, just one big piece that I want to do. Which is about P.G. Wodehouse. When that finally comes out you'll see, that in fact, I am the madman in the attic. You'll find what level of lunacy a critic can descend to."
–Steven Millhauser's Cat 'N' Mouse. The fiction has the best concept of anything I've read since the Cheney-friendly last hurrah of Nerve's "I Did It for Science" column. If you read nothing else today, read the Millhauser story.
