Last night was the inaugural New Yorker Speakeasy, a new series of literary cabaret nights sponsored by the magazine. Given the date, the theme was "Love is Strange." I'm not so sure love was strange last night, so much as intellectualized and neuroticized to the point of no return. Luckily, that's the kind of love I have tons of experience with, so I had a great time.
There was about an hour between when the doors opened and when the festivities started, so Miranda, Jacob, and I amused ourselves with questions like, "Does Sasha Frere-Jones get paid in iTunes giftcards?" and "Who would win in a fight--David Byrne or Gabriel Byrne?" (2 to 1 for Gabriel Byrne, unless the fight takes place in "David Byrne reality.")
The first act was a reading of the most risque story in New Yorker history: "Alma," by Junot Diaz. The magazine's fiction editor claimed that the story's publication marked the first time people canceled subscriptions due to sexual content--no mean feat, in 80+ years. I remember reading the story last year, enjoying it as a piece by a rising modern author, and not thinking too much about the graphic (but well-written!) sex stuff. I guess that's probably more of a reflection on my lack of boundaries or morals or whatever than of the magazine's readership in general. The actor reading it, Victor Rasuk, was charming and energetic enough to pull it off without any of the audience storming out in a huff, and running home to cancel their subscriptions.
Next came a mini-panel on writing and reading about love in fiction (not to be confused with erotimance, by the way). For what is a New Yorker event without a panel? This one had authors Karen Russell and Jeffrey Eugenides picking their favorite love stories from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekov to Munro (copies of which had been left on our chairs beforehand). Russell's selection was from "We Didn't," a sweet, straightforward piece about teenage fumblings. Eugenides's pick was a little less fun, about the domestic ins and outs of bringing your life partner to a holiday dinner.
Then it was audio-visual time: Richard Brody, the ever-controversial David Denby, and David Remnick all picked their favorite love scenes from movies (In Praise of Love, The Big Sleep, and--strangely enough--Duck Soup).
While the event space was dark for movie time, and Miranda was being hit with the revelation that Bogey and Bacall weren't really talking about horses, Bonafide Celebrity Gabriel Byrne snuck in and sat down a few rows ahead of us. He was the penultimate segment of the night's entertainment. He got up on stage, and instead of launching right into his promised reading of Dylan Thomas's love letters, started telling a story from his own past. A story of lust, loss, and miniskirts in 1960s Dublin. It was rambly but sweet. The letter from Dylan Thomas to his wife was similarly rambly, but less sweet, when you consider that he was drinking himself to death at the time.
The big finale came in the form of Grizzly Bear--a Brooklyn-based indie band which sounds exactly like a Brooklyn-based indie band (complete with skinny jeans, natch), but who reduced Sasha Frere-Jones to gushing openly during their intro. Their set was okay enough, but the best part was a re-imagined version of Jojo's classic "Too Little Too Late" (provided here for Jacob, who swears he hasn't heard the song before).
Anyway, it was a fun evening--love-ish without being saccharine, sexy without being cheap. Cocktails and wit are definitely the way to go on Valentine's Day. I think Dorothy Parker would have been proud.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Hub Fan Bids Updike Adieu
The recent Updike tributes, in the New Yorker and other magazines, were great reminders of his work outside of the Rabbits and the Witches--like an excerpt from one of my favorite sports pieces ever, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Updike introduced me to a Fenway Park I never knew, but wish I did:
Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.
And the Updike extravaganza reminds me that I still haven't attempted to recreate his "Rockefeller Center Ho" trip (from a February 1956 issue of the New Yorker), and see if it is, in fact, possible to get from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center without touching 5th or 6th Avenues. I should get on that.
Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.
And the Updike extravaganza reminds me that I still haven't attempted to recreate his "Rockefeller Center Ho" trip (from a February 1956 issue of the New Yorker), and see if it is, in fact, possible to get from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center without touching 5th or 6th Avenues. I should get on that.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Americana by Don DeLillo
Even before the sad news on Tuesday, I'd been thinking about John Updike lately. And Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, and all the other Angsty Young Man writers of years past. I recently finished reading Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, and it's very much in the vein of those others. Glib dude seeks self, seeks tail, seeks less glibness.
Americana follows David Bell, a successful New York TV executive in 1970. Only 28, he's slightly obsessed with being the wunderkind around the office (making his secretary research the ages of any successful peers who might possibly be younger than he is). The first part of the book is a Mad Men-meets-Then We Came to the End scenario, with sharp, entertaining observations about life, love, and quirks in corporate Manhattan.
David is unhappy, although he feels like he shouldn't be: he has girls aplenty; he has an easy job; and he's good-looking, as he tells us repeatedly. David is also obsessed with framing his life as a movie. He describes his outfits in detail. He and his (now ex) wife move through their life together as though Fellini were following them with a camera. Even in divorce, they try for Neil Simon-style hijinks, by living in the same building.
When David's pet TV project is canceled and executives start dropping like flies at the network, he leaves the city, ostensibly to work on a Navajo-themed documentary for the network. He never quite gets there, though, and parts two and three are an On the Road-style attempt at finding meaning in American minutiae. David tags an artist friend whom he really just wants to sleep with, a washed-up journalist, and a failed novelist to go with him in a camper. They travel through the heartland, getting hung up in places like Chicago while he reminisces about his past and makes locals participate in an a weird, obtuse movie, restaging events from David's life. He rearranges all of his inner chaos, but with better blocking and pretentious exterior shots of sweeping American landscapes.
Although David isn't quite likeable (every time you want to cut him some slack for being glib and shallow, he tells an anecdote involving blunt, casual cruelty), it's hard to dislike him for long stretches of time, either. And he's kind of a perfect container for DeLillo's anti-consumerism spiel. It feels more authentic coming from a young, conflicted narrator standing in for a young, conflicted writer. It flows more easily, too--there's just not as much self-conscious social commentary as there is in White Noise, and so I liked Americana better.
I also liked the writing better. It's bumpy sometimes--it's pretty clearly a first novel--but in an endearing way. And the early descriptions of office life are just so dead-on, even 38 years later.
It looks like I'll have to do another DeLillo book soon, to see where the best-of-three lands.
Parts I liked especially:
"One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to lay low."
"Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and self-doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women."
"There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands....Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex."
Americana follows David Bell, a successful New York TV executive in 1970. Only 28, he's slightly obsessed with being the wunderkind around the office (making his secretary research the ages of any successful peers who might possibly be younger than he is). The first part of the book is a Mad Men-meets-Then We Came to the End scenario, with sharp, entertaining observations about life, love, and quirks in corporate Manhattan.David is unhappy, although he feels like he shouldn't be: he has girls aplenty; he has an easy job; and he's good-looking, as he tells us repeatedly. David is also obsessed with framing his life as a movie. He describes his outfits in detail. He and his (now ex) wife move through their life together as though Fellini were following them with a camera. Even in divorce, they try for Neil Simon-style hijinks, by living in the same building.
When David's pet TV project is canceled and executives start dropping like flies at the network, he leaves the city, ostensibly to work on a Navajo-themed documentary for the network. He never quite gets there, though, and parts two and three are an On the Road-style attempt at finding meaning in American minutiae. David tags an artist friend whom he really just wants to sleep with, a washed-up journalist, and a failed novelist to go with him in a camper. They travel through the heartland, getting hung up in places like Chicago while he reminisces about his past and makes locals participate in an a weird, obtuse movie, restaging events from David's life. He rearranges all of his inner chaos, but with better blocking and pretentious exterior shots of sweeping American landscapes.
Although David isn't quite likeable (every time you want to cut him some slack for being glib and shallow, he tells an anecdote involving blunt, casual cruelty), it's hard to dislike him for long stretches of time, either. And he's kind of a perfect container for DeLillo's anti-consumerism spiel. It feels more authentic coming from a young, conflicted narrator standing in for a young, conflicted writer. It flows more easily, too--there's just not as much self-conscious social commentary as there is in White Noise, and so I liked Americana better.
I also liked the writing better. It's bumpy sometimes--it's pretty clearly a first novel--but in an endearing way. And the early descriptions of office life are just so dead-on, even 38 years later.
It looks like I'll have to do another DeLillo book soon, to see where the best-of-three lands.
Parts I liked especially:
"One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to lay low."
"Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and self-doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women."
"There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands....Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex."
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