We’re pleased to bring the jocular doodlers among you news of a rare opportunity: Now that cartoon caption contests are all the rage, why not a contest for the cartoons themselves?
WNYC public radio host Leonard Lopate and New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff had the same thought, and are joining forces to host just such a competition. Naturally, they thought of the readership of Emdashes as a promising source of entrants.
Here are the details: Whip up a cartoon on the subject of Thanksgiving, give it a caption, get it into .jpg or .gif format, and post it to this Flickr group before 12 pm on Wednesday, November 14, 2007. Mankoff will then choose his favorites and discuss them on The Leonard Lopate Show one week later, the day before Thanksgiving, November 21, 2007. (Don’t forget that Thanksgiving is on its earliest possible day this year.)
So bust out your pens, brushes, electronic tablets, crayons, lipsticks, woodcutting equipment, what have you, and do us proud! If the resultant radio segment consists of nothing but Emdashes readers, that’s just fine with us. —Martin Schneider
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Covers in the News, and on the Web
The New Yorker‘s September 11, 2006, cover is a finalist for ASME’s 2007 Best Cover Contest. The two-part cover—published on the five-year anniversary of the attacks of September 11—was illustrated by Owen Smith, from a concept by John Mavroudis, and it’s also a winning entry in PRINT‘s brand-new Regional Design Annual (on newsstands any minute now). Buy the issue; it’s also got a piece I wrote about The New Republic‘s recent redesign and What It Means, plus hundreds of beautiful pages of other Regional winners and, of course, many excellent articles you’ll like.
Speaking of my home magazine, we’ve got a Student Cover Competition going on, so go over there and vote! Forty-three years after the magazine’s first such competition, we’ve made it interactive. A swarm of students from around the world designed fantasy PRINT covers, and we’ve got the work of all three finalists on our website: Brandon Maddox, from Valencia Community College, Orlando, Florida; Katty Maurey, from L’Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada; and Blaz Porenta, from the University of Ljubljana, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
You choose the winner, to be featured in our April 2008 issue; the polls close November 16. Participate in design democracy!
9.03.07 & 9.10.07 Issue: A Cornucopia, a Smorgasbord, and Similar Metaphors
In which various Emdashes contributors note what we liked in a recent issue of the magazine—usually that of the previous week, but, as you will see, not always.
Some weeks ago, when Emily and I were still roughly on POTI (what we call “Pick of the Issue”; it’s like POTUS, but without veto power) schedule, The Millions likened The New Yorker‘s annual food issue to Sports Illustrated‘s swimsuit issue. This take on the subject has never occurred to me, but it’s pretty charming. Do any of you feel that way?
Having now tamped expectations, I will say this year’s food issue was a good one. It arrived right on the heels of William Shawn’s hundredth birthday, for which I used the occasion to wax appreciative about him. Naturally, then, I was tickled to see an extensive article, dedicated to William Shawn, by John McPhee (a writer I must read more of) about the strange animals that McPhee and others have eaten. It didn’t, in the end, have much to do with Shawn, but that didn’t prevent the piece from containing quite a few eyebrow-raisers, which is inevitable when you explain the process of fricaseeing mountain oysters. (Clearly, this genre writes itself.)
I loved Patrick Radden Keefe’s Reporter at Large about flamboyant and improbably named apparent oeno-charlatan Hardy Rodenstock. Excavating an imbroglio heretofore limited to a self-regarding coterie is the kind of thing The New Yorker does best. Jane Kramer’s look at Claudia Roden, the esteemed British writer on Middle Eastern cuisine, seemed a bit cramped in places, but by the time the dust settled, I was glad I read it.
Now I’m hungry; off to plumb the fridge. —Martin Schneider
Guest Post Friday: A Skeptical View of Animated Cartoons
Our friend Jeff Simmermon, fearless globe-trotting reporter, weighs in on those animated versions of New Yorker cartoons that you know and love (and some that you’ve never seen before). Read on.
The New Yorker‘s website has merged its paper cartoons with web animation into a series of ten-second creations that deliver neither the punch of a static cartoon nor the fun of a quick web video.
Ten seconds is eight or nine seconds too long. Single-panel comics are haiku jammed halfway through a looking glass; the process of getting them is nearly immediate, but requires your perception of the situation to flip over halfway. It’s safe to say that New Yorker subscribers are some of the world’s most practiced readers, and safe to assume that it takes those readers two seconds, tops, to read a New Yorker cartoon.
This is a good amount of time to invest in a cartoon. If it’s not funny, it’s quickly forgotten. And if it’s hilarious, the rapid intake makes the cartoon hit harder. The New Yorker’s cartoons are rarely hilarious; they’re not meant to be knee-slapping guffaw-makers—it’s just not their style. Rather, they’re dry and sly, a subtle inversion of ordinary life that makes the lips curl upward a bit. I often think “Wow, that’s funny,” but rarely do I show it. Drumming up expectations for the cartoon and stretching it out five times as long in video form deflates the fun.
Here’s a breakdown of a recent release, an animation of a 1999 Harry Bliss cartoon:
The intro music—usually a few jazzy notes on the bass while a cute cat pulls a sign bearing the “RingTails Presents/A New Yorker Cartoon” logo across the screen—says “Get ready, folks, you’re gonna laugh at something cute and wacky!” We’ll just see about that.
The “camera” pulls back to reveal a doctor holding a needle. As soon as the nervous little boy is in the frame, we’ve got the whole story. Because doctors are supposed to say something reassuring—and we know we’re watching a cartoon—the first law of comedy is to do the exact opposite of what the audience expects from a normal situation. So of course the doctor says “This is going to hurt like hell.” The little boy’s weeping underscores the point too heavily. It’s the cartoon itself saying “See what I did there?†The whole enterprise would have been a little more interesting if the doctor had said “Relax. You’ll just feel a little pinch and then our benevolent alien overlords will welcome you into the comforts of their heavenly bosom.”
Comics are notoriously difficult to translate into moving pictures, and getting a familiar cartoonist’s style right in motion can be tough. Gahan Wilson’s loopy, maniacal style, for instance, translates visually but suffers in translation. Nevertheless, apparently there are folks who like these little hybrids. Editrix Emily Gordon herself told me over coffee, “You know, those video cartoons are really popular.†I’m sure they are, and so are Big Macs and American Idol—quick, cheesy, and overdone.
—Jeff Simmermon
9.17.07 Issue: Because It’s Still on Your Kitchen Table
In which some or all of us review the high points and discuss the particulars of a recent issue.
This issue brought us the first article by Ryan Lizza, and it bodes well. One sign of a good political article is that it is truer two months down the road than the day it came out, and that’s the case here—health care is an asset for Hillary, Obama is cagey and difficult to get a handle on, and Edwards supplies the populist attack on Hillary.
The clear pick in this issue was Mark Singer’s wonderful Letter from England on pianist Joyce Hatto. I don’t even want to say anything about it. If you have a half hour, give it a whirl—you won’t be disappointed. (Then listen to Singer’s audio interview with Matt Dellinger on newyorker.com, and hear more of Singer’s thoughts and some of the music in question.)
Other than that, the cartoons by Zachary Kanin and Paul Noth both have just the right touch of enjoyable daffiness. —Martin Schneider
Lawrence Wright! Pulitzer!
Grand news.
Also, briefly: a New Yorker cartoon rejection (by an artist who did a sort of proto-Rejection Collection for Details).
Speaking of comics, here’s a review of R. Crumb and David Zane Marowitz’s take on Franz Kafka.
Obsessed with the umlaut over certain vowels in The New Yorker? Know first that it’s not an umlaut.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
My final New Yorker Festival wrap-up—in rhyming couplets!—and the return of Pick of the Issue, coming soon to a Mainly Nice New York Media Blog (patent pending) near you. For all of our coverage of the 2007 Festival—for which I thank, from the bottom of my not-yet-bilious bloggy heart, the incredible contributors Martin Schneider, Quin Browne, Toby Gardner, and Tiffany De Vos, as well as everyone at The New Yorker and Print who made it possible—take a gander here.
Avenue Queue: Special Festival Report From the Front (& Middle & Back of the) Line
I had the privilege to meet the talented young writer Ben Bass after the Steve Martin event at the New Yorker Festival this past weekend. Ben was kind enough to send me his report from the impressive–in length and in fervor–line that formed on the festival’s opening day.
When advance tickets for the eighth annual New Yorker Festival weekend went on sale online, events sold out quickly. Happily, more tickets were released on the weekend in question, and so it was that a line formed outside Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street on the first day of the Festival.
First in the queue was Eileen Fishman of North Caldwell, New Jersey, who arrived four hours before tickets went on sale. Unlike others in line, who stood or sat on the pavement, she surveyed the landscape from the nylon comfort of a Tanglewood-appropriate collapsible lounge chair. Someone observed that Fishman looked like a hardcore fan camping out for Bruce Springsteen tickets at the Meadowlands. “I bought this chair around the corner at Bed Bath & Beyond,” she explained. “My kids are coming in from Boston and I want to get Calvin Trillin tickets.”
Arriving early was a wise move. There was room for only thirty people at this year’s version of Trillin’s popular gastronomic walking tour, and magazine insiders were rumored nearly to have cornered the market. Tickets to it are an October tradition not unlike the post-season base hits of Alex Rodríguez: more talked about than seen.
The Festival also evoked Yankee Stadium in the way that it brought families together. Lisa Kittrell of Mississippi, seventh in line, chose this weekend to visit her daughter, an NYU film student. “She told me she’d go to Miranda July with me if I went to Judd Apatow with her,” said Kittrell, who was attending her fourth straight Festival.
As the line slowly lengthened in the bright October sunshine, people settled in for an afternoon of purposeful idling. One might have expected to find some of them reading this magazine, but iPod listening and text messaging were the distractions of choice, and the most prominent magazines on display were Us Weekly and InStyle. “When you go see a band, you don’t wear their T-shirt,” explained Angie Rondeau, 28, an Oxford Press production editor who nonetheless was furtively perusing a New Yorker article on Elizabeth LeCompte.
Not everyone agreed with Rondeau’s fashion mandate against bringing coals to Newcastle. Suzanne Undy, a freelance writer fifteenth in line, was clad in a New Yorker T-shirt emblazoned with a George Booth dog drawing. She was waiting to buy tickets to see Jeffrey Eugenides and Oliver Sacks. “Everything sells out so quickly,” said the first-time Festival attendee, sounding like a veteran.
Wearing a Los Alamos National Laboratory polo shirt, Columbia M.D.-Ph.D. student Sean Escola, 26, whiled away the time working on a full-page theoretical neuroscience problem resembling the contents of a blackboard in a Pat Byrnes cartoon. Blithely unaware of the attractive fellow student forty spots behind him in line with an “I Love Nerds” button on her backpack, Escola (who, in fairness, projected a certain Weezeresque charisma) was third in line, well positioned for tickets to the Icelandic music group Sigur Rós. Their two Festival concerts had sold out online in seconds.
Hoboken’s Carter Frank, thirty-eighth in line, was buying tickets to see a panel of television writers. “I’ve got a soft spot for David Milch since he hired my daughter as a writing intern on John From Cincinnati,” she said. Asked whether she’d read the magazine’s recent Milch profile, she replied, “They got his bad back right. He interviewed my daughter lying flat on the floor.”
As the sun beat down and ennui mounted, patrons become more forthcoming with their petty New Yorker grievances, both Festival and magazine. Josh Frankel, 19, a Drew University economics major, complained that The New Yorker had attracted too much attention to his favorite hidden gem, the Brooklyn Heights restaurant Noodle Pudding.
“They ruined it,” he said. “They put a profile right in the front of the magazine and now you can’t get a table there after 5 p.m.” Princeton senior Amelia Salyers, twentieth in line, expressed dismay that Salman Rushdie and Junot Díaz were appearing at the same time; they represented two-thirds of her thesis topic, along with Vladimir Nabokov.
Less conciliatory was Marty Katz of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a perennially frustrated online Festival ticket buyer. “It sucks,” he said. “They should get a bigger venue.”
Predictably, the media-centric weekend spectacle also attracted Fourth Estate types, though relatively few from breakaway former Soviet republics. Shorena Shaverdashvili was covering the Festival for a literary magazine in Georgia, “the country, not the state.” Shaverdashvili, the magazine’s publisher, winkingly disavowed any conflict of interest in awarding herself the New York City weekend gig. “I just subscribed to The New Yorker because they added Georgia,” she said. “I used to have to buy it in airports or get my friend to send it to me.”
Shortly before tickets went on sale, the door to the Pavilion swung open and patrons were ushered inside. As the line started moving, a burly security guard tried to maintain open space in front of the building next door, where an Hermès sample sale was attracting a steady stream of customers. “You wouldn’t think these Hermès ladies would be that tough, but they are,” muttered the guard. “One lady this morning almost knocked an old man over. She said she was a columnist from the Post so I should let her in early. I told her to come back when we were open.”
Finally it was 3 p.m. and the ticket counter opened for business. The Festival was underway. —Ben Bass
On Blackwater and Military Contractors
My brilliant sister Laura Dickinson, who is and always will be smarter than me and is writing a book called The Death of the State? The Promise and Perils of Outsourcing War and Peace, was just on the BBC program “The World” to talk about prosecuting security contractors. Here she is on WBUR’s “Here and Now,” on the same topic. Also, revisit David Remnick’s Comment, from 2006, on Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.
Postest With the Mostest: Organic Breakfast Links
Some weeks all one is capable of, blog-wise, as Jack Lemmon would say, is short, be-linked bursts. This is one of those weeks, my friend.
A beautiful design for a New Yorker party.
Goody! Jesse Thorn at The Sound of Young America—the eerily gifted young radio host who’s been taking WNYC by storm—has interviewed George Saunders again.
Marisa Acocella Marchetto interviewed. Have you read her book Cancer Vixen yet? It’s astonishingly powerful, and funny, too.
Who will save the Saul Steinberg boat mural? I repeat: who?
Some wonderful old-cartoon tidbits, courtesy of Mike Lynch.
If you’re still bobbing for Dylans after I’m Not There, dig Theme Time Radio Hour, the best show anywhere. Thanks, Bill, for this WaPo story about the sandpaper-smooth DJ with a nose for goofy trivia and a weakness for women’s names.
Is text-messaging the solution for administrations dealing with crises like the one at Virginia Tech? It might be.
Just because, the His Girl Friday screenplay.
“Interesting mention of TNY’s fiction,” writes Carolita, and she’s right.
Speaking of writers for the magazine, I reviewed Paul Hoffman’s new book about lives spent puzzling out heady and confounding strategies in chess games and in families (for Newsday); it’s called King’s Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game.
