Explains some of its frustrating aspects and instills admiration for its purity, focus on an elegant, sophisticated, though quirky and very ivory-tower-ish art for art's sake iron-grip perspective.
After 50-plus years of existence (founded 1925), the magazine had become decorous to a fault, largely because the long-time editor William Shawn (1952-1987), over decades, slowly wrested power into a dictatorial kingdom at the magazine: suspicious of detractors, afflicted with the intriguing aging monarch condition of seeing the end of power and not wanting to let it go. Yagoda writes, "But now [the early '80s] the talents of contributors new and old were unable to transcend the essential dysfunctionality of the magazine. It was simply a creepy place" (404).
Even the hallowed New Yorker writer title seems tenuous with the revelations untomed in Yagoda's book; contributors would write and submit pieces and would not be guaranteed publication or payment, and if a piece was accepted, all too often it took months/years of limbo and had to deal with sometimes amazingly arcane and peculiar edits. How does it work now?
I went to the 2008 Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference (ran by Harvard and I just found out it's being discontinued; horrible) in Boston and Dan Baum, a former New Yorker staff writer, lamented, disgruntledly, that his contract did not get renewed for the next year. He had written extensively on Hurricane Katrina's aftermath for the magazine as the man-on-the-ground for the mess, but, surprisingly, he emoted the gut-wrenching frustration of what appears to be (post-reflection) The New Yorker's edit machine of his long Katrina piece. He called it the "New Yorker deflavorizer," and afterward I noticed it all over the magazine, more so in some places than others. Art critic Peter Scheldjahl's, a climactic exception, always. Have to give him a shout out! Probably my favorite staff writer, and not for subject matter, of the magazine. (Aside - I just met a former good friend of his daughter's. Ah! the glory of a tenuous one-degree of separation).
-- interlude/flashback (Nieman Narrative) --
Me and Anne Hull. Cool!Nieman Narrative: the main reason I went was to meet/see Anne Hull, an amazing national beat writer for the Washington Post. She might be the best newspaper writer working. It's a shame there's not a wider outlet for her. (I first encountered her as I prepared to be a teaching assistant for Cross-Cultural Journalism in J-School; her piece was featured in the class's somewhat-mundane textbook. Her 2002 piece: Rim of the New World. See the popping, alive first article in the series here. It reads as a poetic, off-the-cuff freestyle (in the freeing sense of her voice and perspective) exposé of changing demographics in the Atlanta metropolitan area evidenced by the 2000 census. A snippet:
Cisco gives the man his ice cream cone, mocha-colored fingers wrapped around the white napkin that covers the cone, and into the outstretched knuckles that spell S-K-I-N.
As soon as the man puts the car in gear, Cisco whirls around and spits out a rap.
I represent the South
where the niggas stay scared.
red mouth, nobody mouth as red as mine
down south affiliated with that Georgia pine.
Anne and I corresponded before I arrived; I asked to sit down with her. She gave me her cell number and we texted back and forth at the conference to coordinate (I'm not typically star-struck, but that was cool). And more cool: we (two J-school colleagues and I) were staying in the conference hotel and one of us had got bumped up to the special penthouse breakfast privileges. We all showed up for breakfast the morning of the keynote address and there were Anne Hull and Dana Priest eating breakfast, before their keynote address (within a few months they would win a Pulitzer Prize for their story exposing the pathetic operation of Walter Reed Hospital, run by the U.S. military in D.C.). And there was Roy Peter Clark (a professor's, Berkley Hudson, good friend) who is a big player in journalism, writing, etc. Anyhow, on the way downstairs, guess who was in the elevator? Me and Anne Hull and Dana Priest. Dana was talking about the mundanity of leave-town chores; they were gossipping like any girls would (of course). It was just cool.
When we talked, I asked Anne why she wasn't writing books or writing magazine pieces. Read the story that caught my attention back in 2007 and see why I asked the question. She said she was going to take some time off. A few months later I saw a piece by her in The New Yorker! Her first in the magazine. Didn't have her characteristic freeing voice or spirit (but was good) - maybe because of the deflavorizer?
Note: I looked on Washington Post's website yesterday to read some of Anne's recent stories and there were none for about 15 months, so I emailed her. She responded. She's on sabbatical, working on a book. Thank goodness. It should be a great book with her clear intelligence and her great, clear, free, open, fun writing style.
-- Interlude over --
In 1985, The New Yorker was bought out by Advance Publications, which ended its heavenly, skewed bubble-life; and Shawn was subsequently pushed out, but his farewell letter to the staff indicates the absolute high charm of the magazine and what made/makes it so special:
"Dear colleagues, dear friends:
My feelings at this perplexed moment are too strong for farewells. I will miss you terribly, but I can be grateful to have had your companionship for part of my journey through the years. Whatever our individual roles at The New Yorker, whether on the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth floor, we have built something quite wonderful together. Love has been the controlling emotion, and love is the essential word. The New Yorker, as a reader once said, has been the grandest of magazines. Perhaps it has also been the greatest, but that matters far less. What matters most is that you and I, working together, taking strength from the inspiration that our first editor, Harold Ross, gave us, have tried constantly to find and say what is true. I must speak of love once more. I love all of you, and will love you as long as I live" (416). [My emphasis] Truth and love!
Interestingly, the magazine began to "bleed red ink." After Roger Gottlieb, an interim editor, Si Newhouse, the new owner, hired Vanity Fair editor British Tina Brown, then 38 years old, in 1992, and she moved the magazine, extremely, into photography and timeliness. David Remnick, the current editor (since 1998), took it down a notch, but the magazine still frustratingly covers the exact same topics that spread through the media: The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and NPR's Fresh Air. It really feels like there's a weekly manifesto sent out to the "cultural elite" about what to cover. Come on! Can we do something about this please? I'll add some specific examples later, hopefully. Back to the red point ... between 1994 and 1998 the mag ran a $60.6-million deficit (424). How can that be/be tolerated? It's too good of a product. Is this public knowledge? I'll report back its current economics, if so.
Anyhow ... Regardless ... Look forward to my pieces in the magazine!
Some ridiculous quotes (from the fashion designer Tomas Maier profile "Just Have Less," by John Colapinto in the Jan. 3, 2011, issue), illustrating the "too-elegant" (a friend's criticism of the magazine) realm of The New Yorker:
Maeir [Tomas, "creative director and head designer of the Italian fashion label Bottega Veneta"] asked Longo [a fashion photographer famous for developing, in the 1980s, the modeling pose of reacting to the impact of gunshots] to reproduce the series himself, using models with Bottega Veneta clothing and bags. The proofs had no credit line identifying Longo as the photographer. When I asked Maier about this, he said that anyone who couldn't distinguish the difference between a real Longo and an imitation was not the customer he was after (37). [!!].
and
As Maier finished lunch - a salad - I asked him about the ethics of creating astronomically costly things when many people are having trouble meeting their food bills. Maier insisted that his prices reflected the cost of materials and labor ... He insisted that Bottega's goods were not beyond the reach of middle-class people, who have simply been trained to want too much stuff. Anyone, he said, could afford one five-hundred-and-fifty-dollar hand-painted cashmere scarf. "Just have less," he said (37).
No comments:
Post a Comment