THE ICK FACTOR
5 years ago
March 21, 2003| While listening to R. Kelly’s new album, Chocolate Factory, critic Jon Caramanica couldn’t get the singer’s recent transgression out of his mind.
“On ‘Ignition Remix,’ for example, there’s some awkward business about spewing ‘venom’ into a lady’s ‘trunk.’ And on ‘You Made Me Love You,’...he leers, ‘You must be one of them top models/Body curved like a pop bottle/Got me sweating like a boxer, baby.’ Kelly has always had a gift for injecting the sacred with the profane, and his predilection for young women has been rumored for years. But his arrest makes listening to a track like the operatic ‘Showdown,’ the latest installment of his mano-a-mano song cycle with Ronald Isley, uncomfortable. The saddest part is that nobody else in contemporary pop has his talent when it comes to recording smooth, sensual slowdances and steamy R&B workouts. Chocolate Factory isn’t a bad album, it’s just a difficult one to listen to.” Read full article

ASSHOLE ALERT
18 years ago
March 24, 1989| Mark Jurkowitz gave a picture of Roger Clemens before he’s accused of anything worse than egocentrism and stiffing little kids.
“About an hour after the Texas Rangers beat the Red Sox...in an exhibition game...young autograph hounds are waiting anxiously near the clubhouse. The big news is that Roger Clemens — he of the Cy Young Awards...—has promised he will sign their baseballs on his way out of the ballpark.

“As Clemens’s car comes into view, the youngsters stream into its path...The problem is that Clemens doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Nope; in fact, he’s cruising right by the pack...like a fullback blasting through a narrow opening in the offensive line...[I]t’s obvious that Clemens has as much intention of stopping as he has of grooving a fastball to Jose Canseco in the bottom of the ninth of a 1-1 game.
...
“Roger Clemens. If there’s one ballplayer who seems to epitomize...what many people perceive as the egocentric and selfish new breed of ballplayer, it is the Rocket in ’89 — a somber, hulking presence around the clubhouse, a guy who would stiff a group of kids who have waited for him after the ballgame, and in this exhibition season, a ballplayer who has enveloped himself in the cone of silence by refusing to talk to the press.

“And to Clemens’s way of thinking, the media are the culprits.”

POETRY IN MOTION
25 years ago
March 22, 1983| Robert Polito rhapsodized on the merits of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s body of work.
“Robert Lowell told an interviewer that ‘he enjoyed her poems more than anybody else’s.’ John Ashbery termed her ‘the writer’s writer’s writer.’ To James Merrill she was ‘our greatest national treasure’...

“The Complete Poems 1927-1979...gathers in one volume the life work of Elizabeth Bishop, the poet most admired and celebrated by our other most admired and celebrated poets. ...

“That Bishop is less well known than some of her admirers is a paradox that floats on a short string above the qualities that make her work so distinctive. Her poems resist even the most supple efforts to categorize them. Despite its slenderness — The Complete Poems 1927-1979 comprises 115 original performances — the identifying mark of this book is its variety...Bishop’s writings ‘dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose,’ as she approvingly described the procedures of some 17th-century sermons. And like her ‘Gentleman of Shalott’ she ‘loves/that sense of constant re-adjustment.’ As a result, Bishop has been difficult to pin down in anthologies. Instead of a handful of agreed-upon, representative, important pieces, what we discover here is almost unequaled range and diversity. In the writing of no other American poet...is there greater amplitude of feeling, tone and attitude, and less repetition.”

SEE NO EVIL
35 years ago
March 20, 1973| Staying for some time overseas in Vienna, Austria, writer Sylvia Rothchild said that the city “suffers from amnesia.”
“Strange to come from a post-affluent society to a pre-affluent one, from post-Freud to pre-Freud as well as pre-youth culture, counter culture, women’s liberation, all the rebellions of the sixties and seventies! Especially bizarre since I always felt that the counter culture...was a response to what went on in Austria and Germany. To be sick of the Vietnam war was not only to be horrified at killing innocent people, but also to be terrified that we were not really different from Nazis. Being at the scene of the old crimes, however only added to the confusion. Vienna suffers from amnesia. It’s a city full of statues and memorials, obsessed with history as architecture and operetta, opposed to dwelling on any ‘unpleasantness.’ No demonstrations, no strikes, no controversies in the newspapers...”

3/20/2008 10:56:26 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

Game 5 of the ALCS was about an hour from start-time when Nick Hornby took the stage at the Devotion School in Brookline last night. The first question from the floor concerned, not surprisingly, Hornby's take on the current Red Sox series -- given that Hornby's Fever Pitch, a book about English soccer fanatics, had been magically turned into a Farrelly Bros film about Red Sox obsessives, which in turn was famously forced to undergo several last-second rewrites as the real-life Sox miraculously won their first World Series in 81 years.

Given that experience, you'd think Nick Hornby would understand that making even idle, humorous remarks about the Sox' prospects would not be taken lightly by the famously superstitious Fenway faithful. We're not sure if this rises to the level of the Curse of the Bambino, but it's damn well close. (Click above to see what we're talking about, and listen for the audience's audible gasp.) FOR GOD'S SAKE, MAN, THEY WERE DOWN 3-1. The Sox' subsequent drubbing of the Indians notwithstanding, we reserve the right to hold a book-burning on Yawkey Way should Our Boys fail to take two at home.

More from the Hornby appearance, including a reading from his fantastic new "young adult" novel Slam, coming over on Word Up on Thursday of next week. Thanks to Brookline Booksmith for hosting the reading.

10/19/2007 4:28:27 PM by Carly Carioli | Comments [0] |  

One of the traditions at The New Yorker that has continued unabated by tables of contents, photographs, bylined Talks of the Town, and other heady incursions of late-20th-century magazining is the "newsbreak" -- the wry, lightly condescending filler blurbs at the tail end of select New Yorker stories in which the magazine's copy-editing staff, having plowed through its 3,000-word feature for the afternoon and availed of no better way to entertain itself, takes to excerpting the copy-editing malapropisms of lesser publications. E.B. White once said, "I still regard newsbreaks as the thing I came to earth for." White even edited a book-length collection of newsbreaks; in later years, the tradition spawned an entire genre of shitty late-night comedy bits (see "Jaywalking").

The newsbreak is such a New Yorker hallmark that, when we came across page 63 of frequent New Yorker contributor Jeffrey Toobin's Supreme Court tome The Nine, we wondered whether Toobin hadn't edited in a newsbreak just to get another mention of the book wedged into his magazine's hallowed pages. If so, it would be the meta-est newsbreak of all time: a New Yorker writer caught in a malaprop involving The New Yorker. (Remember, all, that italics are reserved for publication names, albums, and the titles of creative works.) In the style, then, of a New Yorker newsbreak, we give you the Newsbreak of the Century:

HOOPLA DEPT.

"[In picking a list of potential Supreme Court nominees] the names of several nonjudges came up, but it quickly became clear that [Bill] Clinton was most interested in one of them -- Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York.

Clinton and Cuomo had a complicated relationship. Clinton admired The New Yorker's way with words but found his indecisiveness maddening."

We never liked him either, Bill.

For all you bookworms, Toobin discusses The Nine on Wednesday evening at the Brattle Theater, in conversation with local lega-eagle Alan Dershowitz. Tickets available through Harvard Book Store.

10/8/2007 3:05:03 PM by Carly Carioli | Comments [0] |  

In case the text above is too tiny for your squinting, Friday morning after a late Thursday night, pre-coffee eyes, get the larger version here.  Even then, it'll most likely seem too good to be true.  Dave Eggers? Of Montreal?  Eugene Merman? At one event?  Yep, our friends at 826 Boston are rocking out (in the karmic-ly correct, humanitarian way) as usual - in case you aren't in the loop about 826's awesome mission, consult Nina's piece from last March here.  Here's the info on the event, from our inbox:

"826 Boston is pleased to announce its Revenge of the Book Eaters fundraiser, featuring an eclectic lineup of writers, actors, and comedians including Kevin Barnes and Bryan Poole from the band Of Montreal (performing an acoustic set), as well as Dave Eggers (co-founder of the 826 National program, Pulitzer Prize-nominee author of What is the What), Eugene Mirman (comedian and actor, Flight of the Conchords), Davy Rothbart (creator of Found magazine) and Rodney Rothman (Emmy nominee and author of Early Bird) and the band Via Audio.

Berklee Performance Center, 1140 Boylston Street (Hynes Green Line stop), Boston Wednesday, September 26, 7 PM. Doors open at 6 PM.Tickets: General $25, VIP $100+. Tickets available through Ticketmaster and Berklee Box Office. All proceeds go toward 826 Boston’s free student programming."

-- Caitlin Curran

8/17/2007 10:41:26 AM by Carly Carioli | Comments [0] |