The New Yorker, 2006-12-11

[fiefoe]

"Postscript: Swift" / Hendrik Hertzberg

__ the clubby humor magazine housed in a comic castle built by William Randolph Hearst, class of 1885.
__ ... best-known work, “Within the Context of No-Context.” This long essay, edited by William Shawn, was as idiosyncratic as anything this magazine or any other has ever published. Its frame was set out in one of the subtitled snippets from which it was collaged:
    MEMBERSHIP
    The middle distance fell away, so the grids (from small to large) that had supported the middle distance fell into disuse and ceased to be understandable. Two grids remained. The grid of the two hundred million and the grid of intimacy. Everything else fell into disuse. There was a national life—a shimmer of national life—and intimate life. The distance between these two grids was very great. The distance was very frightening. People did not want to measure it.

"Wonderful World" / Anthony Lane

• As for “Fantasia,” what plunderings it required! First, there is the bewitching, sky-high devil who towers over the town in Murnau’s “Faust” (1926), and his no less lofty descendant in the “Night on Bald Mountain” section of the Disney film.
• (Her voice was provided by Lucille La Verne, who is said to have managed the transition to a cackle by the simple expedient of removing her false teeth.)
• (The stores tapered from nine-tenths scale at ground level to seven-tenths at the top), but behind that cunning lurked a weird presumption—a yearning to corral the world and cut it down to size.
• The enduring glory of animation was that it could cram exhilarating depths of energy onto a two-dimensional surface; Mickey Mouse is by his very nature more antic than Chaplin and more volatile than even the Marx Brothers in their windmilling prime.
• Disney has somehow become shorthand for the cushioning with which, knowingly or otherwise, we protect and console ourselves against experience: “All the conflicts of the real world, the nerve centers of bourgeois society, are purified in the imagination in order to be absorbed and co-opted into the world of entertainment.”

Jasper Johns: "There is a kind of - hesitation, or feedback, in my work that would give it the sense of heaviness rather than lightness."

Tad Friend: Failure is repeatedly relatable, whereas triumph goes down best in a single serving, such as one of those movies about unlikely bobsled heroes or plucky pint-size hockey players.

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