Sunday, June 27, 2010

Anthony Lane is a genius

A writer who can cogently bring together the Eurovision Song Contest and the Thirty Years War, who can felicitously employ “the synchronized rattle of sabres” and “an elderly Cretan slapping an octopus against the side of a wharf” while comparing a Celine Dion outfit to “a naval officer trying to mate with a lampshade” belongs to a higher order of being. It's even tastier if you ever watched the contest, as I did growing up in Portugal in the early days of the contest. Read the whole thing, you won't regret it. It requires a subscription to the New Yorker, one of the very few print periodicals that deserves your support. Just this jewel is worth way more than the price of admission, so all of a year of Jane Mayer, Atul Gawande, Ian Frazier, Hendrik Hertzberg, George Packer, just to name a few, will come in better than free.

3 comments:

steve said...

Pretty much every week there is something great. Ten years ago we subscribed to a dozen magazines other than technical magazines and journals -- now we are down to just The New Yorker .. it has earned its keep.

This week's cover (7/15) is remarkable...

Tomas said...

If you haven't read Lane's New Yorker review of "Star Wars: Episode III", you must. Other memorable reviews are those for "Mamma Mia" and "Sex and the City".

Eurovision was certainly a "target-rich environment" for him.

Win said...

Thanks for this post...you saved me a lot of time trying to locate this article online (I googled "slapping an octopus against a wharf," as it's all I could recall...and it made me laugh for at least a day); and you're so right about Lane...he's a different order of being. Other favorites: Reviewing Helen Mirren in something he notes that you could cool a case of chablis in her heart and also notes that she delivers a line in a tone that hasn't been heard since Marie Antoinette took an interest in the peasants' bakery products. His collection of essays, Nobody's Perfect is priceless.