Entries associated with the tag "The New Yorker":

The debate is raging over this week's notorious New Yorker cover of Barack and Michelle Obama, but here in Chicago we've been there, done that. There's a world of difference between Barry Blitt's drawing of the up-and-comers in Islamic and revolutionary regalia and Mirth and Girth, David K. Nelson's 1988 acrylic painting of Harold Washington in a woman's undergarments: Blitt's trying to ridicule Barack Obama's more rabid opponents, while Nelson was trying to knock the recently deceased mayor's more rabid glorifiers. 

But their works have this much in common. They've made people furious. And each works better as an idea than as an executed picture. As Clarence Page said in the Tribune Wednesday about Blitt's cover -- "When it takes you too long to figure out whether a joke is funny, well, forget about it." I've never been able to persuade myself that Nelson's painting wasn't dumb (I've tried), and I'm still looking for ways to decide that Blitt's is witty.

The David K. Nelson controversy was a major chapter in our city's hysteria-packed history, an episode that began with black aldermen under police escort commandeering a painting from the School of the Art Institute and ended six years later with a withering decision in U.S. Appellate Court and an out-of-court settlement to Nelson. In his 1994 opinion Judge Richard Posner noted that after a day in police custody the painting was released to Nelson, "we assume on its own recognizance."

Mirth and Girth wasn't the last time David K. Nelson stirred up trouble in Chicago. In 1991 he made a cartoon for the Reader's year-in-review issue that was pretty funny. It showed Alderman Dorothy Tillman as a paper doll in skivvies trying to decide what to wear, a "feminine yet subtly persuasive" outfit accessorized by a revolver or something a little more rugged accessorized by a submachine gun and matching ammo-clip bandolier. (Tillman had reportedly waved a gun at a community meeting.) "Help Dress Dorothy," we called the cartoon.

To make a long story short, here's the column I wrote three weeks later, after the chairman of the state Democratic Party had urged his party's candidates not to advertise in this newspaper. And here's my column the week after that, meditating on the demonstration against the Reader that I'd watched from an office window.

The late Simone de Beauvoir just turned 100, so to speak, and the French magazine Nouvel Observateur honored the occasion by showing her on its cover in her birthday suit. It's one of my favorite pictures -- a rear view of the writer fussing with her hair in 1952 in a Chicago bathroom, which photographer Art Shay took her to on assignment from Nelson Algren (his pal and her lover), whose own apartment had none. The photo has stirred quite an uproar -- some of it over the posthumous birthday gift of a Photoshopped tush. If you read French, here's Le Monde's report of this "astonishing photograph." 

And finally, here's the New Yorker account. Adam Gopnik sees the bigger picture, which has room in it not only for Algren and de Beauvoir but also for President Sarkozy and his flame, Carla Bruni. Gopnik advises us never to underestimate the power "of masculine sexual conceit, of the kind that leads Chicago writers who can’t believe how they’ve lucked out with their French girlfriend to have her nude portrait taken in the bathroom, and French Presidents who can’t believe how they’ve lucked out with their new babe to parade her around in a swimsuit, even at the price of looking a little tubby themselves."

Tony Lagouranis, the former army interrogator who's the subject of John Conroy's cover story in the March 2 Reader, has a name that might ring a bell. Lagouranis is spreading the message that while working for the army in Iraq he tortured detainees, and to no useful end, and among his public appearances is the one in a recent New Yorker article on the TV show 24 . Lagouranis was part of a delegation led by the dean of the U.S. Military Academy that met last November with the show's creative team to protest its free and easy use of torture. "In Iraq," Lagouranis tells the magazine, "I never saw pain produce intelligence." 24's having a rocky year. I watch it faithfully as a guilty pleasure, but pleasure is more evanescent than guilt and the show everybody celebrated last season now seems to have a lot of people feeling queasy.

Consider this discussion of the show's troubling "political theology." I can't be that lofty. 24 is television, so I'll compare it to another show: Medium, whose hero has the knack of being able to solve crimes in her sleep. Toward the end of the one episode I've seen -- my brother-in-law played the murder victim -- the show wasn't anywhere close to tying up its loose ends and there were only a couple minutes to go till the credits. So the writers sent the hero back to bed. In her dream all was revealed. It was the silliest thing my wife and I had ever seen. Yet in 24 torture functions in the same way. The show pretends to be complicated, but it's got a mass audience it can't afford to confuse, so it's really just The Perils of Pauline (or Jack Bauer) gussied up with outlandish plot twists. Any suspense is over whether the writers will paint themselves into a corner they can't get out of. And since the present peril has to be resolved by the end of the hour so the show can get on to the next one, plot expedients are necessary and torture's the favorite.

Torture moves things along. Besides, it doesn't really hurt. Have we all forgotten the terrible things that the Arab extremists did to Jack within an hour after he got off the plane from China already a wreck? To quote no less an authority than the official 24 Web site: "Fayed pierces the bundle of nerves on Jack's shoulder with a knife." And then, "Fayed stabs Jack in the back with something sharp, causing Jack to keel over." Bauer got out of that one and I don't think he slowed down long enough to dab those pierced nerves with Mercurochrome. But 24 is a show where even death is reversible. At least Jack's was (season two). Lagouranis says in the New Yorker that interrogators he knew in Iraq watched 24 to pick up tips on how to make prisoners come clean. That's scary -- the business end of our intelligence pipeline consists of guys who watch Kiefer Sutherland earn his half million dollars an episode and think they're all in the same line of work.