Really bizarre, embarrassing shit from The New Yorker (merged)

[Scott Dolan]

Whether you feel he's good at it or not, Mr Gold was merely doing his job. The New Yorker deserves the blame for not clearly identifying the piece as satire.

An on-line interview with Gold (see post #158) makes it clear that the piece was all his bright idea, not something that the New Yorker asked/assigned him to write. So he wasn't "merely doing his job" in the sense you seem to mean.

That strikes me as a rather weak argument, Larry. His job IS to come up with pieces to write. It's the editors jobs to review/vet pieces submitted to them.

Do they tell Borowitz what to write?

Though, I do disagree with Captain Howdy that The New Yorker is at some kind of fault for not identifying the piece as satire. They've never identified The Borowitz Report as satire, as far as I know. And like any of his material, the Gold piece was so outrageous that anyone with two brain cells to rub together would have figured it out.

[Larry Kart]

Whether you feel he's good at it or not, Mr Gold was merely doing his job. The New Yorker deserves the blame for not clearly identifying the piece as satire.

An on-line interview with Gold (see post #158) makes it clear that the piece was all his bright idea, not something that the New Yorker asked/assigned him to write. So he wasn't "merely doing his job" in the sense you seem to mean.

That strikes me as a rather weak argument, Larry. His job IS to come up with pieces to write. It's the editors jobs to review/vet pieces submitted to them.

Do they tell Borowitz what to write?

Though, I do disagree with Captain Howdy that The New Yorker is at some kind of fault for not identifying the piece as satire. They've never identified The Borowitz Report as satire, as far as I know. And like any of his material, the Gold piece was so outrageous that anyone with two brain cells to rub together would have figured it out.

Of course that's Gold's job in the larger sense, Scott, but Captain Howdy's post implied to me that he thought Gold was assigned to write the piece, as a member of the New Yorker staff would/might be, when in fact Gold is a freelancer who sold the piece to the New Yorker. Maybe I'm being tedious but just wanted to make that clear.

As for Borowitz, or anyone like him at the New Yorker, I would assume that longtime mutual familiarity between him and his editors would effectively shape what he wanted to write and what they thought he could get away with. Roz Chast doesn't (at least so far) draw cartoons about the state of her vaginal secretions, though I'm sure she has them and might have some thoughts about them.

[Scott Dolan]

Works for me, Larry.

You're not being tedious, but perhaps reading something into Capt. Howdy's statement that wasn't really there. Or maybe it was, and I'm not seeing it...

Just my two cents...

Edited August 20, 2014 by Scott Dolan

[Scott Dolan]

And I still don't buy any of that.

I don't care which door they came in through, if they were dumb enough to fall for such a blatantly obvious piece of satire, the blame lies with the reader. Not the publication.

Then again, I'm a very, VERY hardcore personal responsibility type.

You have to ask yourself the most important question after reading that piece: do you honestly think Sonny Rollins feels that way about an art form he's dedicated 60 years of his life to?

If the answer is, "fuck no!", then there you have it.

[JSngry]

Looks like the takeaway from all this is that it's probably best for to not read about something you don't already know about.

[JSngry]

Yeah, reading, that's the dumbest thing ever invented. All you do is look at these line-y shape-y thingies on a bunch of paper for a while and then you're like, ok, time to do something else. But do you? No, you don't.

I spent a whole summer of my youth doing that to one of those, uh...books, yeah (nooks?), that's what they call them. Something by a husband-wife team, James & Joyce I think they were called, some book about President Grant. At least I think that's what it was about, who knows for sure? All I know was that I was 16 years old, and there was more sex in that book than there was in my summer.

That should have served as a precautionary table, but no. God gave us eyes for sunglasses and ears for headphones, not the other way around. Only recently has this point become clear to me.

I have wasted my life.

[Big Beat Steve]

Euuuhhhh .. Captain Howdy:

About that "believing that a jazz icon had renounced jazz" ...

It CAN happen, you know ... (and NO satire)

Heard of legendary jazz scribe, critic, promoter Joachim Ernst Berendt (a major name in jazz and in the crusade for getting jazz on the map this side of the pond, and never mind if he does not rate in the US, though his "Jazz Book" was acclaimed even there, so I've heard, not to mention his groundbreaking "Jazz Life" with William Claxton)?

In many of his latter-day publications he threw out jazz (and what it stood for) lock stock and barrel (getting the impression that he disowned his former works would not have been an exceedingly far stretch), said that (my paraphrase) "swing is irrelevant and immaterial", world music is what it's all about and just "tones and sounds" are what now counts. Pretty far removed from even a WIDE definition of the understanding of jazz.

And yet ... the world kept turning and jazz kept on being played.

So ...??

[Scott Dolan]

That said, we are all dependent upon what we read and hear, and if we tried to verify all of it before accepting it as true, we would never get anything done.

Wow, I have no idea how to even respond to this statement.

If you believe something simply because you read it somewhere, that's going to lead to a horribly misinformed life.

[Van Basten II]

Peolple interpret things in any way they want, if they want to see good in it they'll manage a way to do so and the other way around. As far as understanding the meaning of a text, well before the internets gimmick came to be mainstream, a lot of people got still easily confused. Just have to remember that Spingsteen's Born in the USA was used as a patrotic anthem !!!!

[JSngry]

[Scott Dolan]

That, too.

[medjuck]

Yeah, reading, that's the dumbest thing ever invented. All you do is look at these line-y shape-y thingies on a bunch of paper for a while and then you're like, ok, time to do something else. But do you? No, you don't.

I spent a whole summer of my youth doing that to one of those, uh...books, yeah (nooks?), that's what they call them. Something by a husband-wife team, James & Joyce I think they were called, some book about President Grant. At least I think that's what it was about, who knows for sure? All I know was that I was 16 years old, and there was more sex in that book than there was in my summer.

That should have served as a precautionary table, but no. God gave us eyes for sunglasses and ears for headphones, not the other way around. Only recently has this point become clear to me.

Now that's funny (unlike the New Yorker piece).

[jlhoots]

IMO the best part of this thread was about electric toothbrushes.

[Scott Dolan]

There is a difference between an aggregation of opinions, and facts. I assumed that was clear to anyone with an educated mind. Opinions are considered, facts are either verified or dismissed.

You can choose to believe anything you wish, but without verifying it, you're leaving yourself in a compromised state.

[hgweber]

in other news german jazzthing chose not to put a recent photo of sonny rollins on the cover for it's photo-homestory, but a 7-year old picture. while a recent photo would have been more "authentic", according to the editor, axel stinshof, in order to compete with other magazines on the newsstands one chose a more forceful looking image of rollins.

http://www.jazzthing.de/heft/104/editorial-104/