{"id":14588,"date":"2011-04-14T10:54:51","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T14:54:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=14588"},"modified":"2013-01-09T11:51:03","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T16:51:03","slug":"a-week-in-culture-john-swansburg-editor-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/14\/a-week-in-culture-john-swansburg-editor-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: John Swansburg, Editor, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Swansburg\u2019s culture diary. Click here<\/a> to read part 1. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

DAY FOUR<\/h3>\n

I slip out of the office around noon and walk over to SoHo to check out an exhibition<\/a> of photographs taken on the Paris Metro by Chris Marker<\/a>. I am an enthusiastic straphanger\u2014I\u2019m known in the Slate<\/em> offices as a staunch defender of the MTA\u2014so I was looking forward to seeing Marker\u2019s project, but the photos fail to move me. Marker has captured the drudgery of commuting and the diversity of Paris\u2019s commuters, but the photos are almost uniformly glum; they fail to register the vitality a packed subway car can have. (I\u2019ll never forget the time I saw a guy with Four Quartets<\/em> and<\/em> a critical text perched on his lap on a crowded C train. Come on, Marker, where\u2019s the wonder?) A few of the shots juxtapose faces Marker has photographed on the subway with faces from masterpieces of painting. Some of the likenesses are impressive, but it feels like a silly trick; I don\u2019t need to be shown that this woman looks kind of like Mona Lisa to care about her. The Marker exhibition leaves me wanting to see what Bill Cunningham<\/a> would do with the assignment of spending a week riding New York\u2019s rails.<\/p>\n

\"\"I have dinner at the bustling John Dory Oyster Bar<\/a>\u2014yes, more oysters, I swear this week is not typical\u2014with my friends from Port Washington, Long Island<\/span>. Among other things, I\u2019ve learned that citizens of Port Washington harbor ill will toward the neighboring hamlet of Plandome, which, despite its tiny size (population 1,272<\/a>) and proximity to both the Port Washington and Manhasset stations, for some reason has its own Long Island Rail Road stop, unnecessarily adding two to three minutes to the Port Washingtonian\u2019s commute each morning and evening. Weary passengers have been said to exhibit countenances akin to Munch\u2019s The Scream<\/em> upon pulling into the Plandome station.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DAY FIVE<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

\"\"I am a card-carrying fraidy cat, but a chunk of this Friday is dedicated to horror films. In the morning I spend some time reading Jason Zinoman\u2019s upcoming book, Shock Value<\/a><\/em>, on the rise of the horror genre. The story of how horror went from being the stuff of seedy exploitation houses to one of the biggest engines of the Hollywood money machine is fascinating, regardless of whether you have a stomach for blood spatter. Meanwhile, with the new entry in the Scream<\/em> series nearly upon us, my colleague Forrest Wickman has concocted an equation that can predict the body count of a slasher movie based on several variables: the movie\u2019s sequel number, the number of colons in the title, et cetera. It\u2019s scarily accurate. Forrest posts it<\/a> on Slate<\/em>\u2019s culture blog, and e-mails a bit later to say that Wes Craven himself has tweeted a link to it<\/a>. Nice.<\/p>\n

\"\"In the evening it\u2019s back to Film Forum, this time to see Le Quattro Volte<\/a><\/em>. Last week, my friend and former colleague Wesley Morris<\/a>, a film critic for the Boston Globe<\/em>, tweeted<\/a> the following: \u201cIf you live in a city showing Le Quattro Volte, please go. It\u2019s what God wants.\u201d As you wish! Set in a small town in rural Calabria, the film tracks the lives of an elderly goatherd, a newborn goat, a tall tree, and a pile of coal, whose fates are loosely related. I realize that doesn\u2019t necessarily sound like a recipe for great cinema\u2014did I mention the movie has no dialogue?\u2014but it\u2019s every bit as good as Wesley promised, by turns funny and tragic, mundane and surprising, provincial and universal. Plus, that baby goat is extremely cute. Go see it.<\/p>\n

DAY SIX<\/h3>\n

My date with Charlie Sheen has arrived. I hop on the 3:07 P.M. train to New Haven. On the train, I read Zadie Smith\u2019s essay<\/a> in The New York Review of Books<\/em> on The Clock<\/span><\/em>, the astonishing, twenty-four-hour film<\/a> by Christian Marclay. Smith\u2019s essay does an impressive job of capturing both Marclay\u2019s achievement and the experience of taking it in. The film is in London now. I really hope it comes back to New York so I can see the whole thing.<\/p>\n

My friends pick me up at the train station in New Haven and we head to Modern Apizza<\/a>. New Haven is home to a famous pizza rivalry, between Pepe\u2019s and Sally\u2019s, but there\u2019s an ardent faction of locals who believe the finest pizza in town is actually made at Modern, which serves us up two exquisite pies. When we finish eating, we drive to Wallingford to see Charlie Sheen do his thing.<\/p>\n

\"\"The show is every bit as dreadful as A. O. Scott warned it would be. In fact, it\u2019s arguably worse, in that the crowd in Connecticut never turns on Sheen, as the ones in Detroit and New York<\/a> did. (Sheen and I get off on the wrong foot when he complains about his reception last night at \u201cRadio Shitty Music Hall.\u201d) The format of the show is this: Sheen and an unnamed sycophant sit in wingback chairs on stage. Just to Sheen\u2019s left, a man with an electric guitar is perched on a stool. The sycophant asks Sheen a series of questions on the order of \u201cYou\u2019ve called yourself a warlock. Why do you like that word?\u201d Sheen replies. (He likes the word warlock<\/em> because it is made up of the words war<\/em> and lock<\/em>: \u201cas in, I\u2019m going to lock you out.\u201d) The guitarist plays a short heavy-metal lick to punctuate Sheen\u2019s response. It goes on like this for some time.<\/p>\n

\"\"There\u2019s no denying that Sheen has a certain way with the language, but the man who gave us \u201ccan\u2019t is the cancer of happen\u201d has lost his spark. He has nothing new to say; he\u2019s already a captive of the catchphrases we first learned last month (all of which are emblazoned on thirty-five-dollar T-shirts, available at the bustling merch table). Each time he says winning<\/em>, it sounds that much more hollow. I can\u2019t help but wonder if what seemed like spontaneity in those initial rambling interviews was actually hardened shtick, developed over the course of years of self-righteous misbehavior.<\/p>\n

One\u2019s attention starts to wander. Around the midpoint in the show, my friends and I notice that a silver-haired gentleman who has spent all evening running up and down the aisles of the orchestra section trying to get Sheen\u2019s attention has finally been corralled by the theater staff and is in the process of being ejected. Sheen notices this, too, and demands that the man be reinstated. Sheen brings the man he\u2019s pardoned up on stage, hoping, perhaps, to burnish his credentials as a champion of the oppressed and the misunderstood. But the man has his own agenda. It turns out that he was eager to get Sheen\u2019s attention because he is an accomplished harmonica player and has composed a blues song for the actor. Pulling a harmonica from his sport coat, he proceeds to belt it out. It\u2019s honestly not half bad, and Sheen and the audience look on in genuine wonder. The man finishes his performance, thanks Sheen for sparing him and for letting him have his moment, does an awkward cartwheel of joy, and descends back into the drunken throng. It\u2019s the only real display of talent all evening.<\/p>\n

DAY SEVEN<\/h3>\n

\"\"My friends and I decide to throw good money after bad and proceed directly from the Sheen debacle to Uncasville, Connecticut, home of the Mohegan Sun<\/a> casino. The first hours of Day 7 open with the three of us playing a few shoes<\/a> of blackjack, dealt by an amiable fellow named Ron who seems sincerely chagrined that the house keeps winning. The gaming floor is strangely full of gamblers in cowboy hats, as if it were some kind of Kenny Rogers<\/a> night at Mohegan. We eventually glean that, in fact, it\u2019s Kenny Chesney<\/em> night\u2014the singer played a show earlier in the evening at the casino\u2019s concert space. We totally should have gone to see Kenny instead of Charlie.<\/p>\n

We return to New Haven and get some rest. In the morning, I attempt to expiate some of last night\u2019s sins by visiting the Knights of Columbus Museum<\/a>\u2014the fraternal organization was founded in New Haven\u2014to check out its recently opened exhibition on the papacy of John Paul II. I\u2019m able to make a quick survey of the papal regalia on display, as I am currently the only museum patron. A video, playing on loop, has some good footage of the mass the Pope gave at Aqueduct in 1995.<\/p>\n

I walk over to New Haven\u2019s Union Station, which is famous (in my mind) for having not one but two<\/em> Dunkin\u2019 Donuts stores. I\u2019ve always assumed it must be the smallest structure in the world to house two of the same franchise. I catch the 12:56 P.M. back to Grand Central. I\u2019ve brought along a copy The Jew of Malta<\/em> to read on the train, but I\u2019m too tired from the previous night\u2019s misadventures for Marlowe. Instead, I fire up the second episode of The Killing<\/em>, the new series on AMC about a murder investigation in Seattle, on my iPad. It\u2019s very good\u2014moody, ever so slightly Twin Peaks<\/em>ish<\/a>. A guy gets on at Westport wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves hat.<\/p>\n

John Swansburg is the culture editor of <\/em>Slate<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Swansburg\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR I slip out of the office around noon and walk over to SoHo to check out an exhibition of photographs taken on the Paris Metro by Chris Marker. I am an enthusiastic straphanger\u2014I\u2019m known in the Slate offices […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":157,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2138,2140,1920,1617,379,2141,2133,2146,2143,2145,2144,2142,1294],"class_list":["post-14588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-charlie-sheen","tag-chris-marker","tag-christian-marclay","tag-culture-diary","tag-gambling","tag-jason-zinoman","tag-john-swansburg","tag-knights-of-columbus","tag-long-island","tag-mohegan-sun-casino","tag-new-haven-pizza","tag-port-washington","tag-slate"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: John Swansburg, Editor, Part 2 by John Swansburg<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 14, 2011 \u2013 This is the second installment of Swansburg\u2019s culture diary. 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