My idea of heaven — an uninterrupted day or five to go through my father’s pile of The New Yorker magazines. Through a Queensland Easter, interrupted days as they were with querulous nephew, hovering, endlessly amusing niece, cooking duties, demanding mother, I managed to hide in a deck chair and skim a few to discover these treasures:
Noah Baumbach, the very definitely sexy writer of The Squid and the Whale, and Margot at the Wedding, and husband of actor Jennifer Jason Leigh, embarks on new research, hilarious new research, looking at the longevity properties of red wine.
A profile of über-blogger Arianna Huffington who, apparently, twice-weekly leads “a highly curated cast of friends on a hike. ‘She’s an inspiration to me,’ Lynda Resnick, the pomegranate juice magnate said. ‘It was Laurie David’s birthday, in 2006. We were up in the Santa Monica mountains, and there was a vista, and we were sipping champagne out of splits with straws and eating soft cheese and hard salami. Laurie had just started to produce An Inconvenient Truth, Arianna’s Web site was going gangbusters, Rita Wilson [Tom Hanks’s wife] was about to appear in Chicago on Broadway. “What are you doing outside of your comfort zone?” Arianna asked me.” (Just the question you want to ponder during a nice hike in the mountains... I would have pushed her into the nearest ravine...)
One back issue of the magazine alerted me to the Broadway debut of 9-5 the Musical. Is it terribly naff to admit that 9-5 the film rocked my teenage world?
Another back issue told me about Valentino, the movie … Valentino, the Last Emperor … oh my God, looks fabulous. “I’m a disaster in everything else,” the maestro says in the trailer, Delibes’ divine Lakmé trilling in the background. “How was I? Tell me the truth,” he asks his lifelong lover and partner Giancarlo Giammetti, “OK, I’ll tell you,” Giammetti replies. “You look a little bit too tan.”
I found a review of our Geoffrey Rush’s Broadway debut, in Exit the King (“Brilliantly directed by Neil Armfield,” according to New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als). A piece about Isabella Rossellini’s latest project — a series of short films about animal reproduction called Green Porno (with gleeful lasciviousness, Rossellini explains the wonder of compatible vaginas and penises). And Simon Rich's entertaining piece headed “Animal Tales”. It’s worth reading beyond the first frog’s question — “Hey, can I ask you something? Why do human children dissect us?”
And, more seriously, Edwidge Danticat’s piece on growing up in Haiti — and on hunger; imagination; sweet plantains swimming in a codfish-and-onion stew; and on a big bowl of crabs, stewed with crushed eggplants and garlic cloves that answers a little girl’s prayers.
