Something like 75% of Condé Nast’s most venerable publication’s readership – the always studious, perpetually thorough The New Yorker – doesn’t even live on the island they’re reading about. (Shit, I live worlds apart in Columbia, South Carolina and still can’t bring myself to cancel my subscription.) When it comes to art, music, theatre and books though, the magazine’s equally studious, equally thorough critics are usually beyond reproach. Throw in some fiction by Updike and T. Coraghessan Boyle, and you’ve got yourself one helluva imposing rag dog-eared there in the wicker basket – between this month’s Vice and an old, “love worn” copy of Screw – right beside the can.
That is, until I read whatever schlop film critic Anthony Lane schtarts schlingin’ around there in the back pages. In a review split down the middle, word-count wise, with Wes Anderson’s newest familial joint The Darjeeling Limited, Lane readily admits that while he’s never even heard of the very band whose very lead singer is the very subject of the very film he’s getting very paid to see, I should still gas up my big-as-a-whale Chrysler and head down the Atlanta Highway to catch Control at Midtown Art Cinema Friday, November 2nd:
“Speaking as someone so irretrievably square that I not only never listened to the band but didn’t even know anyone who liked it, I can’t imagine a tribute more fitting than this.”
Really, Tony? You mean to tell me that all that time you wasted reading Eliot at Oxbridge, you never once ventured northwest to Macclesfield? Fuck, there’s a wasteland for ya. And all that time you spent on assignment for The Independent, you never dropped Ecstasy in Madchester? You’re loss, I suppose. But to state grosse pointe blank in a review that you haven’t done your homework negates nearly everything you have to say about the subject. I’d really like to believe you when you write that Anton Corbijn’s film features Sam Riley as a “dreamy schoolboy, posing shirtless in front of the bedroom mirror, mouthing along to Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie,’” but how can I be sure? For all you know ass clown it could be Shaun Ryder popping zits to Jean Genet.