The New New York Times

[+ Lucky]

While the Wall Street Journal was getting most of the ink these last few weeks, the New York Times was more quietly preparing itself for the battle to remain the nation's thinking newspaper by reducing its size. Today was my first encounter with the Sunday Times since, and I was overjoyed at what a great paper today's edition is. Rather than shrinking what I had to read, today's paper took longer than ever with more interesting articles on more appealing subjects than any issue in recent memory.

 

So take that, Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch! Today I learned about a redeemed quarterback, dirty Olympic air, the redemption of Saturn, laundered lemons, and the perils of combining Saltalamacchia with Simontacchi. And that was just the Sports section.

 

Business took me inside the mortgage marker where Countrywide Financial sports the ugliest CEO I have ever seen and the Maytag man takes off with a new wife.

 

Arts and Leisure...not just leisurely anymore. Great perspective on life in show business, the revenge of revenge movies, and an article on London theater that had me thirsting for the Fall preview sections coming next week. Who knew that Daniel Sunjata was still getting work and that Nureyev was gay? (Well, that last one isn't exactly news...) But step right in, read all about the audition by endurance and get your tickets while they're still available. That's if you survived the fastest gavel in the West, or didn't get taken in by Ang Lee's new idea that love is an illusion.

 

There's plenty more, including a complicated analysis of casualty loss prediction that Adam Smith will have to explain further to me. But my prediction is that the Times is here to stay and that there will still be enough ink left over for all of the Brazilian boys to get their tattoos and Rupert to run free.

 

In the meantime, who do you think was the cutest groom in the Styles section today: I vote for Oliver! Maybe FOX TV can still win a few.

[Guest zipperzone]

I just now noticed you avatar image - is it new?

 

How terribly clever of you - and how unexpectedly generous of RockHard - to finally send us a candid snapshot of himself.

 

It will make his loss a little easier to bear.

[+ Lucky]

Actually, the avatar image is from a photo in today's NYTimes of a Condoleeza puppet being strangled. It is featured in an article describing a show to be presented on PBS tomorrow night on why the British and the French hate us.

 

Love Us or Hate Us, Ya Can’t Ignore Us

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/26/arts/26stra.xlarge1.jpg

 

 

Yves Le Rolland, producer of a satirical French TV series, with a puppet of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in “The Anti-Americans,” a documentary by Louis Alvarez, Peter Odabashian and Andrew Kolker.

 

 

By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH

Published: August 26, 2007

DO Europeans hate America or love it? Lately the answer might seem a no-brainer. But “The Anti-Americans,” a one-hour documentary that has its premiere on PBS on Monday night, suggests that the correct response is: “Both.” We have, the show declares, “a hate-love relationship.”

 

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

 

We see both sides in the program. First the hate:

 

At a fashionable dinner party in London a proper Englishwoman sniffs with supreme condescension, “Americans are the first nation to come from barbarians, skip the civilized bit and go into decline.”

 

In a French country kitchen a woman recalls, with horrified outrage, a trip to Chicago, where she encountered “the fattest people I ever saw in my life.” She gasps that she could have ridden on their “big fat behinds.”

 

At a raucous public forum in a Dublin pub the one brave soul who speaks up in America’s defense is shouted down with angry obscenities.

 

Then the love:

 

In Poland a large crowd in cowboy hats and boots waves American flags and cheers a bluegrass performance. If it weren’t for the accents and the odd spellings like “piknik” and “hod dog,” you might think it’s Branson, Mo.

 

Shooting in 2005 and ’06, Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker and Peter Odabashian of the Center for New American Media, a New York documentary-production company, discovered one thing these countries have in common: The omnipresent culture of the United States is like a giant funhouse mirror in which Europeans see their own distorted reflections.

 

“America is a very, very useful construct for us to ventilate our own inadequacies and frustrations with ourselves,” one Irishman confesses.

 

The British novelist and journalist Will Self accuses his countrymen of being “blatantly hypocritical” and “extremely shallow” about the United States. They speak about American culture with great disdain, he says in the documentary, even as they consume it with a bottomless appetite.

 

As a case in point “The Anti-Americans,” part of the “America at a Crossroads” series, includes segments from a London stage production of “Jerry Springer: The Opera.”

 

“Jerry Springer is very American,” Mr. Alvarez said recently, “but only the British would make an opera about him.”

 

Mr. Kolker compared this program to “The Japanese Version,” which he and Mr. Alvarez produced in 1991. That show explored how the Japanese fascination with American pop culture may say more about the Japanese as cultural magpies than it does about the global influence of the United States.

 

Similarly, when French people complain on camera about everything from American cuisine to American foreign policy to American terms infiltrating their language, they really seem to be lamenting France’s own loss of power and influence in the world.

 

Because France declined on the world stage as the United States rose, the cultural anthropologist and marketing guru G. Clotaire Rapaille says in the film, “Americans are the ideal enemy.”

 

The French writer Pascal Bruckner agrees. “The fact that you’re hated means that you matter,” he says.

 

Mr. Kolker put it more bluntly: “They have empire envy.”

 

He said the producers chose Britain and France because “they were low-hanging fruit really. They’re the greatest America haters in the world, yet they also love America.”

 

They chose Poland, he said, as representative of the New Europe, where they expected to find “a fundamentally different attitude toward America.” He added with a smile, “What we found out was that they’re mostly just glad we’re not Russian.”

 

After decades of domination by the Nazis and then the Soviets, the Poles seem more willing than the British or French to be dominated by American culture. They speak of Uncle Sam as though he were a rich relative, if a distant and rather aloof one. It’s love with a distinct tinge of neurotic insecurity.

 

“If Poland were a person, they would be in permanent analysis,” the British-born historian Tony Judt observes.

 

For the legions of country music fans in Poland, idealized images of the American West represent freedom. Michael Lonstar (pronounced like Lonestar) fondly remembers hearing Ernest Tubb on Voice of America radio as a boy growing up behind the Iron Curtain. He performs country music in Polish and English, complete with achy-breaky dancing girls in denim miniskirts and cowboy boots.

 

In doing historical research for the program, Mr. Alvarez said, the producers were interested to find that Europeans’ stereotypes of the United States and Americans have remained fundamentally unchanged for generations.

 

But, Mr. Judt says in the program, in recent years the Bush administration’s foreign policy has amplified traditional European dismay and “switched on something I haven’t see in a very long time.” He says that Europeans now want to tell us: “Damn it, you’re doing stupid things that could screw up my world, in which case I want the right to have some say in who runs your country. If you must have stupid presidents, I want a vote.”

 

A sense of humor and a light touch are trademarks of the documentaries Mr. Kolker and Mr. Alvarez have made together for 30 years, the last 10 with Mr. Odabashian.

 

Those have included “Vote for Me,” a four-part series on grass-roots politicking that was shown on PBS in 1996; “People Like Us,” in which Americans openly discussed the often taboo subject of social class, shown in 2001; and “Small Ball,” which had its premiere in 2004, about the 2002 Little League Baseball World Series.

 

“We look at culture with a bit of whimsy and a serious undertone,” Mr. Alvarez explained. “We want people chattering when it’s over. We’re not propagandists, but we do have a message.”

 

One message to take away from “The Anti-Americans” is that “Europeans love to criticize us, but they can’t take their eyes off us,” Mr. Alvarez said. “That’s because there’s no escaping us. Every day they have to deal with America politically, economically and culturally. We’re the 800-pound gorilla in their lives.”

[+ Lucky]

Realizing by now, of course, that nobody really cares what I think about the New York Times, I still cannot resist encouraging you to read this delightful letter to the editor of the book review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/books/review/Letters-t-4.html?ref=review

[Guest ncm2169]

Delightful, Lucky. Just delightful. :7

[+ purplekow]

>Realizing by now, of course, that nobody really cares what I

>think about the New York Times, I still cannot resist

>encouraging you to read this delightful letter to the editor

>of the book review:

>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/books/review/Letters-t-4.html?ref=review

 

By sarcastically agreeing with the reviewer and then pointing out, in excess, all of the writer's accolades, does the writer hopes that the reviewer will now see him as less of a clown or simply that the reviewer will be seen as less competent than other reviewers.

It seems this whole letter could have been boiled down to: "Your reviewer didn't like my work. Boo hoo. Others did and do, here's a list. So there." No wonder his book is 600 pages long.

[KMEM]

I enjoyed the letter.

 

Is the New York Times (new or other wise) the one I "borrow" from my neighbor's driveway?

 

Apropos almost nothing, I have read 50 page "books" that I could hardly wait to get rid of (I had to read them)and 1200 page books that I was very sorry they ended.

 

Best regards,

KMEM:

[AdamSmith]

>this delightful letter to the editor

>of the book review:

>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/books/review/Letters-t-4.html?ref=review

 

Kluger's letter a delight indeed! Brookhiser can be pretty insufferable, even if usually with that dry Buckleyesque National Review charm. But after Brookhiser's review I glanced into Kluger's book in the bookstore. Just leafing through, it looked pretty much as Brookhiser said. No idea whether his arguments hold up but got woozy on his waves of prose.

 

You always have to look NY Times Book Reviews a little bit askance. Who is invited to review whom is often a political shell game there. Friends are asked to review friends to repay debts; or enemies likewise, to settle scores and stoke new tiffs. The one time in 50 that I know the back story, it is usually hilarious. The Times Literary Supplement by contrast can usually be counted on to get the world's other living expert on subject X to review the latest book on same.

[Guest zipperzone]

>By sarcastically agreeing with the reviewer and then pointing

>out, in excess, all of the writer's accolades, does the writer

>hopes that the reviewer will now see him as less of a clown or

>simply that the reviewer will be seen as less competent than

>other reviewers.

 

None of the above.

 

I think it was just the author's very original way of saying "fuck you"

[+ Lucky]

Adam, I saw that very thing with the review of Pat Montandon's book, Oh The Hell Of It All, which is her response to her son's book Oh The Glory Of It All. Neither book, imo, merited a Times review, especially the mother's. But, in case you missed it, they bring it up again on the Inside The List column. Office politics, for sure.

 

Plus, in the featured review of what looks to be an insufferable book by Mary Gordon about her mother, the writer takes a gratuitous stab at Christopher Hitchen's book. She claims that he discounts "that longing many of us feel for divinity." Huh?