Every so often, a magazine comes out that carries every article, image, and author that you’d ever want to grace your bedside table. It happens to me maybe once every three years and it happened today. The November 3, 2003, New Yorker is superbly cool. Here’s why:
• Tina Fey, the cutest and smartest Saturday Night Live actress ever, is featured in a nice “anchor” piece.
• David Sedaris, one of my all-time favorite authors, writes about growing up under the sign of Halloween.
• A large reproduction of a new painting by my second favorite artist, John Wesley, appears on page 26. (His new show is at Fredericks Feiser.)
• John Updike, another fave writer who alternately bugs and cajoles me, writes about my third favorite artist, Francisco Jose Goya.
• In a story about Merce Cunningham, photographer Richard Avendon shoots Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Jon Thor Birgisson of Sigur Ros with Cunningham. I do like these two bands an awful lot. (Why all three men have eyelid problems in the photos is beyond me.)
• The new book by David Foster Wallace, the demi-god of contemporary writing, is reviewed and I can’t wait to pick up a copy of Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
• Peter Schjeldahl, a good and sometimes great art critic, writes about the current retrospective of Philip Guston at the Met. Guston beats all hands down; he is my supreme aesthetic leader, my joystick, my uber-fave. (My goodness.)