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The covers the New Yorker rejected | Media | The Observer
April 28, 2012
Photograph: M.Scott Miller/New Yorker

Sometimes it seems like artists are poking fun at the more sedate New Yorker covers of the olden days, though the artist here, M Scott Miller claims that the inspiration for this “jeté” is an experience common to anyone who follows classical ballet.

longreads:

Inside the making of a hit pop song—or hundreds of them. Stargate and Ester Dean are a producer-“top-liner” team that helps write hits for stars like Rihanna:

“The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—’taking control … never die tonight … I can’t live a lie’—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been ‘writing’ in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.

“The Song Machine.” — John Seabrook, The New Yorker

See also: “Daniel Ek’s Spotify: Music’s Last Best Hope.” — Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 12, 2011

Culture Desk: Dear PBS: The Laura Linney “Downton Abbey” Intros Are Freaking Me Out : The New Yorker
By Emily Nussbaum
January 9, 2012 

I adore “Downton Abbey,” the latest TV series that people like to talk about in part so they can establish that they are the kind of person who watches “Downton Abbey” … But do we really need Laura Linney, in a black dress and a tense grin, to welcome us? … Even Alistair Cookie would make more sense.

Stumptown Girl
An indie-rock star satirizes hipster culture, on “Portlandia.”
By Margaret Talbot
January 2, 2012 

“Portlandia,” which débuted last winter, on the Independent Film Channel, and returns on January 6th, is the rare sketch-comedy series that has a sustained object of satire. It’s about life in hipster enclaves, and the self-consciousness that makes hipsters desperately disavow the label. Many of its characters are caught up in the prideful culture of D.I.Y. entrepreneurship, in which people reject office jobs in favor of becoming, say, an appliqué-pillow designer with a page on Etsy. (This season, a couple launch a business based on the catchphrase “We can pickle that!,” brining everything from eggs at an urban farm to a broken high heel found on the sidewalk.) “Portlandia” is an extended joke about what Freud called the narcissism of small differences: the need to distinguish oneself by minute shadings and to insist, with outsized militancy, on the importance of those shadings.

[Carrie] Brownstein, who is also one of the show’s writers and producers, told me, “In general, things in a place like Portland are really great, so little concerns become ridiculous” … [Fred] Armisen, who is forty-five, is a seasoned comic actor who has been in the cast of “Saturday Night Live” since 2002, but Brownstein’s involvement in “Portlandia” is surprising. She had never done comedy before collaborating with Armisen, and, in many ways, she is the epitome of the indie culture that the show sends up. For twelve years, Brownstein, now thirty-seven, was a guitarist and singer in Sleater-Kinney, a three-woman band from Olympia, Washington. Sleater-Kinney drew on the riot-grrrl sound but transcended it; the band’s energy was raw and punky, its vocals haunting and its lyrics vehement.

(via Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen in “Portlandia” : The New Yorker)

The Best Music of 2011: The American Singers
By Sasha Frere-Jones
December 9, 2011 

Beyoncé wins 2011 simply for loving the job more than everyone else … Beyoncé means it, wants it, has the voice, and knows whom to hire to flesh out her ideas. And this vision does seem to be hers, as it’s too idiosyncratic a mesh of tastes and textures to reflect some timid P.R. plan.

(via Culture Desk: The Best Music of 2011: The American Singers : The New Yorker)

The World Series Quake
By Roger Angell
October 17, 2011 

The date is October 17, 1989, and the place, of course, is Candlestick Park, in San Francisco, about half an hour before the start of the third game of the 1989 World Series, between the Giants and the Oakland A’s … The great 7.l magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake, which struck at 5:04 that warm afternoon, shortly before the scheduled first pitch, produced in me not just a turbulent memory of the shuddering light towers, the wavelike motions of the outfield, and my seat bucking like an amusement park ride but, along with subsiding terror, a strong sense of my oneness with everybody else there. In time and without directions (there was no power), we made our way slowly out of the place … I crossed the infield, heading toward the main center-field exit, there were uniformed young Giants players and A’s players standing with the rest of us on the safety of the grass, surrounded by their wives and parents and children, whom they had gestured out of the stands.

(via The Sporting Scene: The World Series Quake : The New Yorker)

newyorker:

Karen Cahn, lawyer, New York, New York. “I don’t know how it’s gonna end, but it has to start, right?”

On Tuesday, Martin Schoeller photographed Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park. Click through to see the rest of Schoeller’s pictures: http://nyr.kr/nolJ0Z

(Source: newyorker.com)