After I paid the bills, the other day, I stuffed the parts that you keep “for your records” into the “February” folder, removing last year’s batch, which I culled for shredding. With the February 2012 bills to be saved in hand, I went looking for the January 2012 bills, which I new to be near a manila folder containing the saved bills from 2011. But I couldn’t find them. I still haven’t found them. I’ve looked just about everywhere. I’ve opened each and every rattan storage box big enough to hold them, but in vain.

Of course, I’ve found a lot of other things, especially things to get rid of. Sometime late last year, I decided to stop saving New Yorker covers. And I did. But I didn’t bother to throw away the piles that I’d been saving for years. Several rattan boxes were filled with them. They made quite a stack, well over a foot high — and I’m sure there are more somewhere. Before pitching the lot, I decided to spend a few minutes running through them, to see if there were any that I really really wanted to save. Typically, I held on to two covers that, as official art prints, hang on the walls of the apartment, the famous “New Yorkistan” cover by Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz — because I acted now, I have one of the limited-edition blow-ups, signed by both the artist and the writer. I also have Jorge Columbo’s cover for 21 September 2009, which features buildings and water towers in evening silhouette, with a plane flying in the distance (perhaps it is meant to be dawn). I bought the “art” version of that from Jen Bekman’s 20X200 project. Which means that I should just get rid of the actual covers, right? You don’t know me!

About halfway through the stack, I began to notice that Barack Obama was making frequent appearances. Going back to the bottom of the pile, I gathered a collection of twelve, not all of which show the president. There is Michelle Obama on the fashion runway (16 March 2009), and the pillars of the south portico of the White House painted in LGBT rainbow colors (21 May 2012), and Bo on the front lawn (27 April 2009). There is the figure of a man, seen from the rear, approaching the White House through the snow, tramping past drifts of red and blue leaves. Those are “honorary” Obama covers. The real ones in my possession are

• Obama walking on water (1 February 2010)
• Obama as George Washington (26 January 2009)
• Obama welcoming Santa (14 December 2009)
• Obama interviewing dogs — Bo not shown (8 December 2008)
• Obama and Boehner (15 November 2010)
• Barack and Michelle, outfitted to suggest terrorists (21 July 2008)

and

• Obama and Hillary as Eustace Tilley, playing-card bashion (11 & 18 February 2008)
• Obama and Hillary in bed, reaching for red phone (17 March 2008)

Ms NOLA straightened me out on that last one, the date of which I’d initially overlooked. I took the red phone to be the line from Putin, announcing War. How quickly we forget.

The other day, my friend Jean wrote in praise of The New Yorker‘s high-quality consistency.

Le New Yorker est un régal aussi bien pour les yeux que par la lecture des articles et la nouvelle hebdomadaire. Rien n’a changé dans la conception du New Yorker depuis 1925. Ni la typographie, ni la maquette. Et pourtant c’est un magazine toujours moderne, à la pointe de l’actualité avec ce recul nécessaire et cette légère ironie qui en fait tout le sel. La couverture est une oeuvre d’art chaque semaine, un objet de collection ainsi qu’un hommage aux illustrateurs. Sempé et François Avril y contribuent de temps en temps. La lecture du New Yorker sur le web ne remplacera jamais l’expérience de feuilleter son édition papier ou sur iPad (qui imite à la perfection l’édition papier).

I had to post a comment to the effect that, when I began reading the magazine, in 1962, there was no Table of Contents, and you had to find the end of a piece to find out who wrote it. Also: no photographs. One thing that I didn’t mention was that covers, at least during the Shawn years (the first forty-odd of my life), covers were never topical. Seasonal, yes, but topical, no. Presidents from Kennedy through Bush I simply did not appear on the cover of The New Yorker. Nor did other celebrities.

Now, it never crosses my mind that The New Yorker that I’m reading today isn’t the same magazine, essentially, that I was reading in my teens. But because there has never been anything remotely like it, considerable changes have been introduced without affronting too many sensibilities. But the shift in covers, once Tina Brown and Art Spiegelman took over, really was shocking. I was repelled by more than a few, reduced to mumbling the Times’s formula about “family” publications. Even though David Remnick’s régime has quieted things down a bit, I find that I’ve fallen into the habit of trying to decode each week’s cover before I’ve even taken it in. Sometimes I get them right away, sometimes I don’t. Quite often, I long for the good old days. Today’s covers are never, ever as clever as Saul Steinberg’s.  

The Obama covers, taken as a whole, are good-humored but steadily satirical: “We like this guy, but we know he doesn’t read us.”

Twelve! In five years! 

***

Ms NOLA straightened me out about the red-phone cover when I called her to tell her about the 12! covers. I never call Ms NOLA in the evening just to chat, but had to make contact. She said that she was watching The State of the Union. Oh, with Spencer Tracy? I asked. No, with Barack Obama, she laughed. The State of the Union address. I had a momentary sense of living in an alternative universe, because in fact I do. Watching the State of the Union is a perfectly normal thing for an educated American to do, but I wouldn’t tune in unless I thought the world was coming to an end, and maybe not even then. I have become so dishabituated to television that I think of it, when I think of it, as a kind of primitive video game. A fun thing to do when I was young, but, as with smoking, I’m glad that I gave it up a long time ago.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2013 at 2:57 pm.