Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Where Have You Gone, E.B. White?
The New Yorker is a handsome, left-leaning magazine of a certain age that is justly famous for many things, including its elegant covers, typographical consistency, and commitment to feature-length journalism. All the best writers want to see their work in The New Yorker.
The magazine was for many years the home of E.B.White, perhaps America’s greatest essayist, certainly my favorite. It is the current home of White’s stepson, the Hall of Fame baseball writer Roger Angell, who at 95 is nothing less than a living monument to grace, wit, and superior prose. He is a national treasure — may he stay with us for many more Octobers.
In addition to its literary legacy, The New Yorker also has many fine cartoons, as you may have heard, but that’s not all. It also has downtown and Brooklyn-based writers scouring the more bohemian quarters of Gotham City to bring you coverage of the very latest whiffinsizzle to catch the notoriously mercurial Millennial eye.
Allow me to draw your attention to “Alien Girls,” a short (800 words) profile of the Brooklyn-based “freak folk” duo CocoRosie. The piece, with byline attributed to Fernanda Eberstadt, appears in the Talk of the Town department of the October 26, 2015 issue.
“Alien Girls” opens in a Williamsburg loft just as Bianca and Sierra Casady, the sisters who form CocoRosie, and a few friends are tucking into a lunch of homemade tacos. The loft, we are informed, “used to belong to Bianca, and it is still filled with her art work, including a photograph of a brown dildo encased in purple quartz. (‘I’m interested in exploring black-male sexual stereotypes,’ she said, laconically.)”
Laconically, okay?
Other characters in this 800-word Bjork-world include a French beatboxer named Tez. France looms large. It’s where CocoRosie was formed in 2003.
Bianca, then a New York poet, showed up in Paris, where Sierra was studying classical voice at the Conservatoire. The two sisters were brought up by ‘alternative’ parents—their father a devotee of Native American shamanism, their mother an artist who dragged her children across California, Hawaii, and New Mexico—and they had lost touch with each other.
Had I not held in my hands the two glossy covers of the redoubtable New Yorker as I read “Alien Girls,” I could easily have been convinced that Eberstadt’s contribution was in fact a practical joke played on the magazine’s legendary fact-checkers and stuffy-fuffy editors.
But, as the kids say these days, it wasn’t The Onion.
Costume is a crucial element of the CocoRosie effect. Bianca, who is thirty-three, was wearing flame-patterned basketball shorts, white kneesocks, and a bowler hat; Sierra, who is two years older, looked comparatively demure in a seersucker jacket and red clown makeup.
“Alien Girls” closes as you would suspect — with a riddle that will leave anyone who doesn’t huff paint four times a week wondering what world he has landed in.
The gals are planning a potluck dinner built around a theme. The theme? “Feasting with the Enemy.” Each guest must bring a dish “native to her ancestral foe” (whatever in the wide world of sports that means).
Bianca, who had concluded that the ancestry of her and her sister is part Cherokee, “but more Syrian than anything else,” said that she was going to wing it. “I really like to surprise myself.”
You know what’s really surprising? Someone at The New Yorker thought this was worth publishing.
For the interested, here’s a taste of CocoRosie:
Published in Culture, General
C’mon. You gotta admit. The facial hair and tattooing is a nice touch. Helps keep the sisters straight from childhood through old age.
Giving Hillary’s cackle some serious competition as ‘the most painful thing to listen to in 2015.’
Wow. The only thing I understood here was EB White.
I guess this stuff is art? So one could listen to/watch this…art, or one could go the local library and bring home a national treasure: a recording of EB White himself reading aloud Charlotte’s Web or Trumpet of the Swan. I am hopelessly plebeian–I will choose White every time.
PS: Wanted to cringe at “I like to surprise myself.” No one who is not a narcissist speaks this way.
You can’t lose.
I always enjoy it when people parody themselves. It saves the rest of us a lot of effort.
“Hey, this is awful, let me share it with Ricochet!”
Thanks?
No prob.
No, it’s ‘Thanks so bloody much!’
You guys can just get down off your high horses any time, okay? Let he who has no dildo encased in purple quartz cast the first stone.
faux gemstone, right?
Ya know that old saying about not being able to look away from a car crash.
I had no problem stopping that after 1 minute and looking away.
#yawn# As an aging punk rocker, I’m still waiting for the kids to offend me. (Really: please offend me. Please.) Or even interest me. But good for you girls: you’ve made a passable 1980’s Christian Death video.
As for E.B. White… well, I’ve got my fourth edition Strunk & White The Elements of Style right here at my desk. Never write more than a paragraph without one I say.
I sorta liked that song. I immediately downloaded it from iTunes and put it in my “Halloween Creepy” playlist. That’ll scare the Trick-or-Treaters.
This is all pretty crazy stuff and I do not know The New Yorker but….
Two things:
I think the deceased Mr. White and his 95 year old step son is an interesting way to assess the magazine. It reminds me of Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City…”You should have seen it back then, it was glorious” (Obscure reference I know, but if you have not seen it, it is worth the watch.)
Secondly, if the magazine is indeed appealing to millennials with a magazine about arts and culture…well…That boat has sailed. I don’t wish them ill, and its a free country and all, but they are doomed.
My first (sympathetic) reaction was “how are these poor 33 and 35- year-old kids ever going to make a living?” Then, I realized that one or both will end up at Columbia as a minority Syrian-Cherokee hire teaching “The Enigma of the Ancestral Foe: Potluck Cooking and Racism in Modern America.”
At lunch I took a look at some additional CocoRosie videos on Youtube. Most are basically a filmed performance which I find much preferable to the slick and arty video which was attached. In all cases the weird tremulous lead vocal styling is front and center.
“Left-leaning”? If Bernie Sanders was a magazine, he would be The New Yorker.