Teenage suicide = comic gold!

Just noticed something incredibly strange in this week's New Yorker (April 3, 2006 issue). The Shouts & Murmurs humor piece, by Paul Rudnick, seems to have been quite obviously inspired by "Prairie Fire," an earlier New Yorker feature by Eric Konigsberg on the March 2005 suicide of Brandenn Bremmer, a 14-year old prodigy from Nebraska. It's all there: the deluded parents, the self-serving "expert," the New Agey lingo (indigo child = dandelion child), the obnoxious condescension towards other kids.

Now, if you read my earlier post on "Prairie Fire," you'll know I think Brandenn's parents and especially his psychologist deserve some criticism for the way they isolated him from other kids and used him as the medium for their own ego gratification. But a humor piece? In the same publication, two months later? Pretty strange. I'd be interested to know if I'm right about that story being Paul Rudnick's inspiration. Heck, maybe I'll ask him.

Caitlin Flanagan: So easy to hate on, so (inexplicably) hard to understand.

Wow. I've read just about every single thing Caitlin Flanagan has published. I've also read most of what's been written about her, and quizzed her in person at some length about her views. So why is it the Caitlin Flanagan her liberal critics describe is almost completely unrecognizable to me?

Here is what Flanagan has to say, as I understand it: It's all but impossible to be a full-time mother and have a full-time career. The same is true for dads. The difference is, whether by nature or culture, women are more particular about their children's upbringing, and they feel more keenly the separation from their kids having a full-time job necessitates.

Here's what liberal feminists (a group I usually have no quarrel with) hear: Women are meant to be mothers. Kids whose primary caregiver is someone other than their mother suffer emotional harm.

Those are disagreeable sentiments, to be sure. But guess what? Flanagan never makes anything like those claims. Her focus is almost exclusively on what the working vs. staying home conflict means for the mothers. What she does say is that a woman who spends virtually all of her waking time with her children typically has a stronger bond with them than the woman who spends three or four hours a day with them. (Again, I'm certain she'd say the same about men.) This is where her beef with feminists comes in. To feminists, it's heresy to say that working women might be sacrificing the intensity of the mother-child bond. They've been saying this for so long, an entire generation of women has grown up expecting it to be true -- only to find themselves confused and grieved at the separation anxiety they feel upon handing their kids off to nannies or daycare. I suppose feminists would argue that such anxiety is nothing but culturally-imposed guilt. But do they really believe that themselves? If they did, I suspect their attacks on Flanagan would contain far less vitriol.

Deep thoughts on an increasingly shallow subject.

Don't laugh, but I used to love GQ. I started reading it my senior year in college, when I bought a couple issues in the erroneous belief that I would need some sort of grownup wardrobe to enter the working world. The writing quickly hooked me, particularly everything by Andrew Corsello, whom I consider to be the best magazine writer working. I read those issues cover to cover, devouring even the semi-ridiculous lifestyle articles about touring Tuscany by motorcycle and how to select the finest calfskin driving gloves for your motorcycle tour of Tuscany. It's probably no exaggeration to say I would not have ended up in journalism were it not for my discovering GQ.

The April issue represents all the reasons I no longer consider myself a fan of the magazine. There's still some great writing -- the piece by John Bowe on the photographer and the mail-order bride is unlike anything I've read before (read about the backstory here) -- but it's packaged with some of the most idiotic, paint-by-numbers lifestyle journalism this side of...well, those other men's magazines. I'm talking about "The Field Guide to American Women," the gay-vague fashion story on how to "reveal your appeal," and the latest installment of Cecil Donahue's absolutely moronic workplace column. (This one starts with a sub-hed saying "You will have an office affair," only for Donahue to say, in his lede, "I've never even come close to having an office affair.")

If only I could stop reading GQ altogether, but I can't. They still publish the very occasional article by Corsello, and they've got a great new writer named John Jeremiah Sullivan, who's up for a National Magazine Award this year. And Jim Nelson writes the funniest editor's notes around (although this month's is nothing to brag about). But intelligence and vapidity are like oil and water -- they don't mix. And when you pick up GQ these days, guess which one jumps out at you.

Important advice for aspiring rock stars.

I understand that if you're looking to start a band, you're probably an artistic type who thinks it's "all about the music" and disdains the other trappings of stardom. You probably think it's poser-ish and very un-punk rock to sit around debating what to call yourselves. But please, try to remember, whatever name you're playing under at the time you make it big will be the name you're known by forever. Thus, a perfectly excellent new band like Deadboy and the Elephantmen will forever be dismissed as lame by those who have never heard their songs, and all because of their shitty, shitty moniker. Please, don't let this happen to you.

We now return to your regularly scheduled sermonizing.

Wow, so much has happened in the world since my last post. The Winter Olympics. The Oscars. Bird flu reaching Western Europe. The shooting of an old guy in the face by a sitting Vice President.

But I'm not here to talk about those things. Instead I'm going to talk about balconies and patios. As many of you know, I've long harbored a dream of being mayor of New York City. Not so much of being elected as of unilaterally declaring my ascension ot the job. All I lacked was a suitable platform.

But today I found it. I was on the roof of my building, 32 stories up, enjoying the nicest weather we've had in months, when I noticed something. Of the many luxurious rooftop patios and balconies visible from my shitty, tarpaper-floored perch, not one was occupied. Actually, exactly one was, by what appeared to be a cleaning woman washing windows, presumably so the occupants of that apartment could enjoy the skyline without, you know, actually going outside. Moreover, this is not the first time I've noticed this phenomenon. In the dozens of times I've been up to the roof, I've spotted maybe a handful of people actually enjoying their landscaped decks and terraces.

I understand why these spaces are typically empty in the summer -- after all, any family wealthy enough to own a penthouse apartment with a furnished patio on the Upper East Side probably spends its weekends in the Hamptons. But on a beautiful day in March?

Which brings me to my platform: eminent domain in the sky. Any outdoor space on a rooftop or balcony observed to go unused for, say, 60 days between April 1 and October 1 gets appropriated for public use. While there are some kinks to work out -- notably how to get onto someone's terrace without walking through their apartment -- the beauty of this plan is everyone wins. The non-rich get access to some of the poshest hangouts in the city. The rich who maybe weren't getting as much enjoyment as they should out of their patios suddently have a strong incentive to spend more time lounging in the sun. And those people who genuinely had no use for their ficus-strewn rooftop decks get relieved of a big chunk of property tax-generating real estate. Brilliant, no?