Why I Never Don’t Love the New Yorker

When I was twelveish, a friend of my mom’s brought us a thick stack of back issues of the New Yorker.  This was kind of a weird thing to happen in small-town Kentucky.  But it happened.  And, as a twelve-year-old, I mostly just read the cartoons and then flipped to the next issue.

Today, as a working adult with a self-paid subscription to the New Yorker, I still read mostly the cartoons.  But I also read Shouts & Murmurs, Talk of the Town, the movie reviews, and many of the interviews and feature articles, and while I feel I’ve outgrown many magazines that I enjoyed in my high school and college years, the New Yorker never gets stale.  It’s.  Just.  Always.  Good.

Take, for instance: this week’s Talk of the Town featured a piece on Michael Shannon, the actor from Lexington, KY who is currently doing some work on Broadway and who you may have seen in a few Hollywood flicks.  The article was split, kind of, in two parts: Take One, in which Shannon takes the reporter down to the local grocery store in Red Hook and talks about his life lately; and Take Two, in which they revisit the grocery after Hurricane Sandy has ravaged the place.  There’s destruction all around, naturally.  But you see it through the eyes of a semi-famous actor, a guy who knows the grocery’s security guard by name, a guy who seems to take a sort of blue-collar approach to the lofty work of film and stage.

Here’s the pure genius of the piece: it’s not about the hurricane, and yet it so obviously is.  By now you can’t talk about the heartbreak and loss and tragedy of Sandy, because you’ll lose your impatient, easily distracted audience of People Who Were Not Affected and Therefore Care Very Little About the Hurricane.  But what you can do is offer a glimpse into an actor’s life—an idea that came to you, the reporter, maybe in September, before anyone knew anything—and use it to demonstrate what life is like, now, really, in places like Red Hook.  Back in September, you thought, hey, this Michael Shannon is interesting, he’s got some stuff going on, let’s do a bit on him.  Then the storm hit.  And you thought, there’s no way I can do the piece I was going to do.  So you talk to your editor.  You call Shannon back.  You say, I’ve got this idea.  And he goes for it.  And now you have a tiny little masterpiece, that maybe won’t seem like a masterpiece to everyone, but you know it’s good and you’re going to be secretly smug about it forever.

That’s what I thought, anyway.

Or, you could say that the New Yorker is wonderful simply because of sentences like this one, buried in an article about the TED conference:

MAN TOWN: And Other Holiday Suggestions

I think most of us would agree that in general, gift-buying is easier when you’re shopping for a woman than for a man, yes?  Even for the woman you’re clueless about, gift-wise, you can generally do well with a pair of earrings or a cute little trinket.  But for dudes?  It’s hard to come up with a one-size-fits-nearly-all gift for dudes.  There aren’t even enough men who wear ties regularly to make that a reliable fallback.

Apparently, Yankee Candle Company noticed that too, and has come out with a new line of candles with man-friendly scents, including the following:

“2x4”: smells like sawdust.

“First Down”: smells like a leather couch.

“Riding Mower”: smells like grass.  The kind on your front lawn, obvs.

And, my personal favorite, “Man Town,” which smells like men’s deodorant and is good for a few hours of saying “MAN TOWN!” in your best manly voice and making your friends laugh.  Seriously, Man Town?  What happens in Man Town?  I bet all the dudes go around mowing their lawns, and then they play football on their freshly mown lawns, and then they go hit things in their woodsheds and then they go sit in their dens and smell the sweet smell of a deodorant candle.  Because that’s what men do.

Bring it, world.  I WILL MOW YOU.

Anyhow, I’m glad that the candle industry is accepting the fact that dudes like to smell things, too, but their attempts to market accordingly are limited thus far.  I have a few suggestions:

“Joystick”: smells like rubber, plastic, and thumbprints.

“Wrench”: smells like a hardware store.

“Taxidermy”: smells like pure animal.

“Blazer”: smells like elbow patches and success.

“Snowshoe”: smells like winter with a hint of wolf pee.

“Moustache”: smells like whatever you had for breakfast.
"Middle Management": smells like starch and disappointment.

“Sausage”: speaks for itself.

You’re welcome.  Give me a call, Yankee Candle Co., I could do this all day.