REAL LANGUAGE

"Curse of Youth," an interesting take on those newspaper tabs for tots, provides a shorthand clue to success: "If you want your newspaper to appeal to young people, you must be willing to print the word 'fuck.'" Vulgar but true, and here's the reason:

Young people want the world as they see it: without filters. It's why they love "The Daily Show." Because it's smart, informed, crude and passionate. Like young people. Young people will argue vehemently with you for hours about party politics, about religion, about love and war and peace and that weird new $20 bill. They will curse when they argue, using words like "fuck." Then, once they are done, they will go out to a bar and get fucking blasted-ass drunk and go home with another young person and fuck like bunnies until they pass out. That's their world, and if you wanna live in it, you'd better print it.

The trouble is, by that reasoning The New Yorker should be more popular with young readers than Us Weekly or People -- and it ain't. Is it possible that young people are not as passionate and smart as claimed? That they're just vulgar? Terrible but true.

November 21, 2003 11:15 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on November 21, 2003 11:15 AM.

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