MOCKING THE VICTIMS

Slate points out that today's frontpager in The New York Times print edition, about the evidence collected in the British investigation of the alleged airline bombing plot in London, doesn't appear on The Times' Web site.* Neither (fortunately) does this spread, which ran in the print edition of the Sunday NYT Magazine:

ORPHANED, An Essay by Jason DeParleEILEEN FISHER, Alive in the World

On the left, above, is the first page of an essay by Jason DeParle, "Orphaned," about children victimized by Hurricane Katrina. On the right is the opposite page, the first of four luxurious pages advertising Eileen Fisher "Alive in the World" clothing that were sandwiched inside DeParle's piece.

"New Orleans was always a place of unsettling juxtapositions," DeParle writes. So, apparently, is the print edition of the magazine. You'd think the editors would have noticed this one, though, and done something to separate the editorial content from an ad that mocks DeParle's entire piece, let alone the photos of the children. Unless, of course, they did notice and could do nothing or, worse, didn't notice at all.

But how could they not? Viz., the double-truck photo by Brenda Ann Keneally, below (one of four, among many other photos that show the destitution):

V. Michaela's crowd [Photo, taken in July 2006, by Brenda Ann Keneally for The New York Times]V. Michaela's crowd [Photo, taken in July 2006, by Brenda Ann Keneally for The New York Times]

And how about the ad execs for Eileen Fisher? Wouldn't it have made sense for them to notice and object?

*Aug. 29 -- The story about evidence in the airline bomb-plot investigation, "Details Emerge in British Terror Case," was posted late yesterday after being withheld from the NYT Web site "on the advice of legal counsel," The Times reports today.

August 28, 2006 12:34 PM |

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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 Straight Up | published on August 28, 2006 12:34 PM.

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