Emily Gordon at Emdashes presents the latest racy installment from that bodice-ripping serial Ask the New Yorker Librarians, with entries on cartoonist Robert Day, defunct NY'er departments (such as Broadway Rackets, Yachts and Yachtsmen, and R.E.M. Whitaker's football column), and the evolution of the magazine's TOC from the terse index of yore to the more standard rundown of contributers/subjects today. I prefer the more modest TOCs of the past but I understand that readers today need to know what's in the magazine, what the peg is, and what the purpose of the article is, so that he/she is fully, comfortably briefed because god forbid anybody should discover anything on their own these days. Everybody's expectations have to be carefully massaged. (I'm not singling out the NY'er here; it's a universal trend.) I hope Emily and Emdashes someday satisfy my curiosity about the NY'er's Race Track correspondent who wrote under the name "Audax Minor." He was one of the magazine's eternals, writing from 1926 to 1978--quite a run for a columnist whose prose left no footprints in the snow. I say that almost admiringly. As I recall, there was a coterie of staffers at the NY'er back in the Veronica Geng-George Trow days who were obsessed with the Race Track column, convinced there were hidden, cryptic messages and plaintive personal notes buried beneath the tidy descriptions of which horsies came into clover at Aqueduct. "Audax Minor," like Herbert Warren Wind, was one of those NY'er writers that you couldn't quite believe inhabited corporeal form but was a benign, word-dispensing cloud.
BBC America has been a major disappointment, a catch-all bin of comedy reruns and home-improvement kitsch, but it does spring the odd surprise, and few have been odder or more inviting than Life on Mars, which reduces Starsky & Hutch to raw nicotine and Dennis Potterish prismatic flashbacks, while never losing its sense of fun. If you haven't caught the series, let Tom Watson be your trail scout.
Steve Gilliard isn't the only one who'll never vote for Mark Green again. You'll never catch me pulling Green's lever again, no innuendo intended. His campaign for New York state attorney general has been so preening and obnoxious that he has achieved the near impossible feat of making Andrew Cuomo look humble and Lincolnesque by comparison. Every politician loves the sound of his own voice but Green takes the cookie. You get the feeling he wakes himself up at night delivering major addresses in the bedroom. "And when I become Attorney General, that Mickey Mouse night light will shine not just for me, but for all the people of New York..." The reason Green seems to be ignoring every prominent Democrat's advice to tone down the attacks on Cuomo is not because he thinks it's a winning strategy (though maybe he does) but because he believes he's smarter than everybody else, and it's the duty of his rivals and doubters to catch up with his staunch intelligence. Only someone too smart for his own good could have made the dumb, presumptuous mistakes Green made in his run for mayor, mistakes that to this day he doesn't seem to recognize were mistakes, so tightly is the yarn wrapped around his ego.
