Readers write

AP photo via NPR.

Very pleased to report the appearance of another New Yorker piece by Jordan Orlando, this one a tribute to the late William Goldman and the making of maybe his greatest screenplay, All the President's Men:

William Goldman, who died a week ago, had already written three Robert Redford movies when the actor contacted him in early winter of 1974 and asked him to write a fourth: an adaptation of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, a firsthand account of the two young Washington Post reporters’ Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of the Watergate scandal. Redford was the one doing the asking because he was producing the movie under the aegis of his company, Wildwood Enterprises—Redford was among the first wave of post-studio-system, post-auteur-movement movie stars who, in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, began taking direct control of their careers, forming companies that would choose projects; select co-stars, directors, and writers; and participate in the casting, writing, and promotion of their movies. But Redford’s involvement in “All the President’s Men” was unusually complex and deep, predating not just Goldman’s involvement but also the conception of the book itself. By most accounts, Redford is a big reason why the book—which launched Bob Woodward’s iconic career as the first modern “star” reporter and permanently changed the public’s understanding of journalism—assumed its innovative form, focussing on the reporters and the Post rather than Nixon and the White House. But it was Goldman, in the crowning achievement of his long, successful career as a novelist and screenwriter, who used his screenplay to forge the modern myth of the reporter as hero.

Glad to see that double-s "focussing" in the first graf just in case people don't believe it's really the New Yorker. This is starting to look like a career. Congratulations, Jordan!

Congrats Jordan

Quick note: An auspicious historical anniversary this month—not the centenary of the 1918 Armistice—is being celebrated in the New Yorker magazine with a lovely appreciation by our friend Jordan Orlando, making his début appearance in that august publication, beginning:

To mark this month’s fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles’ ninth album, “The Beatles”—universally known as the White Album—several new expanded and enhanced editions are being released this week. These new versions were created under the supervision of Giles Martin, the son of the album’s original producer, George Martin. As was done last year with “Sgt. Pepper,” the new editions contain, along with a wealth of archival recordings and other material, a brand-new, digitally remixed presentation—a laborious retrieval and reassembly of the contents of the original multitrack master tapes, with a comprehensive scope far beyond that of all previous remasters and releases. The result reveals what might be called the greatest record ever made, not only in terms of its innovation and its strange, impenetrable, endlessly suggestive beauty but also because of its place at the apex of the Beatles’ career and its role as an aesthetic keystone for nearly all the rock-and-roll recordings that have followed.

Upon returning to England from Rishikesh, India, in April, 1968, John Lennon and George Harrison stripped and sanded the psychedelic paintwork off of their Gibson J-160E Casino guitars; Donovan, one of the many musicians who had accompanied them to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram for an advanced transcendental-meditation course, had told them that this would improve the sound. “If you take the paint and varnish off and get the bare wood,” Harrison explained later, “it seems to sort of breathe.” This stripping away of psychedelic symbolism was part of a larger campaign that the band undertook to remove the layers of Beatles mythology, habit, and convention that had accumulated since their beginnings, as Liverpool teen-agers—before Germany and America, before Astrid Kirchherr’s arty portraits had fetishized their mop-top haircuts, before Ed Sullivan and “A Hard Day’s Night,” and Shea Stadium, and the rest of it. Psychedelia, and the Beatles’ influential participation in it, had peaked with the release of their landmark 1967 album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the surrealist tracks on which had beguiled the world and, many said, inspired the Summer of Love. The American political theorist Langdon Winner observed, “The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album was released. . . . At the time I happened to be driving across the country on Interstate 80; in each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.”

It's just a terrific piece, full of New Yorkerish thingy-ness but not a drop of twee. That Donovan anecdote at the top of the second paragraph filled me with a strange nostalgic joy so I was instantly gripped. Everybody needs to read it.

Literary Corner: Bannon

Image by David Parkin from The Economist, November 2016, via Southfront.

Since the Twitter Mob, in the form of Kevin Kruse, Chelsea Clinton, and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz, not to mention Jimmy Fallon, has driven the magazine's timid editor David Remnick into the shadows and convinced him to rescind his invitation to that Gray-Green Eminence Stephen Bannon to share the stage at the Ethical Culture Society's digs on West 64th St., I thought I should give readers an opportunity to see what they're missing—what Bannon's performance under courteous but firm questioning is like.

Below the fold, from a conference at the Vatican of the Human Dignity Institute, 27 June 2014, on the subject of "Poverty and the Common Good", from Bannon's contribution via Skype ("Should Christians Impose Limits on Wealth Creation?"), apparently representing the Tea Party movement, is his complete response to a question from Benjamin Harnwell, the Institute's founder, asking him to explain the relationship between his European allies, Ukip and the French Front National, with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

I think he's saying that Farage and Le Pen needed (in the summer of 2014) to "look at" Putin's philosophical "traditionalism", notwithstanding Putin's being an "imperialist" and the "state capitalist of kleptocracy" and his views being in some sense the precursors of Italian fascism, because he's "very, very, very intelligent", and people like the "nationalism" part, and something to do with the so-called Islamic State, and "first things first".

Or, shorter still, we should adopt Putin's "Eurasianist" philosophy as part of our public relations strategy for combating ISIS first, and worry about whether it turned us into fascist kleptocrats afterwards.

This could have some relevance to us today, come to think of it. Have a look:

Annals of Culture Change: Kaepernick to Bannon

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

I think the Kaepernick news, if true, that the Nike company is using the otherwise unemployed quarterback and effective protester against police brutality against the black community as an ad model, is very cool.

It looks like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick is starring in a new ad campaign for Nike. He shared an image on his Twitter Monday of a close-up of his face with the words: "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything." Nike's Twitter account later retweeted his post. Nike has represented Kaepernick since 2011, but hasn't featured him in ads for two years...

Not, I mean, that it's going to convince me that Nike is the corporation that will save the world from not having nice corporations, though for all I know the long struggle to get them to provide decent working conditions for the people in developing countries who make their products may well have paid off to some extent—Wikipedia's bibliography on the subject pretty much comes to an end in 2011, but includes an article from 2018 reporting (on the basis of research published in 2009) that