MY FAVOURITE MAGAZINE - THE NEW YORKER

Brilliant cover on the issue of Feb.12 by David Heatley called "Subway Connections". You may not be able to see the detail but it shows a subway car full of poeple and what they are all thinking about those around them. Brillant and very funny.

The covers of the New Yorker and all the wonderful cartoons alone make the magazine worth buying and then of course there are the stories, reviews and new fiction.

Here for your pleasure is an excerpt from this issue.

Critic's Notebook - Anton Reborn

Last week in London, the usually sedate English press was doing cartwheels over Ian Rickson's revival of "The Seagull" at the Royal Court, which is generally considered the finest British production of Chekhov in recent memory. Of its many pleasures- a pitch-perfect cast, a minimal
samovar-free set, elegant staging - the most piquant is the clarity and
psychological cunning of Christopher Hampton's adaptation.
Hampton who made his debut at the Royal Court in the sixties, brings
Checkhov's tragicomic vision of human self-destructiveness into bold relief. His adaptation excavates the unwitting deadliness in all the characters, revealing underneath their palaver a battlefield of unconscious aggression.
The iconic seagull that is shot on a whim by Konstantin and laid
at the feet of his beloved Nina, a would-be actress, subsequently becomes, in her mind, a symbol of her failed life.
Here, however, Hampton's limpid adaptation allows us to see that the
metaphor is more far-reaching than the caprice of destiny

John Lahr.

Here is another:

POSTSCRIPT - WHITNEY BALLIET

"Whitney Balliet, who died last week at the age of eighty, was above all a poet, who pursued poetry by other means. He wrote for this magazine for almost fifty years, mostly about jazz, and what he wrote was so good that Philip Larkin, not an easy man to please about either jazz or poetry, called him a "master of language," while, years later, the young Nicholson Baker still referred to him, in a wondering aside, as a "tireless prodigy." Whitney was about as pure a stylist as anyone who has written American English, yet his sentences were almost always about someone else's art, that's what gave his writing its modestyand its tensile strength."

The above is a brief excerpt from a much longer, superbly written tribute by Adam Gopnik whom some will remember as the author of the enormously entertaining "Paris to the Moon" and other books.

As a result of reading Gopnik on Whitney Balliet I am going to go to my Complete New Yorker CD rom set and look at some of Balliet's articles from the magazine over the past 50 years.

CATE BLANCHETT

Another piece that especially interested me was an eight page story on Cate Blanchett and her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, and their appointment as co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company, Australia's most prestigious theatre.

"Andrew and I are galvanised by a challenge," Blanchett said. "Frankly, this is the most exciting thing that has happened to us, apart from marriage and having children."

They both come from Melbourne originally so it looks like Australia , and Sydney in particular will be getting back two of its highly talented artistic exports. Lucky Australia.

And lucky me for having a subscription to The New Yorker. Thanks Mark.