I get the New Yorker for the...er...cartoons...

So I must get this off my chest. There is just too much pressure,
all those mesmerising covers of (unread) New Yorker magazines
staring at me from different parts of my room: whorls, flowers,
avant-garde stuff, impressionism, goofyism...It has been relentless,
 this weekly assault as it were; a fresh, brightly and intriguingly
packaged New Yorker delivered without fail every week almost for
the past one year now.

Before I can get through the seemingly endless listings in Goings About
Town crammed with  minutely-lettered, mind-boggling list of things to do
or 'catch,' everything from jazz performances, art exhibitions, poetry
readings, Broadway shows, ballets, operas..., before I can get over the
regret of missing so much culture in my life and remaining
oh-not-so-happening, it is time for the next week, and time for the next
New Yorker with its screaming, overflowing, exuberant litany of song and dance.

Well, maybe its not all that bad, I'll have to admit, if coaxed.
While I hardly can claim to have gotten myself much culture out of it,
I have begun to recognize some names. So on occassion I have been
entertained and even edified by some slick writing by Adam Gopnik,
(especially his pungent piece on the New York pedicab:"The pedicab
is, no getting around it, a rickshaw with pedals...It offers, in
a pointedly symbolic, Bertolt Brecht-meets-Barbara Ehrenreich package,
both the eternal facts of capitalism—the capitalist
proceeds from home to office by dint of someone else’s sweat—and the
essential ironies of the post-industrial era: the more emancipated we
seem to become from physical labor, the more physical labor is left for
someone else to do.") and Anthony Lane who instills each movie review
with wit and charm. I know I can also depend on John Updike for a
short story every now and then.

But of course it is the cartoons that cause my spirits to sing and
dance, after the weekly sigh on leafing through the Goings About Town
page and realizing almost forthwith I will never be able to get through
this week's issue as well.

They cover a whole host of topics, from the seemingly profound to
the downright trivial, from the mundane to the bizzare, from local to
international, from topical to brazenly anachronistic.

And they feature a whole host of characters: office-goers, the homeless,
society ladies, executives, husbands and wives, sons and daughters--
scowling, frowning, bickering, jousting, retorting, questioning,
commenting--but in every case, with some expression of casualness,
offhandedness, brutal frankness, exaggerated importance or
sometimes even innocence.

And in this they manage to make one smile. Yes, notice, I say smile.
There is an occassional guffaw too, the hearty laugh of the thigh-slapping,
foot-thumping variety, but very often it is a delicious and delighted smile
and a shaking at the head at the preposterousness of the situation.
There is farce, high-drama, bravado, lofty declarations:
all fine ingredients of the absurd and a nonchalant gravity
("Have you considered a boob-job?" bearded yogi on mountain ledge asks
a concerned looking female backpacker-seeker).

I have even come to recognize a few cartoonists: there is BEK,
whose cartoons often feature men in long, baggy overcoats,
stubby legs and long faces and they say things like
“I’m really behind on all my living.”. Then there is Victoria Roberts
whose cartoons have a couple constantly trading some mild, subtle jibes:
[“If you’re bored with yourself, imagine how I feel.”].
The husband and wife have distinctive round glasses and
large round noses, and the husband positively looking like
 Rastapopulos from the Tintin comics.

Thus, these cartoon constitute pretty much my claim to
reading the New Yorker. Kind of like going through Playboy
for just the pictures...imagine that...!