In the New Yorker...

[serious crayons]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Do you mean like the bad old days when a rape victim was practically put on trial instead of her rapist?

No. I think we've mostly passed that point, thank god.

What I mean is, it's obviously unfair for women to have to keep quiet or be ignored when they report harassment/assault to protect powerful predators. When there's clear evidence, including women speaking publicly, possibly multiple women or multiple events, I think that's enough for the public to agree that the men deserved their fates. I'm very glad the pendulum has swung against Weinstein et. al. (Franken's is a more complex case, tangled as it is in politics.)

However, when it's one anonymous person reporting something not described publicly and it destroys the entire career of a man who says they were just dating, I still think the accuser very possibly has a good case, but also feel like I need more information to really get behind it. "Always believe the accuser" is a nice guideline, and reliable in probably 99% of cases, but not quite all, human nature being what it is.

Of course, these are confidential personnel matters, not criminal charges, so the companies is 19 and can do what it wants and it's not up to the public to decide. But the public decides anyway! So at some point, people may start erring on the side of skepticism, and I'm not really welcoming that.

As it is, a man banned from a mall was almost elected a U.S. senator! 

I won't highlight or quote, but I agree that this situation is cause for concern. I wonder if Lizza has had or will have an opportunity to confront his accuser?

Well, he seems to know who his accuser was and as long as said accuser hasn't taken out a restraining order, I assume he can confront them in private if he has an opportunity. But unless the accuser files criminal charges, it won't happen in a courtroom.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Well, here's something that I really do consider unpardonable.

On page 41 of the Jan. 1 issue, there is a direct quotation where the opening quotation mark is at the end of one line, and the first word of the quotation begins the succeeding line.

If TNY doesn't have people who can fix something like that, it should.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-ferocious-sublime-dolores-oriordan-of-the-cranberries


Postscript
The Ferocious, Sublime
Dolores O’Riordan, of
the Cranberries

By By Amanda Petrusich   January 16, 2018


Dolores O’Riordan, who died on Monday, helped further the then-iffy-seeming idea that a woman could be both beautiful
and ferocious. Photograph by Tim Roney / Getty



The Irish singer Dolores O’Riordan, who fronted the alt-rock band the Cranberries since 1989, died on Monday, at the age of forty-six. O’Riordan was managing several health issues at the time of her death—she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2015 and had been suffering from back pain, which resulted in the cancellation of a Cranberries reunion tour last year. Her body was found in a hotel on Park Lane, in central London; her death was described as sudden and unexplained.

O’Riordan was born in Ballybricken, in County Limerick, in 1971. She was the youngest of seven children and just eighteen when she joined the Cranberries. Her folks were strict: as a teen-ager, she wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or buy her own clothes. In an interview with the Irish Times, she recalled how the guitarist Noel Hogan brought her a pair of Doc Martens to wear for the band’s first photo shoot. “They were too big for me, but I put them on anyway,” she said. “Suddenly I looked like an indie girl.”

Like many people, the first time I heard her sing was on “Linger,” an early single that ended up in fairly heavy rotation on MTV in 1993. The black-and-white video, directed by Melodie McDaniel, was based loosely on Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville,” a film that considers the potency of desire. It’s a hazy, sentimental song about realizing that you’re on the bummer end of a lopsided relationship. “You know I’m such a fool for you,” O’Riordan sings. She’s asking, in a way, for mercy—a final show of kindness: “You’ve got me wrapped around your finger / Do you have to let it linger?” I wasn’t old enough to understand the particular humiliation of being duped and strung along by someone you loved and trusted, but I nonetheless recognized the deep agony and confusion in her voice when she asked, “Why were you holding her hand?”

Still, it wasn’t until “Zombie,” the first single from the band’s second album, “No Need to Argue,” that the sublime recklessness of O’Riordan’s voice became fully evident. By then, the Cranberries were the most successful Irish rock band since U2. Most of the other rock singers I admired at the time (Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth; Kim and Kelley Deal, of the Breeders; Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill) sounded plainly and hopelessly cool—disaffected, vaguely antagonistic, and aloof. O’Riordan sounded like a maniac. “Zombie” was written as a memorial for two children—the twelve-year-old Jonathan Ball and the three-year-old Tim Parry—who were killed in an I.R.A. street bombing, in Warrington, England, in 1993 (the explosives were hidden in garbage cans). She goes feral on the chorus: “Zombie-ie-ie-ie-oh-oh-oh-oh!” It’s all terrifically guttural—ugly, wild, and paralyzing. For an American kid, her round Irish accent made the word seem even stranger, as if she were conjuring something otherworldly, only to vanquish it.



[Note by JG: the author of this New Yorker  article has mistakenly switched the ages of the two killed children (I'm a bit shocked--what has happened to the once storied New Yorker  fact checkers?); the children's names and ages are rather:

Three-year-old Johnathan Ball died at the scene. He had been in town with his babysitter, shopping for a Mother's Day card.[1] The second victim, 12-year-old Tim Parry, was gravely wounded. He died on 25 March 1993 when his life support machine was switched off, after tests had found only minimal brain activity.[6] 54 other people were injured, four of them seriously.[5] One of the survivors, 32-year-old Bronwen Vickers, the mother of two young daughters, had to have a leg amputated, and died just over a year later from cancer.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_bomb_attacks ]



The album went seven-times platinum in the U.S. The band played “Zombie” on “Saturday Night Live,” in 1995. What I find most remarkable about the performance is how soft and blank O’Riordan appears. It reminds me of how, in the movies, when people are tasked with channelling a spirit, their faces go fully slack—the body is given over to the mission. On “S.N.L.,” everything O’Riordan had was being channelled into that vocal. It wasn’t until at least a decade later that I realized she was evoking, in a roundabout way, the fervor of pre-war Irish fiddlers, like Michael Coleman or James Morrison, and the gravity of the great British ballad singers. Conventional prettiness didn’t hold much water there. The idea was only to express something true.

After releasing five albums, the Cranberries went on hiatus, in 2003. O’Riordan made her solo début, in 2007, with the album “Are You Listening?” and later became a judge on Ireland’s version of “The Voice.” The band reunited for a tour in 2009, and released two more albums: “Roses,” in 2012, and “Something Else,” in 2017. In 2014, she grew belligerent on an Aer Lingus flight from New York City to Shannon, Ireland; it was later characterized, in the press, as an “air rage” incident, in which O’Riordan allegedly stomped on a flight attendant’s foot and head-butted a guard. (She later apologized for the behavior.)

I suspect every young woman eventually finds a figure (or, more likely, a series of figures) who helps disabuse her of certain stifling notions about femininity, of all the outmoded binaries—the things a woman is supposed to choose between as she comes into her own. It feels almost quaint to point out now, in a cultural moment in which we’re rethinking the whole of gender dynamics, but, in the early nineties, O’Riordan helped further the then-iffy-seeming idea that a woman could be both beautiful and ferocious. She appeared accountable only to some internal voice—which meant we could be, too.


Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Tell you what, I've been kind of distracted, so I've been forgetting to mention: I'm actually caught up on my New Yorkers! 

And I like Roz Chast's cover of the January 29 issue. 

[serious crayons]

Tell you what, I've been kind of distracted, so I've been forgetting to mention: I'm actually caught up on my New Yorkers! 

I've never achieved that. 

And I like Roz Chast's cover of the January 29 issue. 

Same!

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[Front-Ranger]

 

[CellarDweller]

That cover is too funny!

[serious crayons]

She really captured it.

[CellarDweller]

OMG, I just looked at the cover again, I actually do have a dentist appointment on the 30th!