August 28, 2012
Supporters at the Unity Rally at the River Church of Tampa Bay, August 26, 2012.
Supporters at Paul Fest, a three-day festival honoring Ron Paul that took place at the the Florida State Fairgrounds, August 25, 2012. Ron Paul did not appear.
Lisa Ann, star of the porn-film series “Nailin’ Paylin,” makes a media apperance in character as Sarah Palin at Thee Dollhouse, a strip bar in Tampa, on August 25, 2012. Lisa Ann performed at the bar in costume for three nights prior to the R.N.C. 
Paul Fest.
The Unity Rally.
The Unity Rally.
Michele Bachmann speaks at the Unity Rally.
Outside the Unity Rally.
Herman Cain speaks at the Unity Rally.
Paul Fest.
The Unity Rally.
Paul Fest.
Supporters at the Ron Paul Rally at the Sun Dome in Tampa, August 26, 2012.
Ron Paul addresses the crowd at the end of the five-hour event. Thousands gathered at the University of South Florida Sun Dome for the Ron Paul “We Are The Future” Rally, on August 26, 2012. 
The Ron Paul Rally at the Sun Dome. 
Supporters outside Paul Fest.
The photographer Lauren Lancaster landed at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Saturday, and has been documenting the scene there all week, from Tea Party revellers in tricorn hats and knickers to a Sarah Palin lookalike porn star. This is Lancaster’s third trip following the G.O.P.; she has previously tracked Ron Paulites through Nevada and the Republican Primaries from Florida to Boston. Here’s a slide show from her first few days at the convention.
August 28, 2012
I’m a fan of “Midnight in Paris,” which is implicitly personal in its magical elements; the disappearances of the protagonist from the present into the past turn it into a sort of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It is also conspicuously personal in its practical setup: the dream of abandoning a life in mass media for the life of a writer, and trading the ambitious face of New York for the gracious one of Paris. It turns out—thanks to a new interview with Woody Allen by Marco Schmidt in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—that there’s an even stronger link to the filmmaker’s life than I suspected. Asked whether he experiences regrets akin to those of Alec Baldwin’s character in “To Rome with Love,” Allen responded,
Interestingly, I don’t regret anything that I’ve done, but only certain things that I haven’t done. In 1965, when I was in Paris for the shoot of “What’s New, Pussycat?,” and fell into undying love with that city, the possibility presented itself for me to stay there—but I returned home to America in a panic. I could kick myself for not making use of that opportunity.
There’s plenty of other good stuff in the interview, notably, about his athletic and conventionally middle-class interests and how his childhood passion for doing magic has stayed with him:
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August 28, 2012
Last week, Ed Kashi took The New Yorker’s Instagram feed with him to Aspen, where he spent the week at a photography workshop at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. “Usually when I teach I don’t get the opportunity to create new work, so it was especially exciting to be looking for images and constantly creating, reviewing, and then being able to post the work in real time,” Kashi told me. “Photography has dominated my life for more than thirty-five years, so the ability to make images anywhere without the cumbersome equipment that I normally work with is liberating.”
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August 28, 2012
In the nineteen-seventies, when I was a teen-ager and had fantasies of growing up to be a writer, I didn’t dream of being a novelist or a poet. I wanted to be a critic. I thought criticism was exciting, and I found critics admirable. This was because I learned from them. Every week a copy of The New Yorker would arrive at our house on Long Island, wrapped in a brown wrapper upon which the (I thought) disingenuously modest label NEWSPAPER was printed, and I would hijack the issue before my dad came home from work in order to continue an education that was, then, more important to me than the one I was getting in school.
I learned. I learned about music, particularly opera, from the fantastically detailed reviews by Andrew Porter, the music critic—mini-essays so encyclopedic in their grasp of this or that composer’s oeuvre, so detailed in their descriptions of the libretto and score of the work in question, from Mozart to (a great favorite of his, I distinctly recall) Michael Tippett, that the review could be half over before he got around to talking about the performance under review. But this was the point: by the time he described what he’d seen on stage, you—the reader—had the background necessary to appreciate (or deprecate) the performance as he had described it. I learned about other things. Thanks to Helen Vendler, who in those days regularly contributed long and searching essays about contemporary poets and their work, I began to think about poetry, its aims and methods; and perceived, too, that good poetry ought to be able to withstand the kind of rigor that she brought to her discussion of it. (In those high-school days, we thought that poetry was pretty much anything about “feelings.”)
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August 28, 2012
Consensus, the backbone of politics, is the bane of art, which is the domain of the extreme and the exceptional, of the passionate and the personal, of danger made beautiful and of the impossible realized. So it’s utterly normal that the Sight & Sound tally of voters (critics and filmmakers) that yielded a list of the ten (and fifty, and two hundred and fifty) best films of all time should have come into the world as an object of controversy and discontent. I’ve written about it as an instant spur to counter-canons (and posted about my own ballot, too), calling attention to its omissions and to my own—including of younger directors, of comedy, of obsessive pleasures, and of titanic artists fallen out of fashion.
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August 28, 2012
Sunday
Derek and Simon called to ask if I wanted to meet them at Chick-fil-A tomorrow for a big protest march. I’m in!
Monday
Got to Chick-fil-A early to help make funny signs. Saw Derek (Simon had to work), Danny, Maureen, and two or three others I don’t know. Paint “Hold the Intolerance,” “Bite My Pickle,” “Go Pluck Yourself, Chick-fil-A!,” and “God Hates Fats” signs (two). Maureen had an idea about white meat and racism but we couldn’t fit it on a single sign. She left in a huff when we wouldn’t put her message on four signs and then hold them up side-by-side. Not practical, Maureen!
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August 28, 2012
The creators of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series are launching a new line of actual soups.
Junot Díaz on relationships, writing fiction, and his early adventures as a Jersey kid going clubbing in New York City.
“He wanted to think and write in a sphere apart from sickness.” Christopher Hitchens’s widow, Carol Blue, on her late husband’s life and work.
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August 27, 2012
This week and next, Ben Lowy is at the wheel of The New Yorker’s Instagram feed, posting updates from both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Follow @newyorkermag for more updates from Tampa and Charlotte.
August 27, 2012
The closest I got to pornography as a preteen was a regular trip to the Waldo branch of the Kansas City Public Library. My parents loathed television, strictly followed the M.P.A.A. rating system (no PG-13 movies until you turn thirteen), and reserved a special revulsion for video games. I brought home Matt Christopher and Brian Jacques and R. L. Stine and read them with zeal—especially during the library’s summer reading program, when every ten books earned you a free personal pie at Pizza Hut—but each visit also involved a side trip for an item I never checked out. Books in hand, I would stroll within view of the library’s magazine rack to see if the latest issue of Nintendo Power had arrived. I didn’t have to get too close: I had memorized the previous Nintendo Power cover, so I knew when a new one had arrived. If it had, I grabbed the copy, took it to a corner cubicle, and flipped through it like I’d just discovered Hustler.
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August 27, 2012
As soon as Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, Barry Blitt was looking at media portrayals of the new ticket and noticing how quickly images of the candidates are shaped. “For all the forced bonhomie you see in campaign-stop photos of these two, they look about as comfortable to me as an anxious father and his new, soon-to-be son-in-law,” Blitt says. While sketching, he went through many different ideas—a few of which ended up on this week’s cover, “Bromance.”
See below for Barry’s comments on some of his alternative vignettes that weren’t featured on our cover.
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