For a week one recap of the Beijing Olympics, check out Anthony Lane’s piece in The New Yorker, The Only Games in Town. It’s snarky in a “David Sedaris does P.J. O’Rourke” kind of way:
On the principle that every Western visitor is a sucker, to be wooed into believing that the grass is greener inside the fence, they made sure that security measures were not hammered home like rivets but tricked out with homely detail. To leave your hotel in the morning and have your bag and your person searched before you board a bus to the Olympic Green, as if it were a plane, is no hardship; indeed, from a professional point of view, to be felt up and patted down with such eager regularity has given me the first, helpful hint as to what life was like for Jean Harlow.
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On every seat was a sack of goodies, and we were duly taught to rattle our drums, wave our Chinese flags, shake our funky light sticks, and finally, at the avian highlight of the ceremony, “imitate the movement of the doves with your hands.” Aside from the risk of developing repetitive wing injury, this was all too peaceful for me, and I felt a sudden, heretical yearning for the Paris Olympics of 1900, when the shooting competition used live pigeons.
I even got a chuckle out of some of the recycled cliches:
The obvious precedent for Beijing was the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Both were showcases for a muscle-flexing nation, although Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights.
Anyway, fun read. I recommend it.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Elyse // Aug 17, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Ha! Brilliant read… am now saddened by the memory that I had to cancel my subscription to the New Yorker two years ago (when the international shipping charges were raised *even higher*).
2 Adam // Aug 17, 2008 at 8:27 pm
I dunno. I love the New Yorker’s features, but in recent years the Talk of the Town has become ever more rigidly devoted to the “One Forced Bon Mot Per 150 Words” rule. Might be some people’s cup of tea, but not mine, and I can only thank my lucky stars that I don’t have to spend sixteen days in the company of Anthony Lane, while he tries to amuse those sitting around him with lead bricks like:
“In less than ten hours, tiny Chinese weight lifters would start picking up lumps of metal as heavy as the man from Guam and holding them over their heads.”
Don’t they use red pens at the New Yorker, anymore?
3 Lane-Fan // Aug 17, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Huh. Adam wouldn’t be the same guy filing snarky dispatches for the Atlantic, would he? Love it when the journalists get in the dirt with each other.
4 Dan // Aug 17, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Just so the record is clear: I used the word snarky in an August 9 post.
5 Jeremiah // Aug 18, 2008 at 7:30 am
Dan,
I would never think to accuse you of “Jumping the Snark.”
6 Adam // Aug 18, 2008 at 10:31 am
Geez, Lane-Fan, I thought my dispatches were 95% snark free.
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