Mark Singer

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“Wow, This Guy Is A Performance Artist”

June 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

UNILAD-donald-trump-bible6-750x455 Mark Singer, the great New Yorker portraitist, wrote one of my all-time favorite profiles, a 1993 study of Ricky Jay, who performs magic in the same sense that Benjamin Franklin flew kites. It’s the invisible energy being conducted that makes all the difference. Somehow Singer escorted everything important into the light.

Another excellent piece he penned that decade was his 1997 examination of Donald Trump who was then a needy pseudo-plutocrat before transitioning into a Birther, and, finally, during this Baba Booey of an election season, Bull Connor as a condo salesman, a mocker of American POWs and the disabled. Even 20 years ago, the writer recognized his subject as a performance artist constantly on a campaign, though not yet a political one.

In a Vice Q&A, Harry Cheadle questions Singer about his close encounters with the hideous hotelier back in the day. The opening:

Question:

What were your initial impressions of Donald Trump when you met him in 1996?

Mark Singer:

After I first met him face-to-face, I came back to the office and said, “Wow, this guy is a performance artist. This is a persona I have to deal with, not a regular-type person with whom there is the usual give and take between a writer and a subject.” There was an artifice that was present throughout that was obvious to me from the get-go. This is a person who really choses to be a persona rather than to live the sort of unmediated life you and I might prefer.

Question:

He never dropped that persona of all the hours you’ve spent with him?

Mark Singer:

Trump’s never not in character. He’s got a problem now because that persona that he has been cultivating is obviously not useful to him if he wants to win the election. (This presupposes that he actually does want to win the election.)

Question:

Is that persona you saw basically the same one everyone sees on TV now?

Mark Singer:

This is a different manifestation of the same person. The main thing that Trump did that surprised me, between 1997 and now, was birtherism. I couldn’t see how that served his interest, even if you assume that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I just couldn’t get over that he was engaged in this.

I didn’t know that Trump was a racist. I’m not an idiot, but I didn’t really see it before 2011 [when he accused Barack Obama of faking his birth certificate]—and then it was obvious to me that it is indeed part of what motivates him. I assume that there had to be some other motive and to this day I can’t tell you what it is, other than some function of this person’s incredible insecurity.•

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“Let’s See What He’s Got Up His Sleeve For Us This Time”

December 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

People in show business are labeled “genius” if they’re able to complete a sudoku slightly faster than Stephen Baldwin. But Ricky Jay is the real deal, a deeply brilliant person who can accomplish amazing things with his brain despite the deterioration of some basic neurological functions. A clip of the magus, actor and scholar appearing with Merv Griffin in 1983, and then an excerpt from Mark Singer’s great 1993 New Yorker profile, “Secrets of Magus.”

“Jay has an anomalous memory, extraordinarily retentive but riddled with hard-to-account-for gaps. ‘I’m becoming quite worried about my memory,’ he said not long ago. ‘New information doesn’t stay. I wonder if it’s the NutraSweet.’ As a child, he read avidly and could summon the title and the author of every book that had passed through his hands. Now he gets lost driving in his own neighborhood, where he has lived for several years—he has no idea how many. He once had a summer job tending bar and doing magic at a place called the Royal Palm, in Ithaca, New York. On a bet, he accepted a mnemonic challenge from a group of friendly patrons. A numbered list of a hundred arbitrary objects was drawn up: No. 3 was ‘paintbrush,’ No. 18 was ‘plush ottoman,’ No. 25 was ‘roaring lion,’ and so on. ‘Ricky! Sixty-five!’ someone would demand, and he had ten seconds to respond correctly or lose a buck. He always won, and, to this day, still would. He is capable of leaving the house wearing his suit jacket but forgetting his pants. He can recite verbatim the rapid-fire spiel he delivered a quarter of a century ago, when he was briefly employed as a carnival barker: ‘See the magician; the fire ‘manipulator’; the girl with the yellow e-e-elastic tissue. See Adam and Eve, boy and girl, brother and sister, all in one, one of the world’s three living ‘morphrodites.’ And the e-e-electrode lady . . .’ He can quote verse after verse of nineteenth-century Cockney rhyming slang. He says he cannot remember what age he was when his family moved from Brooklyn to the New Jersey suburbs. He cannot recall the year he entered college or the year he left. ‘If you ask me for specific dates, we’re in trouble,’ he says.”

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Some Movies Errol Morris Never Got To Make

March 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

"'Weirdo,' about the breeding of a giant chicken." (Image by Daniel Postellon.)

From Mark Singer’s 1989 New Yorker profile of the documentarian:

“Among the nonfiction movies that Errol Morris has at one time or another been eager to make but has temporarily abandoned for lack of investor enthusiasm are Ablaze! (or Fire from Heaven), an examination of the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion; Whatever Happened to Einstein’s Brain? (portions of the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex are thought to be in the possession of a doctor in North Carolina, other parts are floating around here and there); Road, the story of one man’s attempt to build across northern Minnesota an interstate highway that no one else wanted; Insanity Inside Out, based on the book of the same tide, by Kenneth Donaldson, a man who, in his forties, was wrongly committed by his parents to a mental hospital and got stuck there for fifteen years; Weirdo, about the breeding of a giant chicken; The Wizard of Wendover, about Robert K. Golka and his laser-induced fireball experiments in Utah; and a perusal of Yap, a South Pacific island where stone money is the traditional currency.” (Thanks Longform.)

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“He Is Capable Of Leaving The House Wearing His Suit Jacket But Forgetting His Pants”

February 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Secrets of Magus,” Mark Singer’s incredibly fun 1993 New Yorker profile of sleight-of-hand genius Ricky Jay:

“Jay has an anomalous memory, extraordinarily retentive but riddled with hard-to-account-for gaps. ‘I’m becoming quite worried about my memory,’ he said not long ago. ‘New information doesn’t stay. I wonder if it’s the NutraSweet.’ As a child, he read avidly and could summon the title and the author of every book that had passed through his hands. Now he gets lost driving in his own neighborhood, where he has lived for several years—he has no idea how many. He once had a summer job tending bar and doing magic at a place called the Royal Palm, in Ithaca, New York. On a bet, he accepted a mnemonic challenge from a group of friendly patrons. A numbered list of a hundred arbitrary objects was drawn up: No. 3 was ‘paintbrush,’ No. 18 was ‘plush ottoman,’ No. 25 was ‘roaring lion,’ and so on. ‘Ricky! Sixty-five!’ someone would demand, and he had ten seconds to respond correctly or lose a buck. He always won, and, to this day, still would. He is capable of leaving the house wearing his suit jacket but forgetting his pants. He can recite verbatim the rapid-fire spiel he delivered a quarter of a century ago, when he was briefly employed as a carnival barker: ‘See the magician; the fire ‘manipulator’; the girl with the yellow e-e-elastic tissue. See Adam and Eve, boy and girl, brother and sister, all in one, one of the world’s three living ‘morphrodites.’ And the e-e-electrode lady . . .’ He can quote verse after verse of nineteenth-century Cockney rhyming slang. He says he cannot remember what age he was when his family moved from Brooklyn to the New Jersey suburbs. He cannot recall the year he entered college or the year he left. ‘If you ask me for specific dates, we’re in trouble,’ he says.”

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