October 1, 2012 Issue

In this week’s issue, three Talk story masters – Nick Paumgarten, Ian Frazier, and Alec Wilkinson - strut their stuff. Paumgarten’s intriguing “Hello, Bobby” is about record producer, Scott Litt, and his experience as recording engineer on Bob Dylan’s latest album “Tempest.” There’s a very funny line in it. It’s Litt quoting Dylan, and it goes, “He just went, ‘Heh heh heh. “Hello, Dolly.” ’ ” That’s a very improbable, surrealistic line, and I can hear Dylan saying it. It’s a tribute to Paumgarten’s ear (listening to Litt tell the story) that he’s able to capture it.

Frazier’s “Neighbors” is a rarity – a Talk story with a line break. That’s because, for a Talk story, it’s longer than usual; it’s actually two stories in one. The first part tells the story of Brooklyn folk artist Evelyn Talarico. The second section is about L. B. Brown, owner of Clinton Hill Simply Art and Framing Gallery, in Brooklyn. The two sections are linked by Talarico’s statement, “Six years ago, I went to the neighborhood gallery, and the owner, Mrs. L. B. Brown, she told me, ‘You are a folk artist, a self-taught outsider artist.’” Frazier visits Brown in her gallery. She turns out to be – like so many of Frazier’s city dwellers – an arresting, admirable individual, full of interesting talk about her “little business.” For example, she says:

“Everybody wants their cherishables framed. And to do this right I’ve got to be like a fortune-teller. I have to take time with you to get a sense of what works in your dining room or your man cave. Are you a wood person or a chrome person? Do you want to go all the way up to museum glass to conserve whatever it is you want in that frame? This is the type of question I ask.”

Mitchell, Liebling, and Singer would appreciate that quote. And so do I. I can almost see Frazier smiling inwardly as he copied it down.

Wilkinson’s “Indigenous” is a little different from Paumgarten’s and Frazier’s pieces. Except for its brilliant last line, it doesn’t contain much direct quotation. What it does have is fabulous descriptions of Mexican herbs and vegetables. “Indigenous” is a mini-profile of Gudelio García, “one of the only farmers in New York City raising crops that are native to central Mexico.” He farms an acre plot, called El Poblano Farm, on Staten Island. Paumgarten describes some of Garcia’s crops as follows:

García grows papalo; pepicha; flor de calabaza, or squash blossoms; quelites; jicama; chayote; epazote, a spicy herb that smells like gasoline; ejote; and three kinds of Mexican peppers – jalapeño, serano, and poblano. Papalo and pepicha are similar tasting herbs. They are used fresh, mainly in soups and tacos. Flor de calabaza is a yellow-orange flower used in quesadillas. Quelites are edible greens, and jicama is a root, something like turnip. Chayote is a pear-shaped squash, epazote is an herb often cooked with beans, and ejote is a string bean.

There’s poetry in that list! It reminds me of the amazing sequence of weeds and wildflowers set out in Joseph Mitchell’s classic “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). And I think Paumgarten’s, Frazier’s and Wilkinson’s pieces are destined to become classics, too. They’re certainly among this year’s most enjoyable Talk stories.

Postscript: I suppose I’m going to sound like a Puritan if I ask why there seems to be such reluctance to disapprove of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s slippery practice of mixing fact and fiction. I don’t think of myself as a Puritan. But I do rigidly hold to one fundamental journalistic principle: facts are not to be messed with. The “Briefly Noted” review of Artur Domoslawski’s biography Ryszard Kapuscinski, in this week’s New Yorker, coolly and neutrally observes that Domoslawski “praises Kapuscinski’s work as ‘non-fiction which does not hold fiction in contempt.'” Praises? The use of fiction in a piece that represents itself as fact hardly warrants praise. Quite the opposite – it should be deplored! I’m surprised the “Briefly Noted” reviewer withheld comment. I’m wondering if James Wood wrote it. He appears quite comfortable with essayists who mingle fact and fiction. In his review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s great essay collection, Pulphead, he praises the contemporary essay for a “sly and knowing movement between reality and fictionality” (“Reality Effects," The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011).

Another reviewer who suspends judgment in respect of Kapuscinski’s blurred line between fact and fiction is Neal Ascherson. In his review of Domoslawski’s book on Kapuscinski, Ascherson says that Kapuscinski “habitually exaggerated, often changing details for effect” (“How It Felt To Be There,” London Review of Books, August 2, 2012). This would seem to be about as damning a charge against a journalist as there could possibly be. Yet, Ascherson appears willing to give Kapuscinski the benefit of the doubt. He admits “there’s no doubt that Kapuscinski – writing for publications and readers who had no way to check what he told them – overstepped them in the sense of selling ‘faction’ as fact.” But after rereading Kapuscinski’s Another Day of Life, a chronicle of the war in Angola, Ascherson softens, concluding, “He probably did embroider and reposition details about the fighting in Angola. But, as a reporter on one of those wars, I can say that he caught ‘how it felt to be there’ as nobody else could.”

This whole business of journalists fiddling with facts came up a few months ago when John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact appeared. Reviewing that book in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jennifer B. McDonald, called D’Agata’s championing of belief over fact “hogwash” (“In the Details,” February 26, 2012). I totally agree. I say the same thing about "non-fiction which does not hold fiction in contempt.”

September 24, 2012 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Peter Schjeldahl’s excellent “Going Pop,” in this week’s issue, with some of his other Warhol reviews. He’s written at least four previous pieces: “Andy Warhol” (The 7 Days Art Columns, 1990); “Warhol and Class Content” (The Hydrogen Juke Box, 1991); “Andy’s Place” (“Critic’s Notebook,” The New Yorker, September 19, 2005); and “Warhol in Bloom” (The New Yorker, March 11, 2002; included in Let’s See, 2008). Warhol is crucial to Schjeldahl’s blissed, ‘60s way of seeing. In his early “Andy Warhol,” he calls Warhol’s 1965 Paris Flowers show a “conversion experience.” He says something similar in “Warhol in Bloom,” a review of Tate Modern’s 2002 Warhol retrospective, installed by Donna De Salvo:

Announcing that pleasure will be the show’s keynote, De Salvo begins with a group of Flowers – large silk-screen paintings from 1964 and 1967 that ring changes on a motif of flat hibiscus blossoms against a grainy ground of grass blades. (Warhol cribbed the image from a tiny black-and-white ad in a magazine.) The choice elated me, because a Flowers show in Paris, in 1965, was one of two experiences I had that year that inspired a vocational devotion to art. (The other was a Piero della Francesca fresco in Tuscany.)

In “Andy Warhol,” Schjeldahl says, “I love Warhol, with a fan’s love. It isn’t so much a warm place in my heart, an organ not notably engaged by this artist, as it is a flat spot among the folds of my brain, from where said brain got run over in the ‘60s.” Almost fifty years on, has Schjeldahl’s Warholian passion cooled? Not at all. According to his latest piece, it’s hotter than ever. In “Going Pop,” a review of the Met’s “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” he refers to Warhol’s “triumph,” "clairvoyance,” “greatness,” “command,” “genius.” He says, “The gold standard of Warhol exposes every inflated value in other currencies.”

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1967

What impresses me about Schjeldahl’s Warhol fixation is the case he repeatedly and persuasively makes for Warhol as colorist, as painter. His “Warhol and Class Content” contains a fascinating description of Warhol’s silk-screen technique that emphasizes its “painterly” aspect:

There is no sense of pastiche about Warhol’s portraits. Their form evolved from his silk-screened multiple images of the sixties, with the important addition of a technique, derived from certain dime-store fine-art reproductions, that involves printing the image on a prepared irregular surface, giving the illusion of “original” facture. Warhol transforms the technique by using it very broadly, for a variety of ends; there is no Lichtenstein-like satirical acknowledgment of its source. Still, a lot of people, Newsweek’s art critic among them, fall for the commonsense illusion that the acrylic paint is applied on rather than under – or is perhaps identical with – the silk-screen enamel. The fact is that nearly all color, including that of eyes, lips, and hair, is laid down before the screening; only occasionally and sparingly does Warhol add important touches with a brush, adjusting the balance of photo and paint in paint’s favor. The wet-in-wet handling (where it is thick; often it is flat, posterlike) dries before receiving the image, which gets its “painterly” look from being distorted by the topography. Warhol had developed the aesthetic and expressive possibilities of this technique in nonportrait paintings for years, notably in a series of large, mysterious near abstractions called Shadows. His ability to improvise with it has reached such a point of casual assurance that one can easily miss its virtuosity.

In the same piece, Schjeldahl also adverts to Warhol’s “endlessly variegated palette of aggressively ‘odd’ flavorful hues and tints.” In “Warhol in Bloom,” Schjeldahl says, “Warhol was a supreme colorist who redid the world’s palette in tart, amazing hues such as cerise, citron, burnt orange, and apple-green.” And in “Going Pop,” he describes Warhol’s two 1967 self-portraits (“One of them gravitates toward glowering reds, set off by a sudden yellow, and the other toward blackish blue, with blood orange, ochre, and aqua”) and says,

Warhol’s eye for improbable chromatic harmonies cannot be overrated. He once said that he wanted to be Matisse. He may have meant only that he wanted that kind of fame, but his potently symbolizing way with colors – which, like scents, are a royal road from the outside world to our emotions – merits comparison with Matisse, in a spectrum of hues that postdate the Frenchman’s palette.

Granted, other critics have praised Warhol's color, too [e.g., Sanford Schwartz, in his "Andy Warhol The Painter" (Artists and Writers, 1990)], says that Warhol “still seems audacious in his use of silver and turquoise, lavender, orange, and brown”). But their descriptions seem bland in comparison with Schjeldahl’s. Like his hero Warhol, Schjeldahl bedazzles. I love him, with a fan’s love.

Second Thoughts: Schwartz’s “Andy Warhol The Painter” does contain at least one inspired line: “But the actual pictures have a powdery and breathing surface; you want to get close to the canvas itself.” 

September 17, 2012 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

Patricia Marx’s Talk story “Happy Hunting” (The bit about the six-year-old cupping “an oodgy-colored something” is inspired.)

The “Briefly Noted” review of Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (Its description of Sinclair’s prose as “lacerating, off-kilter” is perfect. In my opinion, Sinclair is one of the greats. Maybe someday The New Yorker will do a longer piece on him. He merits fuller analysis.)

Anthony Gottlieb’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” [Contains several witty lines, e.g., “We are, in short, all running apps from Fred Flintstone’s not-very-smartphone,” “American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens." But Gottlieb’s mention of Stephen Jay Gould doesn’t do justice to Gould’s view on evolutionary psychology. For example, Gould would be vehemently opposed to the “snappy slogan” (“Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind”) that Gottlieb says sums up the current line of post-Darwinian thinking. In his “Natural Selection and the Brain” (The Panda’s Thumb, 1980), Gould says, “The brain is vastly overdesigned for what it accomplished in primitive society; thus, natural selection could not have built it.” However, there’s at least this to be said for Gottlieb’s piece: it’s rekindled my interest in Gould’s writing. Gould wrote one of the most powerful book reviews ever to appear in The New Yorker. I’m referring to his extraordinary “Curveball” (November 28, 1994), an evisceration of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. The piece is a fit subject for a “Retrospective Review.” Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing it.]
 

Peter Schjeldahl’s “All Stripes” (Regarding Gerhard Richter’s “STRIPS,” Schjeldahl writes, “I like and don’t like the work.” But when he says earlier in the piece, “I can’t think of any other important art that has seemed to expect so little imaginative participation from a viewer,” I’m left wondering what there is to like about it.)

Anthony Lane’s “Sail Away” (I like reviews that proceed by raising questions, and this piece poses a beauty: “Here is frustration made flesh, with fearsome results; would it be heretical or ungrateful to say that there are times, when Phoenix is in full spate, and when Hoffman is revealing similar ruptures of rage in Dodd’s more genial façade, when there is just too much acting going on, perhaps with a capital ‘A’?”)

September 10, 2012 Issue

There are four remarkable pieces in this week’s issue: John Seabrook’s “The Geek of Chic”; John Colapinto’s “Check, Please”; Aleksandar Hemon’s “Beyond the Matrix”; and Ian Parker’s “High Rise.” All four, I’m pleased to note, are written subjectively. The most subjective and, in many ways, the most exhilarating is Seabrook’s “The Geek of Chic.” It’s about Frederico Marchetti and his e-commerce fashion company, the Yoox Group. It reads like a journal (“In June, I was sitting next to him in the front row of the Jil Sander menswear show in Milan,” “I did some shopping on Yoox, and saw nice suits at great prices, but I needed to feel the fabric, and online shopping can’t provide that,” “It was Yoox’s twelfth birthday – June 20, 2012 – and Marchetti and I were in Florence,” “During my visit to corporate headquarters, I met the keeper of Yoox’s algorithm, Alberto Grignolo, a husky, balding man with pale eyes and a large, smiling face”). I devoured it. “The Geek of Chic” is a model piece of journalism. But it’s not this week’s Pick of the Issue. That honor goes to Parker’s brilliant “High Rise.” It’s not as gloriously subjective as Seabrook’s piece, but that’s okay because it has something else going for it that’s pure journalistic gold – an irresistibly fascinating leading character. “High Rise” is a profile of the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Describing this amazing, youthful wizard of energy, wit, creativity and confidence, attempting to get him down on paper, Parker generates some inspired, almost surrealistic word combinations. For example: “For the 2010 promotional film, he rode down the bike path running through the heart of his beautiful, double-looped Danish Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo, to a soundtrack of ‘I Gotta Feeling,’ by the Black-Eyed Peas.” When was the last time you saw “promotional film,” “bike path,” double-looped,” “Danish Pavilion,” “Shanghai World Expo,” “soundtrack,” and “Black-Eyed Peas” strung together? Answer: never - it's an original. “High Rise” contains many such creations. There’s a passage in it illustrating Ingels’s comparison of designing a building to a joke that’s absolutely extraordinary. I believe this is the first piece by Parker that’s caused me to sit up and take notice of his work. I’ll certainly be on the watch for it from now on.

September 3, 2012 Issue

Book reviews are, for me, the ultimate brain candy. I gobble them up like chocolates. This week’s issue of the magazine contains a delicious piece – Joanna Kavenna’s “Things Fall Apart,” a review of Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Dublinesque. I like it because (1) it reverses the usual book review structure, moving from a wide-angle overview of Vila-Matas’s oeuvre to a tight close-up of his latest novel; (2) it features a wonderful simile (“Reading a Vilas-Matas novel is like watching someone weave a beautiful tapestry with one hand while unraveling it just as expertly with the other”); (3) it shows Vila-Matas as a Joycean celebrant of quotidian life (“each small incident, if one knows how to read it … has a wondrous quality”). Kavenna’s piece has kindled my interest in Vila-Matas, a writer new to me. That’s a prime indicator of an effective review.

Postscript: Also included in this week’s issue are two Talk stories that went straight into my personal “Talk of the Town” anthology: Rebecca Mead’s “Right-Hand Man” and Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Rush.” Mead’s piece wonderfully captures the brusque, unsentimental, Front Page-like interaction between Mayor Bloomberg and his press secretary, Stu Loeser on the occasion of Loeser’s leaving his job to start his own consulting company. The sardonic dialogue is quite funny, especially Bloomberg’s crack about “the cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people.” Mead shows she has an excellent ear for such lines. 

Widdicombe’s piece is a kinetic account of her experiences accompanying a bike messenger named Austin Horse as he makes his rounds through crazy Manhattan traffic. (In typical Talk fashion, Widdicombe refers to herself in the third person, as Horse’s “guest.”) I particularly liked the part where she has to yell at some people to get out of the way (“On Fifth Avenue, an armored vehicle blocked the bus lane, and his guest found herself bellowing, “Coming through!” Pedestrians gawked. “You’re picking it up,” Horse said, and continued on to Saks Direct, on West Twenty-fourth Street, where he waited for an elevator, covered in sweat”). “Rush” is a delightful piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

The Collaborative Achievement of "Citizen Kane"

Calling Citizen Kane “a one-man show,” as Richard Brody does in his capsule review ("Goings On About Town," The New Yorker, September 10, 2012), is unfair to the film’s screenwriter (Herman J. Mankiewicz) and its brilliant Expressionist cinematographer (Gregg Toland). Pauline Kael is right when she wrote, in her classic “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 20 & 27, 1971), “Lacking the realistic base and the beautifully engineered structure that Mankiewicz provided, Welles has never again been able to release that charming, wicked rapport with the audience that he brought to Kane." She’s right about Toland’s contribution, too. She says, “In the case of the cinematographer, Gregg Toland, the contribution goes far beyond suggestions and technical solutions. I think he not only provided much of the visual style of Citizen Kane but was responsible for affecting the conception, and even for introducing a few elements that are not in the script.” Undoubtedly, it’s Welles’s theatrical flourish, his showmanship, that makes Kane the great, satisfying movie it is. Kael says, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.” But Welles needed Mankiewicz and Toland to help make his magic. Contrary to Brody’s opinion, Citizen Kane isn’t a one-man show; it’s an inspired collaboration. Mankiewicz and Toland deserve their due. 

In Praise of Criticism - II (Contra Brody)

I’m dismayed by some of the things Richard Brody says in his “How To Be A Critic” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012), e.g., “Criticism is a damned and doomed activity,” “Criticism is a parasitical operation.” I’ve never felt this way. For me, criticism, when it’s done well, is one of the most stimulating, satisfying, nourishing sources of reading pleasure – “done well” meaning brimming with analysis, description, quotation, argument, verve, cool, bliss, and fervor. Janet Malcolm’s deconstruction of Sylvia Plath biographies (The Silent Woman), Richard Ellmann’s tracing of the sources of Joyce’s “The Dead” (James Joyce), Helen Vendler’s analysis of the grammatical shifts in Seamus Heaney’s style (The Breaking of Style), Susan Sontag’s dissection of Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics (Under the Sign of Saturn), Pauline Kael’s analysis of Orson Welles’s directorial style in Citizen Kane (The Citizen Kane Book), Arlene Croce’s detailed descriptions of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance numbers (The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book), Michael Fried’s analysis of the structures of Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration), Svetlana Alpers’s argument for the importance of the distinction between description and narration (The Art of Describing), Whitney Balliett’s descriptive analysis of Big Sid Catlett’s drumming technique (Collected Works), James Wood's exquisite definition of thisness (How Fiction Works), Alex Ross’s explication of Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” (Listen to This), B. J. Leggett’s study of intertexts in Philip Larkin’s jazz poems (Larkin’s Blues), Howard Moss's list of eighteen instances of Proust memory (The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust), Carol Zemel's comparative analysis of Van Gogh's thirty-eight self-portraits (Van Gogh's Progress) – I could go on and on. These books, and many others besides, are every bit as artful and creative as the great works they take as their subjects. They are literature. I value them immensely. Brody’s view of them as parasitical is abhorrent!

Credit: The above photo of Janet Malcolm is by Kevin Sturman.