December 24 & 31, 2012 Issue

I was already agonizing over the selection of my “Top Ten of 2012” pieces when this week’s “World Changers” issue, with its sleek, gleaming blue-black-cream Frank Viva cover, arrived containing three more candidates for consideration - Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Recall of the Wild,” Elif Batuman’s “Stage Mothers,” and Keith Gessen’s “Polar Express” – providing me with hours of readerly bliss and further complicating my “Top Ten” decision-making. All three are “participant observation” pieces – my favorite form of journalism. In “Recall of the Wild,” Kolbert visits the Oostvaardersplassen, a fifteen thousand acre park in the Netherlands that “mimics a Paleolithic ecosystem.” It brims with delicious lines such as “Vera picked me up one day at my hotel in Lelystad, and we drove over to the reserve’s administrative offices, where we had a cup of coffee in a room decorated with the mounted head of a very large Heck bull.” Kolbert is always up for an excursion, and so am I – vicariously through her, of course. When she hears about an auroch-breeding project in Nijmegan, she says, “So while I was in the Netherlands I decided to go for a visit.” I find her personal approach thrilling. Batuman writes in a similar mode, but with this difference: she has a marvelous gift for what I call surreal realism, which she generates organically from her material e.g., her description, in “Stage Mothers,” of the shooting of the movie “Wool Doll” (“Every night, the crew members slept in dead people’s blankets, and every morning they got up to confront a frozen auto transmission”). I notice that “Stage Mothers” is illustrated with a beautiful Carolyn Drake color photo. Batuman and Drake have teamed up at least a couple of times before to excellent effect: see “Natural Histories” (The New Yorker, October 28, 2011) and “The Memory Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010) – both “Top Ten” finishers in their respective years. Of the three writers under consideration this week, Keith Gessen is the minimalist. He’s not afraid to write short, plain lines, stripped to their essentials, e.g., “The next morning, we finally saw it: ice,” “Off we went into the ice,” “I put on a winter coat and hat and walked to the bow.” But his style isn’t starved – far from it. He’s an acute, subtle noticer:

A few times, the ice was so thick, and the icebreaker broke it so cleanly, that it came up again on its side, looking like a giant slice of cake, with green and blue layers separated by thin lines of white. Sometimes a smashed ice floe would be submerged beneath the surface and then come up, the water rolling off its back as off a slowly rising whale.

That “as off a slowly rising whale” is terrific. Gessen is an amazing imagist. Observing the unloading of coal trains in Murmansk, he writes, “It was as if Russia were coughing up her insides.” And this is followed by the evocative, “The cranes’ grabs could barely squeeze into the rail cars. The deep, rumbling sounds of steel on steel echoed in the quiet of the fjord.” I loved everything about “Polar Express” – Gessen’s writing, foremost, but also Davide Monteleone’s photos, and the map by “AJ Frackattack.” There’s such a richesse of great writing in this “World Changers.” I enjoyed it immensely.

William Finnegan's "Getting The Story"

Reading Vince Aletti’s interesting “Critic’s Notebook” review of “Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life,” at the International Center of Photography” (“Crime Seen,” The New Yorker, November 12, 2012), I recalled the opening section of William Finnegan’s superb South African memoir “Getting The Story” (The New Yorker, July 13 & 20, 1987; later published, in slightly different form, as Dateline Soweto, 1988), a vivid account of a trip that Finnegan, Johannesburg Star reporter, Jon Qwelane, and Star photographer, Herbert Mabuza, made to KwaNdebele, a small bantustan northeast of Pretoria under harsh state-of-emergency rule, in early July, 1986, to cover a meeting of anti-independence fighters. The piece contains this grim depiction of the KwaNdebele landscape: 

KwaNdebele had the blasted, frightened look of a war zone. The few shops we saw were all gutted, a turquoise beer hall fronted by a primitive arcade had large black tongues of charred paint licking up its walls from each arch of the arcade. More alarming than all the signs of recent violence, though, were the immense shantytowns sprawled across the bare hills, with the houses packed as densely as in any urban township. Most of the houses were makeshift concoctions of cardboard, plastic, and corrugated metal. Many were simply packing crates with a doorway and a smoke hole cut out. Rocks anchored the roofs against high winds. Clearly, there was no electricity, no plumbing, no running water; everywhere, women and girls could be seen trudging down the dusty lanes with plastic water jugs on their heads. There were obviously no jobs in the area. Hundreds of thousands of people were marooned out in these huge bush ghettos. “And they wonder why we call this country a concentration camp,” Quelane muttered. “These people truly have nothing left to lose.” 

Mabuza’s response to KwaNdebele is more sarcastic. Finnegan quotes him as saying, “All this beautiful countryside. All these friendly people.” Finnegan describes Mabuza as “one of the best black news photographers in the country.” I wonder if his work is included in “Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life.” Aletti doesn’t mention him in his review. I didn’t see his name when I searched ICP’s website. I’d like to see his photos of the liberation struggle. Apparently, he didn’t take any pictures on the day he visited KwaNdebele with Finnegan and Quelane. Finnegan writes, “Mabuaza stashed his cameras – he had not used them that day….”

Credit: The above photo is Gideon Mendel’s “Winnie Mandela Giving The ‘Amandla’ Salute” (1985); it appears in The New Yorker (November 12, 2012), as an illustration for Vince Aletti’s “Crime Seen.”

December 17, 2012 Issue

One of the many brilliant elements of David Fincher’s masterly The Social Network (2010) is the soundtrack. Alec Wilkinson’s excellent “Music from the Machine,” a profile of Trent Reznor, in this week’s issue, illuminates the process that created the movie’s cerebrally beautiful score. Wilkinson says that when Fincher asked Reznor to write the music for The Social Network, he told him he wanted “the sound of creativity.” That request strikes me as dauntingly abstract. But I’m not possessed with Reznor’s genius. Working in partnership with Atticus Ross, Reznor eventually “sent Fincher about forty minutes of music.” Wilkinson quotes Fincher as saying, “Of that forty minutes, I think we ended up using pretty much all of it.” Wilkinson’s description of the opening track is fascinating:

“Hand Covers Bruise,” the theme of “The Social Network,” and the first scored music in the movie, begins with a nervous drone that is Reznor bowing a cello as fast as he can, but the sound has been manipulated, Nine Inch Nails style – in such a way, that is, that it sounds like something else, in this case a vibration from a loose piece of machinery. A halting and melancholy piano line, twelve notes, in nearly identical phrases, descends just over an octave, from an F-sharp to the tonic D. 

Fincher’s initial response to this music, as reported by Wilkinson, is memorable: “‘I opened it on my computer, and I turned my speakers up loud, and it gave me chills,’ Fincher said. ‘How could something this simple be this profound?’” That’s my reaction, too. Like so many other aspects of The Social Network, its soundtrack is inspired.  

Movies and the Matter of Fact: Denby v. Lane

Does dramatic development trump fidelity to fact? David Denby has addressed this issue at least twice. The first time he appears to say yes it does; the second time – no it doesn’t. In his review of David Fincher’s The Social Network, he writes,

A debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun: Doesn’t the actual Zuckerberg have a girlfriend? Is it fair to portray him as arrogant and isolated? And so on. But Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created an irresistibly entertaining work of art that’s definitely suggestive of the way personal relations are evolving – or devolving – in the Internet Age. Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters, and that kind of accuracy can be created only by artists. The Zuckerberg of the movie is the Zuckerberg who matters to us because he’s become part of us. [“David Fincher and The Social Network,” Do The Movies Have a Future? (2012)]

Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters – this contrasts with what Denby says, in this week’s New Yorker, about Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty:

Yet, in attempting to show, in a mainstream movie, the reprehensibility of torture, and what was done in our name, the filmmakers seem to have conflated events, and in this they have generated a sore controversy: the chairs of two Senate committees have said that the information used to find bin Laden was not uncovered through waterboarding. Do such scenes hurt the movie? Not as art; they are expertly done, without flinching from the horror of the acts and without exploitation. But they damage the movie as an alleged authentic account. Bigelow and Boal—the team behind “The Hurt Locker”—want to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time, and the contradiction mars an ambitious project. [“Dead Reckoning,” The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2012]

Denby’s appreciation of the importance of factual accuracy appears to be evolving. He now seems to be saying that “literal accuracy” does matter where the movie is claiming “the authority of fact.” I agree. The crucial question is that of the terms on which the movie offers itself. Christopher Ricks, in his “Literature and the Matter of Fact” (Essays in Appreciation, 1996), says, “The difference between Crime and Punishment and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is not that the latter is based upon a murder which happened but that it proffers itself as a record of a murder which happened.” Zero Dark Thirty proffers itself as an account of the C.I.A.’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. By proffering factuality, it enters into an obligation to be factually accurate.

In my view, Ben Affleck’s Argo, is similarly damaged. It proffers itself as a true story of the C.I.A.’s 1980 rescue of six Americans from Tehran. Yet, as Anthony Lane points out in his review of Argo, the climactic airport scenes are fabricated:

If you visit the C.I.A. Web site, you can read Mendez’s account of events in January, 1980. “As smooth as silk,” he calls the hostages’ passage through the airport, whereas Affleck, chopping up the action and spinning it out, insures that no nails remain unchewed. This is absolutely his right as a teller of tales, and “Argo” never claims to be a documentary. [“Film Within a Film,” The New Yorker, October 15, 2012]

Lane’s view that the tale-teller has a right to distort the real-life event that he purports to represent in order to tell a good story must be considered in conjunction with Denby’s opinion, as expressed in “Dead Reckoning,” that such distortions “damage the movie as an alleged authentic account.” My own view is that historical events such as the killing of bin Laden and the rescue of the six Americans in Tehran happened one way and one way only. It’s only their meaning that’s open to interpretation.

Credit: The above artwork is by Concepción Studios; it appears in The New Yorker (December 24 & 31, 2012) as an illustration for David Denby's "Dead Reckoning." 

December 10, 2012 Issue

What does James Wood mean by “curling”? One thing for sure, he’s not talking about brooms and rocks. In his splendid “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” (The Irresponsible Self, 2004), he writes, “We delight in the curling process of invention whereby seemingly incompatible elements – eyebrows and caterpillars and Eden; or women’s knees and carjacks – are combined.” And in his “Late and Soon,” a wonderful review of Per Petterson’s novels, in this week’s New Yorker, he refers to Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time as “that mysterious book with its curling form and drifting sentences.” Curling process, curling form - I picture a tangle of Virginia creeper. Wood admires “serpentine” sentences (“‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: Laszlo Krasznahorkai”), “bending” chapters (“W. G. Sebald’s Uncertainty”), and “writhing” music (“The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon”). In his Krasznahorkai piece, he adverts to the way that the mind of the protagonist of War and War “stretches and then turns back on itself, like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself.” In “Late and Soon,” he provides at least two more aspects of his “curling” aesthetic: (1) consciousness’s free-associative motion (“Note, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the ‘bitter gift of pain’ mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the ‘bitter gift’ of the funeral”; (2) what he calls “the staggered distances of memory” (“Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial”). “Late and Soon” is a fascinating elaboration of Wood’s concept of “curling form.” It’s also one of this year's best “Critic At Large” pieces. 

December 3, 2012 Issue

Mmm. The air is warm, “with a breakfasty smell.” I taste the “caramelized endive, smothered in bread crumbs, Parmesan, thyme, and cream, and roasted with a topping of serrano ham.” I lick “the platter itself, and even that has a complex nutty flavor, the flakes of crust melting in my mouth.” Where am I? I’m deep inside The Food Issue, experiencing the exquisite double bliss of its prose – double in the sense that there’s the deliciousness of its words and there’s also the deliciousness of the food it describes. Lauren Collins writes that a bite of Poilâne miche “reverberates in the mouth for a few seconds after you’ve swallowed it, as though the taste buds were strings,” and my eyes eat the words. Of the many pleasures of this year’s Food Issue – the pungent details (e.g., the “half a roasted pig’s head, teeth in, glistening fiendishly on the counter,” in Dana Goodyear’s “Toques from Underground”), the surprising similes (e.g., “but this food touched me, it had a message of concern in it, of interest, like a letter” – Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Sameer and the Samosas”), the interesting concepts (e.g., “palate memory,” in Calvin Trillin’s “Land of the Seven Moles”) – the most piquant are the sensuous passages drenched in food enjoyment. For example:

In the early nineteen-sixties, while doing research for a German cookbook, I made several visits to the handsome gray and rainy port of Hamburg. Each time, I stopped at A. Michelsen, a shop famous for its elegant delicatessen. The lure was a sublime goose liverwurst, a creamy, gray-beige sausage with whole goose livers running through the middle, held in place by a pâté of goose meat and liver. At the center was a luscious slab of pure foie gras. Late each afternoon, I would buy a quarter of a pound of the thinly sliced wurst, a rye roll, and a half bottle of chilled Riesling, and then dash to my room in the gracious old Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, to indulge privately in front of an open window overlooking the Inner Alster lake. [Mimi Sheraton, “Missing Links”]

And:

Now Poilâne is bread’s most venerable brand, the Louis Vuitton of boulangers. It is, however, an affordable pleasure – an eighth of a miche, which yields ten or so slices, costs about five dollars. One week, I drizzled the first piece with some olive oil; dunked the second in a bowl of gumbo; spread a few more with pumpkin butter, spanning the holes like spider’s silk; and, on the sixth day, used the hardening remains as the base of a ribollita. Apollonia likes hers with soft-boiled eggs, “just smeared with a little bit of salted butter, and having the grease of the egg revealing all these flavors.” [Lauren Collins, “Bread Winner”]

And:

The smiliest dish I’d seen that week was shakshuka – a North African breakfast from “Plenty,” cooked and served in little cast-iron skillets. It wasn’t fancy: a couple of eggs poached in a spicy saffron-onion-tomato-and-bell-pepper sauce, flecked with fresh herbs and dappled with drops of yogurt. But it was irresistible. I could taste it before I raised my fork. [Jane Kramer, “The Philosopher Chef”]

Ah, yes - I could taste it before I raised my fork – spoken like a true sensualist. There is, in this great Food Issue, an enormous pleasure taken in description. I devour every word, lick the plate clean, and hunger for more. 

Andrew Dominik's "Killing Them Softly": Lane v. Brody v. Crouch

The most interesting aspect of Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly is that it’s adapted from George V. Higgins’s superb Cogan’s Trade (1974). Does the movie do justice to the novel? Three New Yorker critics provide three different perspectives.

Anthony Lane, in his “Tough Times” (The New Yorker, December 3, 2012), says, “I miss the wonderful tics with which Higgins registered word slips on the page (‘I been up since quarter five’; ‘I took Connie the movies the other night’: Somebody asked him if he knew a couple guys’; ‘Onna rocks. Olive. Right?’), but his bleakness endures onscreen.”  Lane also says that the movie “honors Higgins’s faith in the unglamorous.” In the capsule version of his review, Lane says, “Andrew Dominik has honored the novelist’s trademark blend of dirty eloquence and sudden bursts of brutality” (“The Film File,” newyorker.com).

Richard Brody doesn’t see it that way. In “The Most Overrated Value In Moviemaking” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, November 30, 2012), he outlines the film’s plot, which is taken from Cogan’s Trade, and says, “Just summarizing the story and considering its twists is sheer delight – which makes it all the stranger that the movie that would bring it to life, doesn’t.”

Ian Crouch, in his “Words As Weapons” (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, December 5, 2012), observes, “Dominik moves the story up a few decades, to the fall of 2008, but films the novel’s plot virtually scene for scene.” He says, “Dominik repurposes much of the novel’s dialogue in the screenplay, and in a broad sense remains faithful to Higgins’s great tonal achievement, which is to reveal the essential scuzziness of hand-to-mouth criminal life.” In his opinion, Killing Them Softly is “true to the novel’s narrative but somehow false to its spirit.”

I agree with Crouch and, to a lesser degree, Brody. Brody is right when he says that the movie fails to bring the story alive. But he doesn’t dissect the reasons for that failure the way Crouch does. Crouch cuts to the core of the problem when he says, “Cogan’s Trade is not necessarily about anything, and certainly it is not a political novel.” Dominik’s folly was his decision to use Cogan’s Trade for political messaging. Lane considers this politicization a success. He says, “Yet something in the tone of Cogan, Markie, Mickey, and the rest of them does strike home  - you feel the juddering impact of low life against the high hopes on which politics and community spirit rely, and it leaves you shaking.” He puts this even more succinctly in his “Film File” review: Killing Them Softly “gradually unveils a panorama of bleakness contrasted – all too obviously – with a litany of political posters and sound bites, most of them promising a bright future that we know will never dawn.” All too obviously - the film’s political cynicism isn't subtle. Crouch calls it “clunky” (“the clunky political motif that runs through the movie”). He expresses my view when he says, “Like the filmmaker’s visual choices, the addition of this overt political theme seems meant to lend both an aesthetic gravity to the narrative and to give it some kind of ethical resonance. Yet, more than any of the other deviations that the movie makes from the novel, it is this choice—to inject meaning into a void—that is the most hollow and disappointing.”

And yet … it wouldn’t surprise me if, five, ten, fifteen years from now, Killing Them Softly is remembered, if it’s remembered at all, for the acid words that Dominik gives Brad Pitt to speak at the movie’s end (almost as if, as Brody says, Dominik handed him a cue card): “America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now pay me my fucking money.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Steve Wilson; it appears in The New Yorker (December 3, 2012) as an illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Tough Times.” 

Retrospective Review: The Food Issue, September 5, 2005

To sharpen my taste buds for the feast that The New Yorker’s Food Issue is serving up next week, I revisited what is, for me, the greatest Food Issue of them all – the September 5, 2005 issue (with Wayne Thiebaud’s delectable, painterly “Food Bowls” on the cover), containing, among other succulent items, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.”

Thurman’s piece is about Japan’s artisanal-tofu masters. She says, “When a tofu master offers you a slice of bean curd he has just unmolded, he is inviting you to partake, insofar as a stranger can, of what it means to be Japanese.” “Night Kitchens” brims with superbly noticed details – “the accoutrements – even the sink – are handmade of cedar,” “the stove is a slab of lava,” “adobe walls of clay mixed with rice straw are sheathed in bamboo,” “the ceiling is tented in thatch,” “the floor is cobbled with sea stones,” “a ginkgo counter with ten seats,” “parchment walls decorated in drippy ink by an inebriated artist,” “pottery on which breakfast is served – rust-and-ash-colored vessels with a dark under-glaze and a primal beauty,” “an ivory-colored attar of bean curd that arrives on a turquoise plate, with a coral drop of sea-urchin (uni) purée.” My favorite sentence in the piece is the simple, sensuous, “The windows of the shed were open, and the sea breeze carried a scent of rain, wildflowers, and algae.” “Night Kitchens” is included in Thurman’s splendid Cleopatra’s Nose (2007).

Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears” is about arboreal archeology – “the pursuit and recovery of old varieties of fruit”– as practiced by Umbrian agronomist, Isabella Dalla Ragione. Of its many pleasures – a trip to a Perugian mountain valley to visit an old pear tree (“Its black bark had deep crevices, and the trunk and lower branches were covered with scabrous white lichen”), a visit to a villa near Florence to view the fruit paintings of Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648-1729), attendance at a fruit show staged by Dalla Ragione in an old palazzo (“The seeds rattled inside some of the apples, like natural castanets”) - the most piquant is Seabrook’s sketch of Dalla Ragione’s eighty-four-year-old father, Livio, the “genius loci” of the Dalla Ragione orchard (“Livio has a long white fringe of hair around his bald, speckled. Shakespearian dome, and he has the hopeful expression that very old men get in their eyes. He is gruff and blustery, and Isabella treats him as she does the fruit trees – tenderly but firm”). My favorite sentence in “Renaissance Pears” is a description of the flavor of one of Livio’s winter pears: “The taste was so clean – not buttery, which is the standard by which the commercial pear is bred – that it was almost metallic.” Seabrook is like the Medici still-life painters he mentions in his piece - a wonderfully precise, sensuous describer of fruit: see also his excellent "Crunch" in last year’s Food Issue, and his brilliant “The Fruit Detective” (in Flash of Genius, 2008).

Bilger’s “The Egg Men” is about Las Vegas short-order cooks. I’ve extolled its abundant pleasures before (see my post "Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger's 'The Egg Men,'" January 30, 2011). I think it’s destined to be a New Yorker classic, ranking with such masterpieces as John McPhee’s “Atchafalaya,” Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” and Arthur Lubow’s “This Vodka Has Legs.” I’m pleased to see that Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker’s new Archive Editor, recently named it one of his favorites ("Staff Favorites From The Archive," “Double Take,” newyorker.com, November 26, 2012). Suffice it to say here, it’s one of my favorites, too.

All three of these pieces are gloriously subjective. Pursuit of the story is part of the narrative: “So at five o’clock one morning, I rolled off my futon in a lovely old ryokan, the Yoyokaku, near the beach in Karatsu, ready for research” (Thurman); “Earlier this summer, I accompanied Isabella on a trip to visit the old pear tree” (Seabrook); “On early mornings, well before the first rush, Gutstein would let me work at the over-easy station for an hour or two” (Bilger). It’s one of the ingredients I’ll be looking for when I’m devouring next week’s Food Issue. I can hardly wait to get started.