November 24, 2014 Issue

Pleasures abound in this week’s issue (“The Tech Issue”): “the easy, cheesy thrills of the appetizers” at Upland (“Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two”); the “in-process” feel of Bryan Graf’s photograms, “as if the fabric were still moving, refracting and layering gossamer passages of magenta, rose, and acid green” (“Goings On About Town: Art”); the “razor-sharp pulp efficacy” of the action scenes in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies”); the “subtle but staggeringly delicious truffle pasta with grated yak cheese” at Aldo Sohm Wine Bar (“Sarah Larson, “Bar Tab”); the “heavy, golden, fan-shaped leaves” of New York City’s ginkgoes (Oliver Sacks, “Night of the Ginkgo”); the 10xers on the roof of Altay Guvench’s “hacker mansion,” finishing their drinks in the fog (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The Programmer’s Price”); Sean Parker, in his Plaza Hotel apartment, “dressed in jeans and rust-colored high tops, drinking tea from a white china cup” (John Seabrook, “Revenue Streams”); the sound of a Wyss Institute 3-D printer “clacking and clattering like a busy riveting machine” (Jerome Groopman, “Print Thyself”); the roar of the crowd in Lincoln Theatre, “as it saw Scarlett plant a hatchery – a pulsing, cloudy blue blob – down in the corner, next to PartinG’s home base” (Ben McGrath, “Good Game”); the “jagged music” of Penelope Fitzgerald’s prose – “each sentence is a little different from its predecessor; nothing is allowed to settle into the familiar” (James Wood, “Late Bloom”). I enjoyed it immensely. 

Koons's Kitsch: Perl v. Schjeldahl

Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Orange) (1994-2000)

Jed Perl, in his wonderful, indignant, agitated "The Cult of Jeff Koons" (The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2014), objects to what he sees as a consensus among certain critics, including The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, that Jeff Koons’s art is “criticism-proof.” He says, “In The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, certainly a man of discriminating tastes, basically announced that there was no way of arguing with his [Koons’s] success. Koons is ‘the signal artist of today’s world,’ Schjeldahl wrote. ‘If you don’t like that, take it up with the world.’ ” He further says,

When Schjeldahl regards Koons’s overblown baubles, what he sees is an authentic aesthetic response to the mind-bending pressures of a global consumer society. Our Gilded Age, so Schjeldahl may imagine, precipitates—empowers, even legitimates—this high-tech kitsch vision. But does it follow that those of us who do not respond to the work are in denial—that we are, whether consciously or unconsciously, delegitimizing a legitimate aesthetic? Is Schjeldahl suggesting that the very existence of the work forces some sort of aesthetic embrace? Must it be appreciated simply because it exists (and sells for so much money)? And where does this leave the average museumgoer, whoever that mythical being might be, who has been told even before walking through the doors of the Whitney that whatever scruples he or she has are suspect?

These are good questions. I commend Perl for raising them. The line that Perl refers to is from Schjeldahl’s "Selling Points" (The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2014): “It’s really the quality of his work, interlocking with economic and social trends, that makes him the signal artist of today’s world. If you don’t like that, take it up with the world.” I remember reading that passage when it appeared in the magazine and wondering what world he’s talking about – the real world or the art world. Most people in the real world would, I think, consider Koons’s work to be kitsch. Perl calls it “high-tech kitsch.” He also calls it “overblown baubles,” “the apotheosis of Walmart,” “supersized suburban trinkets,” a combination of “in-your-face banality and in-your-face extravagance.”

If, on the other hand, Schjeldahl is referring to the art world, he’s ascribing seriousness to a feverish, fair-driven sphere that he’s previously described as a “circus” ("The Circus," “Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, November 13, 2013), where money is the favorite measure of quality. “Our age will be bookmarked in history by the self-adoring gestures of the incredibly rich. Aesthetics ride coach,” he says in "Changing My Mind About Gustav Klimt's 'Adele'," “Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, June 7, 2012).

So when Schjeldahl says of Koons’s work, “If you don’t like it, take it up with the world,” he seems to be saying, “Look, you can’t change the nature of the times we live in. Big money is now the ultimate arbiter of what is great. Aesthetics rides coach.” This is one interpretation. It’s the one that Perl adopts. He says, “Our Gilded Age, so Schjeldahl may imagine, precipitates – empowers, even legitimates – this high-tech kitsch.”

That’s Perl’s interpretation. It’s a reasonable one. But I don’t buy it. Plutocrats may relegate aesthetics to the cheap seats, but not Schjeldahl. His appreciation of beauty is there in the “It’s really the quality of his work” part of the above-quoted sentence. It’s there in the distinction he draws between Koons and Damien Hirst. In his "Spot On" (The New Yorker, January 12, 2013), he says of the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 Young British Artists show, which included work by Hirst, “It was too transparently desperate—unlike the pricey frivolity, backed by real artistic command, of our own Jeff Koons.” Note that “backed by real artistic command.” In the same piece, he says, “Hirst will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.” This is close to what Perl is saying about Koons. But Schjeldahl treats Koons differently than he does Hirst. In “Selling Points,” he says, “No other artist so lends himself to a caricature of the indecently rich ravening after the vulgarly bright and shiny. But mockery comes harder when, approaching the work with eyes and mind open, you encounter Koons’s formidable aesthetic intelligence.”

In an earlier piece on Koons, Schjeldahl says, “Can you dislike Balloon Dog (Orange) (1994-2000), a ten-foot-high representation, in chromium stainless steel with a coppery tint, of a cartoony canine formed with twists in a long balloon?” ("Funhouse," The New Yorker, June 9, 2008). Right there, in his pleasurable description (“cartoony canine formed with twists in a long balloon”), I detect a strand of Schjeldahl’s aesthetic. Later, in the same piece, it’s evident in his description of Koons’s Hanging Heart (Blue / Silver) (1994-2006) – “sweet as dime-store perfume.” Schjeldahl’s response to these particular Koonses has nothing to do with “the mind-bending pressures of a global consumer society,” as alleged by Perl, and everything to do with pure delight – the pleasure principle in his experience of Koons’s art.

November 17, 2014 Issue

Paige Williams’s "Double Jeopardy," in this week’s issue, is impressive. I like its structure, the way its scope keeps expanding – from the facts of Shonelle Jackson’s case to Judge Gordon’s override of the jury’s sentence to the appalling frequency of override usage in Alabama to the constitutionality of override to the link between elected judges, judicial election-spending, and the use of judicial override. The piece climaxes with Judge Gordon, now retired, in his Montgomery office (“His tidy desk held a glass gavel”) talking about his decision to ignore the jury’s unanimous vote and sentence Jackson to death:

He went on, “People talk about being hard on crime. O.K.—are you willing to pay the price? Are you willing to construct the prisons? Staff the prisons? Budget for food and medical care? You can’t put everybody in the penitentiary. You just can’t.” He looked away, shook his head, and said, “Sometimes you just have to put ’em down.”

Sometimes you just have to put ’em down. Gordon talks as if he was dealing with dogs rather than human beings. He chose to put Jackson down even though (1) Jackson might not be the killer and (2) the jury unanimously recommended life. Well, here’s my verdict on the Alabama judicial system after reading Williams’s powerful piece: it’s rotten to the core.

Postscript: A special shout-out to David Black for his luminous, ravishing “Goings On About Town” photo of Seu Jorge.

November 10, 2014 Issue

There are four dandy “Talk” stories in this week’s issue: Tad Friend’s "Rembrandt Lighting," Ian Parker’s "Oldies But Goodies," Ian Frazier’s "Tracks," and Mark Singer’s "Showrunning." Friend’s piece is about a visit with the movie director Dan Gilroy, at the Steven Kasher Gallery, in Chelsea, as he sifts through a box of Weegee photographs from the forties. Gilroy uses the collection “to explain how Weegee – connoisseur of the blood-spattered corpse – had inspired his new film, Nightcrawler, about a feral loner who roams Los Angeles, filming scenes of mayhem for the local news.” Friend says Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss, with a sepulchral face and milky-blue eyes.” The story brims with pungent details. At one point, Gilroy looks at the circular stamp (“Credit Photo by Weegee”) on one of the photos and says, “He used a Speed Graphic camera, had a ten-foot focus, and shot with flash to create what he called Rembrandt lighting.” I delight in the way this piece combines so many seemingly incongruous elements – “a human coyote who comes down from the hills to feed,” “a wild-eyed woman resisting being frog-marched by a man in a trenchcoat,” “Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh and Lady Decies, imperious in white furs,” the Metropolitan Opera, a horrific car accident, Marilyn Monroe – in such a concentrated frame. It’s like a surreal, noir prose poem.

Ian Parker’s “Oldies But Goodies” wonderfully describes an encounter with the ninety-three-year-old painter Wayne Thiebaud in an inspired setting – a table at Lady M, “on East Seventy-eighth Street, a minimally decorated boutique-y place selling ‘confectionary delights.’ ’’ The setting is inspired because Thiebaud is famous for his “confections” paintings. Although Parker doesn’t say so, Thiebaud also happens to be the creator of some of the New Yorker’s yummiest “Food Issue” covers. A couple of lines in the piece made me smile: “As Thiebaud put it, there are still days that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie”; “I was interested in the Americanism of gumball machines.” And there’s this arresting sentence, incorporating a Thiebaud quotation: “He also painted crudités, fanned out on a plate, such as ‘you see over and over at everything you go to, that same stuff, in a circle – a Kenneth Noland abstraction.’ ” For me, the best part of “Oldies But Goodies” is the ending, when Parker attentively picks up on a nearby conversation: “At the counter, a woman used the tone of someone choosing between careers to ask for help deciding between a strawberry cake and a banana cake. ‘It depends on whether you like strawberries or bananas,’ the sales assistant replied.” I like this ending because it shows a virtuoso Talk writer artfully using a seemingly stray bit of reality to help make his story.

Ian Frazier's “Tracks” tells about a plan to convert a three-and-a-half-mile section of abandoned railroad tracks in central Queens into a linear park called the QueensWay. It takes the reader on a tour of the site in the company of three proponents of the project (Andrea Crawford, Marc Matsil, and Andy Stone) and a “visitor” (stand-in for Frazier, who in accordance with Talk tradition, refrains from using “I”). One of the hallmarks of Frazier’s style is his superb urban nature description, and in this piece he notes a place “where now the trunk of a large tree grew over a rusted rail like a potbelly over a belt.” Another distinctive feature of Frazier’s writing is the list. In “Tracks” he lists the names of businesses near or under the elevated section of railway at the QueensWay’s southern end: “RC Forklift Co., R & H Industrial Fabricators, Punjabi Brothers Auto Repair, Arco Electrical Contractors, United Propane, Hart Truck Refrigeration, 3 Kings Collision.” There’s poetry in those names! My favorite part of “Tracks” is when, late in the afternoon, after Crawford, Matsil and Stone leave the site, Frazier “found himself walking there alone.” This, to me, is such a Frazierian thing to do – to go back, explore the tracks again by himself, see what impressions he might gather. Sure enough, his contemplation of  “the vaulted spaces beneath the elevated tracks” yields this beautiful detail: “Slabs of rusted corrugated iron wall off the spaces, coils of barbed wire discourage burglars, and curbside ailanthus trees shoot upward until they meet the track overhang, which causes them to curl out over the street.”

Like Frazier, Mark Singer has been writing Talk stories since 1974. He, too, is a master of the form. His Mr. Personality (1989), one of the most beautiful collections of New Yorker writing ever published, contains twenty-five Talk pieces, including such classics as “Yabba-Yabba, Doodle-Doodle” (in which Mr. Blatford memorably says, “You get your change from a change machine, put your dog in the Doggie Washer, do your yabba-yabba, doodle-doodle – you know, whatever you do while you’re waiting in a Laundromat – and then go home with a clean dog”) and “Pigeon Mumblers” (“Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer’s irascible moods say that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably hatch a baseball”). Singer’s “Showrunning,” in this week’s issue, is about Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist and executive director of the TV series Alpha House. Trudeau, sitting at a table in the “imprecisely named Excellent Dumpling House,” on Lafayette Street, after a day of jury duty, discusses “the difference between spending days alone drawing and being an executive producer responsible for a cast and crew of a hundred and twenty people and one bloodhound (Gil John Bigg’s look-alike best friend).” He tells about a theatre group he formed when he was seven years old:

I just rounded up all the neighborhood kids, and we put on these productions in our basement. I think even then I understood that I really didn’t have the performance gene. But I did have the impresario gene. I wrote the plays, I wrote the music, I did the scenery, I made the tickets, I directed, I manned the light board. For one of my birthdays, I asked for a curtain. My mother got red curtains that divided the basement in half. We packed the basement. There were some bunk beds down there. We turned those into balconies.

That last bit about turning the bunk beds into balconies made me smile.

So there you have it – four great Talk pieces by four great Talk writers. Proof, if proof is needed, that the Talk of the Town story, invented eighty-nine years ago by Harold Ross, is still vibrant.

James Ley On James Wood

James Ley, in his absorbing The Critic in the Modern World (2014), says of James Wood’s criticism, “His characteristic approach is to interpret a fictional work via an assessment of the author’s stylistic proclivities: his point of entry, the basis of his understanding, is the weave and texture of a writer’s prose.” This is well said. It gets at the quality that most draws me to Wood’s writing – his detailed analysis of what makes great writing great. It reminds me of what Helen Vendler said about Seamus Heaney’s critical writing: “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act” (“A Wounded Man Falling Toward Me,” The New Yorker, March 13, 1989). It’s Wood’s art, too. For example, in his superb "Late and Soon" (The New Yorker, December 12, 2012), a review of Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time, he quotes a couple of excerpts from the novel and says,

In the first passage, what is strange is not just the way the function of that linking “and” changes (sometimes “and” is used to connect sequential details; sometimes it is used to shift from one temporality to another) but also the way that information expands and contracts. We go from the precision and banality of the uncle with his 8-mm. camera to the almost placeless, blurred lyricism about the grey grandparents from an unnamed but “more puritanical town . . . standing windswept and grey on the quay.” There is something wonderful about the passionate reality with which, in the second excerpt, the narrator invests a liquid that is at first fictional but which becomes absolutely alive, a golden nectar flowing “in multiple streams.” Notice, 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.

I relish this kind of stylistic analysis. Wood provides it in almost every piece he writes. I wish Ley had devoted more of his study to consideration of Wood’s aesthetics. But, unlike Wood, Ley isn’t an aesthetic critic. His approach is metaphysical. He’s interested in Wood’s ideas – hysterical realism, fictionality, lifeness, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. It illuminates Wood’s thinking. But it neglects an essential point: Wood’s strongest thought is in his style, the way he expresses himself. Ley knows this. At one point, he says, “The metaphysics of each critic is reflected in the texture of his writing.” Exactly. Ley’s study would’ve been much richer if he'd focused on examining “the weave and texture” of Wood’s splendid prose.

November 3, 2014 Issue

I find the pleasure quotient in this year’s Food Issue noticeably skimpier than in previous years. The prose is still delicious, but it’s used to express anxiety rather than food love. John Lanchester’s “Shut Up and Eat” sets the tone. He writes, “Most of the energy that we put into food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious.” Other pieces in The Food Issue illustrate Lanchester’s point. Michael Specter, in his “Against the Grain,” writes about “gluten anxiety” (“Gluten anxiety has been building for years, but it didn’t become acute until 2011, when a group led by Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and the director of the G.I. unit at the Alfred Hospital, in Melbourne, seemed to provide evidence that gluten was capable of causing illness even in people who did not have celiac disease”). Dana Goodyear, in her “Élite Meat,” says, “More than any other food, meat focuses cultural anxieties.” She goes on:

In the seventies, beef caused heart attacks; in the eighties and afterward it carried mad-cow. Recent decades have brought to light the dark side of industrial agriculture, with its hormone- and antibiotic-intensive confinement-feeding operations, food-safety scares, and torture-porn optics. The social and environmental costs, the moral burden, the threat to individual health—all seem increasingly hard to justify when weighed against a tenderloin.

And when pleasure is expressed, as it is in Adam Gopnik’s “Bakeoff,” it’s never whole-hearted. Gopnik undercuts his sensuous description of the Cronut’s taste (“intensely sweet, interestingly textured, almost unbearably rich in ‘mouth feel’ ”) with the later observation that it “sits right on the edge of being slightly sickening.” David Owen’s excellent “Floating Feasts,” an account of his cruise on the Royal Caribbean’s Oasis, includes a section on Norwalk virus.

And yet, there are pleasures in this anxiety-ridden Food Issue: Jiayang Fan’s “Bar Tab: Drunken Munkey” (“a Bollywood flick plays, the churidar-outfitted waitstaff deliver railroad chicken on placemats mapping British India”); the delightful last paragraph of Gopnik’s “Bakeoff,” in which he imagines Antonin Carême, the early nineteenth century chef, standing in line for a Cronut (“One sees him outside, waiting for hours, furiously scribbling new ideas for pièces montées—perhaps a triumphal procession in pastry, with a temple of Art and Appetite made of pretzel croissants, blessed by Love in the form of three or four crusty Cronut Cupids, smiling down, for novelty’s sake”); the superb noticing of “the milk coming out of a white rubber hose that was un-pinched when you lifted the metal paddle,” in Chang-rae Lee’s “Immovable Feast”; and – my favorite – Rivka Galchen’s wonderful description of the operation of an ice-cream bar vending machine, in her “Medical Meals” (“Mike and I would listen to each coin fall. Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin. A robot arm descended, suctioned up glycerides on a wooden stick, then released the treasure into the dispensing slot of the machine. ‘I’m so glad I’m here,’ Mike would say”).

But none of the above is comparable to the double bliss of reading delicious prose describing delectable eats, e.g., Lauren Collins, in the 2012 Food Issue, writing 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” (“Bread Winner,” The New Yorker, December 23, 2012). Next year, less anxiety and more food love, please.