September 26, 2016, Issue

Rivka Galchen’s “Keeping It Off,” in this week’s issue, contains echoes of her great “Medical Meals” (The New Yorker, November 3, 2014), in which she recollects her first month of surgical training. The unit that she was assigned to did mostly bariatric procedures – weight-reduction surgeries. That’s what “Keeping It Off” is about, too – bariatric procedures. It follows a patient, Henry Roberts, who undergoes a sleeve gastrectomy. Galchen brilliantly describes the operation:

Large monitors were mounted above Roberts’s body, like sports-bar television screens. Inabnet and Taye Bellistri looked up at the monitors, rather than down at the patient, as they maneuvered the handles of tools threaded through the left and right incisions. On the screens, the image was so big and so clear that it was easy to read the tiny brand names—Covidien, Karl Storz—written on the slender surgical instruments. Roberts’s abdominal cavity looked like the inside of a mossy, yellow cave lit up by miners’ headlamps; vasculature appeared like streaks of mineral ore, the liver like a respiring troglobite.

Early in her piece, Galchen mentions two hospital vending machines: “Arriving early for Roberts’s surgery, I waited in a corner of the lobby by two vending machines, one that sold candies and chips and another that sold kosher food, mainly apples and bagels wrapped in cellophane.”

I smiled when I read that. It reminded me of “Medical Meals,” in which vending machines figure centrally:

The cafeteria would be closed, leaving only a corridor of six or seven vending machines. On illuminated display were pretzels, and chocolate bars, and potato chips that were baked, and potato chips that were made from superior root vegetables, and potato chips that were actually corn chips coated with a supernatural orange powder. There were bright-colored drinks full of “essential electrolytes,” which medical professionals knew basically just meant sugar and salt, but still. One machine was different. It hid its wares. Nothing was on display but a closed freezer unit and artistic renderings of ice-cream bars. The drawings recalled ice-cream trucks from a childhood before mine, with almond-like objects matted onto a chocolate-like substance, with a vanilla-like substance inside. The bars were a dollar and twenty-five cents, I believe, payable in quarters. 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. 

That “Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin” is marvelously fine. Vending machines are to Galchen as sunflowers were to van Gogh.

Postscript: In addition to Galchen’s above-quoted surgery description, there are at least six other inspired passages in this week’s issue:

LVL UP sound-checks comfortably in the post-D.I.Y. nostalgia that has driven New York bands and their fans back toward the music that they heard at their first all-ages gig, but wistful thinking is the enemy of originality, especially when you’re sharing amps. – “Night Life: LVL UP”

Robinson is a Manet of hot babes and a Morandi of McDonald’s French fries and Budweiser beer cans, magnetized by his subjects as he devotes his brush to generic painterly description.  – Peter Schjeldahl, “Reality Principle”

Ceramics are umber-glazed snarls of curled and twisted slabs. – “Art: Lynda Benglis”

A first-time patron strolled in, looked around, and summed up the scene, rather approvingly: “Oh, so this is like a fake shithole, basically.” But, hey—it’s one with bathroom doors that consistently lock, if that’s worth anything to you. – Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: The Johnson’s”

When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of “Theories of Business Behavior,” by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas). – Mark Singer, “Bank Shot”

As “Eight Days a Week” springs from color to black-and-white, and as frenzied action is intercut with stills, we get a delicious sense of doubleness. – Anthony Lane, “Come Together”

Of Spiky Grime and Muddy Wail: Matthew Trammell's "Night Life"

Matthew Trammell (Illustration by Stanley Chow)

There’s a great new writer at The New Yorker. His name is Matthew Trammell. His ravishing “Night Life” pieces describe a dense, crazy, fascinating world of names – names of bands (Flatbush Zombies, A$AP Mob, Girlpool, Sheer Mag, Babymetal, Naughty by Nature, Bluntfang, Breakdown, Cro Mags, Token Entry, Antidote, Maximum Penalty, Potty Mouth, King Missile), names of venues ((Rough Trade, Terminal 5, Market Hotel, Barclays Center, Playstation Theatre, Apollo Theatre, Wembley Arena, Stage 48, Citi Field, Highline Ballroom, Trans-Pecos, Madison Square Garden, Tompkins Square Park, Zinc Bar, Union Hall, Brooklyn Bowl), names of platforms (YouTube, Twitter, SoundCloud, Tumblr, Creem, Snapchat, Noisey), names of songs ((“Bitch Better Have My Money,” “Skrt,” “1 Sec,” “Wild Things,” “O.P.P.,” “Hip Hop Hooray,” “Jamboree,” “Feel Me Flow,” “I’m in It,” “The Blacker the Berry,” “Kid A,” “Creep,” “Them Changes,” “Detachable Penis,” “Cheesecake Truck,” “The Bridge,” “The World Is Yours”), names of rappers ((Kodak Black, Silentó, Desiigner, Novelist, Nas, MC Shan, Kanye West, Dean Blunt).

There’s poetry in those names, in their specificity, in the delightful way Trammell blends them in rich skeins of imagery and observation. For example, in his superb “Also Known,” a tribute to the late A$AP Yams, he writes,

Yams was a rap fan first, and expressed this through his work with Rocky, who grew to be an avatar for so many of the things that his mentor loved: the stylish decadence of Sean Combs’s New York, the muddy starkness of DJ Screw’s Houston, the creative fearlessness of Lil B’s Internet.

That “the muddy starkness of DJ Screw’s Houston, the creative fearlessness of Lil B’s Internet” is inspired!

Here, from his recent “Of the Cloth” (September 5, 2016), is another example of his combinational art:

“First nigga with a Benz and a backpack,” West rapped on his début album, “The College Dropout,” from 2004, toying with symbols of an old binary: the luxury cars of rap’s late-nineties maximalist period and the scrapbook-stuffed JanSports toted by the era’s anti-platinum purists. Twelve years later, a Lamborghini is a step up from a Benz, and McDonald’s isn’t exactly Harold’s Chicken Shack, but the blueprint remains.

When was the last time you saw “Benz,” “backpack,” “scrapbook-stuffed JanSports,” “anti-platinum purists,” “Lamborghini,” “McDonald’s,” “Harold’s Chicken Shack,” and “blueprints” comprehended in the same sentence? I'll bet never. Trammell is a combinatorial genius. I enjoy his work immensely. 

Gideon Lewis-Krauss's "What We See When We Look at Travel Photography"

Robert Frank, "Santa Fe" (1955)

A special shout-out to Gideon Lewis-Krauss for his terrific “What We See When We Look at Travel Photography,” in this week’s New York Times Magazine, a delicious essay connecting Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” Paul Fussell’s Abroad, Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, Edward Hopper’s Gas, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, Janet Malcolm’s Diana and Nikon (a collection of her New Yorker photography pieces), Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station” (The New Yorker, December 3, 1955) with transfixing “road” photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, and Gary Winogrand. The core of the piece’s combinational delight is Lewis-Krauss’s multilayered interpretation of his friend David’s Instagram image of a nighttime gas station. “ ‘What is it,’ his caption asked, ‘about #gasstationsatdusk?’ ” Lewis-Krauss’s answer is brilliant:

It wasn’t an act of representation at all, and it certainly wasn’t private. It was the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment — something a little smart, and a little sad, and a little funny, and all in all very David. The image, an internet square of labyrinthine self-referentiality — a photograph that recalled a painting that was at home in a poem — recalled for me a different line of Geoff Dyer’s, where he quotes John Berger on Paul Strand’s portraits: They arrested a moment “whose duration is measured not by seconds, but by its relation to a lifetime.”

The “lifetime” Berger is referring to is, I think, the lifetime of Strand's subjects. Berger, in his superb essay, writes, “Strand’s photographs suggest his sitters trust him to see their life story.” Lewis-Krauss, in his piece, seems to be saying that David’s gas station photo is self-referential - “the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment.” I agree with both writers. Photographs have a double aspect, as much that of a mirror as of a lens.

September 19, 2016, Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Richard Brody on Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (“Along the way, the film offers verse by Christina Rossetti; a record of Caruso; Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony; souped-up cars, and a man crushed under one; a woman on a meat hook; a whiff of narcotics; a primordial answering machine; bloody street fights; and nuclear catastrophe”), Becky Cooper’s “Lunch à la Mode” (“The real star, though, is the hot sauce. It’s the marigold color of a Buddhist monk’s cloak, with a complex bitter heat, and it should be spooned onto everything”), Colin Stokes’s “Bar Tab: King Tai” [“The #5 (Barr Hill gin, Cocchi Americano, Dimmi, grapefruit bitters) is a caustic confusion, but the #1 (Yaguara Cachaça Branca, apricot, Licor 43, grated nutmeg) was described by a drinker as ‘lovely stuff’ ”], Rebecca Mead’s “Costume Drama” (“The seductiveness of Michele’s vision was signalled by a barely subdued clamor among the guests over the emerald seat cushions, which were to be taken home as gifts”), Nick Paumgarten’s “Wild Man” (“Guilt and high principle mutate into marketing: this was the Patagonia feedback loop, on high screech”) – the most sheerly enjoyable, for me, is Ian Frazier’s “Patina,” an inspired reflection on the irreproducible color of the Statute of Liberty’s patina (“that elusive, flickering, familiar, sea-polished shade of copper-green”). There’s poetry in “Patina” (“When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes”) and lots of fascinating Statue of Liberty facts (e.g., The Statue’s copper is “only three-thirty-seconds of an inch thick and unusually pure”). “Patina” is this week’s Pick of the Issue.

Postscript: Another pleasurable piece in this week’s New Yorker is Jane Kramer’s “Eat, Memory,” a review of Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Kramer writes delicious long lines. For example:

Reading Paul Freedman about America, stalking myself through the taste of meals at eight of his ten restaurants, each sampled for different reasons at different moments in my life, I began to draw the outlines of a world I shared with other people, people more or less like me, and to wonder what “like me” meant when it came to expectations of inclusion, of common flash points of reference, of understanding and participating in the coded language of what we eat and how it is prepared and who is sitting at all those tables around us.

I relished Kramer’s recollections about eating in Le Pavillon, Antoine’s, Sylvia’s, Shrafft’s, the Grill Room, and Chez Panisse – all on Freedman’s list. But I wish she’d provided at least one extended quotation from Freedman’s book to help me decide whether I’d enjoy reading it. John Updike, in his “A Poetics of Book Reviewing” (included in his 2011 collection Higher Gossip), says, “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reviewer’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.”

My Igloolik "New Yorker"

One of the most memorable days of my life began with The New Yorker. September 14, 2003, 6:30 a.m., I was lying in bed in my room at the Igloolik Hotel in Igloolik, Nunavut, reading Robert Gottlieb’s absorbing “The Years With Thurber” (The New Yorker, September 8, 2003). Near the end of the piece, Gottlieb quotes Thurber: “People are not funny; they are vicious and horrible—and so is life.” On that cheery note, I rose, dressed, and headed for the dining room for coffee. Shortly afterwards, my friend George Qulaut appeared and invited me to go seal hunting with him. We went out in George’s big freighter canoe. Foxe Basin brimmed with ice floes. During the course of the day, George shot and skinned a harp seal, a ring seal, and a bearded seal – the Inuit equivalent of hitting for the cycle. Late in the afternoon, we stopped at an ice pan – multiyear ice, George called it. It contained an aqua-colored pool. George scooped water from it and made tea on his Coleman stove. While we were there, we heard what sounded like an air hose - psssssssss. George said it was a bowhead. We looked and looked. Suddenly, about twenty feet away, the glistening black back of a bowhead calf emerged from the water. It was visible for only a few seconds, and then it disappeared. George said its mother was likely nearby. We thought we could hear her breathing. We looked for her, but didn’t see her. We headed back to Igloolik. “This is the sad part of the journey,” George said. But I didn’t feel sad. I was elated. It had been a wonderful day. Thurber was wrong. 

September 12, 2016, Issue

Hooray! Bilger is back! He’s been absent from The New Yorker for almost two years. I’ve missed him. He’s one of the New Yorker greats, in my opinion – right up there with Liebling, Mitchell, McPhee, and Frazier. Now, here he is, with a terrific “Personal History” piece called “Ghost Stories,” set in Germany, in which he participates in a weird form of group therapy known as Familienaufstellung. His participation isn’t just for reporting purposes; it’s personally motivated. He says, “Like the others in the room, I was there to untangle a knot in my mind. I’d come to Germany to research the life of my grandfather Karl Gönner.” Gönner was born in Weil am Rhein, Germany. He fought in the First World War. During World War II, he was sent to Occupied France to work as a schoolteacher in an Alsatian village. He was also a member of the Nazis Party, and eventually became the village’s Ortsgruppenleiter, or Party chief. Bilger writes,

My mother rarely talked about his years in France, but she was well versed in the atrocities committed by men in his position. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Vichy regime. It must have been a torment to her, trying to square what she learned with her memories of her father. How could he have been both the man she knew and the monster history suggested?

Bilger participates in two Familienaufstellungs. His description of the second one produces one of the piece’s most vivid passages:

By the end of the second day, I’d been a brother, a grandfather, Restlessness, and the country of Germany. I’d watched people burst into tears, climb into one another’s laps, and pretend to be God. I’d heard a woman scream that she was bleeding from her vagina and that crows had eaten her baby. At times, the sobs and shouting rose to such a pitch that I worried that the police might come.

Bilger is skeptical about the reliability of Familienaufstellung narratives. He likens the process to “a visit to a psyche under the sober auspices of therapy.” What impresses him is “the careful attention people paid to one another.” He says, “The very act of empathizing so deeply seems to help people understand themselves.”

“Ghost Stories” is different from Bilger’s previous work. It’s more personal. He’s always written in the first person. But here his “I” is very close to his material. I think it’s one of his best pieces.

Three other excellent articles in this week’s issue are: Tom Kizzia’s “The New Harpoon,” Ian Parker’s “Knives Out,” and Dan Chiasson’s “Force of Nature.” In “The New Harpoon,” Kizzia visits the Inupiat community of Point Hope, on the Chukchi Sea in northern Alaska. The piece brims with interesting details (“a whaling skin boat provides the center support for a glass-topped boardroom table”; “a drum made of whale-liver membrane”). Parker’s “Knives Out” profiles The New York Times’ restaurant critic, Pete Wells (“His expressions of enthusiasm often take the form of wariness swept away: Wells found joy in a conga line at Señor Frog’s, in Times Square”). Chiasson’s “Force of Nature” is a review of Alice Oswald’s new poetry collection Falling Awake (“These poems give us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality”).

I devoured all these pieces. This week’s New Yorker is one of the year’s best.

Helen Vendler's Great "Stevens and Keats's 'To Autumn' " (Contra Mark Jarman)

Mark Jarman, in his “The Judgment of Poetry” (The Hudson Review, Autumn, 2015), praises Vendler as “one of the best close readers of poetry today.” But his treatment of her great “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ” seems peevish. He writes,

In her discussion of Keats’s “To Autumn,” she hears the great ode in Stevens’ poetry, especially in the final strophe of “Sunday Morning.” Her argument is illuminating, and yet it seems as if no other modern poet read Keats as Stevens did. She believes the central problems of Keats’s ode “become central to Stevens’ poetry as well.” But what about the fact that Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” gathers together two of Keats’s great odes, “To Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” and links sleep, poetry, and imagination in similar ways?

At no point in “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ” does Vendler argue that Stevens is the only poet to rework the materials of Keats’s ode. But I think it’s safe to say, based on Vendler’s essay, that the magnitude of Stevens’s rich reworking of it is unmatched by any other poet. Frost may have had “To Autumn” in mind when he wrote “After Apple-Picking.” But his poem doesn’t come close to reinterpreting, reusing, and recreating “To Autumn” the way that, say, Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” does. Vendler writes,

The resemblances have been often remarked. Both poets use successive clauses of animal presence (gnats, lambs, crickets, redbreast, and swallows in Keats; deer, quail, and pigeons in Stevenson; both poems close with birds in the sky (gathering swallows in Keats, flocks of pigeons in Stevens) and with the sense of sound (including a whistling bird in each); Keats’s soft-dying day becomes Stevens’s evening.

Vendler shows that the end of “Sunday Morning” is a rewritten version of the close of Keats’s “To Autumn.” But what’s even more arresting is her analysis of how Stevens, in his rewriting, made the materials of Keats’s great poem distinctly his own:

Keats writes a long clause about the gnats, then follows it with shorter ones dwindling to “hedge-crickets sing,” then broadens out to end his poem. Stevens writes short clauses followed by a final long one. The result is a gain in climactic force and explicit pathos, but a loss in stoicism and discretion of statement. Keats’s pathos (at its most plangent in the small gnats who mourn in wailful choir, helpless in the light wind; less insistent but still audible in the bleating lambs; but largely absent in the whistle and twitter of the closing lines) reaches us with steadily diminishing force, in inverse relation to Keats’s recognition of the independent worth of autumnal music, without reference to any dying fall. Stevens’s pathos, on the other hand, is at its most evident in the closing lines. In short, Stevens has adopted Keats’s manner – the population of animals, the types of clause, the diction, even the sunset landscape – without embracing Keats’s essential stylistic argument against nostalgia. Nor has he imitated Keats’s reticent diction and chaste rhetoric; instead, he writes with an increasing opulence of rhetorical music, and imposes explicit metaphysical dimensions on the landscape.

Jarman calls Vendler’s discussion of “To Autumn” and “Sunday Morning” “illuminating.” Yes, it certainly is. But it’s more than that. It’s an extraordinary work of comparative analysis. Jarman doesn’t do it justice.

Postscript: Helen Vendler was The New Yorker’s poetry critic from 1978 to 2001. Her work is one of this blog’s touchstones.

September 5, 2016, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is unquestionably Janet Malcolm’s “Performance Artist.” Malcolm is one of this blog’s presiding deities. A new piece by her is an event. At age eighty-two, she’s still very much in the game. Her “The Master Writer of the City” was one of last year’s most memorable reviews. And her Forty-One False Starts was one of 2013’s best books. What makes Malcolm great is her combination of sharp-eyed journalism with sharp-edged criticism. And she likes to be provocative. “Performance Artist” contains all three of these elements. It’s a profile of piano virtuoso Yuja Wang. But it’s a profile with a difference. It has a subtle sexual aspect, introduced in the opening sentence:

What is one to think of the clothes the twenty-nine-year-old pianist Yuja Wang wears when she performs—extremely short and tight dresses that ride up as she plays, so that she has to tug at them when she has a free hand, or clinging backless gowns that give an impression of near-nakedness (accompanied in all cases by four-inch-high stiletto heels)?

The piece is peppered with references to Wang’s “stripper-wear,”  “nude dress,” “skintight flame-colored dress,” etc. Malcolm describes Wang playing at Carnegie Hall:

As she performed, the thigh, splayed by the weight of the torso and the action of the toe working the pedal, looked startlingly large, almost fat, though Yuja is a very slender woman. Her back was bare, thin straps crossing it. She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer’s assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!

“Performance Artist” culminates in a wild photo-shoot in a Steinway piano showroom. Malcolm describes the scene:

Yuja went to the designated piano, and Dukovic—a handsome young man, with a warm and charming manner—began circling around it, snapping pictures with a handheld camera, as she played bits and pieces of repertoire. At first, she played tentatively and quietly, starting a piece and trailing off—and then she worked her way into a horrible and wonderful pastiche of Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Gershwin, Horowitz, Tchaikovsky, all mushed together, playing louder and louder and faster and faster, banging with mischievous demonic force, as Dukovic continued his circling and snapping, like the photographer in the famous orgasmic scene in “Blowup.” Yuja ended with a parodic crescendo as Dukovic shouted, “I love you!” and she burst into laughter.

Photo by Pari Dukovic

I enjoyed that passage immensely. It builds and builds, enacting the musical climax it describes. And it’s cool seeing The New Yorker’s Pari Dukovic in action, “circling and snapping, like the photographer in the famous orgasmic scene in Blowup.”

“Performance Artist” is also a self-portrait of sorts. It touches on Malcolm’s preoccupation with apartments. She’s a master interpreter of apartments, using them as an indicator of their occupants’ taste (see, for example, her brilliant “A Girl of the Zeitgeist”). Malcolm’s description of Wang’s apartment contains an interesting detail:

When you walk into the apartment—which is small and dark—the first thing you see is a royal-blue nylon curtain suspended from the ceiling like a shower curtain and drawn around a lumpish object that turns out to be a Steinway grand piano. The curtain is there to muffle the piano’s sound, to accommodate a neighbor for whom the practicing of a world-class pianist is not the thrill it would be for you and me.

I smiled when Malcolm proposed visiting the apartment again – this time with a notebook – and Wang “politely demurred.” It showed Wang drawing a boundary, limiting Malcolm’s scrutiny. She does it again later in the piece when Malcolm asks her what her concert fee is and Wang refuses to tell her.

Malcolm and Wang appear to have more than just a journalist-subject relationship. They appear to be friends. Their discussions at the Sky Lounge are, at times, fairly intimate. This made me uneasy. Would Malcolm betray Wang’s trust and write something embarrassing about her? As we all know, she’s quite capable of it. Her classic The Journalist and the Murderer famously begins,

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

I’m pleased to report there’s no betrayal in “Performance Artist.” It’s a superb portrait of an alluring, passionate, immensely gifted artist. Bravo, Ms. Wang! Well done, Ms. Malcolm! 

Geoff Dyer's "The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs"

Photograph by Eli Weinberg

This, for me, has been a Geoff Dyer summer. First, I read his great new collection, White Sands. Then I went back and reread his wonderful New Yorker piece, “Poles Apart.” A few days ago, I started reading his The Missing of the Somme. Yesterday, perusing the online version of this week’s The New York Times Magazine, I encountered his “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs.” What an extraordinary essay! It’s a consideration of Eli Weinberg’s 1956 photo “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956.” It brims with illuminating perceptions and features at least five bravura analytical moves. First, he views the presence of the solitary white boy in the front row as a “crucial component.” Second, after making inquiries, he concludes with reasonable certainty that the boy is Weinberg’s son, Mark. Third, he compares Weinberg’s photo with one taken less than a year later by Will Counts in Little Rock, Arkansas. Fourth, he looks at another photograph of the scene depicted in Weinberg’s picture, which leads to his realization that Mark is “dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else.” And lastly, he reveals two facts he’s discovered about Mark:

First, it seems that he died in 1965 at 24, so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging that he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident, Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Dyer’s brilliant piece shows how criticism can enrich and amplify a great photograph.

August 29, 2016 Issue

This week’s issue contains pieces by two of the magazine’s best writers – Nick Paumgarten and Dana Goodyear. Paumgarten’s “The Country Restaurant” probes the “myths” surrounding Damon Baehrel, a gourmet restaurant in Earlton, New York, that Bloomberg News calls the “most exclusive restaurant in the U.S.” The restaurant is named after its “presiding wizard and host, who serves as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper.” One of the “myths” is that the restaurant is booked through 2025. Another is that all the ingredients of the dishes it serves are derived from the “twelve acres of yard, garden, forest, and swamp” on which it’s located. The skeptical nature of the piece is expressed in its tagline: “You can’t get in. It’s booked through 2025. Or is it?”

Reading “The Country Restaurant,” I found myself cheering for Baehrel. I didn’t want him to be unmasked as a fraud. “Betrayal” journalism, in which the writer secures the subject’s trust and then proceeds to write an ugly portrait of him, gives me the creeps. Paumgarten comes close to writing such a piece, but, in the end, after noting all the “bogusness,” seems to side with Baehrel and his “sublime” cooking. He writes,

Later, back outside, as Baehrel led us [Paumgarten and a photographer] around the property and identified plants, my attention wandered, and I thought about my first visit, months before, and a particular dish, the sixth course, which had so engaged my attention that the only surreptitious photo I got of it was of a plate licked clean. It consisted of a small layered cube of wild daylily tuber and wild honey mushrooms—a phyllo of the soil. He’d sliced the tubers thin and soaked the mushrooms in fresh maple sap, then stacked them in more than a dozen fine alternating layers. He then roasted it on a slab of oak wood, dribbled it with grapeseed oil and wild-fennel-frond powder, and added a drizzle of dried milkweed pods cooked in fresh birch sap, which he’d mashed in a stone bowl with some rutabaga starch, and a second drizzle that he called burnt-corn sauce, made from liquefied kernels that he’d scraped off the cob onto a stone, dried, then thinned out with sycamore sap. Somehow I got all this down in the notebook. Beneath it, I’d written, “Sublime.”

Now, down by the road, near the gate, Baehrel guided us alongside his garden beds. In one of them, a single sprig of asparagus rose from the earth. He snapped it off and handed it to me. It tasted like—asparagus.

It’s a great ending. I confess I’ve read that last bit about the asparagus numerous times. What does it mean? It could mean that Paumgarten was relieved to find at least one thing at Damon Baehrel that was what it appeared to be. Or, it could signify that Paumgarten had decided to put aside all his doubts about Damon Baehrel’s authenticity and go with the evidence of his senses. It’s a fittingly ambiguous conclusion to an arresting, delicious piece. I devoured every word.

The authenticity of Dana Goodyear’s subject – seventy-one-year-old earth sculptor Michael Heizer – is never in doubt. What a wild, crazy, brilliant guy! Here, in Goodyear’s terrific “The Earth Mover,” is our first view of him:

At a crosswalk, Heizer—ravaged, needy, fierce, suspicious, witty, loyal, sly, and pure—leaned against a lamppost to rest, thin on thin. He wore a felt rancher hat whose band was adorned with the tips of elk antlers, and a jackknife in a holster at his waist. In the eighties, Andy Warhol photographed him wearing plaid flannel, his hands raised like claws and a vague, suggestive smile on his lips: Am I scaring you, honey? Now, with his hat casting an elliptical shadow on the pavement, he looked ready for another portrait.

That “thin on thin” is pure Goodyear; she’s a superb describer. And here, in one of the most memorable scenes of the piece, is Heizer painting in his New York City loft:

He picked up a can of paint that a studio assistant had mixed—imperial Venetian bronze blended with carbon black and dark brown to create a tone he called “volcanic”—and poured it through a net into a tin tray. Painting with a roller is physical work. With effort, he covered the roller with paint and stepped up to a canvas whose bottom-heavy angularity resembled an origami swan, banded with green tape. He climbed a ladder to the third rung from the top and started painting from the upper left in long, smooth strokes. Within a few seconds, something had gone wrong. “Arrrgh! Not good!” He got down from the ladder and inspected the painting for impurities. There was a fleck of white, which he picked out with the tip of his knife. On his knees, he went at the lower portion of the canvas, bending double with each stroke and pulling himself up again with the ladder.

“Fu-u-u-u-uck, I can’t breathe anymore,” he said after a few minutes of intense application. His tongue was hanging out, and his mouth was open like that of a parched man receiving rain. Los Lobos’s sax came through the wall. “Here it is! Yo! Ha, ha, ha, yo!” he laughed, suddenly revived. With saxophone, the painting looked better to him: twenty bucks’ worth of paint from Ace Hardware transformed into a cosmic offering. He bent over, hands on knees, panting, and looked up with a giddy smile. “That’s somethin’, huh?” he laughed. “Cuidado.”

My god, I love that passage – so many piquant details! And that drawn out “Fu-u-u-u-uck” is inspired.

Heizer’s art tool of choice isn’t a paintbrush or a paint roller – it’s a bulldozer. In “The Earth Mover” ’s final section, there’s a scene in which Goodyear rides with Heizer in a 996K Caterpillar loader, “perching on the armrest of the driver’s seat,” as he moves earth (“a specially formulated dirt that looked like turbinado sugar”) and packs it around an eighty-foot-long steel box to form a sculpture called “Compression Line.” Goodyear writes,

A wooden wall with I-beams anchored in concrete was making it hard to back up; there was nowhere to turn around. Heizer smashed his bucket deliberately into an offending beam. Rales stood under a shade tent, watching. “She’s all wired up, thinks I’m going to knock her building over,” he said, and wiggled his fingers at her—“Don’t worry”—then signalled for her to snap a picture. To me, he said, “Wanna see the loader work?” and went at the beam again. He took his hands off the controls like a bronco rider, swaying, and put his fists up—whoop, whoop. I hadn’t seen him happier. Three workers in orange vests looked away.

It’s a great scene – one of many in this excellent piece. And it’s Goodyear’s presence in the cab with Heizer that, for me, makes it extra vivid.

“The Country Restaurant” and “The Earth Mover” are wonderful pieces. I enjoyed them immensely.

Postscript: Other aspects of this week’s issue that I enjoyed: Andrea K. Scott’s description of Agnes Martin’s paintings – “whisper-pale shimmering grids” – in “Art: Fall Preview”; Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Fall Preview” (“with electric odes to evening chills and a timbre that clears storm clouds”); Richard Brody’s capsule review of Hell or High Water (“Only Bridges emerges whole; with his typical brilliance, he leaps from the laconic to the rhetorical, making even the shady brim of his hat speak volumes”); the cocktails in Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: Pouring Ribbons” [“Complex cocktails arrive in ornate teapots or nestled in tiny chafing dishes: the Painted Veil (Scottish-toffee-pu-ehr-tea-infused Beefeater gin, Hong Kong Baijiu) is a frosted chalice of smoky caramel, while the Snake in the Grass (Tanqueray gin, coconut water, makrut-lime leaf) offers a compelling argument for pairing alcohol with Greek yogurt”]; Christaan Felber’s light-filled “Hao Noodles and Tea by Madame Zhu's Kitchen” photo illustration; Tad Friend’s description of Ben Foster – “his body a grenade, his face the pin” (“Out of Character”); Vinson Cunningham’s “A Darker Presence,” on the National Museum of African American History and Culture (“no one will leave without scores of wide-eyed did-you-know’s to share”); Julie Bruck’s beautiful “Blue Heron, Walking” (“these outsized / apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole, / these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail / their risen bird like useless bits of leather”); and Curtis Sittenfeld’s wickedly good short story, “Gender Studies” (“Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps three per cent less hammered than she was down in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, 'You’re pretty'").