Best of 2017: newyorker.com

Christoph Niemann, "Kosciuszko Bridge" (2017)

Here are my favorite newyorker.com posts of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ethan Iverson, “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City,” August 17, 2017 (“Playing with Coltrane, Ellington’s ‘new-style’ arrangement had a mournful raindrop piano part that was dramatic and distinctive. At the Rainbow Grill, Ellington doesn’t play many of the raindrops but goes all out in rhapsodic style: heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs”).

2. Richard Brody, “Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places Honors Ordinary People on a Heroic Scale,” October 10, 2017 (““One of the movie’s most powerful sequences slips from the aforementioned goat mural to Varda’s own photograph of a dead goat from the start of her career, in 1954. It leads both to her extended recollection of one of her models, the late Guy Bourdin, himself a photographer, whom she commemorates with a visit to his house, another to the site of one of their photographs, and to an extraordinary, calculatedly ephemeral mural of him by JR that’s washed away with the tides”).

3. Christoph Niemann, “Under the Kosciuszko Bridge,” September 20, 2017 (“It was around noon on a Wednesday morning. The atmosphere was peaceful: half-empty parking lots, fences, warehouses, strange factories, strings of unkempt wires, and the odd traffic cone adding a touch of color”).

4. Philip Gefter, “Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan’s California Suburbs,” April 9, 2017 (“Whenever I walked down the boardwalk and entered his house, I was reminded of the light in his pictures; this is where he honed his precision-cut insight”).

5. Charlotte Mendelson, “In Praise of Autumn’s Rotting Beauty,” November 8, 2017 (“And, at this time of year, when even the most ordinary vine leaf is pink-spotted, when a simple Cox’s Orange Pippin apple is striped and freckled as a Paul Klee landscape, it’s extraordinary that I ever make it down the street”).

6. Jessamyn Hatcher, “The Ardent Followers of A Détache,” August 7, 2017 (“A box of knitwear samples had arrived from a factory in Peru, and Kowalska was trying to figure out whether a pair of wool culottes in UPS brown would work on the runway with shrimp-pink alpaca-lined clogs”).

7. Andrea K. Scott, “Calling All Eye-Rollers: An Undeniable David Hockney Show at the Met,” December 10, 2017 (“But for all his interest in optic technologies—he makes digital drawings on iPads, a selection of which concludes the Met’s show—Hockney’s thoughts always encircle painting. How acrylic can be thinned to soak into canvas and mimic the blue translucence of water, or how it can be brushed onto a surface in undulating cream-and-gray strokes to convey the plushness of a shag rug underfoot. Sensations—visual, tactile, emotional—are the heart of his project”).

8. Morgan Meis, “Charles McGee’s Vibrant Art and the Beauty of Detroit,” July 22, 2017 (“Recently, I spent an afternoon with the artist Charles McGee, at his home in Rosedale Park, a neighborhood in northwest Detroit. I was trying to understand the thinking behind his new mural downtown, titled “Unity,” which is a hundred and eighteen feet high and fifty feet wide, and which, as of May 31st, can be found on the side of a thirteen-story building at 28 West Grand River Avenue”).

9. Benjamin Hedin, “The Radical Criticism of William Gass,” December 8, 2017 (“Works of prose, he insisted, were not mirrors; they did not show us life. He called sentences ‘containers of consciousness,’ and the consciousness he meant was not mine, or yours, or even the author’s. It belonged to the book alone”).

10. Richard Brody, “What to Stream this Weekend: Seaside Frolics,” August 18, 2017 (“Shot by shot, line by line, moment by moment, Varda rescues the vitality and the beauty of the incidental, the haphazard, the easily overlooked—because she fills each detail with the ardent energy of her own exquisite sensibility”).