May 28, 2018 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is Thomas Mallon’s “Shots in the Dark,” a review of Christopher Bonanos’s Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous. Mallon approaches Weegee from various angles – voyeur, exhibitionist, street photographer, artist. He calls him a “night-crawling creature of newsprint.” He notes that Weegee staged some of his pictures. But he also says,

There were plenty of occasions when circumstances arranged themselves without need of manipulation—ones Weegee recognized for their unlikely, organic beauty, and took pains to capture before they could disappear from his viewfinder. “Extra! Weegee!” reproduces his photograph of a church fire on West 122nd Street, where the water arcs made by several fire hoses appear to be flying buttresses, permanent parts of the structure they’ve just come to save. In a nighttime picture, a thin man near a lamppost looks like one of Giacometti’s elongated sculptures. A shot through the open doors of a paddy wagon reveals two men on opposite sides of the van’s spare tire, covering their faces with hats; the result is a comic mystery and a sort of Mickey Mouse silhouette, in which their hats look like ears.

My favorite passage in Mallon’s piece describes the transformative power of Weegee’s art:

With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees. For a split second, the immigrant scrapper could be God, or, at least, Lucifer.

“Shots in the Dark” is an excellent appreciation of Weegee’s gritty, grisly aesthetic. I enjoyed it immensely. 

May 21, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s New Yorker:

1. Jane Freilicher’s “The Painting Table” is one of this blog’s touchstones (see here). This week’s “Goings On About Town: Art” contains a wonderful description of two of her other paintings: 

“Early New York Evening,” made in 1954, frames a vista of reddish-brown apartment buildings between a vase of irises in the foreground and four distant smokestacks in a violet sky. In an interior painted the same year, the threshold between a living room and a bedroom becomes an adventure of yellow highlights and lavender shadows. 

2. Richard Brody’s capsule review of Howard Hawks’s Fig Leaves (1926) is excellent, featuring this inspired observation: “Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that viewers might swear they hear the intertitles spoken.”

3. Adam Gopnik is a natural-born first-person writer. His best pieces are all first-person, e.g., “Cool Runnings” (The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2016), “Bread and Women” (The New Yorker, November 4, 2013), and “New York Local” (The New Yorker, September 3 & 10, 2007). His “Bottled Dreams,” in this week’s issue, has a great subject –a vintner’s quest to create a truly American wine. But, for me, the piece is spoiled by its detached third-person perspective. Where is Gopnik’s inimitable “I” –  the “I,” in “Cool Runnings,” who attends a football match (“Later that day, I crowded, together with what seemed like the entire remaining population of Reykjavík, into Ingólfstorg square to watch the Iceland-Austria match”); the “I,” in “Bread and Women,” who bakes bread with his mother (“I was taken by the plasticity of every sort of dough, its way of being pliable to your touch and then springy—first merging into your hands and then stretching and resisting, oddly alive, as though it had a mind of its own, the collective intelligence of all those little bugs”), the “I” in “New York Local,” who visits a community garden in the Bronx called The Garden of Happiness (“I had come to the Garden of Happiness not only to see a New York City chicken committee in operation but also to get myself a chicken”)? In these pieces, Gopnik is personally present. In “Bottled Dreams,” his voice is there on the page, but that’s all. When Grahm gets in his Citroën and drives out to look at the Popelouchum property, is Gopnik with him? It’s unclear. Is Gopnik present for the wine-tasting session in Bonny Doon’s back office? Again, it’s unclear. Is Gopnik with Grahm when he returns, for the first time in a quarter century, to his original vineyard in Bonny Doon? I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s implicit in the details Gopnik uses to describe these scenes that he was personally present. Nevertheless, I miss the verification of his authenticating “I.” 

4. Anthony Lane, in his review of a new movie version of Chekhov’s The Seagull, says that the film’s director, Michael Mayer, and its screenwriter, Stephen Karam, “have pruned, or purged, the drama until it runs just over an hour and a half, and, in so doing, mislaid its nervous languor.” This criticism is mild compared to Pauline Kael’s evisceration of Sidney Lumet’s 1968 The Seagull: see “Filmed Theatre” (The New Yorker, January 11, 1969; included in Kael’s classic 1970 collection Going Steady). Kael called Lumet’s version a “disaster” (“The movie version of Chekhov’s The Seagull is a disaster, not because it is a filmed play but because it is a badly filmed play”). She says, “Technically, the movie is slovenly.” But apparently even a slovenly production of The Seagull is worth watching. Kael puts it this way: “The Seagull is a terrible movie, but it is a movie of The Seagull.”

May 14, 2018 Issue

One of the defining characteristics of great lyric poetry is spontaneity. It has the look of casual notation, of immediate expression – the equivalent of an artist’s sketch or a jazz musician’s improvisation or a street photographer’s quick snapshot (think of Allen Ginsberg’s “Manhattan May Day Midnight” or John Updike’s “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting” or Elizabeth Bishop’s “Santarém”).

The poems in this week’s New Yorker may have taken years to write, but they appear spontaneous – that’s one of the things I love about them. Sharon Olds’s “For You” starts out with morning coffee (“In the morning, when I’m pouring the hot milk / into the coffee …”) and ends unexpectedly, miraculously in elegy (“Trayvon Martin, song was / invented for you, art was made / for you, painting, writing, was yours, / our youngest, our most precious …”). 

Christian Wiman’s “Eating Grapes Downward” enacts the impromptu notebook-style writing mentioned in its opening sentence (“Every morning without thinking I open / my notebook and see if something / might have grown in me during the night”), doodles along for three stanzas, musing on such things as a “cousin’s cartoon mustache like Rollie Fingers” and a “miniature cow” named Mona, and then, at the beginning of the final stanza, seemingly going nowhere, offhandedly asks “What else?,” and, in reply, suddenly conjures this amazing passage:

Oh, and Mona, who seemed less cow
than concept, really, half animal, half irony,
sticking her rubbable muzzle
through the fence like a Labrador.
We stayed a long while petting the impossibility of her.
We gave her—if you can believe it—grapes
left over from our lunch,
and when they were gone, and we were almost,
her moo blued the air like a sorrow
so absurd it left nothing left of us
but laughter.

That “blued the air like a sorrow / so absurd” is inspired!

“For You” and “Eating Grapes Downward” brim with spontaneity. I enjoyed them immensely.

T. J. Clark on Cézanne’s Portraits

      Paul Cézanne, Woman with a Cafetière (c.1895)  

T. J. Clark’s dazzling “Relentless Intimacy” (London Review of Books (January 25, 2018), attempts to light a fuse under traditional Cézanne criticism. The piece begins thrillingly:

Look first at Woman with a Cafetière, who presides over the next to last room of the Cézanne Portraits show, staring down even the saturnine Ambroise Vollard. Then meet the gaze of Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress, infinitely courageous in her alarming throne-room, oppressed – or is it enlivened? – by a glorious Vermeer curtain, a bucking dado, a chairback like a coffin lid, exploding fire tongs, white lightning in the grate, a painting – or is it a mirror? – perched on the chimney breast. It matters that both portraits are of women, and I shall come to that. But it matters just as much that still, more than a century after they were painted, these images so effortlessly keep their distance, resisting our understanding, refusing (as the philosophers say) to ‘come under a description’. In particular they strike me as putting the strange word ‘expression’ to death.

The orthodox line on Cézanne is that his portraits are “inexpressive,” that he’s “detached” from his subjects. For example, Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent “High Anxiety” (The New Yorker, April 9, 2018), a review of “Cézanne: Portraits” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., writes,

Once, at the Metropolitan Museum, I counted dozens of people clumped in front of several paintings by van Gogh while one or two or none paid a whole room of Cézannes cursory attention as others walked through with passing glances. I empathized. A glance at his work warns of slow going ahead. That’s because he didn’t paint for the pleasure of other people but for his own, always elusive satisfaction. I’m used to feeling lonely when looking at his work—as humanly unconsidered as Hortense, who, through hours and days and years, displays not the slightest flicker of happiness. 

Note that “as humanly unconsidered as Hortense.” The reference is to Hortense Fiquet (Madame Cézanne), the subject of at least twenty-eight Cézanne portraits. 

Clark rejects this view. He says, “Cézanne is not in the least ‘detached’ from his sitters, he is relentlessly intimate with them.” Cézanne’s intimacy, he argues, is in his details (“Avert your gaze from Madame’s mummified torso and attend to the earth-quaking room instead”), e.g., the spoon in Woman with a Cafetière:

The spoon in Woman with a Cafetière is upright with its own identity: it has a halo of shadow to keep the rest of reality from contaminating it. The woman’s hands (or her hair with its geological parting) have the same weight and distinctiveness as the spoon. And yet spoon, hair and hands are fitted like cogs or levers into the pictures naïve, elaborate of the world-all-at-once: the table so eager to be there for us, pushing its way through the picture plane; the flowers tumbling down the wall, changing colour as they hit the floor; the long central seam of the woman’s dress splitting open under her fist.

This is magnificent critical writing, and what makes it magnificent is its concentration on detail. Another strand of Clark’s argument – his theory that “the famous ‘inexpressiveness’ of his [Cézanne’s] sitters has to do (not wholly, but indubitably) with their situation in class society” – is less persuasive. But his argument from particulars is exhilarating. “Relentless Intimacy” is one of this year’s finest critical essays.  

May 7, 2018 Issue

I relish photography writing. This week’s issue contains a beauty by Zadie Smith. Titled “Through the Portal,” it considers Deana Lawson’s transfixing portraits of “diaspora gods.” Smith writes,

Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa. Typically, she photographs her subjects semi-nude or naked, and in cramped domestic spaces, yet they rarely look either vulnerable or confined. (“When I’m going out to make work,” Lawson has said, “usually I’m choosing people that come from a lower- or working-class situation. Like, I’m choosing people around the neighborhood.”) Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.

Deana Lawson, "Baby Sleep" (2009)

Smith refers to a number of Lawson’s photos, including  “Sharon” (2007), “Otisha” (2013), “Living Room” (2015), “Kingdom Come” (2014), “Mama Goma” (2014), “Ashanti” (2011), “Nicole” (2016), “Wanda and Daughters” (2009), “Portal” (2017), “Cowboys” (2014), “Signs” (2016), “The Garden” (2015), and “Oath” (2013). Of  “Living Room,” she writes,

In “Living Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless, while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission, that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the viewer who ends up feeling naked.

Deana Lawson, "Living Room" (2015)

My favourite passage in “Through the Portal” interprets Lawson’s use of curtains:

Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable, thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration. There is “kinship in free fall.”

“Through the Portal” expands my appreciation of Deana Lawson’s extraordinary photos. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: “Through the Portal” is the second New Yorker piece on Deana Lawson’s photography. The first is Doreen St. Félix’s “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love” (“Photo Booth,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2018), a review of Lawson’s recent exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, in New York City. It, too, is a superb piece of descriptive analysis. Here, for example, is St. Félix’s description of Lawson’s great “Seagulls in Kitchen” (2017):

Looking around her new show, I kept returning to “Seagulls in Kitchen.” During her travels last year, Lawson encountered a man and a woman in Charleston, who were “basically strangers,” the gallerist at Sikkema Jenkins told me. They agreed to have Lawson shoot them as lovers. The title refers to the wall decoration, the kind of sweet ornament that, were the tableau real, would almost certainly be accompanied by a story. The couple’s prom pose, the man plaiting his hands over her soft torso. Tattoos on oiled brown skin are reminders of prior lives; food on the shelf of the present one. Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so. 

That last sentence is inspired!

Eggleston v. Shore

William Eggleston, "Memphis" (1971-74)

Who’s better – William Eggleston or Stephen Shore? Now is the perfect time to compare them. Both currently have shows in Manhattan – “William Eggleston: Los Alamos,” at the Metropolitan Museum; “Stephen Shore,” at the Museum of Modern Art. Both are in their seventies (Eggleston was born in 1939; Shore in 1947). Both photograph in color. Both have an eye for what Peter Schjeldahl calls “epiphanies in the every day” (“Local Color,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008). 

Eggleston and Shore are often associated with each other. Geoff Dyer, in his The Ongoing Moment (2005), says, “It’s quite possible that some of my favourite Shores were taken by Eggleston, and vice versa.” Schjeldahl, in his “Looking Easy” (The New Yorker, December 8, 2017), writes, 

The closest to Shore, in a cohort that includes Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, and Richard Misrach, is his friend William Eggleston, the raffish Southern aristocrat who has made pictures unbeatably intense and iconic: epiphanies triggered by the hues and textures of a stranded tricycle, say, or of a faded billboard in a scrubby field.

Let’s compare some of their photos. Here’s Eggleston’s luminous Memphis (1965):

What strikes me about this picture is the ravishing rose gold light on the young man’s arms, face, and ducktail-combed hair. For me, light is one of photography’s defining essences. Eggleston’s Memphis glows. Is there anything in Shore’s oeuvre that matches its intensity? I don’t think so, unless it’s his gorgeous Graig Nettles, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, March 1, 1978: 

The mesh of the batting cage makes the sky seem tent-like. The natural Florida light is beautiful. But it lacks the burnished quality of Eggleston’s Memphis. 

Eggleston and Shore are both master colorists. Consider Eggleston’s Memphis (1971-74):

This is one of my favorite Egglestons. What draws me to it is the rich lipstick red of the car’s upholstery. Is there an equivalent in Shore’s work? No, but the candy apple red in his 2^nd Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, July 9, 1973 has its own attraction:

I love the neon reflection on the engine bonnet of the car in the foreground – one of those everyday epiphanies that are a hallmark of Shore’s photos. 

Schjeldahl distinguishes between these two greats on the basis of receptivity. In his “Looking Easy,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2017, he writes, 

While similarly alert to offbeat sublimities, Shore is a New Yorker more receptive than marauding in attitude. I fancy that Eggleston is the cavalier Mephistopheles of American color photography, and Shore the discreet angel Gabriel.

It’s an interesting distinction. I relish the idea of photographs as acts of “alertness to offbeat sublimities.” D. H. Lawrence said, “The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention and ‘discovers’ a new world within the known world” (Preface to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun, 1936). I think this is true of photography, too. 

Schjeldahl appears to prefer Shore over Eggleston. He calls him “my favorite American photographer of the past half century.” I’m partial to Eggleston, based on his superb capture of light and color. Implicit in the work of both is an intense effort of attention. 

April 30, 2018 Issue

This week’s “Food & Drink,” featuring Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Miznon” and Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: Anyway Café,” brims with deliciousness. Of Miznon’s pita, Goldfield writes, 

It seems almost unfair to compare Miznon pita to any other pita. Miznon pita is plush, Miznon pita is pillowy—I would happily take a nap on a stack of Miznon pita. It’s as stretchy and pliant as Neapolitan pizza dough, its surface similarly taut and golden brown, glistening ever so slightly with oil. It cradles whatever you stuff it with as supportively as a hammock, efficiently absorbing the flavors of herb-flecked ground-lamb kebab, roasted mushrooms, or spicy fish stew.

Mmm, so good! As is Lavin’s ravishing description of Anyway Café’s vodka Martinis: 

Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim. 

These two pieces satisfy to the point of sensuousness. I devoured them.