September 24, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The newyorker.com version of Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Sofreh” features six images by my favorite New Yorker photographer, William Mebane, including a wonderful portrait of Sofreh’s chef and owner, Nasim Alikhani, that is sure to make my 2018 “Top Ten Photos” list.

2. Great to see illustrator Angie Wang back in the magazine (see “Goings On About Town: Modern Dance” by Brian Seibert). Her portrait of the singer Nellie McKay, in the December 13, 2010 issue, is one of my all-time favorites.

3. Neima Jahromi, in her “Bar Tab: Apothéke,” mentions an alluring drink called the Devil’s Playground (gin, absinthe, local dragon fruit, prickly pear) I’d love to taste.

4. What’s the most interesting line in this week’s issue? Three contenders: (1) “His late-July set for the Australian radio station Triple J’s ‘Mix Up’ series is a sauntering, slow-burn disco workout, highlighted by a reëdited version of the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s eternally goofy ‘Troglodyte (Cave Man)’ ” (Michaelangelo Matos, “Night Life: Tim Sweeney”); (2) In a saffron vesper, mixed with gin, vodka, and Lillet, it’s too intense—like taking a glug from a perfume bottle in your grandmother’s bathroom—but in desserts it’s more subtle, an intoxicating footnote” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Sofreh”); (3) “The picture has time in it, the residue of innumerable side-to-side shifts of scrutiny” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Only See”). And the winner is: Hannah Goldfield for that inspired “like taking a glug from a perfume bottle in your grandmother’s bathroom.”

September 17, 2018 Issue

In this week’s issue, Anna Russell scores another Talk triumph, her third this year. The others are “Caffeinated” (March 19) and “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16). In her new piece, “Reunion,” she accompanies virtuoso cellist Matt Haimovitz on his way to a repair shop to pick up his beloved Matteo, a rare, multimillion-dollar cello, which Haimovitz has owned and played for thirty years. Matteo required fixing because fifteen months earlier, Haimovitz accidentally dropped it while teaching a student. Russell writes, 

He had played it for thirty years, until, fifteen months earlier, while giving a lesson to a promising Canadian student, he dropped it, and the cello’s neck snapped. Since then, the instrument had been undergoing extensive repairs by a team of five luthiers at Reed Yeboah Fine Violins, near Columbus Circle. Now the shop had called to say that Matteo was ready for release.

The piece builds suspense: Will the rebuilt cello sound the same as the original? At first the answer appears to be no:

Haimovitz sat down and played a few hoarse scales, before launching into a jaunty tune, the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. He ended on a long note, and then sat in silence. “Hmm,” he said.

But then a new bow is provided and Haimovitz plays the cello again: 

He leaned in, listening. “Yeah,” he said. He played a mournful tune, Philip Glass’s “Overture,” and came up smiling: “Very cool!” Everyone applauded.

The ending is inspired:

Afterward, flushed, Haimovitz was more circumspect. While playing, he said, he couldn’t help thinking about the old Matteo. “There were moments where it was, like, I’m missing certain things, where’s that?” But then something changed. “Gradually, the vibration felt the same.” He accepted a glass of prosecco. “It’s a process,” he said.

September 10, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Emily Witt’s “What Is New?,” a profile of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The newyorker.com version’s tagline says, “For three decades, the photographer has explored the fragility of the political consensus on which his personal utopia depends.” Maybe that’s true, although, to me, his explorations are as much hedonistic as they are political. The print version’s succinct “The life and art of Wolfgang Tillmans” is preferable. But I do like that “personal utopia.” It conveys Tillmans's cocoon-like cosmopolitan world – the Panorama Bar, his Berlin studio, galleries such as Nairobi’s GoDown Arts Centre – all superbly described by Witt. Here’s her depiction of his studio:

The space occupies an entire floor of a building originally intended as a department store, designed by the Bauhaus architect Max Taut. It has unfinished concrete floors and long rows of windows. Tillmans cultivates a small wilderness of houseplants—sculptural cacti, papyrus, greenish-purple-leafed begonias, delicate ferns—which he grows from cuttings that he gets from friends and collects on his travels. Walls are decorated with maps, exhibition posters, and protest signs, shelves are lined with records and books. Tillmans takes still-lifes, and I was reminded of one composed from half-smoked packs of Gauloises, decks of Post-it notes, and tape dispensers scattered between computer monitors and plants. He encourages a careful selection of visual clutter, which, he said, “keeps it interesting for the assistants and myself.”

Witt also gets at Tillmans’s creative process. My favourite passage is her description of his “casual, and barely noticeable, often in motion” way of taking pictures:

In Berlin, he took photographs of a building under renovation across the street from his studio, and of his friends dancing at Clausen’s fortieth birthday party. In Kenya, I saw Tillmans reach around a driver’s head to take a photograph through the driver’s-side window of people assembling wheelbarrows. After a radio interview at Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, he took a portrait of the host, Khainga O’Okwemba. As we were walking out of the building, he photographed a pink wastebasket in the corner of someone’s office, a spider plant placed underneath the stairs, and a sign declaring the corporation “a corruption-free zone.” In New York, three months later, walking north from the Whitney Museum to the David Zwirner gallery, in Chelsea, where Tillmans has a show this fall, he led me along the West Side Highway. As we walked past construction sites, open-bed trucks loaded with building material, and construction workers sawing amid showers of sparks, he took photographs. I saw the things that I have mentioned, but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph, if it became one at all. “People are so unable to talk about what makes a picture, because technically they’re all the same, they’re all pigment on paper, and we are using the same cameras,” Tillmans told me. “The reason why a photograph I take can be recognized is literally beyond words.”

That “but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph” is excellent, a variation on Garry Winogrand’s inspired “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” 

September 3, 2018 Issue

Simon Schama is a superb word-painter. His “Blue as Can Be,” in this week’s issue, contains a bravura passage that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker writing. Inspired by his tour of Harvard’s Forbes Pigment Collection, he writes,

Gazing at Vincent posed against his poisoned teal, his jacket edged with the bright-blue trim of his imagination, I thought of the laborers behind all those Forbes pigments: the women who rinsed, kneaded, sieved, and dried the pulverized lapis lazuli that Giovanni Bellini used for the Virgin’s ultramarine robe; who stood waist-deep in horse manure, the vapors of which hastened the flaking of lead that produced the “lead white” used by Frans Hals and Rembrandt to capture folds of linen and lace. I thought of van Gogh claiming to recognize more than twenty black pigments in the portraiture of Frans Hals, the best of them created from charred bones. And of the bright pigments made in grim captivity: the North African slaves and the forzado convicts condemned to work in the mercury mines of Almaden so that the Spanish crown could sell cinnabar; the Caribbean slaves who grew and harvested indigo; the inmates of the Amsterdam House of Correction, rasping away at brazilwood.

Schama’s brilliant piece not only celebrates paint; it reminds us that paint is a product, sourced in rocks, roots, oxides, and, yes, even horse manure and charred bones.

August 27, 2018 Issue

Calvin Tomkins, in his absorbing “Painterly Virtues,” a profile of painter Alex Katz, in this week’s issue, says, “Many of Katz’s best paintings capture the light and the atmosphere of a specific time of day—none more hauntingly than his 1982 image of an adolescent girl, alone, in ‘Tracy on the Raft at 7:30.’ ” I don’t know about that. The use of “specific” to describe a Katz is surprising. He’s among the least specific painters I know of. Looking at “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30,” I see an image denuded of detail. Everything in it is massively simplified: the girl in her two-piece red-and-white bathing suit looks like a mannequin; an immense swath of slate green paint represents foliage; there’s a glimpse of sage green sky; the raft is a bar of white and a bar of grey; water is a bar of slate green with sage green splotches indicating reflections of sky. It’s the title that provides the specificity, not the painting. “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30” is an abstractionist’s idea of representation. As Tomkins says, Katz’s work was never realistic. “The faces of his subjects are smooth and unblemished, almost generic, and the background details, when they exist, are minimal.”

Alex Katz, "Tracy on the Raft at 7:30" (1982)

I relish details. Katz’s pared-down style isn’t entirely to my taste. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Tomkins’s piece immensely, especially his account of watching Katz paint:

Moving deliberately, Katz climbed five steps to the top of a creaky wheeled platform and started applying ultramarine to the upper-right section of the canvas, using a housepainter’s six-inch-wide brush. The paint went on easily, in smooth, unhurried strokes, back and forth and diagonally. One of his rules is “no noodling,” which means no fussy brushwork. He came down, moved the platform a few feet to the left, and climbed up again to do the next part. Every now and then he paused to consult the smaller sketch, which he had with him on the platform, or the warmup canvas. He kept going back over the painted areas, to adjust the tone. “I’m not sure the blue is right,” he said, at one point. “We’ll see when the black comes into play.” It took him about half an hour to finish the sky. Occasionally, between trips up and down the steps, he paused to wipe up drops of paint that had fallen beyond the brown paper he’d laid on the studio’s faded but immaculate linoleum floor.

Tomkins’s recent series of artist profiles, including “Somewhere Different” (on Peter Doig), “Troubling Pictures” (on Dana Schutz), and “Into the Unknown” (on Chris Ofili), are among the most pleasurable New Yorker pieces of the last five years. “Painterly Virtues” is a wonderful addition to the collection.