Best of 2019: Talk

João Fazenda's illustration for Adam Gopnik's "If You Listen"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” stories of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Adam Gopnik, “If You Listen,” August 19, 2019 (“The vessels, placed on pedestals of different heights, are configured out of musical order, to emphasize their range and varied provenances. Beer walked among them. ‘This boat sings a G,’ he said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat vase. ‘This earthenware temple by William Wyman, from 1977, that’s a beautiful F, and this very early portrait bust by Gaston Lachaise is our A-flat’ ”).

2. Mark Singer, “Man vs. Mouse,” January 7, 2019 (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”).

3. Paige Williams, “Boxes,” July 1, 2019 (“Schiffman plucked a Nikon from her backpack and started shooting—moody light at the bedroom windows, a bouquet of bodega roses”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Cookout,” September 30, 2019 (“Cicadas in the trees did their impersonations of various electrical appliances, hydrangea bushes in the yard burst into even more elaborate bloom, and the incoming sunlight, at a rate of a thousand watts per square metre, transformed into culinary heat, seemed to hum”).

5. Rachel Felder, “Avocado Al Dente,” October 28, 2019 (“Miguel Gonzalez wakes up just after 4 A. M. on most weekdays with one thing on his mind: avocados”).

6. Nicholas Schmidle, “The Anti-Perfect,” September 16, 2019 (“ ‘It’s too early for you,’ she scolded one empty can, its ball bearing rattling around inside it”).

7. Patricia Marx, “Viewing Party,” April 1, 2019 (“There, among the chintz furniture and cucumber sandwiches that could have come over on the Mayflower, was ‘1076 Madison,’ an exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge’s paintings depicting the Campbell building. The art works were displayed on easels that on other occasions had supported wreaths, photo collages, and, in one case, a deceased’s cherished dartboard”).

8. Mark Singer, “ ‘The Anti-“Godot,' " April 15, 2019 ("Lean and nimble, he has dark brown hair that aimed in various opposing directions, a horseshoe mustache, a graying goatee, and scruffy extra-in-a-saloon-scene cheeks”).

9. Ben McGrath, “Boom,” January 28, 2019 (“The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown”).

10. Patricia Marx, “New Shade,” January 14, 2019 (“It was a clear morning—the sky was a shade of blue that resembled Benjamin Moore’s Icing on the Cake”).

Best of 2019: Illustrations

Sergiy Maidukov's illustration for Alex Ross's "The Concerto Challenge"

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2019:

1. Sergiy Maidukov’s illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (see above).

2. Sergiy Maidukov's illustration for Hua Hsu's "Dance About Dance" (December 9, 2019)

3. Nancy Liang’s illustration for James Marcus’s “A Dark Ride” (October 29, 2019)

4. Liam Hopkins’ illustration for Steve Smith’s “Garden Music” (August 19, 2019)

5. Max Dalton’s illustration for Andrea K. Scott’s “Fall Preview” (August 26, 2019).

6. Leo Espinosa’s illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “Unlike Any Other” (June 24, 2019).

7. Aude Van Ryn's illustration for Andrea K. Scott's "At the Galleries" (November 4, 2019)

8. Keith Negley’s illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “The Symptoms” (November 11, 2019).

9. Daniel Salmieri's illustration for Mark Binelli's "Arrivederci, Little Italy" (December 8, 2019)

10. João Fazenda’s illustration for Adam Gopnik’s “If You Listen” (August 19, 2019).

Best of 2019: GOAT

Jessica Pettway's photo for Shauna Lyon's "Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl's “Art: T. C. Cannon,” September 9, 2019 ("One of his last paintings, 'Two Guns Arikara' (1978), blazes with special promise: a stern man wearing a mixture of traditional and contemporary garb sits holding a pair of long-barrelled pistols. The picture’s uniformly intense hues—purple, red-orange, burnt orange, lilac, terre verte, sienna, cerulean, golden yellow, violet, black, and white—generate a visual cadenza, violently serene").

2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Barca,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearl-shaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared”).

3. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: ‘Maya Lin,’ ” January 14, 2019 (“As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded”). 

4. Richard Brody’s “Movies: Under the Silver Lake,” April 29, 2019 (“A zine traces long-ago Hollywood scandals; a friend finds the secrets of the world on the back of a cereal box; clips and names of classic movies and video games hint at vast secret connections; a popular band fronts a cult; and a reclusive old songwriter claims to be behind all modern culture and its labyrinthine conspiracies”).

5. Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Heidi Bucher,” May 20, 2019 (“Among the nine stunning pieces in this exhibition, which have yellowed and become more scab-like with age, is a drooping mold of one of that building’s windows, its slightly bowed shutters suggesting the wings of an enormous insect”).

6. Briana Younger’s “Night Life: Ari Lennox,” June 3, 2019 (“Her love-struck tales are consistently gorgeous, but it's when she weaves in the mundane details—a new apartment, watching ‘Adventure Time,’ shopping at Target—that the silken muscle of her voice makes itself most evident, a reminder that there is soul to be found in even the most prosaic life events, that just having breath can be worth singing about”).

7. Michaelangelo Matos’ “Night Life: Wata Igarashi,” May 20, 2019 (“As synth patterns shape-shift in slow motion and crisp percussion slumps into slurping timbres, his mixes find the sounds' edges melting into one another”).

8. Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: The Fulton,” July 29, 2019 (“Two words: chocolate mousse. The tiny tower of decadence, so elaborately layered with peanut caramel, chocolate crunch, passion-fruit sorbet, and vanilla ice cream that it appears almost indecent, represents the restaurant in a few ostentatiously luscious bites: a routine dessert spruced up into something needlessly sumptuous, but also unimpeachably satisfying”).

9. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: Aki Sasamoto,” April 22, 2019 (“Blown-glass tumblers the color of whiskey spin on a trio of round barroom tables, powered by gusts of air from H.V.A.C. tubes, whose nozzles suggest empty bottles of booze. The mood matches the circular logic of an alcohol-addled mind. Screening in another room is video of the artist performing a cryptic ritual; it was commissioned by Triple Canopy, a vital downtown nonprofit as uncategorizable as Sasamoto’s art. The enticing setup: a forest, a doughnut, an ant”).

10. Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana,” September 16, 2019 [“For some reason, there are peas and corn, too, but also beans and guacamole (thank God), and the chips are nicely crunchy”].

2019 Year in Review

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Unlike Any Other"

Three words sum up this year’s New Yorker: Paumgarten, Paumgarten, and Paumgarten. He had quite a run, producing three superb reporting pieces (“The Descent of Man,” “Unlike Any Other,” “The Message of Measles”) and a wonderful “Personal History” essay (“The Symptoms”). Here’s a sample from “The Descent of Man”:

My own “Holy shit, I’m in Kitzbühel” moment came on a Tuesday in January, earlier this year, after I stepped off the train at the base of the Hahnenkamm gondola. It was dusk. The town was still relatively quiet, in the absence of the eighty or so thousand fans who were expected to invade that weekend for the annual series of Alpine races and debauches. I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour. I had been watching the race on television for decades, whenever and wherever I could find it, with a heart-in-throat intensity of devotion that embarrasses me, and this last hellbent stretch was always the emotional climax, the site of either life-threatening crackups or ecstatic finishes, amid the drunken, swaying throngs. And here it was, the empty stage, the star of the show. The course was marked off with blue food dye, which, in flat light, helps the skiers see the contours in the snow. Viewed in person, from below, the traverse looked narrower and steeper than it did on TV. From the angle of the course workers’ stance, as they tended to the slope in crampons, you’d have guessed that they were ice climbing. I walked up on the snow to the finish area. If the Streif was an idol, I was close enough to ask for an autograph.

  

Another writer who had a great year: Alexandra Schwartz. Her “Bounty Hunters,” an account of her experience working at the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, is one of my favorites. In addition, she wrote a marvellous profile of Miriam Toews ("Benefit of the Doubt") and several excellent critical pieces, including “Painted Love,” on the life of Picasso’s muse, Françoise Gilot, and “ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing.” Here’s an excerpt from her brilliant “Bounty Hunters”:

You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart.

The best piece of the year, for me, was Anne Boyer’s essay on cancer treatment, “The Undying.” What an extraordinary work! It fuses unmistakable, idiosyncratic, personal style with radical, original observation. Here’s a sample:

We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. We are supposed to be feisty, sexy, snarky women, or girls, or ladies, or whatever. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch.

A special shout-out to Peter Schjeldahl – the magazine’s pre-eminent pleasure-giver, and one of my heroes. In addition to publishing one of this year’s most delectable books (Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light), he produced yet another run of marvellous exhibition reviews, including “Enigma Variations” (on Dana Schutz and Richard Deacon), “Modernism for All” (on Joan Miró), “Exposed” (on Garry Winogrand and Jeff Wall), “Not Waving” (on the Whitney Biennial), “Of Nature” (on Thomas Cole and Brice Marden), “Skin Deep” (on Pierre-Auguste Renoir), and “Heavy” (on Richard Serra) – all suffused with his love of textures, shapes, lines, light, and color. And then his terrific personal essay, “77 Sunset Me,” appeared earlier this month and blew me away. Here’s a taste:

I’m not in physical pain as I write, though I tire quickly and nap often. I have been receiving, every three weeks, an immunotherapy infusion—not chemo, and not a cure—which, at the outset, the doctor said had a thirty-five-per-cent chance of slowing the disease. (At those odds in Vegas, you’re broke within an hour, but in baseball you’re a cinch for the Hall of Fame.) A recent scan shows marked improvement, likely extending my prospect of survival. But I have to wonder if, whatever betides, I can stay upbeat in spirit. A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.

My highlight reel could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen! 

December 30, 2019 Issue

This week, in The New Yorker, I was delighted to find a reprint of John Updike’s great “Lost Art,” which originally appeared in the magazine’s December 15, 1997 issue, and is included in Updike’s 1999 essay collection More Matter under the title “Cartoon Magic.” It’s about Updike’s love of cartoons and his “brief cartooning heyday” at the Harvard Lampoon. It shows a deep pleasure taken in studying various cartoonists’ work and describing their styles. For example:

V. T. Hamlin, for instance, who drew the syndicated strip “Alley Oop,” had a deliberate, gridlike style of cross-hatching that, mixed with the peculiar inverted proportions of his cavemen’s legs and arms, signalled a special solidity in the progress of his dinosaur-studded panels. Hamlin, like Alex Raymond of “Flash Gordon” and Harold Foster of “Prince Valiant” and Milton Caniff of “Terry and the Pirates” and then “Steve Canyon,” seemed to be operating well within his artistic capacities, as opposed to Chester Gould of “Dick Tracy” and Harold Gray of “Little Orphan Annie,” who I felt were drawing at the very limit of their skills, with a cozy, wooden consistency; Gould, in his doubts that he had made this or that detail clear, would sometimes enclose an enlargement within a sharply outlined balloon, with an arrow and a label saying “2-Way Wrist Radio” or “Secret Compartment for Cyanide.” Fontaine Fox of “Toonerville Folks” and Percy Crosby of “Skippy,” on the other hand, worked with a certain inky looseness, a touch of impatience in their confident pen lines. This inky ease attained opulence in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner,” the lines of which experienced a voluptuous thickening when limning the curves of Daisy Mae or Moonbeam McSwine. Capp and Caniff and Will Eisner, who drew the bloody, vertiginous “Spirit” comic books, were virtuosos; closer to a child’s heart, and containing the essence of cartoon reality, were the strips of finite artistic means, like “Mutt and Jeff” and “Bringing Up Father” (Jiggs and Maggie)—holdovers from an earlier, vaudevillian era—and adventure strips whose implausibility was framed in an earnest stiffness of execution, such as “The Phantom” and “Mandrake the Magician.” Strikingly minimal, in that pre-“Peanuts” era, was Crockett Johnson’s “Barnaby,” whose characters appeared in invariable profile and whose talk balloons were lettered not by hand but by mechanical typesetting.

My favorite sentence in “Lost Art” is this surreal beauty:

Li’l Abner’s hair was always seen with the parting toward the viewer, and Mickey Mouse’s circular ears were never seen on edge, and Downwind, in Zack Mosley’s “Smilin’ Jack,” was always shown with face averted, and Smokey Stover, in Bill Holman’s “Krazy Kat”-ish slapstick, kept saying “Foo” apropos of nothing and drove vehicles that were endlessly shedding their nuts and bolts.

You don’t have to be crazy about old cartoons to appreciate “Lost Art.” You can read it, as I do, for the sheer pleasure of its description.   

December 23, 2019 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his terrific “77 Sunset Me,” in this week’s issue, confronts the reality that he may soon die of lung cancer. He describes receiving the diagnosis:

I got the preliminary word from my doctor by phone while driving alone upstate from the city to join my wife, Brooke, at our country place. After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land. At mile eighty-one of the New York State Thruway, the gray silhouettes of the Catskills come into view, perfectly framed and proportioned. How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? I thought of Thomas Cole’s paintings, from another angle, of those very old, worn mountains, brooding on something until the extinction of matter.

Facing the prospect of his own extinction, Schjeldahl doesn’t brood on his fate. He appears to accept it. He says,

Oddly, or not, I find myself thinking about death less than I used to. I thought that I might be kidding myself in my explorations of the subject while my life stretched ahead of me to an invisible horizon. But no. The thinking cut channels in which I now slip along. They involve acceptance. Why me? Why not me? In point of fact, me. 

He doesn’t brood, but he is reflective. His piece is a series of journal-like notations, some of which are brilliantly aphoristic:

Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. 

Wisecracks in Chandler are existential rescues of imperilled self-possession.

My problem was not a lack of connection with the collective unconscious. I was a fucking poet. My problem was getting out of bed in the morning.

Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.

Educating yourself in public is painful, but the lessons stick.

Writers can be only so conscientious about truth before becoming paralyzed.

The aesthetic isn’t bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption.

I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?

We wear as many such badges as there are dead people we admire. 

I regret my lack of the church and its gift of community. My ego is too fat to squeeze through the door.

Disbelieving is toilsome. It can be a pleasure for adolescent brains with energy to spare, but hanging on to it later saps and rigidifies. 

Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.

Nicotine stimulates and relaxes. Beat that. 

Bury me. Nix to cremation. I want an address that people know they can visit even if they never do. 

Originality is overrated, except by people who have it. 

Today, the little bit of death in me has sat up in bed and is pulling on its socks.

Memory is a liar.

Meaning is a scrap among other scraps, though stickier. 

Quit now? Sure, and have the rest of my life be a tragicomedy of nicotine withdrawal.

A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.

One regrettable thing about death that Schjeldahl doesn’t mention is the ceasing of his own special brand of magic. As John Updike says in his great poem “Perfection Wasted,” “The whole act. / Who will do it again? That’s it: no one; / imitators and descendants aren’t the same.” But wait! Hold the sorrow! He’s still with us! He’s still writing! Let’s give a huzzah for his spirited, wisecracking, hard-edged “77 Sunset Me.”  

Lane v. Brody: Do They Ever Agree?

Zohar Lazar's illustration for Anthony Lane's "No Laughing Matter"

Have Anthony Lane and Richard Brody ever agreed on a movie? I ask this after reading their reviews of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Lane sees Scorsese’s movie as a potential sitcom (“Don’t tell the Bufalinos, but deep inside this movie lurks a sitcom”). Brody calls it “a sociopolitical horror story.” This certainly isn’t the first time they’ve disagreed. Regarding James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari, Lane describes the racing in it as “surreal as well as punchy”; Brody calls it “sanitized.”  Lane on Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood: a declaration of Tarantino’s love for “cars and songs.” Brody on the same movie: “obscenely regressive.” Lane on Yesterday: “spry and engaging, and the jokes rain down.” Brody: “soft-soap particulars and flimsy dramatics.” Lane on Roma: “persuasive in its beauty”; Brody: “little more than the righteous affirmation of good intentions.” Lane on La La Land: “it looks so delicious that I genuinely couldn’t decide whether to watch it or lick it”; Brody: “strenuous emptiness, forced whimsy, and programmed emotion.” Lane on Trainwreck: has “the softness of a regular rom-com”; Brody: “a robust comedy, ranging from genial to zingy to uproarious.” On and on it goes: Lane zigs; Brody zags. 

So I ask again: is there a movie they both agree on? As a matter of fact, there is; they both hate Todd Phillip’s Joker. Lane calls it “a product” (“Here’s the deal. Joker is not a great leap forward, or a deep dive into our collective unconscious, let alone a work of art. It’s a product”). Brody says it’s a “viewing experience of rare, numbing emptiness.” Congratulations, Joker, you managed to unite Lane and Brody – no small feat.