Gone to Haarlem

Haarlem Town Hall (Photo © Holland-Cycling.com) 

Lorna and I depart for the Netherlands tomorrow to do some cycling. We’ve rented a place in Haarlem. I’m taking the September 9 New Yorker with me. I’ll post my review when I return, October 7. 

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #4 "The Descent of Man"

Photo by Immo Klink for Nick Paumgarten's "The Descent of Man"

My #4 pick is Paumgarten’s recent masterpiece, “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019), an account of his attendance at the 2019 Hahnenkamm, a World Cup ski event held annually in Kitzbühel, Austria. Did I say “attendance”? “Immersion” would be more accurate. Paumgarten walks the treacherous course, eats with the U.S. team at their training table, rides in the back of the team’s supply truck, visits the old wooden starter shed (“the Hahnenkamm’s emotional epicenter, the germ of the mayhem down in the valley”), skis a substantial part of the race course (“As the pitch fell away, my edges failed to bite. I’d been told to stay off the racing line, and stick to the softer snow on the fringe, but I couldn’t really see any snow, as I understood snow to be”), watches the racers’ training runs, and visits the workshop of Christian Steinbach, “the inventor of the system, now all but universally implemented in competition, of injecting water into the snow.”

On race day, he hikes up the course, outside the fence, to observe the action:

I worked my way up the course, outside the fence. From towers of speakers came the sounds of hair metal from the eighties and an announcer shouting sharply in German. Halfway up the Zielschuss, I passed through the Matthias Mayer fan club (orange parkas) and the Christian Walder fan club (black parkas), before finding myself in the company of the Ski Club St. Martin, enthusiasts from Switzerland, who were passing around a flask. Austrian troops snowplowed down the fringes of the course, to push aside fresh snow, and the public-address system began to play the national anthem, as the Swiss jeered and waved flags. 

Then, after the race, he checks out the street party in town:

Stately town houses and hotels in mint green, terra-cotta, mustard, ochre, and pink. A fourteenth-century Gothic church. Bogner, Moncler, Lacoste, Louis Vuitton. As a day-drinking backdrop, it was almost comically grand. “Sweet Caroline,” not even the Neil Diamond version, seemed to pop up on every block, a Whack-a-Mole of song. Bands of young men in red-and-white Dr. Seuss hats erupted in drinking chants. Swiss men in white smocks marched in formation, swinging giant cowbells called Trychlers—each bell weighing more than forty pounds—with deadpan expressions, holding them at arm’s length in front of their privates.

True to form, he stops in at a bar – the Londoner Pub, “the town’s epicentre of excess”:

Inside, it was hard to move—or breathe, if you were accustomed to smokeless bars. (Kelley Altick, Bryce Bennett’s girlfriend, had told me that morning, “If you go into the Londoner, you’ll have to burn everything you own.”) A clutch of women danced on a platform in one corner. “Get Down on It,” “99 Luftballons,” “Summer of ’69”—the patrons, whose average age seemed about half mine, sang along. I forced my way into an eddy by the bar and ordered a beer.

He attends a high society bash at the Stanglwirt Hotel (“At a certain point, I found myself trapped in a vortex of flashbulbs, loden, jawlines, and boobs”). 

Paumgarten is like a human GoPro; he sees, he records. His pieces are verbal records of his experience. They’re marvels of description, none more so than “The Descent of Man.” 

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #5 "Berlin Nights"

Istvan Banyai's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Berlin Nights"

At its most basic level, Nick Paumgarten’s superb “Berlin Nights” is about getting into a bar. But not just any bar. The one he wants to access is Berghain – “the most famous techno club in the world.” It’s located in an abandoned power plant in what used to be East Berlin. Paumgarten says of it,

Berghain’s renown rests on many attributes: the quality of the music, and of the d.j.s who present it; the power and clarity of the sound system; the eyeball-bending decadence of the weekend parties, which often spill into Monday morning; the stringent and mysterious door policy, and the menacing head doorman, with a tattoo on his face; the majesty and complexity of the interior; and the tolerant and indulgent atmosphere, most infamously in its so-called dark rooms, where patrons, gay and straight, can get it on with friends or strangers in an anonymous murk. For some Berliners, Berghain is an elemental part of their weekly existence, a perfectly pitched and carefully conceived apotheosis of Berlin’s post-Wall club culture. To pilgrims and many expats, it is a temple of techno, a consecrated space, a source of enchantment and wonder.

Note that “stringent and mysterious door policy.” The question of whether Paumgarten will be let in hangs over the piece, giving it a magnetic tinge of narrative tension. “Berlin Nights” is one of the most evocative pieces Paumgarten has ever written. Here’s his description of another Berlin bar, Tresor (this is a few days before he goes to Berghain):

At around 2:30 A.M., I left for Tresor. The walk was about a mile along deserted streets, past giant apartment blocks. It was like a zombie movie set in the outskirts of Helsinki. I tacked toward a pair of giant smokestacks, red lights blinking slow. The original Tresor closed in 2005, and eventually the land was sold to a developer. In 2007, Hegemann and his partners opened a new Tresor in a gigantic decommissioned power plant on Köpenicker Strasse, on the Spree. I had no trouble getting in. Inside, an assault of pounding primal techno lured me down a corridor of smoke and strobes, into a smoky basement, figures appearing and disappearing in it like ships in fog. It didn’t seem crowded, but everyone looked to be in a world of his own, some speedy, others half catatonic. The music was muscular, unrelenting. The d.j. stood behind steel bars, as though in a cell, and pressed buttons on two laptops. I got a beer from a stern bartender and went to stand in front of a wall of old blackened safe-deposit boxes from Wertheim. One could admire this music—the rigor, the noise, the industrial badassness of it—but after a while it began to seem absurd. 

I got a beer from a stern bartender and went to stand in front of a wall of old blackened safe-deposit boxes from Wertheim– oh god, I wish I’d written that! It’s one of the great Paumgartenian sentences – where “great” means specific, surreal, experiential, vivid.

“Berlin Nights” is divided into ten sections. Section 9 is the climax, where we find out if Paumgarten is allowed into Berghain. Paumgarten writes,

On wide, empty streets, I rehearsed my pidgin-Deutsch greeting—“Ich bin auf der Hausliste”—and walked past superstores that had sprung up in recent years on vacant lots. Before long, I fell in with a few other cloaked figures and came upon a line of taxis, then followed a muddy path along a metal grate toward the old power station, an industrial-deco block of stone and concrete. Berghain. Through the windows you could hear the kick drum and see flashing colored lights. The line wasn’t long: a few dozen bundled and murmuring souls. I circumvented it, as instructed, and waited by the entrance while the bouncer, a big square-jawed crewcut man in an overcoat, dealt with some supplicants. He was in intense but quiet conversation, as though about a medical condition, with two young men with the sides of their heads shaved. Turks, perhaps.

Here’s the decision:

“Ich bin . . .” The bouncer disappeared inside. I’d been told that the list was no guarantee. I also knew that they didn’t want me in their club. (“You’re an American,” I’d been told, “and to them that makes you a Puritan.”) After a moment, he came back out with two other bouncers. They looked me up and down, then motioned me in. Another man patted me down. Nearby, Sven Marquardt, the infamously intimidating tattooed bouncer, was talking and laughing with a group. He didn’t look so scary, at least compared with the others. At a ticket window, a man stamped my wrist and said, “See? Easy.”

Paumgarten puts us squarely there, inside Berghain:

Through a door was a big concrete hall. Coat check: the operation was brisk. For a chit, you got a dog tag to wear around your neck, so you wouldn’t lose it. I tried some doors and found them to be locked, and realized that Berghain proper wasn’t open until the following night. Tonight was just Panorama Bar, an evening billed as “Get Perlonized!,” a celebration of the music of Perlon, a small but beloved Berlin techno and house record label. I walked up some side stairs decorated with giant photo portraits of the resident d.j.s, who were all, it seemed, forbiddingly handsome, and, at a small bar half hidden behind a grate, ordered a Club-Mate—an herbal energy drink—into which, as is the custom, I poured a shot of vodka, and then went Carrawaying around.

The thereness of this piece is exquisite! Section 10, the last section, is a beauty. It’s Saturday night (“or really Sunday morning”); Paumgarten is back at Berghain. He writes,

I had a shot of Jägermeister and an espresso and went out onto the dance floor and stood in front of one of the speakers. There were six of them, each about the size of a Trabant. The sound was revelatory, the deep bass tones like a drug. A d.j. named Mathew Jonson, from Vancouver, had taken over the booth for an improvisational turn with two others, who performed under the name Minilogue. The three men hunched over laptops and mixers as though herding tiny animals with their hands. Jonson had a curly mop of hair and a beard, and looked like some wild ape-man of electronica. The music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to it.

The piece ends wonderfully, memorably (with maybe a hint of sexual arousal?). Paumgarten is in Berghain’s Panorama Bar, observing a d.j. named Heidi playing a set of Chicago house and Detroit techno:

After a few hours, Heidi stretched her back and leaned into the climax of her set. Downstairs, the techno—and the crowd—had turned hard. Upstairs, the dingy gray light of another Baltic morning leaked past the edges of the louvred shutters at the windows. Soon the shades would flash open in synch with the music, to astonish the congregation with the insult of daylight.

Those last two sentences are amazing! The whole piece is amazing – a techno-drenched tour de force. 

September 2, 2019 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Calvin Tomkins’ “Surface Matters” and Nick Paumgarten’s “The Measure of Measles.” Tomkins’ piece profiles artist Vija Celmins. It contains a wonderful description of how Celmins makes her night-sky paintings:

Her layered painting process has become increasingly complex. After getting the initial image on canvas, she covers each star with a tiny drop of liquid cement, and when that hardens she paints the image again. She may repeat this process twenty times or more, sanding the entire surface, before she lays down the next layer of ivory black mixed with burnt umber, ultramarine blue, and sometimes a touch of white. When she decides that the background is sufficiently developed, she scrapes out the cement and, using the smallest sable brush, fills the little holes with white paint mixed with cerulean blue, or sometimes raw umber or yellow ochre. “I ruined a lot of paintings by sanding,” she told me. “It scared me. But it’s like building a relationship. You do it again and again, and you sense that the thing is beginning to have a form that looks strong. And all the time you’re thinking, and making decisions. The making, the devotion to making, is what gives it an emotional quality.”

Paumgarten’s “The Measure of Measles” reports on New York State's “largest measles outbreak since 1992.” Paumgarten says, “Because of the success of the anti-vaccination movement, measles cases have since turned up in twenty-nine other states, but New York has had by far the most cases: 1,046 as of last week, out of a national total of 1,203.” 

Paumgarten mocks the anti-vaxxers’ irrationalism. He writes,

You could say that many of the parents who send their children to Waldorf private schools and choose not to vaccinate them—for example, at Green Meadow, a Waldorf school whose immunization rate was so low that Rockland County officials banned unvaccinated students from attending—are declaring an allegiance to an ethos, or even bowing to peer pressure. They’re going with a different flow, even if it’s the one that says measles can be prevented by breast milk and bone broth. The Hollywood Reporter found that the rates of vaccination in some of the private schools in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills—Marianne Williamson country—are roughly the same as in Chad and South Sudan. Last year, at the Westside Waldorf School, in the Pacific Palisades, about four in ten kindergartners were fully vaccinated. At the Garden of Angels School, in Santa Monica, about half were. “We perceive each growing child as a precious cluster of unique treasure,” the school’s Web site reads. “Our Garden Ideology aspires to accurately mirror an environment where students are limited by nothing and liberated by everything.” Nothing says liberation like pertussis.

He quotes New York State commissioner of health, Howard Zucker:

“It’s shocking how strong the anti-vax movement is,” Zucker said. “What surprises me is the really educated people who are passionately against vaccinations. I see this as part of a larger war against science-based reality. We need to study vaccine hesitancy as a disease.” 

Paumgarten’s portrait of Zucker is a gem. He describes him as “an odd combination of child and old man, the latent proportion of the one increasing to account for the preponderance of the actual other. Colleagues have attributed his knack for pediatrics to his seeing the world through a child’s eyes.” 

My favorite part of “The Measure of Measles” is Paumgarten’s account of driving with Zucker to the Catskills to check in on some kids’ summer camps. This, for me, is the “action” of the piece. It includes this delightful detail: 

He [Zucker] had a brand-new red Volvo wagon, which he, a longtime car nut, considered a regrettable concession to fatherhood. He’d brought scones for the ride. He feigned nonchalance as we christened the interior with crumbs.

That last sentence made me smile. Reading it, I visualized Zucker and Paumgarten in the car eating scones as they talked (or, in Zucker’s case, “speed-mumbled”) about the medical response to the anti-vaxxers. It’s a vivid image. Paumgarten has a sharp eye for such things.  

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #6 "Useless Beauty"

Photo by Robert Polidori for Nick Paumgarten's "Useless Beauty"

As good as Nick Paumgarten is at portraying people, he’s even better at describing places. One of his most evocative pieces is “Useless Beauty” (August 31, 2009), an exploration of Governors Island. What is Governors Island and where’s it located? In the first of three memorable descriptions, Paumgarten tells us:

Seen from the air, Governors Island has the shape of an ice-cream scoop atop a kiddie-cup cone. It is now a hundred and seventy-two acres. Its southern half (the cone) is landfill, detritus from the excavation of the Lexington Avenue subway a century ago. The island is one-fifth the size of Central Park, and more than twenty times the size of Bryant Park. It is less than a half mile from Manhattan, and even closer to Brooklyn, yet a world apart.

Yet a world apart– that’s the key. Governors Island is a “time capsule.” Here’s Paumgarten’s second description:

The fortunate few who were permitted on the island after the Coast Guard left—park rangers, ferry crews, architects, city dignitaries and their guests—discovered a time capsule, with the beguiling anachronisms of Havana and the eerie emptiness of Chernobyl, minus the tyranny and the radiation. Reports came back of spectacular views, shady lanes, weird buildings, ocean breezes, and a wealth of oddball archeology. The island’s history is long on miscellanea. Benjamin Franklin’s nephew oversaw the design of a fort. John Peter Zenger, the first American champion of freedom of the press, had, as a German immigrant, been quarantined here. Wilbur Wright took off and landed here for the first airplane flight over water in the U.S. The Smothers Brothers were born in the island’s hospital. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held a summit in 1988 in the Admiral’s House. The Burger King was the only one in America that served beer.

But Paumgarten isn’t done. He casts a third description of the Island – this one emphasizing the view:

I’ve since seen the island in foul and fine weather, in fog (you could be in Nova Scotia) and in bluebird Indian summer (you are nowhere but New York). Riding or walking along the promenade, you notice the wind and the tide, and the smell of salt and exhaust. Waves splash up against the seawall, the current rips by, and the water looks swimmable. (It isn’t, really.) The ships are close, creating bizarre telescopic vistas: a gargantuan cruise ship docked across Buttermilk Channel, or the Staten Island Ferry passing by. WaveRunners, police boats, fireboats, rod-studded outboards, garbage barges, tugs, container ships, sailboats, water taxis, yachts: the bustle offers the eternal five-year-old a live-action immersion in a Richard Scarry book. Koch likes to boast that this is the best place in New York from which to see the Statue of Liberty’s face. The view out the Narrows from the south end of the island, Picnic Point (a name selected in a contest on GIPEC’s blog), is unlike any other: the Verrazano Bridge, the loading cranes, the freighters at mooring. It is the wateriest prospect in town. 

Paumgarten’s mention of the extraordinary view (“unlike any other”) leads to what, for me, is the piece’s most striking passage:

One morning last fall, to give me an idea of the view you’d get from the hills, Koch led me up to the roof of one of the condemned structures—No. 877, the Cunningham Apartment Building, named for Earl Cunningham, a Coast Guard boatswain’s mate who died in 1936 in an attempt to rescue fishermen stuck in the ice during a snowstorm in Charlevoix, Michigan. (The building was also the location for some of the drug-factory-raid scenes in “American Gangster.”) We walked up a dingy, moldy stairwell, twelve flights, and stepped out onto a tar-and-gravel roof. The prospect was virtually San Franciscan: three hundred and sixty degrees of New York Harbor—Hoboken, Bayonne, Fort Wadsworth, the Narrows, Red Hook, the Heights, the East River bridges, downtown Manhattan. The skyline, from this perspective, looked as though it could belong to some other American city: San Antonio’s, or Charlotte’s. It was, in other words, an entirely unfamiliar and thrilling view.

That image of Paumgarten and Leslie Koch (President of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation) ascending the twelve flights of the condemned building’s “dingy, moldy stairwell” and stepping out onto the “tar-and-gravel roof” with its thrilling three hundred and sixty-degree view of New York Harbor is one of my favorites in all of Paumgarten’s writing. I think what makes it so delightful is its specificity, right down to who the old building was named for (Earl Cunningham), why it was named for him (in recognition of his heroic effort “to rescue fishermen stuck in the ice during a snowstorm in Charlevoix, Michigan”), and the intriguing additional detail tucked in parentheses that the building was also the location for some of the drug-factory-raid scenes in American Gangster. 

Paumgarten deals in particulars. That’s one of the reasons he’s able to evoke a sense of place so effectively. “Useless Beauty” exemplifies his approach perfectly.

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #7 "The Ring and the Bar"

Bob Bozic (Photo by Steve Pyke for Nick Paumgarten's "The Ring and the Bar")

Nick Paumgarten is an excellent profile-writer. He’s written memorable pieces on Billy Joel (“Thirty-Three Hit Wonder”), Elvis Costello (“Brilliant Mistakes”), Mickey Drexler (“The Merchant”), St. Vincent (“Singer of Secrets”), and Yvon Chouinard (“Wild Man”), to name five that come quickly to mind. My favorite is “The Ring and the Bar” (January 30, 2012), a profile of bartender and former heavyweight boxer Bob Bozic. Here’s Paumgarten’s description of Bozic:

Bozic, who is sixty-one, is a stocky six feet two, with bearish arms and shoulders and the belly of a man who likes a beer at lunch. He shaves clean what hair there’d still be over his ears; he’s got a melon. His features manage to seem both doughy and sharp—with his arched eyebrows and his piercing eyes, he looks a little like Lenin after a back-alley beating. He speaks in the sinusy muffle of an old prizefighter and has a bulldog laugh, all grunts and snorts. He often taps your arm or shoulder when he’s telling a story, to make sure you’re listening. He tears up easily, thinking about all that he has been through and the people who have put up with him.

That passage makes me smile every time I read it, especially the part about “with his arched eyebrows and his piercing eyes, he looks a little like Lenin after a back-alley beating.”

Bozic is a great talker. Paumgarten says,

Bozic isn’t the first boxer or barkeep to talk a lot; everyone’s got a story, pal. But his, hopping from Belgrade to Afghanistan, from memories of a vagrant stretch on the streets of Toronto to a bout against Larry Holmes at Madison Square Garden and a possible claim on a Serbian spa and a coal mine in Kosovo, tests the confines of the form. He tells his tales without bravado or bombast. He often punctuates them with a shrug, as if they were nothing to him.

Note that “everyone’s got a story, pal.” It’s Paumgarten momentarily shifting into indirect free style, talking like a bartender. It’s nothing major; just a neat bit of technique that Paumgarten uses to roughen the texture of his prose. 

Another of his techniques is use of the first-person perspective. “The Ring and the Bar” contains several examples of it, including this beauty:  

Bozic at sixty-one, shadowboxing in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the Church Street Boxing Gym, in lower Manhattan, on a recent weekday morning. He jabbed at his reflection, exhaling sharply, like an air brake. He had me hold the heavy bag for a while as he pounded it. I pressed my head into the bag, to absorb the blows. “This is when you feel who you are,” he said.

I think that is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker passages. The use of a sentence fragment to set the scene; the vivid figuration (“exhaling sharply, like an air brake”); the indelible image of Paumgarten pressing his head into the punching bag as Bozic pounds it; the meaning that Bozic extracts from the experience (“ ‘This is when you feel who you are’ ”) – the whole thing is total perfection!

“The Ring and the Bar” tells the story of Bozic’s life: his family’s roots in Serbia; their emigration to Canada; Bozic’s birth in Windsor, Ontario; the family splitting up; his mother giving Bozic up to a foster family; “Bozic, at sixteen, living hand-to-mouth on the streets of Toronto”; Bozic training as a boxer at the Lansdowne Training Club, meeting, among others, Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo; Bozic winning the Canadian national amateur heavyweight championship in 1969; Bozic fighting Larry Holmes at Madison Square Gardens in 1973. Paumgarten writes,

No one gave Bozic much of a chance; at the weigh-in, he overheard Duke Stefano, the matchmaker, assure Don King, the promoter, that Bozic wouldn’t give Holmes any trouble. Holmes was already known for his jab. Bozic, at the outset, thought he’d test it: “You know how a batter takes the first pitch? Well, I took the first punch. Eight seconds in. It broke my nose. I thought, This is another level. This is gonna be quite an evening.” Two rounds later, a right knocked out several of Bozic’s teeth. Holmes beat him badly, but Bozic stayed upright and went the distance: “There is something almost cleansing about getting a whooping in front of a big crowd and yet not giving in. Just give in to your master, walk right into that buzz saw.”

“The Ring and the Bar” begins in the Fanelli Café, where Bozic works, and ends in the Pembroke Room, at the Lowell Hotel, where Paumgarten joins Bozic and his twenty-year-old daughter, Vesna, for tea. The ending subtly hints that Vesna may have inherited her father’s gift for storytelling.

What a pleasure to revisit this great piece!

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #8 "The Mannahatta Project"

New Yorker illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "The Mannahatta Project"

Nick Paumgarten’s wonderful “The Mannahatta Project” (October 1, 2007) is about ecologist Eric Sanderson’s attempt to map Manhattan’s natural landscape as it looked before it was settled by European colonists and began “its accelerated transformation into a manipulated forest of asphalt and steel.” Paumgarten writes,

The Mannahatta Project aspires to minute verisimilitude, down to the varieties of moss, and will facilitate a kind of naturalist’s version of George-Washington-slept-here. Eventually, Sanderson would like to put up plaques around town calling attention to this or that bygone pond or dune, or even to post re-creations of 1609 vistas on the city’s next generation of bus shelters. A visitor to Times Square, standing alongside the Naked Cowboy on the traffic island at Forty-fifth Street and Broadway, might be encouraged to see a convergence, under what is now the Marriott Marquis, of two freshwater creeks, one flowing out of a marsh beneath the headquarters of the New York Post, and the other from under the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School. The creeks were dammed by beavers to create a red-maple swamp, frequented by wood ducks and elk. The idea of all this, of course, is to get us to appreciate the remnants of the natural world, even in this degraded place, and then to work harder to preserve them, here and everywhere else. Still, although Sanderson might not admit it, such visions also have a way of helping us to savor our particular range of degradations. We’ve made a fine mess.

The piece is divided into six sections.  Section 1 tells about Henry Hudson and his crew sailing their ship, the Half Moon, up the Hudson River in 1609. 

Section 2 describes Manhattan’s 1609 ecology (“Its temperate seasons, dense hardwood forests, ample freshwater, great diversity of habitats—fifty-four ‘ecological communities’ in all, according to Sanderson, from pitch-pine barrens to peatlands to eelgrass meadows—made it an unusually abundant corner of the continent”). 

Section 3 tells about Paumgarten’s visit with Sanderson in the Wildlife Conservation Society’s offices, which occupy a cluster of trailers in a parking lot of the Bronx Zoo (“His trailer was a paradise of field guides and cool maps”). It also introduces Sanderson’s associate, Mark Boyer, “a digital-photography entrepreneur,” who translates Sanderson’s data into 3-D pictures. 

Section 4 describes a number of Manhattan locations in terms of what used to exist there circa 1609 (“Broadway, parts of which were formerly Bloomingdale Road, had followed the course of an old Lenape trail up the spine of the island. The Lenape had likely followed the game; Broadway belonged to cougar and deer”). 

Section 5 tells about a field trip that Paumgarten, Sanderson and Boyer took, hunting for traces of 1609 Manhattan (“We took Dyckman Street to the Harlem River Drive and drove down to East 106th Street, where another F.D.R. exit follows the course of a vanished tidal creek. This one, called Pension’s Creek, ran west from the East River all the way past Fifth Avenue to the current shore of the Harlem Meer, in Central Park, before turning north”).

Section 6 continues the field trip (“We stood on the north side of Forty-seventh, looking across the street at the row of jewelry shops—the Futurama Diamond Exchange—and tried to picture a cool, shady forest”).

My favorite part is section 5, containing this superb passage:

Nowadays, McGowan’s Pass is defended by Knish Nosh, a snack bar next to the Conservatory Garden. On the day we visited, it was manned by a young Russian who claimed to have pumpkin bagels (he meant muffins). The patrons, that morning, consisted of a group of summer campers engaged in a scavenger hunt, and a fleet of hospital patients in wheelchairs, attended by a few nurses. A man drifted by on a bicycle, with “Brick House” playing from a boom box. As tempting as it was to rue the absence of otters, egrets, and acres upon acres of spartina grass waving in the breeze, there was something beguiling about this assemblage in the Park on a summer weekday morning.

Even as he searches for a vanished tidal creek, Paumgarten notes the beguiling, vibrant overlay of city life. “The Mannahatta Project” is a brilliant reminder that the nature we inhabit is never just first or second nature, but rather a complex mingling of the two.  

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #9 "Swarm"

Tom Bachtell's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Swarm"

Nick Paumgarten has written dozens of “Talk of the Town” stories, several of them masterpieces of the genre, including “Little Helper” (“Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day”); “Request Line” (“Still, voices rose from the audience, barking requests, and the shushing kicked up, like a sudden breeze”); “Up and Away” (“It was a gorgeous, seemingly low-particle evening. You could clearly see both Manhattan and Philadelphia, and miles of farmland, forest, and sprawl”); and “Bong Show” (One object widely admired by the other lampworkers was a pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass”). 

My favorite is “Swarm” (January 24, 2011), a visit with the Dewan brothers in New Rochelle, inventors of an electronic synthesizer called the Swarmatron. Paumgarten writes, “The Swarmatron, in the center of the room, had a pitch ribbon and a swarm ribbon, and an array of unlabelled knobs and switches, which Brian began manipulating in a way that produced something that your own first cousin once removed might recognize as music.” 

But the part I love about “Swarm” isn’t about the Swarmatron; it’s about the bassoon. Paumgarten begins his piece with a consideration of how the bassoon got its name:

It is hard to think of a musical instrument that doesn’t have a great name. Tuba, oboe, clarinet. The word “bassoon” comes from Pleury de Basseau, a vice-admiral in the French Royal Navy who was stationed aboard a paddle frigate off the German colony of Kamerun. Basseau ordered his crew to hollow out the ship’s bowsprit and take turns playing Schubert lieder on it in a flowery Francophonic style that he hoped would annoy the German spies hidden in nearby shrimp boats. The Germans called this sound schwachsinnige Musik, but the vice-admiral’s name for it—“bassoon”—was the one that stuck.

All very interesting. But then, in the next paragraph, Paumgarten pulls a surprise:

Actually, no. “Bassoon” is merely “basso” (Italian for “bass”) with an augmentative suffix. The names of most instruments arise out of the sounds they produce or the feature that produces those sounds. So what about the Swarmatron? 

“Swarm” ’s transition (with reverse pivot) from bassoon to Swarmatron is one of Paumgarten’s coolest moves. The whole piece is cool – one of Paumgarten’s best.