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.