M. F. K. Fisher's "Two Kitchens in Provence"

Illustration from M. F. K. Fisher's "Once a Tramp, Always ..."

This week I’ve been enjoying “Sunday Reading: Culinary Journeys,” a collection of food pieces from the newyorker.com archive. It includes a wonderful essay by M. F. K. Fisher titled “Once a Tramp, Always …” (September 7, 1968), containing, among other delectable morsels, a description of Fisher eating caviar at the Café de la Paix:

I was perhaps twenty-three when I first ate almost enough caviar—not to mention any caviar at all that I can now remember. It was one of the best, brightest days of my whole life with my parents, and lunching in the quiet back room at the Café de la Paix was only a part of the luminous whole. My mother ate fresh foie gras, sternly forbidden to her liver, but she loved the cathedral at Strasbourg enough to risk almost any kind of attack, and this truffled slab was so plainly the best of her lifetime that we all agreed it could do her nothing but good, which it did. My father and I ate caviar, probably Sevruga, with green-black smallish beads and a superb challenge of flavor for the iced grassy vodka we used to cleanse our happy palates. We ate three portions apiece, tacitly knowing it could never happen again that anything would be quite so mysteriously perfect in both time and space. The headwaiter sensed all this, which is, of course, why he was world-known, and the portions got larger, and at our third blissful command he simply put the tin in its ice bowl upon our table. It was a regal gesture, like being tapped on the shoulder with a sword. We bowed, served ourselves exactly as he would have done, grain for grain, and had no need for any more. It was reward enough to sit in the almost empty room, chaste rococo in the slanting June sunlight, with the generous tub of pure delight between us, Mother purring there, the vodka seeping slyly through our veins, and real wood strawberries to come, to make us feel like children again and not near-gods. That was a fine introduction to what I hope is a reasonably long life of such occasional bliss.

My favorite Fisher piece is “Two Kitchens in Provence” (The New Yorker, August 27, 1966; included in her great 1982 collection As They Were). It's an account of her experience in two different Provençal kitchens. Here’s a taste:

The sink was faced with the same red tiles as the old stove and the floor – the rough glazed squares of red and pink and ochre clay that comes from the soil of Provence, the clay that makes the roofs there glow and burn even in the moonlight. They were cool in summer, warm and comforting in winter, and easy to clean, and altogether so pleasing that the prospect of ever having to walk about on another surface was painful to me.

And another: 

The Place Richelme et aux Herbes is small, and shaded by very tall and noble plane trees, which in summer sift down such green light as I have seldom seen. Perhaps some fortunate fish have known it, but for human beings it is rare to float at the bottom of the deeps and yet breathe with rapture the smells of all living things spead out to sell in the pure, filtered moving air.

And another:

The fruits and vegetables of Provence are dying as they grow – literally leaping from the ancient soil, so filled with natural richness and bacilli and fungi that they seem a kind of summing up of whatever they are. A tomato there, for instance, is the essence of all tomatoes, of tomato-ness, the way a fragment of a Greek frieze is not a horse but horse itself.

And this marvelous one-hundred-and-fifty-seven-word sentence:

With the mistral surging and leaning against the windows and the chestnut trees and the red poppies in the meadows, and the spiritual food a part of the whole, we would eat at breakfast canned grapefruit juice, large bowls of café au lait with brown sugar, slices of Dijon gingerbread with sweet butter and Alpine honey; at noontime whole new potatoes boiled in their jackets in a big pot of carrots-onions-sausgage, which we’d eat later, sweet butter, mild cheese, and a bowl of green olives and little radishes; then for supper the vegetable broth, with the sausage cut in thin rings, the whole new carrots and onions drained and tossed with a little butter and chopped parsley and celery tops from the farmer’s garden, and a bowl of three cans mixed together of peaches-pears-pineapple, all with hot, delicious, somewhat charcoalish toast made on one of those flat grill things our parents used at least forty years ago.

Fisher lived and wrote by her senses. She was the quintessential carnal writer. Her “Two Kitchens in Provence” is pure, sensuous pleasure.  

On Realism

I like my realism served straight – no fables, myths, or allegories mixed in. Just give me the thing itself. This thought is triggered by Richard Brody’s observation in this week’s New Yorker regarding Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club Encore: “Coppola can’t avoid a dash of mythology when filming brutal killings.” That, to me, is a damning criticism. I recall seeing The Cotton Club when it originally appeared in 1985. I don’t remember anything about it, except that it was a disappointment. Maybe my response was influenced by Pauline Kael’s review of it. She called it a pastiche (“Coppola apparently believes this pastiche to be an authentic, epic view of the Jazz Age”: The New Yorker, January 7, 1985). Brody’s recent assessment does nothing to spur me to see Cotton Club again.

October 21, 2019 Issue

My favorite sentences in this week’s issue:

1. And just because the cauliflower looks fantastic on Instagram—its cruciferous treetop fried until it appears to have been spray-painted gold, placed upon a pool of tahini dyed electric fuchsia with beet juice, and finished with forest-green chermoula and jewels of dried apricot—doesn’t mean it’s not absolutely delicious. - Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Miss Ada / Golda”

2. Masterpieces dulled by overfamiliarity in an account that had become as rote as a college textbook spring to second lives by being repositioned. - Peter Schjeldahl, “Rehab”

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #1 "Deadhead"

The Grateful Dead (Photo by Robert Altman)

Nick Paumgarten’s "Deadhead" (The New Yorker, November 26, 2012) is a deep, funny, perceptive, stylish consideration of his obsession with the rock band Grateful Dead. A bumper sticker quoted in the piece – “Who are the Grateful Dead, and why do they keep following me?” – could stand as its epigraph. 

Paumgarten approaches his subject from at least five angles:

1. The tapes (“Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal”);

2. The music (“The music, even in the standard verse-chorus stretches, often had a limber, wobbly feel to it that struck many listeners as slovenly but others as sinuous and alive, open to possibility and surprise”);

3. The band (“The musicians were not virtuosos, in the sense of technical skill. But each was unique, peerless, sui generis”);

4. The fans (“There is a silent minority, though, of otherwise unobjectionable aesthetes who, as “Grateful Dead” has become a historical record, rather than a living creative enterprise, have found themselves rekindling a fascination with the band’s recorded legacy. These are the tapeheads, the geeks, the throngs of workaday Phil Schaaps, who approach the band’s body of work with the intensity and the attention to detail that one might bring to birding, baseball, or the Talmud”);

5. The shows (“No two shows were the same, although many were similar. Even on good nights, they might stink it up for a stretch, and on bad ones they could suddenly catch fire—a trapdoor springs open. Then, there were the weird inimitable gigs, the yellow lobsters. Variation was built into the music. They played their parts as if they were inventing them on the spot, and sometimes they were”).

But, most of all, it’s about the tapes. Paumgarten is a tapehead. He writes,

Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or cheese. You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog.

Later in the piece, he says,

So a drug-addled, rehearsal-averse, error-prone band of non-virtuosos perfected a state-of-the-art sound system that created a taping community that distributed a gigantic body of work that often came to sound as sloppy as some of the performances. Each had a character and odor of its own, a terroir. Some combination of the era, the lineup, the set list, the sound system, the recording apparatus, its positioning in the hall, the recorder’s sonic bias, the chain of custody, and, yes, the actual performance would render up a sonic aura that could be unique.

Paumgarten’s obsession takes him places. In the company of the Dead’s archivist, David Lemieux, he visits Warner Music Group’s giant warehouse, near Burbank, where the Dead’s vault of recordings is located (“There was a smell of vinegar—the disintegration of old magnetic audiotape. We wandered the aisles, tunnelling through music”). He interviews the band’s bass guitarist, Phil Lesh (“Lesh walked in alone. He’s a spry seventy-two, thin as a branch of manzanita, with fierce, appraising eyes, a quiet speaking voice, and the poor hearing of a guy who’s spent half his life standing in front of a stack of amps. He got a liver transplant in 1998. He was wearing jeans and an untucked button-down. He ordered beets”). He attends the performance of a Grateful Dead tribute band called Dark Star Orchestra (“It was embarrassing and pathetic, perhaps, to be going to see a tribute band unironically—my wife calls them the Dork Star Orchestra—yet it was a thrill to hear the music played well in a small room”). He seeks out the Dead’s longtime recording engineer, Betty Cantor-Jackson, and finds her working as a sound technician at a Methodist church in San Francisco (“She had on a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and a pair of reading glasses propped on her head. She has long brown hair parted in the middle, a warm melancholic smile, and an air of broad-mindedness tinged with resentment”).

“Deadhead” brims with inspired sentences. (When I read, I underline noteworthy passages. Almost three-quarters of “Deadhead” is underlined.) I think my favorite is “On one shelf, I found a bunch of hand-labelled cassettes arrayed chronologically on a Stroh’s beer flat, as in the back seat of a Deadhead’s Datsun.”

You don't have to be a fan of the Grateful Dead to appreciate "Deadhead." You can read it, as I do, for the sheer pleasure of its writing.    

October 14, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” a review of Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon, points out a cool thing: Betts’s use of redacted court documents to make poetry. Chiasson says,

Several poems here are constructed out of redacted court documents from cases in which people have been held for not paying bail—in essence, for being poor and black. “Redaction is a dialect after prison,” Betts writes, in “Ghazal.” The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours. They’re also rhythmic units, building time and suspense into the otherwise affectless prose. For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences. 

2. James Wood’s “Lifelines,” a review of Jokha Alharthi’s novel Celestial Bodies, contains this wonderful description of the way Alharthi shifts narrative time:

Within all the chapters, the stories float like this, lightly tethered to what the French call récit—the moment in which the story is being told, the narrative present. The result is a beautifully wavering, always mobile set of temporalities, the way starlight seems to flicker when we gaze at distant and nearer celestial bodies.

3. Hannah Goldfield, in her “Tables For Two: Mo’s Original,” posits the existence of something I’ve never thought about before – a “three dimensional flavor”:

The “smoke” ramen, made with both smoked-chicken broth and shreds of smoked pork loin, would be my second choice, and, in the mushroom-broth ramen, the three-dimensional flavor of the sweet smoked cherry tomatoes alone makes that dish worth ordering.

4. I relished Briana Younger’s quasi-abstract description of Bon Iver’s new album:

Its expansive new album, “i,i,” revels in anxious emotional rawness, which is at once muted and augmented by serpentine arrangements that form its gorgeously visceral bedrock. ["Indie Rock"]

I'm voting for Justin Trudeau

Perusing the news at cbc.ca a couple of days ago, I discovered this arresting photo. It shows Justin Trudeau walking my favorite river, the Sylvia Grinnell. When I lived in Iqaluit, I walked that exact same spot many times. Trudeau is the only party leader to visit the North during the current election campaign. 

Recently, Barack Obama said,

I was proud to work with Justin Trudeau as President. He's a hard-working, effective leader who takes on big issues like climate change. The world needs his progressive leadership now, and I hope our neighbors to the north support him for another term.

On October 21, I’m voting for Justin Trudeau. 

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #2 "Life Is Rescues"

Benjamin Lowy's photo illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Life Is Rescues"

Nick Paumgarten has a taste for danger. It’s an ingredient in several of his best pieces, e.g., “The Descent of Man” (downhill racing), “Dangerous Game" (extreme skiing), and “The Manic Mountain” (mountain-climbing). In his great “Life Is Rescues” (November 9, 2015), he rides with a search-and-rescue team on patrol in Iceland’s southern plain. The team is part of Iceland’s renowned Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg – an extensive system of emergency-response volunteers. 

The piece brims with gripping search-and-rescue stories. The opening section is a riveting account of Landsbjörg’s attempt to recover the body of a woman who’d apparently fallen into a “completely unsearchable” pool at the bottom of thirty-metre high waterfall  
(“ ‘Divers went in but couldn’t get close enough. Three or four metres from the waterfall, it was a total washing machine’ ”).

But, for me, the most enjoyable parts of “Life Is Rescues” aren’t the rescues. What I like are the seemingly mundane in-between scenes showing the Landsbjörg crew in non-rescue mode, traveling, camping, kibitzing.

For example,

Rebekka called shotgun. The convoy hit the highway, passing big-box stores and meadows of purple lupine. Within minutes, it pulled into a gas station, where members of another Landsbjörg team were loitering on the grass, and warning approaching motorists against the country’s dangers. The Garðabær crew got out and mingled. Elva went inside for gum, and when it was time to go, Einar, unable to find her, drove the van in circles around the station lot. The week’s first search: they found her after a few laps.

And this:

A while later, as the road cut through foothills of steaming fumaroles, the team came upon a three-car fender bender. They all got out, but no drivers or passengers were hurt, and the police were supposedly on their way. Onward. The next stop, not much farther east, was a KFC in the town of Selfoss, home to the team handballer Þórir Ólafsson and the grave of Bobby Fischer. Afterward, having forgotten to get gas, they had to backtrack a few miles, to a station that provides Landsbjörg vehicles with discount fuel. Now they got caught in traffic heading back through Selfoss. One began to get a sense that this wasn’t SEAL Team 6.

And this:

In the morning, Rebekka summoned everyone to the kitchen tent: “Beikon! Beikon!” The rescue team huddled around a propane wok, chattering and laughing in Icelandic. Palli was the worst snorer, they all agreed. On a pair of folding picnic tables they’d set out cans of Heinz beans and juice boxes, and they drank coffee out of clear plastic cups, on which each team member wrote his name with an indelible marker. The team passed around a box of kleinur—Icelandic doughnuts—and spread butter on slices of white bread. There were scrambled eggs and beikon, donated by Nýherji, the I.T. company Elva worked for. Day One of highland watch is the high life.

Paumgarten is a superb noticer. He notices the “strange salty licorice candies called Dracula Mega” that one of the crew members hands around. He notices the card game called skitakall, “which they said meant ‘shitty man’ ” that some of the members play. And, in my favourite passage in the piece, he notices … bananas:

I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.

That bit about the bananas in the kitchen tent is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s very best. 

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #3 "The Country Restaurant"

Eleanor Davis's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "The Country Restaurant"

Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “The Country Restaurant” (August 29, 2016) is about a wizard chef, Damon Baehrel, who operates his restaurant, called simply Damon Baehrel, in the basement of his woodland home, totally on his own. In Paumgarten’s words, he’s “forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper.” The piece reminds me of John McPhee’s classic “Brigade de Cuisine” (February 19, 1979) with one major difference: McPhee reveres his subject chef, whereas Paumgarten suspects Baehrel of “bogusness.” Baehrel claims to be booked through 2025. He says he derives all his cooking ingredients, except meat, fish, and dairy, from his own twelve acres of land in Earlton, New York, the location of his restaurant. Paumgarten is deeply sceptical of these claims. The action of his piece is his attempt to show Baehrel to be something of a phony. Normally, I’m not a fan of “betrayal” journalism, in which, unbeknownst to the subject, the writer is out to take him or her down. But “The Country Restaurant” is different. Paumgarten’s scepticism is tempered by the pleasure he experiences eating Baehrel’s cooking. The piece contains several wonderful descriptions of Baehrel’s culinary creativity. Here’s a sample:

Over the next several hours, as he brought in course after course, he appeared and disappeared (“I’ll get you some more sap!”) like a character in a resort-hotel farce. But the dishes were a dizzying array of tastes and textures. Oyster mushrooms, palate-cleansing ices (one was made of wild carrot juice, stevia tea syrup, pickled baby maple-leaf powder, violet leaves, and lichen powder), cured turkey leg, mahogany clams, lobster, prawns, swordfish ham, brined pork with goat sausage—all of it subjected to a jumble of verbs and nouns, many of them new to me. Bull-thistle stem, chopped barberry root, ostrich fern. I deployed an index finger to dab up every woodland fleck. The platings were whimsical and inspired. The sprigs and needles that adorned the mid-meal platter of cheese and cured meat brought to mind Saul Steinberg or Paul Klee.

The piece has a piquant tension to it – scepticism v. pleasure. And in the end, it seems pleasure wins out. Paumgarten writes,

Later, back outside, as Baehrel led us around the property and identified plants, my attention wandered, and I thought about my first visit, months before, and a particular dish, the sixth course, which had so engaged my attention that the only surreptitious photo I got of it was of a plate licked clean. It consisted of a small layered cube of wild daylily tuber and wild honey mushrooms—a phyllo of the soil. He’d sliced the tubers thin and soaked the mushrooms in fresh maple sap, then stacked them in more than a dozen fine alternating layers. He then roasted it on a slab of oak wood, dribbled it with grapeseed oil and wild-fennel-frond powder, and added a drizzle of dried milkweed pods cooked in fresh birch sap, which he’d mashed in a stone bowl with some rutabaga starch, and a second drizzle that he called burnt-corn sauce, made from liquefied kernels that he’d scraped off the cob onto a stone, dried, then thinned out with sycamore sap. Somehow I got all this down in the notebook. Beneath it, I’d written, “Sublime.”

And that’s exactly the word I’d choose to describe this extraordinary, delectable piece. 

October 7, 2019 Issue

Dana Goodyear is a superb describer. Remember her description of eating a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts at a secret Los Angeles sushi bar?

We ate the beef, we ate the crab, we ate gumball-size baby peaches, olive green and tasting like a nineteen-forties perfume. There was slippery jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, and a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful. That one—quiver on quiver on quiver—was almost impossible to swallow, but it rewarded you with a briny, primal rush.[“Beastly Appetites”]

That “quiver on quiver on quiver” is inspired!

Goodyear’s absorbing “The Ends of the Earth,” in this week’s issue, a profile of eccentric photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, contains this delightful line:

At Point Mugu, a conical hunk of rock where car commercials are often filmed, Cooper set up on a crumbling asphalt promontory, with one toe of the tripod hovering midair. 

God that’s brilliant! What makes it brilliant is the coupling of so many unlike words (“Point Mugu,” “conical,” “commercials,” “Cooper,” “crumbling,” “toe,” “tripod,” “midair”). And yet the whole delicious thing coheres. It’s the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. I devour it.

Nate Chinen on Brad Mehldau

If you’re a fan of Brad Mehldau’s gorgeous album series The Art of the Trio, as I am, you’ll likely enjoy the chapter in Nate Chinen’s Playing Changes titled “From This Moment On.” Chinen praises Mehldau’s “virtuoso style – a confluence of silvery precision, ambidextrous ease, floating equilibrium, and courtly lyricism.” Note that last element. “Courtly lyricism” is exactly what I most treasure in Mehldau’s playing. It’s an ingredient glaringly absent from the music of most of the other jazz artists Chinen celebrates (e.g., John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer). He appears to favor the jagged, lurching, screeching, churning, dissonant deconstructions of postmillennial jazz. His chapter on Mehldau is a tonic exception. 

September 30, 2019 Issue

My favourite sentence in this week’s New Yorker is the description of the solar lunch in Ian Frazier’s delightful Talk story “Cookout”:

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.

That “Cicadas in the trees did their impersonations of various electrical appliances” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired. I enjoyed it immensely. 

September 23, 2019 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” in this week’s issue, with Melissa Anderson’s “For Interpretation,” in the current Bookforum. Both are reviews of Benjamin Moser’s recently published Sontag: Her Life and Work. Malcolm says Moser’s feelings for Sontag are mixed – “he always seems a little awed as well as irked by her.” She writes,

Midway through the biography, he drops the mask of neutral observer and reveals himself to be—you could almost say comes out as—an intellectual adversary of his subject.

Compare this with Anderson’s view: 

With Sontag, Moser intelligently brings together both public and private, onstage and off-. His scrutiny of her essays, fiction, films, and political activism is clear-eyed, his analysis of her tumultuous affective life sympathetic (if at times slightly less astute). 

Which is it – sympathetic or adversarial? I guess I’ll have to read Moser’s book to find out.

September 16, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Johanna Fateman’s “Goings On About Town” note “Art: ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ ” contains this superb description:

The melancholy air of an oversized replica of a broken laundry basket, by Ester Partegàs, is balanced by the cathedral-like effect of light filtering through holes in its seafoam-green form. 

2. Shauna Lyon, in her excellent “Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana,” writes, 

For some reason, there are peas and corn, too, but also beans and guacamole (thank God), and the chips are nicely crunchy.

That parenthetical “thank God” made me smile. It reminded me of Pauline Kael’s many parenthetical wisecracks, although Lyon’s line isn’t so much a wisecrack as it is an expression of relief. 

3.  I enjoyed Nicholas Schmidle’s Talk story “The Anti-Perfect,” particularly the part in which the street artist Bahia Shelab talks to her empty paint can: “ ‘It’s too early for you,’ she scolded one empty can, its ball bearing rattling around inside it.”

4. Judith Thurman’s Talk piece “Postscript: James Atlas” pays eloquent tribute to biographer James Atlas, who died September 4, 2019. In her piece, Thurman mentions that Atlas studied under “the great Richard Ellmann.” She says of Ellmann:

In 1959, Ellmann had published his life of James Joyce, a masterpiece that redefined literary biography for a new generation. Its message was that in telling the story of a life with scrupulous fidelity to the facts, an erudite reading of the texts, and a novelist’s feeling for the narrative, a writer could aspire to create a work of literature in its own right.

I totally agree. I discovered Ellmann’s work many years ago when I read a paperback of James Joyce’s Dubliners that included Ellmann’s “The Backgrounds of ‘The Dead.’ ” This essay, which appears as Chapter 15 in Ellmann’s James Joyce, is inspired! It traces the various sources Joyce drew upon to compose his great short story “The Dead.” Here’s a sample:

No one can know how Joyce conceived the joining of Gabriel’s final experience with the snow. But his fondness for a background of this kind is also illustrated by his use of the fireplace in “Ivy Day,” of the streetlamps in “Two Gallants,” and of the river in Finnegans Wake. It does not seem that the snow can be death, as so many have said, for it falls on living and dead alike, and for death to fall on the dead is a simple redundancy of which Joyce would not have been guilty. 

5. Jonathan Dee, in his “Dearly Departed,” a review of two new collections of Lafcadio Hearn’s short stories and a novel about Hearn by Monique Truong, coins the term “meta-folk” to describe Hearn’s writing. Reading Dee’s absorbing piece, I recalled another fine New Yorker review of Hearn’s work – Brad Leithauser’s “Alone and Extremely Alone” (April 22, 1991), included in his wonderful 1995 essay collection Penchants & Places. Leithauser says of Hearn’s writings on Japan, “He pared his prose and showed himself increasingly capable of an almost epigrammatic finish.”

September 9, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Dan Piepenbring’s fascinating “The Beautiful One,” an account of his experience collaborating with Prince on his memoir. The time frame of the piece – January 29, 2016 to April 21, 2016 – happens to be the last three months of Prince’s life. Piepenbring didn’t know that, of course. Did Prince? At some level, was Prince conscious he was nearing the end? Had he lost the will to live? Piepenbring’s piece hints he might’ve. It reports, 

One of the people closest to Prince told detectives that, after Prince’s first show in Atlanta, he’d said that he “enjoyed sleeping more these days,” and that maybe it meant he’d done all he was supposed to do on Earth; waking life was “incredibly boring.”

Well, it may have been boring for Prince, but it wasn’t for Piepenbring, and it wasn’t for me, as I vicariously tagged along. The second section describing Piepenbring’s first meeting with Prince is riveting. Here’s a sample:

Behind his sphinxlike features, I could sense, there was an air of skepticism. I tried to calm my nerves by making as much eye contact as possible. Though his face was unlined and his skin glowed, there was a fleeting glassiness in his eyes. We spoke about diction. “Certain words don’t describe me,” he said. White critics bandied about terms that demonstrated a lack of awareness of who he was. “Alchemy” was one. When writers ascribed alchemical qualities to his music, they were ignoring the literal meaning of the word, the dark art of turning base metal into gold. He would never do something like that. He reserved a special disdain for the word “magical.” I’d used some version of it in my statement. “Funk is the opposite of magic,” he said. “Funk is about rules.”

The third section is superb, a description of Piepenbring’s visit to Paisley Park (“In a high-ceilinged room adjacent to the soundstage, Jakissa Taylor Semple, who goes by DJ Kiss, was spinning records on a plinth surrounded by couches and candles. Six of Prince’s aides and bandmates swayed to the music next to a tray of vegan desserts. A mural of black jazz musicians from Prince’s “Rainbow Children” era was on the wall; a large silver rendering of Prince’s glyph was suspended from the ceiling”) and, later in the evening, his attendance, with Prince and his entourage, at a local movie theatre to see Kung Fu Panda 3 (“We headed over in two cars and found a lone attendant in the empty parking lot ready to unlock the door. Prince arrived just after the movie began, slipping into the back row”).

What an adventure! It leads to a trip to Melbourne to join Prince for the first leg of his “Piano & a Microphone” tour in Australia, resulting in this memorable scene:

The car pulled into Crown Towers through a special entrance that snaked below the hotel to a bank of underground elevators. I told Prince that I liked the quiet of hotels at this hour. There was something weirdly appealing about wandering their long carpeted corridors late at night. Prince gave a sly smile. “I’ve done it many times,” he said.

The piece brims with wonderful details: “the plastic diamond the size of a Ring Pop” that Prince’s driver wears; the smell of perfume in Prince’s hair; the “fistful of twenty-dollar bills in the cup holder” of Prince’s black Lincoln MKT; Prince’s sneakers, white platforms with light-up Lucite soles,” flashing red. 

Those sneakers play a part in “The Beautiful One” ’s most beautiful sentence: 

As the credits rolled, he rose without a word, skipping down the stairs and out of the theatre, his sneakers shining laser red in the darkness.

God I wish I’d written that. I devoured this piece – one of the best of 2019, for sure.