Best of 2020: Photos

Photo by Joseph Michael Lopez, for "April 15, 2020"

Here are my favorite New Yorker photographs of 2020:

1. Joseph Michael Lopez’s photo for “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (see above).

2. Naila Ruechel’s photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: EMP To Go” (November 23, 2020).

3. Dina Litovsky’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine” (March 18, 2020).

4. Paolo Pellegrin’s photo for Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020).

5. Collier Schorr’s photo for Amanda Petrusich’s “Opened Up” (October 19, 2020).

6. Andre D. Wagner’s photo for “April 15, 2020” (May 4, 2020).

7. Caroline Tompkins’ photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Table for Two: Aquavit” (January 27, 2020).

8. Christaan Felber’s photo for “This Week” (April 27, 2020).

9. Christopher Payne’s photo for his “Vital Vessels” (December 7, 2020).

10. Heami Lee’s photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Edy’s Grocer” (December 7, 2020).

Best of 2020: Talk of the Town

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Michael Shulman's "Ruins"

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ian Frazier’s “Still Open,” April 6, 2020 (“By ten-fifteen, the line stretched to Twenty-eighth Street, around the corner, and down the long block between Ninth Avenue and Eighth. A soup-kitchen employee in a jacket of high-visibility green was walking along the line and urging those waiting to maintain spaces of six feet between one another. They complied, reluctantly, but somehow the line kept re-compressing itself”). 

2. Ian Frazier’s “Bringing in the Comfort,” April 13, 2020 (“The Navy hospital ship Comfort went under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge at about nine-twenty last Monday morning. Trucks on the bridge blew long blasts of welcome on their horns. The ship appeared suddenly in the overcast day as if out of nowhere; the medical-clinic white of her hull and superstructure blended in with the sea and the sky”).

3. Ian Frazier’s “Biting Back,” October 19, 2020 (“From a distance, a vertical view would include the table, covered with a white cloth; a Martini in a Martini glass (yellow dab of lemon peel); a pack of Marlboros; a brushed-chrome Zippo lighter; the seated artist, deliberately unshaved, dressed in a white T-shirt and a gray knit hoodie (unzipped; purchased at a Salvation Army store); the awning of the gallery, which says ‘American Artist, Scott LoBaido’; and, atop all that, on the roof, an unrelated billboard for a personal-injury law firm, with the words ‘Bite Back’ in big letters and a picture of a snarling dog in a spiked collar”).

4. Ian Frazier’s “Ballistic,” November 23, 2020 [“The names of some of the different windows in subway cars are: full-picture windows (the main windows in the middle), half-picture windows (the same as full-picture, except smaller, to leave room for the vents), door windows (oval, self-explanatory), vent windows (long and narrow, ditto), and motorman’s-vision windows.]

5. Nick Paumgarten’s “Old Drug,” March 2, 2020 (“Midtown Manhattan, 5:30 a.m., Huey Lewis riding shotgun”).

6. Nick Paumgarten’s “Pointillism,” March 9, 2020 (“On Central Park West, he pointed out a painted railing and said, “That, I wouldn’t worry about. You’ve got ultraviolet light, wind.” But on the C train he wrapped an elbow around a pole and said, “I look at the world differently than you do. I see surfaces in a pointillistic ¬fashion”).

7. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Lady from Shanghai,” March 9, 2020 (“Outside Wu’s Wonton King, Yan struggled to light some sparklers she had just bought. An elderly passerby stopped to cup his hands around Yan’s, shielding the flame from the elements. ‘He says it’s raining and it’s windy,’ Yan said, when he’d left. ‘There’s a metaphor in here somewhere.’ She produced a party popper from a bag and began to twist. Tiny hundred-dollar bills shot into the air. Yan squealed and took a photo. Then she headed off, shedding miniature Benjamins as she walked. Maybe there was a metaphor in there, too”).

8. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Together Again,” November 23, 2020 (“As an homage to Lawrence’s distinctive palette, she wore a royal-blue jacket and a new blue checked scarf. ‘I usually like earth tones,’ she said. ‘So it was, as they say, bashert’ ”).

9. Michael Shulman’s “Ruins,” May 25, 2020 (“ ‘So you are really into philosophy, just not Greek philosophy,’ Coogan said, not quite impressed. ‘You’re into pistachio philosophy.’ Brydon, pleased with his progress, displayed his bowl of nuts”).

10. Naomi Fry’s “Dread by the Pool,” November 23, 2020 [“Stepping over a trail of ants rushing along a pavement (‘Do you know that some ants can live for up to thirty years? That always makes me feel guilty about killing them’), David headed toward a pond”].

Best of 2020: Illustrations

Illustration by Leo Espinosa, from Bill Buford's "Good Bread"

 

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2020:

1. Leo Espinosa’s illustration for Bill Buford’s “Good Bread,” April 13, 2020 (see above).

2. Andy Friedman’s illustrations for his “The Return of Kathleen Edwards” (newyorker.com, August 8, 2020).

3. Barry Blitt’s “Is It Time to Change the President?” (November 16, 2020).

4. Sergiy Maidukov’s illustration for Sarah Larson’s “Podcast Dept.” (November 23, 2020).

5. Bill Bragg’s illustration for Caleb Crain’s “City Limits” (April 27, 2020).

6. Cristiana Couceiro’s illustration for Steve Smith’s “New Music” (January 27, 2020).

7. Ilya Milstein’s illustration for Adam Gopnik’s “Black, No Sugar” (April 27, 2020).

8. João Fazenda’s illustration for Michael Schulman’s “Ruins” (May 25, 2020).

9. Leonardo Santamaria’s illustration for Rachel Syme’s “On Television: The Queen’s Gambit” (November 30, 2020).

10. Byron Eggenshwiler’s illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Overseas Operations” (June 29, 2020).

Best of 2020: GOAT

Illustration by Juan Bernabeu, from Brian Seibert's "Argentine Dance"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” notes of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Brian Seibert’s “Argentine Dance,” February 10, 2020 (“Heads and torsos ride haughtily over legs that buck, twist, and beat out rhythms, often ostentatiously on the rims of boots. Drums slung over shoulders sometimes take up the beat, as do boleadoras, weights attached to ropes that are thrown to ensnare cattle on the run. These tools, swung like lassos or jump ropes or yo-yos, are visually spectacular musical instruments, whipping the air and striking the ground. Imagine a stage full of those whirring implements, some held between teeth, and you get a sense of why the roars of this troupe of twelve sexy, sweaty guys, directed by the French choreographer Gilles Brinas, are usually answered by whoops”).

 2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: HK Food Court,” February 3, 2020 (“A friendly cashier with a tattoo on her neck of a lipstick kiss carefully sealed a patterned bowl (for which I paid a five-dollar deposit) with plastic wrap to insure that it stayed hot. That proved unnecessary; it was many minutes before the dish cooled to less than scalding—which didn’t stop me from immediately plunging my flimsy spoon into the oily depths to find silky fillets of fish, tender cabbage, and chunks of cucumber, Sichuan peppercorns clinging to all, staining my rice with neon drips”).

3. Richard Brody’s “Movies: Kiss Me Deadly,” November 23, 2020 (“He crashes blindly through his case—a forbidden quest for a mysterious object of surprising importance—and leaves a trail of collateral damage, both human and cultural. Along the way, the film offers verse by Christina Rossetti, a recording of Caruso, Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, souped-up cars (with a man crushed under one), a whiff of narcotics, a primordial answering machine, bloody street fights, and nuclear catastrophe. The actors’ idiosyncratic voices, wrapped around such chrome-plated phrases as ‘the great whatsit’ and ‘va-va-voom,’ are as hauntingly musical as Aldrich’s images. In his vision of ambient terror, the apocalyptic nightmares of the Cold War ring in everyone’s heads, like an alarm that can’t be shut off”).

4. Anthony Lane’s “Movies: Lake Placid,” November 30, 2020 (“The actors seem to be having slightly too good a time, but thank goodness for the monster of the deep, who rolls up his sleeves and gets down to business; this may be no more than a squib of a B movie, and it remains about as frightening as a fish tank, but, if you have any poetry in your soul, you will surely thrill to a film that ends with a crocodile sticking its head in a helicopter”).

5. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Art: Sam Gilliam,” November 30, 2020 (“Bevelled edges flirt with object-ness, but, as always with Gilliam, paint wins”).

6. Jay Ruttenberg’s “Music: Seth Bogart,” October 5, 2020 (“The album’s lodestar is its lone cover, the feminist anthem ‘Oh Bondage! Up Yours!’ The original X-Ray Spex song scorched the earth; Bogart reads it as a downbeat postmortem in the mold of the Jesus and Mary Chain—a smutty kitsch princeling singing of sadomasochism and finding emptiness”).

7. Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Henni Alftan,” October 19, 2020 (“In ‘Hands Behind His Back,’ the artist is far more attentive to an expanse of black sweater, in which careful zigzagging lines of raised paint closely mimic the texture of knitwear, than to the peach-gold hands themselves”).

8. Michaelangelo Matos’s “Music: William Basinski: ‘Lamentations,’ ” November 23, 2020  (“His new album, ‘Lamentations,’ hangs in the air like a cobweb, reflecting new layers at every angle”).

9. Andrea K. Scott’s “At the Gallery,” March 2, 2020 ("Picture Alexander Calder weaving dream catchers at Stonehenge. The results might resemble the superbly weird sculptures of Michelle Segre. The native New Yorker’s colorful concatenations begin with yarn, metal, paint, wire, and thread, and extend to ingredients that are so sorcerous they might as well include eye of newt").

10. Rachel Syme’s “On Television: The Queen’s Gambit,” November 30, 2020 (“What makes 'The Queen’s Gambit' so satisfying comes in large measure from the character Taylor-Joy brings to the screen: a charming, elegant weirdo who delivers her lines with a cool, wintergreen snap, and never really reacts the way one might expect”).

2020 in Review

Illustration by Min Heo, from newyorker.com

Let’s begin with a drink. I’ll have one of those Root of All Beers that Hannah Goldfield mentions in her “Tables For Two: The HiHi Room” (January 20, 2020). It “mixes a licorice-and-sarsaparilla witch’s brew with rye, vermouth, and honey.” Take a little sip. Ah, that's fucking wicked! Just what the doctor ordered. 

Okay, down to business. What to make of this year’s run of New Yorkers? Well, there was a hell of lot written about Trump. I skipped most of it. There was a hell of a lot written about the pandemic. I read every word. Best pandemic piece? No contest: “April 15, 2020” (May 4, 2020) – a brilliant mosaic portrait of twenty-four hours in the life of New York City as it struggles to deal with the pandemic, written by twenty-five New Yorker reporters and illustrated (in the online version) by seventeen photographers. Sample: 

As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room.

  

But great as it is, “April 15, 2020” is not this year’s most memorable piece. That honour belongs to Ben Taub’s extraordinary “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020). An account of an exploration team that builds an amazing one-of-a-kind submersible, named the Limiting Factor, and pilots it to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trenches, it brims with superb description and arresting details (e.g., “Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves”). In my review of it, when it first appeared, I said, 

Reading “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” I was in awe of the way Taub put me right there with Vescovo inside the Limiting Factor as he explores the bottom of, first, the Puerto Rico Trench, then the South Sandwich Trench, then the Java Trench, then the Mariana Trench, and, finally, Molloy Hole, in the Arctic. It’s an epic journey. I enjoyed it immensely.

Another piece I enjoyed enormously is Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story “A for Alone” (November 2, 2020), about an artist named Irene who’s doing a project on the so-called Billy Graham/Mike Pence rule that if you’re a married man, you don’t spend time alone with another woman. The project involves inviting men to lunch, asking them to fill out a handwritten questionnaire, and taking a Polaroid photo of them. This project flares into an affair with one of Irene’s interview subjects, a geologist named Jack (“Man No. 6”). 

I devoured this story. It intrigued me; it excited me; and I found myself mirroring off the character Jack. Does the story prove the rule's validity? Maybe, but it also shows it to be, as Jack says, “so depressingly heteronormative.” The piece abounds with wonderful lines. I think my favorite is “She wants his questionnaire to impart some central truth, to give her closure, and, while it’s nice, the niceness pales in comparison with what he said moments after filling it out—‘It’s you specifically’—or the many ardent declarations of devotion in the months that followed.” Sittenfeld’s return to Jack’s questionnaire after the affair suddenly ends is inspired. The whole story is inspired – one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

Other highlights: Bill Buford’s “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020); Alex Ross’s “The Bristlecones Speak” (January 20, 2020); Burkhard Bilger’s “Building the Impossible” (November 30, 2020) – all crazy good! But that’s enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I relished most. Thank you, New Yorker, for helping me get through this insane year. I propose a toast. Here’s to you, New Yorker, you gorgeous creature. I love you. 

December 28, 2020 Issue

In the last New Yorker of this uniquely trying year, I’m seeking pleasure. I think I’ve found it – a delicious sentence in Peter Schjeldahl’s “What Are Artists For?” Reviewing MOMA’s “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918-1939,” he says,

Art happens when someone wants to do it. Advertising and propaganda start from given ends and work backward to means. There’s just enough genuine art in the exhibition to hone this point. The small Malevich, of cockeyed red and black squares on white, elates. Then there’s my favorite work, which I’d like to steal: a version of the sublimely sophisticated Liubov Popova’s “Production Clothing for Actor No. 7” (1922). A black-caped, robotic figure extends a square red sleeve like a smuggled Suprematist banner. Personal flair and practical use merge.

That “The small Malevich, of cockeyed red and black squares on white, elates” is superb. Even more sublime is Schjeldahl’s description of the Popova: “A black-caped, robotic figure extends a square red sleeve like a smuggled Suprematist banner.” Schjeldahl has been writing inspired lines like that all year. He’s The New Yorker’s supreme pleasure-giver. 

Interesting Emendations: Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

Here are two versions of the same passage:

1. 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. 

2. We are supposed to be legible as patients and illegible as our actual selves while going to work and taking care of others as our actual selves now with the extra work of the false heroics of legibility as a disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery, and smiling after, too, bald and radiant and funny and productively exposed.

The first version is from Anne Boyer’s great personal essay “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019); the second is from her Pulitzer-prize-winning book of the same name. Which is more effective? To me, it’s no contest. The New Yorker version is much clearer.

The same applies to other passages in Boyer’s book; the New Yorker versions appear superior. Here are three more examples:

New Yorker	Book
In the week before chemotherapy begins, it is like preparing for a winter storm, or a winter storm and a house guest, or a winter storm, a house guest, and the birth of a child.	In the week before chemotherapy begins, it is like preparing for a winter storm, or a winter storm and a houseguest, or a winter storm, a houseguest, and the birth of a child; also, maybe it is as if preparing for all three of these and a holiday, a virus, and a brief but intense episode of depression, all while also suffering the effects of the previous storm, houseguest, birth, holiday, virus, and depression.
The day before chemotherapy, a friend arrives from someplace I would rather be—California or Vermont or two different towns named Athens. I do everything to look healthy so that my friend will praise the skillfulness of my camouflage, its materials purchased at Wigs.com, CVS, and Sephora. We don’t speak of chemotherapy except for the practical exchange of information, like what time to set the alarm for and the best route to the pavilion. We pass our time as friends would, roasting vegetables and listening to music and speaking excitedly of other friends or ideas or political events.	The day before chemotherapy, a friend arrives from someplace I would rather be—California or Vermont or two different towns named Athens or New York or Chicago. Then it is exactly as it is: as if a friend has arrived from far away. On that day, I do everything to look healthy so that my friend will praise the skillfulness of my camouflage, its materials purchased at Wigs.com, CVS, and Sephora. On the day before chemotherapy, we don’t speak of chemotherapy any more than is necessary for the practical exchange of information, like what time to set the alarm and the best route to the pavilion. We pass our time as friends would, roasting vegetables and listening to music and speaking excitedly of other friends or ideas or political events.
The day of chemotherapy, we wake up early and arrive at least fifteen minutes late. We predict how well the treatment will go by what song is playing on the car radio: “Bohemian Rhapsody” (not so good), TLC’s “Waterfalls” (better). Chemotherapy, like most medical treatments, is boring. Like death, it is a lot of waiting for your name to be called. It is also waiting while the potential for panic and pain hangs around, too.	The day of chemotherapy, we wake up early and arrive at least fifteen minutes late. We predict how well the treatment will go by what song is playing on the car radio: “Bohemian Rhapsody” (not so good), TLC’s “Waterfalls” (better). Chemotherapy, like most medical treatments, is boring. Like death, it is a lot of waiting for your name to be called. It is also waiting while the potential for panic and pain hangs around, too, waiting for its name to be called. In this it is like war. The aesthetics of chemotherapy appear to have been decided by no one. That makes them like everything ideological. Later we begin to understand the costumes, machines, sounds, rituals, and architectures.

“Omit needless words!” cried William Strunk in his classic The Elements of Style (1972). The New Yorker followed this injunction when it edited Boyer’s manuscript. Yet, when Boyer published her book, she put those words back in. Why? The obvious answer is that she doesn’t consider them needless. Those additional words mean something to her. Sometimes concision isn’t the only aim. Artist’s necessity plays a role, too – fidelity to his or her own consciousness. And if that means breaking Professor Strunk’s rules, so be it. 

December 21, 2020 Issue

I love the way Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Fix We’re In,” in this week’s issue, moves from intriguing specificity (“What unites Rashid Johnson’s grease-stick abstraction, conjuring a state of alarm in a pigment that he has invented and dubbed Anxious Red; Cecily Brown’s pencilled carnage of game animals after a seventeenth-century still-life by Frans Snyders; and a meticulous, strikingly sombre self-portrait by R. Crumb?”) to gorgeous abstraction (“When time is a trackless waste, escapes from the aridity detonate”), and then back to the concrete (“But here we are, and '100 Drawings from Now' vivifies the situation for me”). It’s a wonderful rhythm. No one does it better than Schjeldahl. 

December 14, 2020 Issue

Anthony Lane, in his “Plotting the Course,” a review of Steven Soderbergh’s new movie “Let Them All Talk,” in this week’s issue, asks one of the great questions of 2020: “Could Susan be the first person on record to discuss her distant sexual history while playing Monopoly and Scrabble, and, if so, does a threesome count as a triple-word score?” I read Lane’s piece avidly. I saw “Let Them All Talk” last week on Crave, and enjoyed it immensely. But I found myself struggling to say why. Yes, there’s the treat of watching Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, and Dianne Wiest interact. But I feel there’s more to it than that. Lane says, “Much of the tale has a noodling and speculative air.” “Noodling” is an apt description of this film. It has an easy, improvisatory air, like a Bill Charlap or Joe Lovano riff. Soderbergh has taken the slightest of storylines – a famous author goes on a cruise trip with her friends and nephew – and spun it into something beautiful and absorbing. 

There's More to Law Than Just Storytelling

Tarpley Hitt, in her “I Read Court Documents for Fun. Hear Me Out” (The New York Times Magazine, December 1, 2020), says, “Trial lawyers are storytellers, and competitive ones at that. Each side accumulates details supporting their arc, explaining away those that don’t, editing along the strict stylization of law.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Janet Malcolm takes the same view. In her great “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010, she says, “If we understand that a trial is a contest between competing narratives, we can see the importance of the first appearance of the narrators.” Well, I don’t understand trials that way. For me, they’re contests of competing arguments. Trial lawyers are arguers. They argue evidence. They argue issues. They argue law. Yes, facts are important in a trial case. And yes, facts are often packaged in a narrative – I’ll concede that much. But the most thrilling cases, for me, at least, are the ones in which facts fall away, and the case becomes a contest between competing interpretations of the law. 

One such case that comes immediately to mind is R. v. Laviolette, [1987] 2 S.C.R. 667, in which a priest was clubbed to death in his parish home. Three men were charged. One of them, Stephen Laviolette, pleaded guilty. The other two were tried for constructive murder. Under the doctrine of constructive murder, a person who doesn’t actually commit murder, but who is involved in a crime (e.g., break-and-enter) that results in murder, can be convicted of it. It’s a highly controversial concept because it means that a person can be found guilty of murder even though he or she didn’t intend it. 

I represented the younger of the two accused, Brian Laviolette, who was only about seventeen at the time, if I remember correctly. Brian hadn’t entered the parish house that night. Stephen was the only one of the three who entered. He broke a window at the back of the property and climbed inside. As soon as he was in, he turned, pointed outside to a length of iron pipe on the ground, and told Brian to pass it to him. Brian did so, not knowing he was handing Stephen the murder weapon.

Brian was convicted at trial under the doctrine of constructive murder. Between his trial and his appeal, Parliament enacted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At Brian’s appeal, I argued that constructive murder violated Charter section 7, which guarantees an accused’s right not to be deprived of his freedom except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. One of those principles of fundamental justice, I submitted, was that a person should only be convicted of murder if he or she had the intent to do so. The Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal rejected my argument. We appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, and on December 3, 1987, the Court struck down constructive murder. 

I mention all this to show how a case based on the most grisly facts can become a vehicle for an exhilarating argument of pure law. In a sense, transforming the lead of facts into the pure gold of constitutional argument is a form of decontextualization, a process that Malcolm herself writes about in her wonderful essay “Burdock” (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008). Someday I’ll write more about the analogous relationship between legal process and the art of decontextualizing. But for now, suffice it to say, there’s more to law than storytelling. That may be the least of its ingredients.  

On the Horizon: My "Best of 2020" Lists

Illustration by Min Heo, from Hua Hsu's "My Year of Making Lists"

It’s time to start making my “Best of 2020” lists. Each year at this juncture, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading experience. I find listing is a good way to do it.

I’m not going to reveal my pick for best reporting piece just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It has nothing to do with COVID-19. It has nothing to do with Trump. It’s about an object in the “the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom.” That’s all I’m going to say for now. As it is, I’ve probably given it away. Besides, the year isn’t over. There are still three more New Yorkers to come. Who knows what delightful surprises they might contain? 

Ian Frazier on the Meaning of "American carnage"

Ian Frazier (Photo by Sara Barrett)

I’ve pretty much given up on political reporting as a source of inspired writing. But when I saw Ian Frazier’s name among the contributors to The New York Review of Book’s recent series “On the Election” (November 19, 2020), I thought to myself, This is one I’ve got to read. I wasn’t disappointed. Unlike most political writing, Frazier’s piece has the breath of life. It deals in particulars. Its words call up images. For example:

In 2017 I went to Washington to see the inauguration. I wandered around with no purpose and did not get very close to the Capitol steps, where the swearing-in ceremony appeared as a tiny cluster of people among a larger crowd. Fewer onlookers gathered in the vicinity of the Reflecting Pool, where the regiments of portable johns shoulder to shoulder outnumbered the humans, and a lone hawk watched from atop a tree. I was standing by a loudspeaker when I heard the phrase “American carnage.” In that relatively abandoned area, it came out of the loudspeaker during Trump’s speech and seemed to hang in the air in 3D.

That sentence about the “regiments of portable johns shoulder to shoulder” and the “lone hawk” is amazing! As is the description of Trump’s words (“American carnage”) seeming “to hang in the air in 3D.” 

“American carnage” has specific meaning for Frazier. Hearing it, he thinks about “small towns in Ohio, near where I’m from, that used to be flourishing and now are half-deserted and boarded up.” He says,

Today the emblematic image of the former small town is a pillar that once held an oval-shaped plastic sign for some local business like a muffler shop or a feed store, and the plastic is mostly broken and gone, and just the frame of the sign is still there.

Note Frazier’s use of definite, specific, concrete language. The whole piece is like that. Frazier concludes with a plea to Democrats to “start paying more attention, FDR-style, to the less populated places.” It’s a practical suggestion. I totally agree with it. I wish more writers would write this way about politics. 

December 7, 2020 Issue

Johanna Fateman’s absorbing “Art: Luigi Ghirri,” in this week’s “Goings On About Town” introduced me to a photographer I’d never heard of before. She says,

In his signature faded color palette, Ghirri captured signage, murals, and ads layered onto the surfaces of a city; his frontal, symmetrical compositions often flatten three-dimensional space, an effect that might be described as trompe l’oeil in reverse. In the dreamy, sunlit factory scene “Ferrari Automobili,” from 1985-88, an upright, glossy-red car hood recedes on an assembly-line track—but the view is oddly cropped by a metal archway. Some of Ghirri’s works might be easily mistaken for photomontage. 

Maybe “found photomontage” might describe Ghirri’s style? Check out the fascinating online exhibition of his work at matthewmarks.com. My favorite is this luminous night shot, “San Maritino Vallo Caudino” (1990):

November 30, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Burkhard Bilger’s excellent “Building the Impossible,” a profile of New York carpenter Mark Ellison – “a man who gets hired to build impossible things.” Bilger says of him,

He is a big man with heavy, sloped shoulders. He has thick wrists and meaty paws, a bald head and fleshy lips that protrude over a ragged beard. There is a bone-deep competence about him that reads as solidity: he seems built of denser stuff than other people. With his gruff voice and wide-set, watchful eyes, he can seem like a character out of Tolkien or Wagner: the clever Nibelung, fabricator of treasures. He loves machines and fire and precious metals. He loves wood and brass and stone. He bought a cement mixer and was obsessed with it for two years—couldn’t stop using it. What draws him to a project, he says, is the potential for magic, the unexpected thing. The glimmer of gems that veins the mundane.

Ellison renovates luxury New York apartments. Bilger visits several of them, including a gutted nineteenth-century townhouse (“Above him, joists, beams, and electrical conduits crisscrossed in the half-light like a demented spider’s web”), a ten-room triplex (“It was like stepping into a water lily. The door to the great room was shaped like a curling leaf, framing a swirling oval staircase behind it”), a five-story penthouse atop the Woolworth Building called the Pinnacle (“The ceiling was two stories high; the windows gave vaulting views across the city on every side. You could see the Palisades and the Throgs Neck Bridge to the north, Sandy Hook and the shores of Galilee, New Jersey, to the south. It was just a raw white space with some steel girders stretched across it, but it was still astonishing”), and, most memorably, a four-story penthouse known as the Sky House (“full of splintered, refracted spaces, as if you were walking inside a diamond”). 

Bilger’s description of Sky House is superb:

Yet the apartment feels less cerebral than exuberant, full of little jokes and surprises. The white floors give way to glass panels here and there, suspending you in the air. The steel girder that holds up the living-room ceiling is also a climbing pole, with a harness so guests can rappel down. The walls in the master bedroom and bath have tunnels hidden behind them, so the owners’ cats can crawl around and pop their heads through small openings. And all four floors are connected by a huge tubular slide, made of polished German stainless steel. At the top, cashmere blankets are provided to insure a fast, frictionless ride.

My favourite passage in "Building the Impossible" is Bilger’s description of Sky House’s staircase:

Built of white nanoglass—an opaque and extremely hard synthetic stone—it twists up through the building in precisely organized shards, offering sudden glimpses through the rooms unfolding around it.

That “twists up through the building in precisely organized shards” is delightful! The whole piece is delightful – as artfully crafted as the interiors it describes.