The New Yorker & Me: June 12, 2023 Issue

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Monday, June 26, 2023

June 12, 2023 Issue

Sven Marquardt, the “infamously tattooed bouncer” in Nick Paumgarten’s great “Berlin Nights” (The New Yorker, March 24, 2014) is back! This time he’s the subject of Paumgarten’s Talk story, "Ein Berliner," in this week’s issue. Marquardt is in New York for the opening of his photo exhibition “Disturbing Beauty.” Paumgarten attends the opening and talks with the überdoorman. He writes,

The party that night began at ten, which meant more like midnight. Oontz, oontz, oontz, oontz. The projections of Marquardt’s portraits flashed on the walls, apparently to the beat but in random sequences. The revellers seemed unsure whether to watch or to dance. In the hall, Mosbeck, the gallerist, pulled on cotton gloves and rehung one of the eighties prints, which had been knocked off the wall by the heavy thud of the kick drum. Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene and said, “I am happy.” Then he went with Paetke to hang out by the entrance, as though he were working his own party. “Ja, I am at the door,” he said. “Maybe this is the normal situation.”

That “Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene and said, ‘I am happy’ ” is brilliant! The whole piece is brilliant – an inspired coda to Paumgarten’s superb “Berlin Nights.”