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| Photo by Eric Ogden (from "Goings On About Town," February 8, 2010) |
I’m feeling nostalgic. I want to look back at some old GOAT. I’ll begin at the beginning, February 20, 2010, my first post, a note on the February 8, 2010 New Yorker, in which I highlighted, among other interesting things, four GOAT items: (1) “Yola Monakhov's photo of a girl in green tights suspended in golden light”; (2) the “Night Life” note on Glasslands Gallery (“this charming, skuzzy venue”); (3) “the gorgeous pink-and-brown Eric Ogden photo ‘Gents’ (Is that Penelope Cruz peering out of the men’s washroom?)”; and (4) Nick Paumgarten’s delightful “Tables For Two” review of Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte (“The heart leaps at the sight of a waitress, tongs in hand, offering an extra helping of fries. Yes, please”).
I still have that New Yorker. It’s one of my favorites. The wonderful cover showing nine pooches bundled up for winter is by the incomparable Ana Juan. Looking at the issue now, I see that GOAT (“Goings On About Town”) consists of eleven rich pages of notes and illustrations. For example, there are three “Critic’s Notebooks” – one by Sasha Frere-Jones (“Unsound Opinion” on the Polish electronic-music festival Unsound), one by Hilton Als (“Let the Sunshine In” on Melba Moore’s solo album “Book of Dreams”), and one by Anthony Lane (“Top of the World” on Peter Biskind’s Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America). All three items are accompanied by eye-catching original artwork by Federico Jordan (“Unsound Opinion”), QuickHoney (“Let the Sunshine In”), and Rachel Domm (“Top of the World”).
In addition, it contains three columns on Theatre, including fifteen “openings and previews” and eight capsule reviews of productions “now playing.” It also has two-and-a-half columns of Night Life, containing fourteen capsule reviews of, among other acts, the Beets at Cake Shop (“Fast, loose, and dirty, the Beets traffic in energetic garage rock”), Saxon Shore at the Knitting Factory (“lush and largely instrumental passages of textured, drone-oriented music”), and the London Souls at Mercury Lounge (“a young New York City power trio, favoring a brash blend of retro-leaning rock, packing a blues-drenched wallop”). There are one-and-a-half columns on Jazz and Standards, including notes on gigs at Birdland, Blue Note, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, Iridium, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Jazz Standard, and Village Vanguard. There are two columns on Dance, two-and-a-half columns on Classical Music, and six columns on Movies, including fifteen mini-reviews of such films as Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (“From her own privileged position, she reveals the paradoxes of plenty and the distinctively French twists on its uses”), Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (“The movie requires patience, but it’s bracing and funny – a minor classic shot in light so even and gray that all thought of sunshine seems to have been banished”), and Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon (“The monochrome imagery is not just jewel-sharp but, unusually for Haneke, touched with moments of loveliness and hints of peace”). There’s also the “On the Horizon” section with a beautiful portrait of harpist and singer Joanna Newsom. And there are four-and-a-half columns on Art, including twelve capsule reviews. My favorite is the note on a Diane Arbus / William Eggleston exhibition at Cheim & Read gallery. It reads as follows:
Both photographers have made better pictures, but, even if this is extremely minor work, it’s not uninteresting. The dozen Arbus images are dark, unpopulated interiors and landscapes, including a castle at Disneyland, a Coney Island house of horrors, and two haunted-seeming Hollywood back lots. They look especially gloomy next to Eggleston’s most recent color work, much of it made outdoors in Mexico, Cuba, Russia, and the U.S. His subjects are negligible – trash in a Dumpster, ice bags in a freezer, a news clipping in the dirt – but Eggleston knows that the mundane can be marvellous, and his best pictures are startling and unexpectedly beautiful.
How I love that last part – “but Eggleston knows that the mundane can be marvellous.” He certainly does. The anonymous reviewer makes a great point. [Most of the GOAT notes back then were anonymous (except for “Movies,” “Tables for Two,” and “Critic’s Notebook”). The policy changed in 2018. In my June 21, 2018 post, I wrote, “I applaud the elimination of GOAT-writer anonymity. In the new version, the writer’s name appears at the end of each note. This is as it should be. Some of the magazine’s best writing is in GOAT. Now we can tell who writes it.”]
Some of the magazine’s best writing is in GOAT - how many times have I said that? Five months after I launched this blog, I posted this:
One aspect of the magazine that I absolutely love, but, as yet, have failed to do justice to, is Goings On About Town (GOAT). Well, there’s no time like the present, as they say. Here then is my GOAT tribute. My reading of the magazine always starts with GOAT, not just because it’s located at the front, but because it’s such a great source of pleasure, and it’s easily digestible in small delicious bite-size chunks of text. And it’s not only about the text; the GOAT photos and the GOAT illustrations are an important part of the mix, too. Right now, I have the July 5th issue open before me to the wonderful Julieta Cervantes concert photo of Allen Toussaint. I like this picture so much, I went, in celebration, to iTunes and bought a couple of cuts off Toussaint’s album “The Bright Mississippi,” to wit, “Blue Drag,” and “Solitude.” Cervantes is fairly new to the magazine, but from the evidence so far, I’d say she fits right in. Also in this issue is the lovely pink, green and turquoise Rachel Domm illustration for She & Him at the Beach @ Governors Island and at Terminal 5. It’s a good thing I don’t live in NYC or I’d be spending a fortune taking in all these events. It’s better, at least from a pocket book standpoint, just to read about them in GOAT – read about them and dream. Another marvelous illustration is Stefanie Augustine’s red-plaid, wild-hair portrait of Reggie Watts at (Le) Poisson Rouge. It’s spectacular! It’s also on the magazine’s page where my fine-point, black ink underlining of certain noteworthy passages of the text kicks in. For example, here’s one from the capsule review of the Charles Johnstone show of basketball court photographs: “The geometry of the setup provides a template that each site tweaks with dappled shadows, housing-project walls, or abstract passages of painted-over graffiti.” Writing like that – I eat it up! It must be the surprising word combos that I like so much. I mean when was the last time you saw “geometry,” “template,” “tweaks,” “dappled,” “housing-project,” “abstract,” “graffiti” all rubbing shoulders, jostling for attention, in the same sentence? My soul, it's beautiful! I wonder who wrote it? My guess is that it’s Andrea K. Scott, who has penned some of the most delightful Critic’s Notebook entries recently. Here’s another of my highlighted sentences from July 5th GOAT (actually, this is a sentence-fragment): “with the camera dollying back to reveal the band, in shadow, with spotlights gleaming off the bells of brass instruments and the chrome keys of woodwinds.” My, my, that’s beautiful! And to think Richard Brody, of all people, wrote it (in “DVD Notes: The Fury”)! I’ve been awfully hard on Brody in my comments on his blog. But he deserves it; his attacks (there’s no other word for them) on Pauline Kael are contemptible. Don’t get me started. But every now and then, Brody gets off a gem. Here’s another one he wrote a few months ago in GOAT: “the long, sinuous tracking shots, with expressive vertical accents thanks to a crane, suggest the convergence of expedience (Fuller also produced the film) and boredom with a drama, indeed a genre, in need of juicing.” That’s from a capsule review of Samuel Fuller’s “The Crimson Kimono.” Again, as with the quotation above, it’s the string of unexpected, delectable words (“sinuous,” “vertical,” “crane,” “convergence,” “genre,” “juicing”) – some specific, some abstract - that makes this sentence as ravishing as a Rauschenberg. Each issue of GOAT abounds with succulent details. Dipping into it is like dipping into a box of Godiva chocolates. ["GOAT," July 11, 2010]
I loved GOAT so much I used to make assemblages of GOAT quotations. This one for example:
In the mornings, mothers with children and scooters in tow line up behind subway-bound suits for dollar cups of Stumptown coffee – no lattes here, only drip (Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Jeffrey’s Grocery) | Exercising a tribal right passed down for generations, the Blackfeet artist Lyle J. Heavy Runner will paint a twenty-five-foot-tall tipi in a bleeding-buffalo-skull design at the Brooklyn Museum, as part of the exhibition “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” (“On The Horizon”) | David Cossin was the star soloist in an energetic and – it must be said – splashy performance of Tan Dun’s “Water Concerto,” which employs tubs of water as percussion (Alex Ross, “Critic’s Notebook: Jersey Boy”) | Instead, there’s a different kind of magic, as he lets Jackson’s vocals – drenched in echo and other effects, but still filled with the same strange baby-doll ferocity – loose on sexy, brassy covers of Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain,” Dinah Washington’s “Teach Me Tonight,” and more (Ben Greenman, “Critic’s Notebook: Kinda Fonda Wanda”) | With her tall body and her long, grave, gorgeous face, she truly does look like a messenger from the beyond (Joan Acocella, “Critc’s Notebook: Vestal Virgin”) | You’re likely to end up slumped in your lounge chair, gazing at the bongos (Lizzie Widdicombe, “Tables For Two: Bohemian”) | Nostalgia cascades (Peter Schjeldahl, “Critic’s Notebook: Getting Clocked”) | At regular intervals, a semi-transparent section of a rear wall slides open, and out come Lo’s ornate, succulent creations, sparked by her blended heritage (Mike Peed, “Tables For Two: Annisa”) | It was a knotty time to make art, and Benglis literalized it in tangles of painted and glitter-flecked cotton bunting, which gave way to elegant arabesques of pleated metal and Zen-punk wonders in glass and ceramic (Andrea K. Scott, “Critic’s Notebook: Making A Splash”) | If you like hand-pulled noodles, as much for their simplicity as for their artistry, you’d do best to stay south of Canal (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Hung Ry”) | There is an ingenious beer ice cream, made with the clove-y Bavarian Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel, and beignets are like the Platonic ideal of childhood carnival-truck zeppole (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: Riverpark”) | This is what Southern funk music looks like now: no big-time bling, only ambition and raw nerve, denim short shorts and chili dogs (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Michael Schmelling”) | In the roofless remains of schools, blackboards and painted walls display fading alphabets and numbers for the edification of a stray goat (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Juan Manuel Eschavarria”) | Birdcages and dog crates in storage become a meditation on the modernist grid, as does a shrinelike arrangement of vases (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Jonas Wood”) | A Tuesday-evening special of fried chicken holds the promise of spice, but it requires getting to the Carroll Street F stop well before 8 P.M. (Silvia Killingsworth, “Tables For Two: Seersucker”) | Skip the scoop and kick back with a carmel-nut lager from Laos – or a house cocktail, like the Phuket Fizz, made of vodka, Thai basil, and fresh pineapple, as low key a pleasure as Kin Shop itself (Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Kin Shop”). [“Goat Collage #1, January 8, 2012]
At the end of every year, I do a “Year in Review,” including “Best of GOAT.” Here are the lists from 2015 to 2022:
Best of 2015: GOAT
1. Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Shuko," August 10 & 17, 2015). (“ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard.”)
2. Sarah Larson, "Bar Tab: Wassail," April 20, 2015. (“Better yet was the Falling Up, with bourbon, apple brandy, Cynar, lemon, fresh ginger, and port. Served in a brandy snifter, piled high with pebbled ice, like a sno-cone, and garnished with an elaborately carved wedge of gala apple, it swirled cloudily in the glass, looking gloriously silly.”)
3. Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Winnie's," February 9, 2015. (“One evening in Chinatown, a young woman in a Nirvana T-shirt took a break from mixing Hawaiian punches—a juggling act involving eight kinds of liquor, pineapple juice, and grenadine—to pull out a giant laser disk, grab a mic, and perform “Santeria,” by Sublime.”)
4. Andrea K. Scott, "Boxing Days," June 29, 2015. (“It’s a portable survey of Cianciolo’s career, revealing a hunter-gatherer of the flea market and an inveterate archivist of her own process. They’re the shamanic-punk heirs to a lineage of inside-the-box thinkers whose most famous son is Joseph Cornell.”)
5. Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Livingston Manor," March 16, 2015. (“So it is that such throwbacks as wood reclaimed from a Virginia elementary school and a bourbon-and-ginger-spiked egg cream called the Bugsville Fizz coexist with neoteric features like a hearty dark lager from Catskill Brewery (est. 2014), a duck-rillette banh mi, and a woman guilelessly confessing, ‘I never really got into Seinfeld, I think because I was too young.’ ”)
6. Richard Brody, "Bodies of Work," June 22, 2015. (“Fairchild, who performs like a counterculture Gena Rowlands, is irresistibly passionate and volatile even in repose, and Shults displays a bold visual and dramatic sensibility with his impressionistic rearrangement of time and his repertory of darting, whirling, plunging, and retreating camera moves, which seem to paint the action onto the screen.”)
7. Colin Stokes, "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015. (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust. ‘Your mouth might not be able to detect how strong it is, but your liver will,’ a server advised.”)
8. Nicolas Niarchos, "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills," November 2, 2015. (“Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel.”)
9. Jiayang Fan, "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," February 16, 2015. (“Hookah beer towers (strawberry, mint, melon) are hailed like cabs on a busy avenue.”)
10. Silvia Killingsworth, "Tables For Two: Timna," October 26, 2015. (“Kubaneh is a Yemenite-Jewish yeast loaf traditionally eaten on the morning of the sabbath, after it has baked overnight at a low temperature. Mesika’s version is served steaming hot in a clay flowerpot, freckled with sesame seeds. Its texture falls somewhere between brioche, challah, and croissant, and it pulls apart like cotton candy.”)
Best of 2016: GOAT
1. Nicolas Niarchos, “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016 (“At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat”).
2. Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Bar Omar,” June 20, 2016 (“Shatter the shell of blistered sugar into pieces that look like stained glass and try not to smile.”)
3. Colin Stokes, “Bar Tab: The Ship,” May 16, 2016 (“One wore a single black latex glove and smashed a large ice cube with a wand-like spoon to make the gin-based Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and triple sec, from a recipe he’d ‘found in a book not too long ago’ ”).
4. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: The Lucky Bee,” October 31, 2016 (“On a recent Tuesday, one patron was about to call an Uber when the coconut tapioca pudding arrived, unassuming in a lowball glass. Beneath a cloud of golden-crusted marshmallows were banana-toffee gems, tapioca pearls, and an exquisite layer of liquid honey”).
5. Matthew Trammell, “Night Life: Under the Bridge,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“Compact and glowingly musical, the album reworked silent film scores and nimble kalimba phrases into a humming city tableau, on which the young rapper sulks through his writhing neighborhood with the moral baggage of an Arthur Miller lead”).
6. Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: The Johnson’s,” September 26, 2016 (“A first-time patron strolled in, looked around, and summed up the scene, rather approvingly: “Oh, so this is like a fake shithole, basically.” But, hey—it’s one with bathroom doors that consistently lock, if that’s worth anything to you”).
7. McKenna Stayner, “Bar Tab: Sycamore,” May 2, 2016 (“The crawlers, finishing a hot whiskey cider that tasted like the dregs of an overly honeyed tea, passed through a teensy smokers’ patio and into the booze-soaked main bar, attracted by a glowing yellow counter, its surface like the cracked crust of a crème brûlée”).
8. Michael Sragow, “Movies: The Deadly Companions,” April 4, 2016 (“Wills makes a terrific mangy villain; he sweats corruption through his buffalo-fur coat”).
9. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Subject to Change,” August 22, 2016 [“The show opens with ‘A Movie’ (1958), a free-associative pageant of found footage, which flashes both slapstick (a clip of a periscope cuts to a voluptuous pinup, then to a speeding torpedo) and tragic (executed bodies strung up by their feet, an elephant swarmed by its hunters, children beset by famine), compressing the thrill, dread, desire, hostility, and too-muchness of life into twelve stunning minutes”].
10. Richard Brody, “Movies: Hell or High Water,” August 22, 2016 (“Only Bridges emerges whole; with his typical brilliance, he leaps from the laconic to the rhetorical, making even the shady brim of his hat speak volumes”).
Best of 2017: GOAT
1. Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Mermaid Spa,” March 6, 2017 (“The best, though, are the cold appetizers, especially the pickled herring or, if you dare, the salo—raw pig lard, frozen and sliced thin. The procedure is half the fun: Layer it over some brown bread. Salt it. Pick up a raw garlic clove. Salt that. Bite one, then the other. The sharp fire of the raw garlic gives way to the sweetness of the bread, and to the soothing fat as it melts. It’s more bracing than the ice pools”).
2. Matthew Trammell, “Night Life: Past Customs,” July 24, 2017 (“Far from the sustained keys and billowing loops of Brian Eno’s ambient opus “Music for Airports” (1978), Amobi’s transcontinental score has a more explicit take on air travel: buzzy synths swell into prominence like a takeoff, asymmetrical percussion mimics the metallic dance of landing gear unfolding, and talk-box samples evoke the chorus of voices, automated and analog, that echo through terminal halls”).
3. Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Sunday in Brooklyn,” January 23, 2017 (“At some point, someone near you will order the pancakes, and you will turn involuntarily to stare at the stack coated in hazelnut-praline-maple syrup and brown butter. Gesture to your waiter for an order of those. The sauce, the texture of butterscotch, slips down the sides like a slow-motion waterfall. It tastes like melted gelato. The pancakes, slightly undercooked, seem almost naughty”).
4. McKenna Stayner, “Bar Tab: Super Power,” February 27, 2017 (“Visiting Super Power, with the gentle glow of a blowfish lamp, the fogged windows dripping hypnotically with condensation, and the humid, coconut-scented air, was exactly like being on a cruise, but everyone was wearing wool”).
5. Richard Brody, “Movies: The Long Day Closes,” April 3, 2017 (“Davies resurrects footfalls and shadows, the pattern and texture of carpets, the sound of his mother’s singing voice—the inner drama of undramatic things that are lodged in memory for a lifetime”).
6. Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Highlands,” July 24, 2017 (“A business-casual crowd filled the West Village redoubt, and the music played at a pleasant soft throb. “I need to find another lover,” a man in a lavender shirt sighed; ice clattered in a shaker as another cocktail was poured with luxuriant slowness. The Catholic Guilt left a taste of anise on the tongue. For the less whiskey-inclined, the Wobbly Piper (mezcal, cardamom syrup) and the Royal Mile (vodka, a grapefruity rhubarb pureé) offered their own path to contentment. As the evening deepened, the eyes of the deer heads on the walls glinted in the tawny light, but without malice”).
7. Andrea K. Scott, “Paper Weight,” November 6, 2017 (“The penumbral horse that Georges Seurat let loose with his black Conté crayon in 1882, on view here, might be up for a wild ride with Black Hawk’s ‘Buffalo Dreamers’ ”).
8. Carolyn Kormann, “Bar Tab: The Wooly Public,” August 7 & 14, 2017 (“A woman with a glittery backpack ordered a Woolynesia, tropical punch with gin, lime, chili, cinnamon, and puréed stone fruits, served in a woolly-mammoth-shaped mug. Paintings, prints, and statuary of the extinct beast, a lugubrious mascot, lurk everywhere you look. The woman took a sip, smiled at her man-bunned companion, and said, as far as an amateur lip-reader could tell, either ‘I love you or ‘Elephant juice’ ”).
9. Richard Brody, “Movies: Who’s Crazy?,” March 13, 2017 (“When love creeps in, the doings turn mock-solemn, as a mystical marriage—a threadbare rite of flung-together outfits and tinfoil décor—plays out like a discothèque exorcism”).
10. Andrea K. Scott, “Woman on Wire,” October 9, 2017 (“But such gripes melt away in the presence of an ethereal copper-and-iron-wire concatenation from 1954—seven interconnected orbs, two of which surround smaller spheres like translucent cocoons. It hangs in front of a window overlooking a garden, enmeshing nature and art”).
11. Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Augustine,” April 3, 2017 (“Roberta’s mere presence, as she delivers the tarte tatin, a rose of butter-caramel apple slices hugging a hazelnut crust, rescues the experience from the dispassion of the suits—as does François’s wink and pour of gifted Calvados”).
12. Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: The Penrose,” November 27, 2017 (“The sound of fashionable boots striking the white floor was muted by a staccato prog-rock soundtrack; a young woman in a clinging leather blazer frowned at her companion by the light of a tiny candle and flicked beer foam at his lush red beard”).
Best of 2018: GOAT
1. Elizabeth Barber, “Bar Tab: Ophelia,” April 23, 2018 [“At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want”].
2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Art: Dike Blair,” November 26, 2018 (“A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life”).
3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Miznon,” April 30, 2018 (“It seems almost unfair to compare Miznon pita to any other pita. Miznon pita is plush, Miznon pita is pillowy—I would happily take a nap on a stack of Miznon pita. It’s as stretchy and pliant as Neapolitan pizza dough, its surface similarly taut and golden brown, glistening ever so slightly with oil. It cradles whatever you stuff it with as supportively as a hammock, efficiently absorbing the flavors of herb-flecked ground-lamb kebab, roasted mushrooms, or spicy fish stew”).
4. David Kortava, “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” August 6 & 13, 2018 (“After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to ‘Celebration,’ by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene”).
5. Richard Brody, “Movies: Fig Leaves,” May 21, 2018 (“Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that viewers might swear they hear the intertitles spoken”).
6. Doreen St. Félix, “Art: ‘African American Portraits,’ ” August 20, 2018 (“But there is a depthless artificiality to the stock scenery, which makes the sitters seem as if they have been dropped into a placeless limbo. An altering occurs when an institution puts relics of real and recent life behind glass, making them into art objects. The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific stories”).
7. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Lee Krasner,” October 29, 2018 (“Linear geometries partner with biomorphic curves in a dominant palette of red, yellow, and blue. Zinging orange and chartreuse have guest-starring turns, and Léger-like black lines maintain order”).
8. Talia Lavin, "Bar Tab: Anyway Café," April 30, 2018 [“Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim”].
9. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“Oil paint lends itself to Thiebaud’s canvases like buttercream to cake, and his works on paper are every bit as delectable”).
10. Neima Jahromi, “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” July 23, 2018 (“On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut”).
Best of 2019: GOAT
1. Peter Schjeldahl's “Art: T. C. Cannon,” September 9, 2019 ("One of his last paintings, 'Two Guns Arikara' (1978), blazes with special promise: a stern man wearing a mixture of traditional and contemporary garb sits holding a pair of long-barrelled pistols. The picture’s uniformly intense hues—purple, red-orange, burnt orange, lilac, terre verte, sienna, cerulean, golden yellow, violet, black, and white—generate a visual cadenza, violently serene").
2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Barca,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearl-shaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared”).
3. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: ‘Maya Lin,’ ” January 14, 2019 (“As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded”).
4. Richard Brody’s “Movies: Under the Silver Lake,” April 29, 2019 (“A zine traces long-ago Hollywood scandals; a friend finds the secrets of the world on the back of a cereal box; clips and names of classic movies and video games hint at vast secret connections; a popular band fronts a cult; and a reclusive old songwriter claims to be behind all modern culture and its labyrinthine conspiracies”).
5. Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Heidi Bucher,” May 20, 2019 (“Among the nine stunning pieces in this exhibition, which have yellowed and become more scab-like with age, is a drooping mold of one of that building’s windows, its slightly bowed shutters suggesting the wings of an enormous insect”).
6. Briana Younger’s “Night Life: Ari Lennox,” June 3, 2019 (“Her love-struck tales are consistently gorgeous, but it's when she weaves in the mundane details—a new apartment, watching ‘Adventure Time,’ shopping at Target—that the silken muscle of her voice makes itself most evident, a reminder that there is soul to be found in even the most prosaic life events, that just having breath can be worth singing about”).
7. Michaelangelo Matos’ “Night Life: Wata Igarashi,” May 20, 2019 (“As synth patterns shape-shift in slow motion and crisp percussion slumps into slurping timbres, his mixes find the sounds' edges melting into one another”).
8. Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: The Fulton,” July 29, 2019 (“Two words: chocolate mousse. The tiny tower of decadence, so elaborately layered with peanut caramel, chocolate crunch, passion-fruit sorbet, and vanilla ice cream that it appears almost indecent, represents the restaurant in a few ostentatiously luscious bites: a routine dessert spruced up into something needlessly sumptuous, but also unimpeachably satisfying”).
9. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: Aki Sasamoto,” April 22, 2019 (“Blown-glass tumblers the color of whiskey spin on a trio of round barroom tables, powered by gusts of air from H.V.A.C. tubes, whose nozzles suggest empty bottles of booze. The mood matches the circular logic of an alcohol-addled mind. Screening in another room is video of the artist performing a cryptic ritual; it was commissioned by Triple Canopy, a vital downtown nonprofit as uncategorizable as Sasamoto’s art. The enticing setup: a forest, a doughnut, an ant”).
10. Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana,” September 16, 2019 [“For some reason, there are peas and corn, too, but also beans and guacamole (thank God), and the chips are nicely crunchy”].
Best of 2020: GOAT
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”).
Best of 2021: GOAT
1. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream,” August 2, 2021 [“There are pints to take home, too; availing myself of an insulated bag outfitted with ice packs ($7), I toted several on the subway, including Panna Stracciatella, flecked with dark-chocolate shards, and Somebody Scoop Phil, the brainchild of the sitcom producer turned food personality Phil Rosenthal, featuring a lightly salted malted milk-chocolate base, dense with chunks of Twix and candied peanuts, plus swirls of fudge and panna caramel that oozed obscenely when I peeled off the lid”].
2. Richard Brody, “Movies: Despair,” August 2, 2021 ("In the crude and vulgar beauty of a society on the edge of violence, Stoppard’s ping-ponging witticisms freeze in the air with a ballistic grimness").
3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Fan-Fan Doughnuts and El Newyorkino,” March 15, 2021 ["But it’s the basics I crave: Gerson’s yeasted, brioche-style dough, which contains flour, butter, and eggs and is fried to the color of honey, is a marvel in itself, not much heavier than cotton candy, and is perhaps best coated in an inky slick of Valrhona chocolate or braided and lightly lacquered with the simplest white icing. Chocolate comes in hot-beverage form, too: a rich, velvety Belgian-style mix of melted Guittard (both milk and dark), not so thick that you need a spoon, but thick enough that it’s nice to use one, to more easily consume the doughnut croutons and house-made marshmallow bobbing at the top"].
4. Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: LSDXOXO: ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect,’ ” May 24, 2021 ("The Berlin-based d.j. and producer LSDXOXO makes spiky, near-iridescent house music, full of distortion-heavy riffs and buzzing percussion that cuts through a room like a silver suit").
5. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Peter Luger Steak House,” March 29, 2021 ["At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun"].
6. Andrea K. Scott, “At the Galleries: Lee Lozano,” August 2, 2021 ["Lozano blazes through subjects, from the X-ray intensity of charcoal self-portraits, made during her student years, to cartoonish near-Pop (such as the untitled 1961 work pictured here), absurdly priapic gags, and muscular renditions of hardware and tools that strain at the edges of the paper on which they’re drawn, as if to say, Screw this"].
7. Anthony Lane, “Movies: Senna,” ("Asif Kapadia’s 2011 documentary, which should reward the attention even of those who would never dream of watching cars on a track, is filmed as an homage to velocity—it’s stripped of narration, talking heads, and anything else that might threaten to slow it down. What remains is a self-propelling drama, and the abiding image of Senna’s oil-dark eyes, gleaming through the letter box of his helmet").
8. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Becky Kolsrud,” March 8, 2021 ("In another, smaller landscape, bordered by a band of sky blue, a neon-pink skull rests on the curve of a green planet as a lemon moon blares from the corner").
9. David Kortava, “Tables For Two: Bathhouse Kitchen,” December 6, 2021 ("For the lovely butternut-squash salad, Sousa served the squash raw, thinly sliced, and tossed with golden raisins, pecans, onion, tarragon, and blue cheese. It was easily the funkiest dish I’ve ever consumed in a bathrobe").
10. Richard Brody, “What to Stream: Thomasine & Bushrod,” March 8, 2021 ("When, during a shoot-out, Bushrod—in a majestic closeup—reloads his revolver, the whispered click of metal on metal resounds like righteous thunder").
Best of 2022: GOAT
1. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: All’ Antico Vinaio,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged from the basement at regular intervals, shiny with olive oil and sparkling with coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from a dense landscape of air bubbles as the loaves were sliced horizontally, ends slivered off and passed to patiently waiting customers”);
2. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett,” February 28, 2022 (“The quasi-functional sculptures—tables, chairs, cabinets, a bed—are anthropomorphized domestic objects, in which found elements combine with others that were hand-carved or upholstered by the artist. Millett’s not quite figures are at once goofy and strange. Fluted or cabriole legs alternate with puppet-like limbs; a slatted chair back, painted bright red, is inset with a pair of blue eyes; a china cabinet is topped by a smooth wooden head. In ‘Blue-Eyed Marble Box,’ from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples”);
3. Richard Brody, “Movies: Show People,” August 8, 2022 (“Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound”);
4. Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Rosella,” January 31, 2022 (“For dessert, you can have that American favorite, carrot cake, here on the verge of savory, fortified with sunchoke miso and garnished with candied orange peel and marigold flowers. The cake is scooped into a bowl, its sides smeared with a generous whoosh of scrumptious white frosting. The star ingredient? The cult favorite Ben’s cream cheese, from Rockland County, just up the road”);
5. Andrea K. Scott, “At the Galleries: 'Court, Epic, Spirit,' ” February 28, 2022 (“Ask for a magnifying glass at the front desk, the better to lose yourself in the details: a pearl-and-gold piercing in an elephant’s ear at the coronation of Rama; a peacock in a tree overlooking a gang of drug-addled sadhus; the gray-flecked beard of 'A Man of Commanding Presence.' There are decorative flourishes, too, including a tall cotton panel intricately printed with flora and fauna in crimson and green, used to line what must have been a magnificent tent, pitched for royalty on the Coromandel Coast in the mid-seventeenth century—glampers, take note”);
6. Rachel Syme, “On Television: ‘The Resort,’ ” August 1, 2022 [“ ‘The Resort,’ a splashy new streaming offering from Peacock and the creator Andy Siara (‘Palm Springs’), feels like a slushy beach drink made in a blender using parts of other recent shows: take a dash of ‘White Lotus’ (for the tropical hotel setting), add a shake of ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ (for the air of campy, unhinged mystery among the palm trees), and top it off with the likes of ‘The Flight Attendant’ or ‘The Afterparty’ (for their good old-fashioned, soapy murder mysteries). But just because this show is a piña colada of frothy ideas doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying. The charm-oozing stars Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper play a couple on vacation in Mexico who become unwittingly embroiled in solving a crime that took place there years before. The cast is chock-full of shimmery character actors—Skyler Gisondo, Debby Ryan, Nick Offerman, Ben Sinclair, Becky Ann Baker, Dylan Baker—and the twists and turns are tense enough to keep you glued to the screen on a sweltering day. Think ‘Romancing the Stone’ meets a bottle of S.P.F. 50—this is made for high-summer bingeing”];
7. Vince Aletti, “In the Museums: ‘William Klein: YES,’ ” August 29, 2022 (“Klein’s best pictures are cinematic character studies, with every face and every figure singular, animated, and vividly present for his camera—a gaggle of kids with baseball cards and bubble blowers, a sidewalk full of distracted businessmen, a dapper young man sprinting through Harlem”);
8. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Gugu Room,” September 12, 2022 (“The most persuasive dishes unapologetically layer richness upon richness.” |”Around the room, skewers of meat were being delivered at a fast pace, some rapturously waved into the frames of gleeful selfies”);
9. Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: The Black Dog: ‘Brutal Minimalism,’ ” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“The grainy, gray-toned percussion, redolent of cracked concrete walls, and the low-mixed chimes, like faraway train signals, add to the verisimilitude. Even when the beats come forward, they amplify the background details”);
10. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Queens Lanka,” August 1, 2022 (“A plate of “rice and curry,” one recent afternoon, included four varieties of the latter—made with yellow dal, or split peas; batons of beetroot, almost chocolate-like in their melty richness; jackfruit; and pineapple—in addition to a tantalizing tangle of sticky-sweet deep-fried sprats, and a version of a traditional relish called gotu kola sambol, with finely chopped kale, red onion, and tomato.” | “A lush, enormous banana leaf was folded carefully around a tightly packed pie chart of delights, over rice: slippery, soft curried cashews; dark, crispy snips of zippy batu moju, or fried-eggplant pickle; seeni sambol, a relish of supple tamarind-and-chili-glazed shallots; a fluffy curried-mackerel-and-potato fritter”).
But let’s go back to that ravishing Eric Ogden shot that appeared in the February 8, 2010 GOAT. My god, I love that image! Let it be an emblem of GOAT’s beauty, GOAT's artfulness, GOAT's greatness.
Postscript: GOAT was discontinued last month, replaced by a meagre two-page section called “Goings On.” It's a major loss.
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