October 30, 2023 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two: The Bazaar by José Andrés,” in this week’s issue, with the version that appears on newyorker.com. The electronic version is richer, more detailed. For example, in the magazine, Rosner writes, 

The theme is unsubtle (a towering portrait of a geisha wearing a comb and a mantilla looms over the bar), and it’s all a little ridiculous in a way that could be fun – if the restaurant didn’t seem to be working so hard to deflate any shred of amusement. This is unfortunate, because playfulness is the most generous lens through which to consider the experience. Take the 0-toro tuna wrapped in poufs of cotton candy (total nonsense, with flavors that fight one another), or the dramatically vertical Japanese coffee siphon employed tableside to infuse a mushroom broth for a bowl of ramen – dishes that foreground spectacle over satiety, presented with monklike sombreness by stone-faced servers.

Here's the newyorker.com version:

Playfulness is the most generous lens through which to consider many of the dishes on the menu, which are intricate, kooky, and not always successful. Cotton Candy O-toro is a small pouf of spun sugar on a stick, in the center of which is a morsel of soy-marinated raw tuna and a confetti of crispy rice. The creation is a riff on Andrés’s famous cotton-candy-wrapped foie gras—a brilliant twist on the traditional pairing of the sweet and the fatty. Andrés débuted the dish in the early two-thousands, at his now-closed D.C. restaurant Café Atlántico. Here, run through a Nipponifying algorithm, it becomes total nonsense, with the one-note sugar of cotton candy fighting against the delicate salinity of the fish rather than balancing it. For a bowl of mushroom ramen, the broth is heated tableside in a Japanese coffee siphon, a complexly vertical contraption that looks like lab equipment and is thrillingly, pointlessly dramatic as a vehicle for soup. It’s impossible to take seriously, but if you engaged with it on the level of silly spectacle it could be a delight—if only any of the nervous-seeming servers, lighting the flame and gazing into the roiling liquid with the sombreness of holy monks, looked as if they were allowed to have fun. 

To me, the newyorker.com version, with all those marvellous extra details, is far superior to the print version. 

Here’s another example. In the print version, Rosner writes,

I was grateful for the relief of the cocktail menu. The drinks are unreservedly exquisite – tight, focussed, and beautifully balanced. Though, like the food, which seems priced for people who never look at prices, they are soberingly expensive, twenty to thirty dollars apiece; a few, made with a jamón iberico-infused mezcal, climb to fifty dollars. For the cost of one ham-kissed glass, you can get a lordly portion of actual meat, sliced tableside, precisely arranged in a vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat. It’s funky and ferocious, the righteous king of aged hams. Such severe simplicity is, itself, a type of spectacle. Not another thing on the menu is its equal.

Here's the newyorker.com version:

I’ve eaten at many José Andrés joints over the years, including the original Bazaar, in Los Angeles, an excellent restaurant that knew how to wield its gimmickry. (Sadly, it closed permanently during the pandemic.) My favorite thing, across the whole Andrésverse, is a cocktail: the Salt Air Margarita, a satiny blend of tequila, orange liqueur, and lime juice, under a dollop of salty foam, like the fading head on a beer. I first encountered the drink a decade ago at China Poblano, Andrés’s dumpling-and-taco parlor in Las Vegas (another, more successful exercise in audacious culinary exchange), and was overjoyed to see it pop up here at home, albeit with a pomegranate twist. Andrés and his team have an uncanny knack for drinks; their love of unexpected infusions and trompe-l’oeil textures are more reliably successful behind the bar than in the kitchen. At the Bazaar, a nonalcoholic concoction called the Firefly was one of the most pleasing zero-proof drinks I’ve had in ages.

Like the food, which seems to be priced for people who have no need to look at prices, the drinks are soberingly expensive, at twenty-five to thirty dollars apiece. A few, made with a pricey mezcal that’s been infused with precious jamón ibérico de bellota, have price tags that can climb to fifty. It seems like a pointless flourish—the star ingredient, to my palate, was undetectable in the Andrés y Cooper, though the drink itself, something like a smoky Negroni, was otherwise excellent. Still, for the price of that one ham-kissed glass, you could get a lordly portion of the actual meat: a leg of jamón ibérico crisscrosses the dining room on a wheeled mahogany cart; flag it down to have a serving sliced tableside, each piece carefully arranged in a spiralling vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat. It’s funky and ferocious, the righteous king of aged hams. Such severe simplicity is, itself, a type of spectacle. Not another thing on the menu is its equal. 

Note how “precisely arranged in a vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat,” in the magazine version, becomes, in the newyorker.com version, “carefully arranged in a spiralling vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat.” Both versions are excellent. But, to me, the addition of “spiralling” in the newyorker.com rendering makes it a shade more vivid.

What's the lesson to be learned from this comparison? Simply this: if you enjoy “Tables For Two,” as I do, it pays to check out the newyorker.com version. It provides a much richer reading experience. 

October 23, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “The French Connection,” in this week’s issue, says of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863-65), “You can’t really appreciate Olympia unless you feel the rude slap of its shortcomings.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Peter Schjeldahl had a more memorable response:

Here's a pop quiz: in Olympia, how many things is the model, Victorine Meurent, wearing? Time’s up. Six: a high-heeled slipper (its mate has come off), a ribbon choker with a pearl attached, a pair of earrings, a bracelet with another dangling jewel, and a flower, perhaps a hibiscus, in her hair. Every item renders her more naked, of course, as do the fully clothed black maid proffering a gorgeous bouquet, the bristling black cat, and the sumptuous topography of fringed coverlet, yielding pillows, and wrinkled sheets. Without all those objects, the painting would be a nude. With them, it’s a general-alarm fire.

I love that passage. It’s from Schjeldahl’s great “The Urbane Innocent” (The New Yorker, November 20, 2000). 

Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863-65)

October 16, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s “Under the Carpet Bag,” a fond recollection of his sixty-year friendship with Bill Bradley. Actually, McPhee doesn’t just recollect this friendship, he relives it on the page. For example:

And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M.

That “lately condensed” made me smile. The piece brims with humor. One of my favorite passages is a quote from McPhee’s brilliant Draft No. 4, in which he describes William Shawn’s approach to editing new writers, “breaking them in, so to speak, but not exactly like a horse, more like a baseball mitt.” 

Readers of McPhee’s 1965 profile of Bradley, titled “A Sense of Where You Are” (The New Yorker, January 25, 1965), who find its constant adulation of Bradley a bit much (as I do), should read this new piece. It helps explain McPhee’s hagiography. McPhee and Bradley are very close. As McPhee says in “Under the Carpet Bag, “He is the younger brother I never had, and I am the brother he never had.” 

October 9, 2023 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Ben McGrath’s “Talk” story “Dystopian Sublime” and Hannah Goldfield’s “Top of the Line.” McGrath’s piece is an account of his attendance at a bizarre opera staged on a barge floating on Newtown Creek in Maspeth, New York City. The creek is grossly polluted. McGrath says of it, “Black mayonnaise is the connoisseur’s name for its sedimentary ooze.” The event is watched by an audience riding in canoes, kayaks, and other types of boats. McGrath writes, “Boating spectators gripped one another’s gunwales to hold position against the southerly breeze. A skein of geese passed overhead in eerie synchronicity with the end of a scene like fighter pilots after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My favorite line in the piece is this beauty: “A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban.”

Goldfield’s “Top of the Line” is a profile of chef Kwame Onwuachi. She tells about his career – his attendance at the Culinary Institute of America, his competing in “Top Chef,” his ownership of the successful restaurant Tatiana, in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, and so on. But, for me, the piece really comes alive in its last part when Goldfield describes Onwuachi in Tatiana’s kitchen, making a corn-bread pudding:

He bloomed curry powder in butter in a pot on the stove, then crumbled in the corn bread and added heavy cream and oat milk. When it had cooked down into a smooth, thick paste, he tasted it. “Fucking great!” he declared. “That’s fun.” Instead of crème fraîche, he decided to top it with the white sauce that he makes for his halal-cart-inspired shawarma chicken. In the finished dish, the gentle heat of the curry and the sweetness of the warm pudding were offset by the cool, tangy white sauce and a salty plink of caviar at the end of each bite.

That last sentence is superb!

Taking a Break

 La Villageoise Bike Trail, Mont-Tremblant (Photo from bromptoning.com)

Lorna and I are going on the road for a couple of weeks. Our destination is Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, where we’ll do some cycling. I’ll take the October 9 New Yorker with me and post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about November 1. 

À bientôt!

October 2, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in this week’s "Goings On," reviews Wolfgang Tillmans’s new exhibition at Zwirner gallery. He describes it as “hypnotically glum.” After visiting the online version of the show at davidzwirner.com, I have to agree. One image caught my eye – a still life titled Lagos still life II (2022), which shows exotic fruit in yellows and greens with, among other things, a yellow-and-black plastic bag and an exotic red flower. You can see it here. It might not seem like much, but its odd combination of shapes, colors, and textures strikes me as beautiful. 

September 25, 2023 Issue

Couture shows are describers’ dreams – so many gorgeous shapes, colors, and textures for the eye to devour. There’s an excellent description of one in Rachel Syme’s “The Suitor,” in this week’s issue. Syme profiles American fashion designer Thom Browne. She visits Browne’s French headquarters in Paris. She visits his Georgian-style mansion in New York. And, most arrestingly, she attends his couture show at the Palais Garnier, Paris’s grand nineteenth-century opera house. She writes,

During the next thirty minutes, more than fifty looks paraded down the runway. Alek Wek emerged first, wearing a plain Thom Browne suit and a head scarf. She sat onstage, on a piece of luggage, and remained there for the rest of the presentation, making eye contact with each model passing by. The collection was a kind of self-retrospective, but with Browne’s usual motifs carried to elaborate extremes. A series of coats had a plaid pattern—a Browne staple—that was made not with preprinted fabric but by crisscrossing colored threads through tiny glass beads. His typically kitschy nautical themes were pushed into riskier, more grotesque territory. One striped blazer featured a puffy golden lobster whose embroidered claws came up over the shoulders, as if it were trying to drag the model underwater. Browne had strayed from his monochrome palette in previous collections—his 2022 styles included sumptuous evening jackets in mustard, lavender, emerald, and cantaloupe—but his couture looks were nearly all in shades of gray. The effect was to attune the eye to subtle contrasts—the way a gown juxtaposed shiny pewter satin with matte taffeta in a similar hue, or a pair of sequinned ombré trousers changed from charcoal at the hip to faintly ashen at the hem.

That “One striped blazer featured a puffy golden lobster whose embroidered claws came up over the shoulders, as if it were trying to drag the model underwater” made me smile. 

My favorite passage in “The Suitor” is Syme’s description of a Browne-designed wedding gown: 

She glided down the center aisle, wearing a beaded, sheer white garment that looked like a tuxedo jacket whose hem was melting to the floor. Two men in swim caps carried the train of the dress. From far away, the piece shimmered as if made of shaved ice.

Syme’s piece is a fascinating tour of Browne’s surreal world of gargoyle gowns, shrunken suits, men’s skirts, and starfish codpieces. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: Another highlight in this week’s issue is Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two: Foxface Natural,” featuring superb description, e.g., “Sitting at the bar one evening, I swirled a glass of a Vermentino-Moscato blend that looked like apple juice and tasted wild and metallic, like beautiful gasoline.” The newyorker.com version of this piece is even more delectable, containing several additional passages, including this zinger: “A meal at Foxface Natural is a calm affair, even as the dining room thrums with the grimy, horny bass line of Peaches’ ‘Fuck the Pain Away.’ ”

T. J. Clark and the Fiction of Individuality

Paul Cézanne, House and Tree, L'Hermitage (1874-75)

T. J. Clark is one of my favorite writers. I want to stress that at the outset. But there’s an aspect of his thinking that bugs me. He contends that the individual subjectivity of the artist is a fiction. In his otherwise brilliant “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020), a comparative analysis of Cézanne and Pissarro, he writes,

I said that these painters believed the world had somehow to happen to a picture – impinge on it, touch it. This ultimately is the point of the ‘tache’. It puts us back in the moment when the world occurs to the sensorium; and at that point it isn’t clear to the painting subject whether the occurrence is something made by the mind – by the mind’s eye – or entirely a material event, an actual unstoppable touch of light on the receptor evolved to receive it. Is the ‘tache’ transitive or intransitive, in other words? It is certainly a made thing, but made by what ... by whom?

He further states:

This brings us back to Schapiro and the question of individualism. Both Cézanne and Pissarro put their trust in the idea that their painting was founded on truth to their own irreducible ‘petite sensation’. But what the ‘petite sensation’ was remained for them a mystery. This was the great thing that painting was meant to find out. Yes, it was ‘mine’; but as I made the actual marks that were my seeing (‘Je vois, par taches’), I came to understand that in some sense it did not belong to me at all – or at least to the ‘me’ of the mind, of subjectivity. It, the ‘sensation’, was the contact – the deep structure of the contact – between sensorium and surrounding. Unique to each individual, doubtless, but full of a materiality, an exposure to the exterior, that put individuality at risk.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find that a weird bit of magical thinking, especially the part in the second passage when Clark suddenly starts talking as if he’s Cézanne. “I came to understand that in some sense it did not belong to me at all – or at least to the ‘me’ of the mind, of subjectivity” – those are Clark’s words, not Cézanne’s. Clark is doing more here that just putting words in Cézanne’s mouth.  He’s questioning the existence of Cézanne’s individual subjectivity. This isn’t the first time he’s done this. In a previous piece, also on Cézanne, he wrote, “The sadness and tension and confinement in Cézanne, I’ve been proposing, are all bound up with the ultimate fiction, ‘individuality’ ” (“Relentless Intimacy,” London Review of Books, January 25, 2018).

I find this view puzzling. For one thing, it offends common sense. It’s Cézanne’s sensorium that is making contact with his surroundings. And it’s Cézanne who is making the marks. The idea that Pool at Jas de Bouffin, say, or House and Tree, L’Hermitage somehow occurred without any operation of Cézanne’s mind is crazy. Cézanne as a brainless Tin Man on automatic pilot, standing at his easel without a thought of what he’s doing or how he’s doing it? Come on! It contradicts Clark’s own thesis – that Cézanne apprenticed himself to Pissarro “to unlearn his first style.” That “unlearn” suggests a mind intent on stylistic change. Style is an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal way of doing something. It implies individuality. Clark’s denial of it is perplexing. 

3 More for the Road: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of figuration.

In Cross Country, Sullivan writes, “Saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake.” It’s part of a passage so good, I can’t resist quoting it in full:

The next morning, I woke in the dark, took my one small bag (clothes, a tooth brush, my journal) to the trunk of the cab, pulled away; made the gradual turn onto the interstate; convinced a Texaco gas station owner a few exits away to allow me to park on the side of his lot for a second while I jogged into downtown Hood River for pancakes to go; ran back to the truck; thought, What was I thinking getting pancakes?; got maple syrup all over the truck’s steering wheel; drove into the high desert of eastern Oregon and then the high desert of eastern Washington; saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake; drove up into the Bitterroots via Idaho and Interstate 90; drove through winding steep-edged turns that gave views of darkening valleys full of pine trees; and then, late in the day, approached Fourth of July Pass, a summit. I was three thousand feet up, on the road built by Captain John Mullan, the great western road builder, the road later followed by interstate builders. 

God, I wish I’d written that. It’s got everything I relish – action, specificity, detail, humor, and, at its heart, that brilliant creative simile: “saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake.”

Figurative speech doesn’t get much better than that. Can Frazier top it? Yes! In one of Travels in Siberia’s most sublime passages, he describes leaving the Marinsky Theatre after watching a ballet:

Afterward, Luda and I jostled through the remarkably long and slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses, and the equally full line at the coat check, and then we were outside in the cold among the dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke, and snow was falling steadily straight down. It was billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs, and as we stood deciding whether to walk or take a cab, snowflakes came to rest among the fibres of fur in her hat. Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.

That passage gets to me every time I read it. It conjoins such a variety of delectable, fascinating elements: the “slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses”; the “equally full line at the coat check”; the “outside in the cold among the dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke”; the “snow was falling steadily straight down,” “billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs”; the snowflakes coming to rest “among the fibres of fur in her hat,” and then that exquisite, finely observed, clinching detail: “Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.” That’s pretty damn heady stuff. What more can I say? I love it. 

Bailey isn’t in this contest. Or is he? In one of Along the Edge of the Forest’s most memorable uses of figuration, he compares the border fence (die Grenze) between East and West Germany to a chemistry experiment:

In one way, the border was something that made everything artificially clear: it divided everything into one side or another, between us and them, right and wrong, with no middle ground. Die Grenze was an emblem of institutionalized conflict – the visible manifestation of the entire apparatus of political, industrial, scientific and military machinery on both sides, confronting one another. In another way, the division was like that of substances in a chemistry experiment – substances that should not mix, that create a barrier between one another so as to avoid combustion or explosion – or was this to look at it from a peace-and-quiet-at-all-cost point of view?

Bailey’s chemistry analogy is an example of figuration as meaning-making. It helps make sense of a seemingly irrational, grotesque phenomenon. 

In my next post in this series, I’ll consider another literary tool, of which all three of these writers are masters – use of detail.