February 26, 2024 Issue

Art is where you find it. This week Nick Paumgarten finds it in a hotel-room singing session of the vocal trio Tiny Habits. Paumgarten writes,

Still, with a couple of hours to kill, they were determined, or maybe just habituated, to make and post one of their signature short videos. They try to put out two a week. The space was snug, and, sitting cross-legged on the bed together in their socks, they exuded conviviality and ease. Rae and Khan wore parachute-y pants. Mayowa, the shy one, had a head scarf holding back all but a few of his dreadlocks.

Mayowa had chosen “Misty,” the Erroll Garner classic, with lyrics reluctantly furnished by Johnny Burke. First, they listened to Ella Fitzgerald’s version, then got to work arranging it into three parts.

Mayowa often takes the lower register, and Rae the highest, though they seem to weave around one another. On “Misty,” the melody fell to Rae. Sometimes they make a Google Doc, color-coding the parts, but this time they winged it.

Look at me

I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree.

And I feel like I’m clingin’ to a cloud I can’t understand;

I get misty, just holding your hand

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it.

That last line made me smile. Paumgarten’s account of the session continues for several more delightful paragraphs. It ends with a description of the group making a video of their performance:

They set up an iPhone on some pillows and scrunched together at the foot of the bed. Ten takes later, they still hadn’t got it.

They went at it again, making their singing faces. They nailed it this time, and Rae shouted, “That’s the one!” The process had taken an hour. They tinkered with the reverb, and then got ready to post.

“What’s a misty emoji?” Rae asked. They settled on an umbrella, then titled the vid “misty . . . in manhattan.” It was time to get ready for a big dinner out with their agent.

Paumgarten’s “Misty in Manhattan” is another in his ongoing series of music-related Talk stories: see, for example, “Skin in the Game,” “Banger,” and “Nice Things.”  I enjoy them immensely. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #9 "Minimal Realism: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' "

Still from Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida (2013)

This is the second post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is "Minimal Realism: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' " (August 6, 2014):

I like the look of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, and the feel of it. Pawlikowski has a poet’s gift for using objects, landscapes, and people expressively, so that they all become part of his vision. It’s this gift, I think, that makes Ida a rich, emotionally charged experience.

The best description of Pawlikowski’s technique that I’ve read is found in David Denby’s " 'Ida': A Film Masterpiece" (“Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, May 27, 2014):

The director and his fledgling cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, shot the movie in hard-focus black and white; they have produced images so distinct and powerful that they sharpen our senses. “Ida” might be called static were it not for the currents of emotion from shot to shot, which electrify the women’s relation to each other throughout. Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited). Sometimes the figures are positioned at the bottom of the frame, with enormous gray Polish skies above them, as if the entire burden of a cursed country weighed on its people. Both beautiful and oppressive, the bleakness of the landscape in winter suggests something uncanny in the air, as if we were watching a horror film without ghouls.

One can trace possible influences—Carl Theodor Dreyer, very likely, and Robert Bresson, and European art films from the sixties and early seventies like François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child,” and also Polish movies made in the period in which “Ida” is set. But I can’t recall anything major that looks quite like this movie. Pawlikowski is not after commonplace realism but something you would have to call minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention to what remains almost rapt: the clinking of the nuns’ spoons at a silent convent dinner, some gentle country sounds, the transfixing boredom of long drives through the flat landscape.

That “minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention almost rapt,” is an excellent description of Pawlikowski’s style. I prefer it to, say, “stylistic austerity,” and variations thereof, which some critics are using to describe Ida’s form. See, for example, Dana Stevens, "Ida" (Slate, May 2, 2014): “In many ways, Ida feels like a film that might have been made anytime in the past 50 years. It’s set in the early 1960s, and its stylistic austerity and interest in theological questions often recall the work of Robert Bresson (though Pawlikowski lacks, I think, Bresson’s deeply held faith in salvation).”

The comparison of Ida with Bresson’s work is, I think, a mistake. Bresson’s films, particularly Diary of a Country Priest (1950), are austerely beautiful. But they’re also intolerably pious and inhumanly pure. In her capsule review of Diary of a Country Priest, Pauline Kael says of the young priest whose faith is neither understood nor accepted by his parishioners, “Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is? The priest’s austere spirituality may give the community the same sort of pain that Bresson’s later movies give some of us in the audience” (5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991). Ida is brief; it is spare; it is shot in black-and-white; it is dominated by the color gray, not because Pawlikowski wants to be austere, but because he wants to be true to the times (“What was that lovely city beneath Communism’s gray casing?” Adam Zagajewsky asks, in his memoir Another Beauty). But Ida also has jazz in it, and sex, and vitality. There’s a young naïve, pious Catholic nun in it, but there’s also a worldly, cynical, hard-drinking, nicotine-addicted aunt known as Red Wanda.

Ida is, as Anthony Lane says, in his "Road Trips" (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014), “a road movie, of sorts” (“Thus to our surprise, this small tale becomes a road movie, of sorts, and a journey back into a divisive past”). That “of sorts” is crucial. Most road movies (e.g., Thelma & Louise, The Motorcycle Diaries, Sideways) are wild rides. Ida is more solemn (Denby calls it a “spiritual journey”). But it’s still a thousand times wilder than Bresson’s painstakingly tedious and offensively holy Diary of a Country Priest. In Ida, two women – tough, wry Wanda and her young niece, Ida, a Catholic nun – set off by car to discover how Ida’s parents died. Their vehicle, a white Wartburg, has almost as much presence as the Norton motorcycle (“the Mighty One”) in Motorcycle Diaries. At one point, we see an intoxicated Wanda driving it, and in the next moment, we see it being hauled back onto the road by a handsome team of workhorses. I leaned forward to absorb this remarkable scene, but it vanished in an instant – just one example of Ida’s many wonderful, understated details.

Road movie landscapes are often ravishing (e.g., the gold-and-green Santa Ynez Valley in Sideways, the soaring Andean vistas in Motorcycle Diaries); not so in Ida. Well, let me qualify that. Ida’s landscape is ravishing if you relish, as I do, the beauty of bleakness – “the moon-gray landscape of eastern Poland,” as Lane describes it ("Ida," newyorker.com). This is a landscape soaked in repressed memory, and Ida is an opening to it, an excavation of horrific memory buried in the Polish ground.

February 12 & 19, 2024 Issue

One of the magazine’s most inspired recent moves was the creation of the new Hannah Goldfield column “On and Off the Menu.” Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. Her new column gives her more space to explore subjects that interest her. For example, in this week’s issue, in a piece titled “Pucker Up,” she writes about handmade vinegar. She says,

Many vinegars taste overwhelmingly of acid, which might seem like the point—until you try Crawford’s, which are more flavorful than sharp. You can sip them without wincing; they’re as suited for spiking soda water or cookie icing as they are for finishing a soup or a salad. A young batch we tasted, made from fresh bay leaves, could convert the staunchest skeptic of that herb: it was powerfully earthy but also citrusy and a bit sweet. 

Crawford is a former restaurant chef who is the founder and sole employee of a company called Tart Vinegar. Goldfield visits her at her “factory” – a single room, situated on a high floor of a building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, “equipped with an induction burner, a microscope, and a big sink, plus bouquets of lemon verbena and whole persimmons hanging from the ceiling to dry. About half the room is occupied by tall shelving units, lined with hundreds of large plastic pails.” 

In my favorite passage, Goldfield goes “foraging” with Crawford at the Union Square Greenmarket:

On the day I spent with her, we stopped at the Union Square Greenmarket, where she goes at least once a week, foraging for what could become vinegar—Vermont maple syrup, lavender grown on Long Island, perilla from the Catskills. “If it doesn’t taste good raw, it won’t taste good fermented,” she said—and, if it tastes good raw, turning it into vinegar is like preserving it in edible amber. At the factory, she plunged her arms elbow-deep into her newest batches, swishing around the pungent matter, nudging it toward its next life.

That “and, if it tastes good raw, turning it into vinegar is like preserving it in edible amber” is delightful! The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: The New Yorker’s other food writer, Helen Rosner, also has a piece in this week’s issue. Her “Tables for Two: Border Town at the Screen Door” reviews a breakfast-taco pop-up in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint. It contains this delectable passage:

On one visit to Border Town, I devised a test: I scarfed down one potato-and-chorizo taco almost the instant Rosa handed me my bag: terrific. Back at home, I unwrapped another one, after the tortilla and its filling had been steaming inside their foil blanket for close to an hour. Sure enough, the taco was extra warm and yielding, and the flavors—the flour and the char, the faint and sweet minerality of the potato, the spice and fat of the chorizo—all blurred together, a perfect harmonic chord.

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner in the same issue: double bliss. 

February 5, 2024 Issue

This week’s issue contains a disturbing, depressing report by Elizabeth Kolbert. Titled “Burn Notice,” it’s a survey of recent books on the wildfire crisis. Kolbert asks what’s fuelling it. Her answer is climate change. She writes,

Another recent report, from the Federation of American Scientists, observed that the world is warming so fast that the models firefighters rely on to predict how blazes will behave have become obsolete. “Climate change is drying fuels and making forests more flammable,” the report said. “As a result, no matter how much money we spend on wildfire suppression, we will not be able to stop increasingly extreme wildfires.”

And, as Kolbert explains, these megafires are increasingly extreme because of the "CO2 feedback loop”:

When trees burn, they release the carbon they took up while growing. This carbon contributes to warming, which increases the likelihood of wildfires, which release more carbon, and so on. 

This cycle seems impossible to reverse. We’re fated to a flame-filled future. What happened in Canada last year (loss of nearly forty-six million acres to wildfire) is just a taste of what's coming. It's hard to avoid the feeling that we're doomed. 

Postscript: It's still winter here in Canada, but already there are over fifty wildfires burning in Alberta. The 2024 wildfire season is off to an early start.  

January 29, 2024 Issue

I love art description. There are two wonderful examples of it in this week’s issue – both by Jackson Arn. In his absorbing “Tone Control,” a review of an exhibition of works by the abstract painter Emily Mason, Arn writes,

I enjoy her paintings most when she makes an unlikely pair of colors scrape against each other and then smooths things over with a third. In “Greener Lean” (1978), the odd couple are a thick, too sugary green and a sickly yellow, and the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red in the lower right, which gives the yellow a little life and the green a little nuance. 

That “the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red” is excellent! Even better is Arn’s description of Mason’s “Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle” (1972-74):

Working your way from the left to the right side of the small, square “Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle” (1972-74), you first find bright yellow and blue cheek to cheek with hunter green, simple as two plus three equals five. In the center, everything goes wonky. The blue ripens, the shade of green switches from hunter to rusty penny, and the yellow disappears altogether, only to emerge on the other side bearing a little penny rust itself. 

Translating painting into words is itself an art - one that Arn seems quite adept at. 

Emily Mason, Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle (1972-74)

  

January 22, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Leslie Jamison’s extraordinary personal essay “A New Life.” It’s about becoming a parent and ending a marriage – both experiences tightly interwoven. The piece brims with thisness – “blue mesh hospital underwear,” “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers,” “zipped pajamas with little dangling feet,” “diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon.” 

Jamison is a superb describer – direct, specific, concrete. For example:

In April, I took the baby on a book tour. She was three months old. My mother came with us. Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

Another:

Up in the mountains, I ran out of baby-food pouches the day before the ceremony. So I walked into town to buy more, the baby snug against me in her carrier, bundled in an eggplant-purple snowsuit, swivelling her head like an owl to look at all the snowy trees. On the walk back, she cried because her cheeks were red and burning from the cold. Why hadn’t I packed more pouches? Every time something went wrong, it was only my fault. I wanted a life that was ninety per cent thinking about the complexities of consciousness, and just ten per cent buying pouches of purée. But this was not the life I’d signed up for.

Jamison’s imagery is astounding. On falling in love, she writes, “It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth.” On nursing her baby: “When my phone buzzed with the third text from my husband, She really needs to nurse, I called our break early and ran, breasts hard and heavy as stones, my flip-flops slapping against the hot asphalt. I began to feel the dizzying vertigo of role-switching, draining and propulsive at once, flicking back and forth between selves: I’m a teacher. I’m tits. I’m a teacher. I’m tits.” On divorce: “When I was very young, I thought divorce involved a ceremony, the couple moving backward through the choreography of their wedding, starting at the altar, unclasping their hands, and then walking separately down the aisle.”

There are dozens of other quotable passages. The whole piece is quotable! It’s a masterpiece of personal history writing. Highly recommended.

Postscript: The unfurling clementine-peel illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli that accompanies Jamison’s piece is brilliant.

3 for the River: Jonathan Raban's "Old Glory"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Old Glory. 

This extraordinary book chronicles the two-thousand-mile journey down the Mississippi River that Raban made in 1979, piloting a sixteen-foot, mustard-colored aluminum motorboat, powered by a fifteen horsepower Johnson outboard motor. For a big, dangerous river like the Mississippi, the boat seems small and frail. The typical reaction of river people when they see it is “Shit, you came all the ways down in this?” Time and again during the trip, Raban is warned to be careful. A lockmaster in Minneapolis tells him, “You going to ride the Mississippi, you better respect her or she’ll do you in.” The dangers are many: sloughs, chutes, towboats, stumps, waves, eddies, boils, wing dams, hidden bank supports, pipes, cables, wrecks, wind, rain, and fog. Here, for example, is Raban’s description of Boulanger Slough:

The bluffs widened, and the Mississippi spread itself into a great islanded pool, two miles from shore to shore. It was Boulanger Slough. Two nights before, sitting in the restaurant in Minneapolis, I had crossed it on the charts as casually as if I’d been planning a country stroll. Boulanger Slough in life, though, looked horribly different from Boulanger Slough on paper.

So this was what a stump field was: a barbered forest. For as far as one could see, the rotten tree trunks stood up, some just below, some a few inches above the water. It had been, perhaps, a hundred years since they’d been cut down, and they looked as if they were already halfway to being coal. The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles. The channel here swung out and east through this waste of water, bog and timber. The wind was bowling long gusts from the right-hand shore, where it began as a riffle on the edge of the stump field, then built up a rolling swell as it came north across the mile or so of peaty water.

By the time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel. They took hold of the boat and rocked it over on its gunwales. I had to find a diagonal course into the rollers, and kept on trying to tack against the grain of the wind. Black to red and red to black ... but the buoys were mostly hidden by the high waves. Suddenly lifted on a crest, I’d see them, then get pitched down again into the slop. Riding a wave top for a moment, I looked for the two shores. They were both getting farther away.

That “The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles” is excellent. One of the great pleasures of this book is reading its many wonderful river descriptions. Here’s another:

On this windless morning, the water of Big Slough looked as viscous as thick machine oil. It was blackened by the decomposing forest that lay under it. Miles of it were so shallow that the stump fields on either side of the channel were exposed right down to their spreading roots. Wedded to their own immobile reflections, the stumps, in their hundreds of thousands, made arabesque patterns of flattened hexagons. Away across the slough there was the rigid outline of a man in a punt, fishing for his image, and the image casting back. Not a sound, not a ripple fractured the great, empty symmetry of the place. With the motor killed, I was part of it: doubled in water, I was as lifeless a component of the scheme as a carboniferous stump.

And one more:

There were sharp rips and creases in the current now, as if the Mississippi were trying to tear itself apart; but the most scary change was the succession of great waxy boils. I could see them coming from a long way off. Most of the river was lightly puckered by the wind, but there were patches of what looked like dead-calm water: circular in shape, a hundred yards or so across. I took them for quiet millponds, good places to light a pipe or unscrew the cap of a thermos flask. Delighted to find that the Mississippi now afforded such convenient picnic spots, I drove straight for one. I hit its edge, the boat slewed sideways and I was caught on the rim of a spinning centrifuge. I had mistaken it for calm water because its motion was so violent that no wind could disturb it. I could see the cap of the boil far away in the middle, a clear eighteen inches higher than the rest of the river. From this raised point, the water was spilling around and down the convex face, disappearing deep into the crack in which my boat was caught. Running the engine at full speed, I yanked myself out easily enough, but I had felt the river trying to suck me under, boat and all, and I was tense with fright. 

Raban’s journey starts in Minneapolis, September 3, 1979, and ends three-and-a-half months later in the river delta near Morgan City, Louisiana. Along the way, he visits more than forty river towns, including Red Wing, Wabasha, Winona, La Crosse, Lansing, Prairie du Chien, Guttenberg, North Buena Vista, Dubuque, Galena, Bellevue, Savanna, Moline, Davenport, Andalusia, Muscatine, Oquawka, Burlington, Dallas City, Nauvoo, Hannibal, St. Louis, Sainte Genevieve, Chester, Grand Tower, Cape Girardeau, Hickman, New Madrid, Caruthersville, Osceola, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, New Orleans, Lockport, and Houma. He roams these places, drinking in bars and pool halls, eating in restaurants and cafes, staying in hotels and motels, crashing community picnics and pig roasts, attending church services (even though he’s not a believer), touring local businesses (meat packing plant, cotton warehouse, grain terminal). He occasionally goes on a date (Ms. Alpine, in Dubuque; Judith, in Muscatine). In Savanna, he participates in a nighttime raccoon hunt. In St. Louis, he has a brief relationship with a woman named Sally. In Memphis, where there’s a mayoral election happening, he follows the campaign of Reverend Judge Otis Higgs. He rides two towboats – the Frank Stegbauer, from Memphis to Vicksburg, and the Jimmie L., from Natchez to New Orleans. In a Houma bar, he nearly gets knifed. 

Everywhere he goes, he talks with people – people in bars, restaurants, and hotels; business people; river people; towboat people. None of it is planned. To me, that’s the allure of his approach. As he says early on, the whole idea of the journey is "to follow the current of things.” He writes, 

The book and the journey would be all of a piece. The plot would be written by the current of the river itself. It would carry me into long deep pools of solitude, and into brushes with society on the shore. Where the river meandered, so would the book, and when the current speeded up into a narrow chute, the book would follow it. Everything would be left to chance. There’d be no advance reservations, no letters of introduction. I would try to be as much like a piece of human driftwood as I could manage. Cast off, let the Mississippi take hold, and trust to whatever adventures or longueurs the river might throw my way. It was a journey that would be random and haphazard; but it would also have the insistent purpose of the river current as it drove southward and seaward to the Gulf of the Mexico. 

I find this approach irresistible. Raban carries it out magnificently. Old Glory is one of his masterpieces. 

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various specific aspects of Old Glory, e.g., its structure, action, and point of view. But first I want to introduce the third book of my trio – Tim Butcher’s superb Blood River. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.