1. The Maira Kalman cover is brilliant! Titled “Stéphane Mallarmé with Shawl,” it shows the poet all in gray, wearing a vivid red-and-white patterned scarf and an opulent pink bowtie. Kalman is one of the preeminent colorists of our time. It’s great to see her still doing New Yorker covers.
2. One of my favorite “Talk of the Town” writers is Robert Sullivan. He relates (as I do) to quirky individuals who do things solely for their own sake. His “Manhattan's Springs,” in this week’s issue, is a perfect example of his own idiosyncratic work. It’s about a Brooklyn-based photographer named Stanley Greenberg, who walks through upper Manhattan and the Bronx, posting copies of James Reuel Smith’s photos of old springs and wells near the spots where they originally existed. Sullivan writes,
On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. “The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,” he said. Many of the photographs have already disappeared, though a friend recently spotted one that had been posted in June, at Broadway and 108th Street, outside a closed bagel shop. “I don’t care,” Greenberg said. “I just want to post them all.”
It's a curious project, charting the disappearance of old water sources. Greenberg has a deep sense of transience. So does Sullivan. I enjoyed this piece immensely.
3. Another enjoyable piece is Lauren Collins’ “The Unicode.” It’s a profile of a giant clothing company based in Tokyo called Uniqlo. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of it. Collins visits the company’s headquarters. She visits a newly renovated Uniqlo store in the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa. She visits the Uniqlo store in Paris. She visits the Uniqlo offices in London, where she talks with Uniqlo’s creative director Clare Waight Keller. She attends an event at Tate Modern, in London, in which people around the world vie to design a Uniqlo shirt. In Paris, she meets and talks with Uniqlo’s founder, Tadashi Yanai, who still serves as its C.E.O., and who is now the second-richest man in Japan. It’s quite a tour! My favorite part is Collins’ description of Uniqlo’s factory:
The employees were working on a batch of women’s chocolate-brown 3D Knit Soufflé Yarn Skirts (size M) and forest-green 3D Knit polo shirts (size XL). After the machines pumped out the items, the clothes were sent, ten at a time, to be examined for flaws. At an inspection station, a woman in pigtails and a surgical mask was in the process of checking a green polo. She draped it over two upright illuminated cones—think lightsabres mounted on a lazy Susan—scrutinizing the fabric for snags and holes. As we watched, a chimelike tune filled the room. “Five minutes until break,” Tomoya said.
Collins is excellent at conveying the culture of complex corporations. Her “House Perfect” (The New Yorker, October 3, 2011), a portrait of IKEA, is masterly. “The Unicode” is every bit as good.
4. Yet another absorbing piece in this week’s issue is D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth.” It tells about Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, an immense unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882, and the amazing construction work currently underway to complete it. The Sagrada Família is an unusual church. Max describes it as "a head-spinning mixture of morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have the lumpy beauty of sandcastles." He visits the construction site and describes the activity. He’s guided by Jordi Faulí, the project’s ninth and current chief architect. The two of them ride rickety construction elevators, crawl through small passageways, climb vertical catwalks. The views are stunning. Here’s a sample:
Suddenly, we were standing inside the Mary tower, which is four hundred and fifty-two feet tall. Its walls were white—the color of purity—and the interior was brightly illuminated by eight hundred triangular windows of translucent white glass. The windows, Faulí later explained, were a scaled-up version of ones Gaudí had made for the sacristy, a section of Sagrada Família for which the architect had made a complete model.
The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor.
“The Behemoth” is a fascinating tour of an astonishing architectural work of art. I devoured it.
5. Beautiful architecture is also the subject of Adam Gopnik’s “Making a Move,” a tour of Philadelphia’s new Calder Gardens. Gopnik writes,
As one enters and descends, the space unfolds in a purposefully whimsical range of materials. Volcanic-seeming black rock lines a catacomblike stairway, punctuated by a single glass window framing a lone Calder. Tiered seats lead down into a viewing area that doubles as an amphitheatre for lectures or performances. Though buried, the sometimes monumental forms of the exhibition space rise convexly, lifting upward, while light from the Parkway pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Even underground, one feels enlarged, not entombed. And there’s nothing tomblike about the constant rumble of traffic from the boulevard outside.
Uniqlo factory, Sagrada Família, Calder Gardens – all transfixing places you can visit vicariously in this week’s splendid New Yorker.
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