Friday, February 13, 2015
February 9, 2015 Issue
Notes on this week's issue:
1. I like a good argument. Kelefa Sanneh, in his absorbing
"Don't Be Like That," takes issue with a new anthology called The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black
Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson (with Ethan Fosse), which faults black
culture for, among other things, “suboptimal cultural traits,” such as devaluation
of traditional coparenting and eschewal of mainstream styles of childrearing.
Sanneh sees this as a form of “victim-blaming.” The real culprit, he says, is
racism. He says of Patterson’s approach, “He contends that black culture can
and must change while conceding, less loudly, that ‘thoroughly racist’ whites
are likely to remain stubbornly the same.” In the aftermath of Ferguson,
Sanneh’s conclusion – “If we want to learn more about black culture, we should
study it. But, if we seek to answer the question of racial inequality in
America, black culture won’t tell us what we want to know” – seems irrefutable.
2. Last year, Amelia Lester, in her review of Wallflower, wrote
one of my favorite lines: “If you feel
like eating a carrot-and-black-trumpet-mushroom salad with your second tequila
cocktail, you’re in luck, and perhaps it’s the right call—the windows frame an
obnoxiously bright Equinox gym, where Lululemoners reading Us Weekly on the elliptical pedal through the night
in silent rebuke” ("Bar Tab: Wallflower," The New Yorker, March 31, 2014). This week, she scores
another wonderful description, a representation of a Cosme dessert: “a
corn-husk meringue with its own hashtag, possessed of an intensely milky taste
from the mousse of mascarpone, cream, and corn purée that spills out like lava
from its core.” "Tables For Two: Cosme is ravishing; every line surprises and
delights.
3. Not to be outdone, Emma Allen, in her terrific "Bar Tab: Winnie's,"
constructs this verbal wunderkammern: “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.” Her review
features a great opening line, too: “The narrative arcs of nights spent drinking
are sometimes self-imposed (pub crawl begins here, ends there), sometimes
forced upon us (I woke up in Ronkonkoma!).”
4. Alex Ross’s "Eyes and Ears" describes a marvelous effect – the way
seventeenth-century music played amid Caravaggios brings the paintings alive.
He writes,
Throughout the evening, I couldn’t escape the uncanny feeling that the
people in the paintings were listening in, as in some spooky Victorian tale of
portraits come to life. In the presence of the music, their eyes possibly glowed
a little brighter, their flesh a little warmer. In Gallery 621, the effect was
all but electric: chaste religious figures seemed on the verge of jumping out
of the chiaroscuro shadows and joining the women of TENET, who, in turn, looked
ready to step through the frames into the other world. Then, with the applause,
the spell was broken: the living walked away, and the pictures fell silent for
the night.
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