Monday, March 2, 2015
February 23 & March 2, 2015 Issue
“As I write this, The
New Yorker is dead,” claimed Renata Adler, in her bitter Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker
(1999). Well, that was sixteen years ago, and The New Yorker is still with us, more vibrant than ever, as the
current issue – the loaded and layered 90th Anniversary Issue –
vividly shows. Of its many pleasures – Mary Norris’s "Holy Writ" (“Chances are
that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront
before going out”), Ian Frazier’s "The Cabaret Beat" (“Portrait photographers
emphasized Ross’s hair, which grew straight up and which a famous actress said
she would like to walk barefoot in”), James Wood’s "Look Again" (“It is the
writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle
with the aperture”) – the most piquant, for me, is Ian Parker’s brilliant "The Shape of Things to Come." It’s a profile of Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior
vice-president of design. Its materials are vast and finely woven: people [Ive,
J. J. Abrams, Robert Bruner, Michael Ive (Ive’s father), Steve Jobs, Powell
Jobs, Clive Grinyer, Bob Mansfield, Tim Cook, Eugene Whang, Dan Riccio, Jeff
Williams, Marc Newson, Bart André, Richard Seymour, Jeff Williams, among
others]; events (a launch of new Apple products and services, a visit to
Apple’s industrial design studio, a tour of Apple’s future campus); things [“a
black steam-punk watch,” “three eight-foot-high computer-numerical-control
(C.N.C.) milling machines,” “dozens of custom sketchbooks that had padded blue
covers and silver edging,” “Ive’s black Bentley, which is as demure as a highly
conspicuous luxury car can be,” “a Rams-designed Braun MPZ2 Citromatic juicer,”
“an Apple Watch … in rose gold, with a band of white rubbery plastic,” “a
glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a
descending, motorized flap like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane”]. It
brims with inspired sentences (e.g., “Ive’s aesthetic is not austere: one could think of the work
done here as a reticent man’s idea of exuberance, with rapture expressed in the
magnetic click of a power adapter”; “But others may have had the thought, or the half-thought,
that the sounds made the phones more coherent – a more natural accompaniment to
glass, aluminum, and Helvetica Neue”). Best of all is Parker’s liberal use of
the first-person. He’s not only an observer; he’s a participant (“I spoke to
Dye at a table by the lawn at Infinite Loop”; “Inside the shed, I tried on a
watch, and its stainless-steel bracelet, guided by magnets, fell into place
with the click of someone stacking nickels”; “The next day, I visited Ive in
his studio”). “The Shape of Things to Come” is a masterpiece. I enjoyed it
immensely.
Labels:
Ian Frazier,
Ian Parker,
James Wood,
Mary Norris,
Renata Adler,
The New Yorker
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