Best of 2018: GOAT

Jorge Colombo, "Ophelia" (2018)

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Elizabeth Barber, “Bar Tab: Ophelia,” April 23, 2018 [“At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want”].

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Art: Dike Blair,” November 26, 2018 (“A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life”).

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Miznon,” April 30, 2018 (“It seems almost unfair to compare Miznon pita to any other pita. Miznon pita is plush, Miznon pita is pillowy—I would happily take a nap on a stack of Miznon pita. It’s as stretchy and pliant as Neapolitan pizza dough, its surface similarly taut and golden brown, glistening ever so slightly with oil. It cradles whatever you stuff it with as supportively as a hammock, efficiently absorbing the flavors of herb-flecked ground-lamb kebab, roasted mushrooms, or spicy fish stew”).

4. David Kortava, “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” August 6 & 13, 2018 (“After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to ‘Celebration,’ by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene”).

5. Richard Brody, “Movies: Fig Leaves,” May 21, 2018 (“Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that viewers might swear they hear the intertitles spoken”).

6. Doreen St. Félix, “Art: ‘African American Portraits,’ ” August 20, 2018 (“But there is a depthless artificiality to the stock scenery, which makes the sitters seem as if they have been dropped into a placeless limbo. An altering occurs when an institution puts relics of real and recent life behind glass, making them into art objects. The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific stories”).

7. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Lee Krasner,” October 29, 2018 (“Linear geometries partner with biomorphic curves in a dominant palette of red, yellow, and blue. Zinging orange and chartreuse have guest-starring turns, and Léger-like black lines maintain order”).

8. Talia Lavin, "Bar Tab: Anyway Café," April 30, 2018 [“Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim”]. 

9. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“Oil paint lends itself to Thiebaud’s canvases like buttercream to cake, and his works on paper are every bit as delectable”).

10. Neima Jahromi, “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” July 23, 2018 (“On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut”).