Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

February 17 & 24, 2020 Issue


Michaelangelo Matos’s “Night Life: Classixx,” in this week’s issue, is a beauty:

The limpid saxophone solo, redolent of eighties High Street fashion, will always have a place on the dance floor if the Los Angeles duo Classixx has anything to say about it. Michael David and Tyler Blake’s relaxed disco stomp and heavily filtered hooks emit the bawdy suavity of Parisian house; in December, they dedicated a live remake of their single “Love Me No More” to the late French producer Phillippe Zdar.

That “relaxed disco stomp and heavily filtered hooks emit the bawdy suavity of Parisian house” enacts the impeccable rhythm it describes.
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