March 9, 2020 Issue

Here are some of the things in this week’s New Yorker that I enjoyed immensely:

1. The delectable description in Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Shannon Cartier Lucy": “The creamily painted, crystalline image of goldfish whose bowl rests, alarmingly, on the lavender flame of a gas stove.”

2. Steve Futterman’s wonderful “Night Life: Andy Statman”: 

An Orthodox Jew walks into the back room of a bar and proceeds to play avant-garde jazz on the clarinet and bluegrass on the mandolin, among much else. Welcome to the manifold musical world of Andy Statman, who, in his frequent visits to this long-standing Park Slope watering hole and music space, proves that New York has always been the place to be if multiculturalism is the air you breathe.

3. News of a new French film that might be worth checking out - Rebecca Zlottowski’s An Easy Girl – described by Richard Brody, in his capsule review of it, as “passionate and finely observed.” 

4. Nick Paumgarten’s excellent Talk story “Pointillism,” a mini-profile of W. Ian Lipkin, “one of the one of the world’s leading infectious-disease epidemiologists,” commenting on the spread of COVID-19:

On Central Park West, he pointed out a painted railing and said, “That, I wouldn’t worry about. You’ve got ultraviolet light, wind.” But on the C train he wrapped an elbow around a pole and said, “I look at the world differently than you do. I see surfaces in a pointillistic ­fashion.” 

5. Alexandra Schwartz’s Talk piece, “Lady from Shanghai,” an encounter with movie director Cathy Yan, the last paragraph of which is superb:

Outside Wu’s Wonton King, Yan struggled to light some sparklers she had just bought. An elderly passerby stopped to cup his hands around Yan’s, shielding the flame from the elements. “He says it’s raining and it’s windy,” Yan said, when he’d left. “There’s a metaphor in here somewhere.” She produced a party popper from a bag and began to twist. Tiny hundred-dollar bills shot into the air. Yan squealed and took a photo. Then she headed off, shedding miniature Benjamins as she walked. Maybe there was a metaphor in there, too.

6. Rivka Galchin’s excellent “Complete Trash,” reporting on South Korea’s progressive approach to waste-processing (“Interspersed among the windrows were truck-size machines that looked like toys: a bright-orange Doppstadt Inventhor ground up trees, an emerald-green Komptech Multistar sorted waste by size, and a white-and-yellow SCARAB turned and aerated the windrows with its inner spokes”). 

7. Vinson Cunningham’s absorbing “Test Case,” an account of his education at a wonderful non-profit school called Prep for Prep and the far-reaching impact it had on his life: 

So Prep recommended me as a tutor for the teen-age son of a black investment banker who was on Prep’s board of directors. The banker paid me directly, by the hour, and I sent him occasional e-mail updates on his son’s progress. We read plays and short stories and articles from the sports pages, and ran through long sets of simple algebra. The kid didn’t like to concentrate; I could relate. One day, I got a call from his stepmother, who was from Chicago. She was supporting a young Illinois senator who was preparing to run for President. His campaign was setting up a fund-raising office in New York, and they’d need an assistant. I knew that I was stumbling into another unmerited adventure.

8. Peter Schjeldahl grappling with the meaning of Donald Judd’s benumbing artworks: “They aren’t about anything. They afford no traction for analysis while making you more or less conscious of your physical relation to them, and to the space that you and they share” (“The Shape of Things”). 

  

9. And Anthony Lane’s description of sex in two new movies, The Burnt Orange Heresy and The Whistler: “vanilla but vigorous, like a frothing milkshake” (“Lying Together”).