Amy Sillman's Gorgeous Blooms

Amy Sillman's Floral Still Lifes (Photo by Calla Kessler)

 

One of the most beautiful online art shows I’ve seen recently is Amy Sillman’s “Twice Removed,” at the Gladstone Gallery, NYC. Hilton Als, in his “Goings On About Town: Art: Amy Sillman” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2020), says of it,

The splendor of Sillman’s new show at the Gladstone gallery lies in its restlessness. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on paper, canvas, and linen, the painter’s fecund imagination finds its expression, first, in a number of abstract images made up of bold dark lines that suggest Sillman’s interest in collage, less in terms of juxtaposing one texture next to another than in drawing, with paint, one image on top of another, the better to give fuller credence to both. These various collisions are very exciting, and come to rest in her paintings of flowers, which convey some of the lush despair and loneliness of van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises but are mostly about the spontaneity that is Sillman’s stock-in-trade: the flowers are the visual manifestation of her blooming mind.

I agree. Sillman’s blooms are delightful. Jason Farago, in his “Amy Sillman’s Breakthrough Moment Is Here" (The New York Times, October 8, 2020), writes,

The great shock of the Gladstone show are the smallest works here: the flowers she painted every morning, all alone in her humble North Fork rental as the virus spread and the temperatures rose. A posy of peonies, their petals rendered as splotches, dense as a bowling ball. A single drooping sunflower, and then a bouquet of them, in a simple jug.

Sillman’s online Gladstone exhibition brims with gorgeous abstracts and floral still lifes. I wish I could own one.

October 19, 2020 Issue

My favorite piece in this week’s New Yorker is Ian Frazier’s "Talk of the Town" story “Biting Back,” an account of his latest visit with artist Scott LoBaido at his gallery on New Dorp Lane, Staten Island. I like it mainly because of one particular sentence – a description of what Frazier sees as he approaches LoBaido, who is taking a break at a table on the sidewalk:

From a distance, a vertical view would include the table, covered with a white cloth; a Martini in a Martini glass (yellow dab of lemon peel); a pack of Marlboros; a brushed-chrome Zippo lighter; the seated artist, deliberately unshaved, dressed in a white T-shirt and a gray knit hoodie (unzipped; purchased at a Salvation Army store); the awning of the gallery, which says “American Artist, Scott LoBaido”; and, atop all that, on the roof, an unrelated billboard for a personal-injury law firm, with the words “Bite Back” in big letters and a picture of a snarling dog in a spiked collar.

That is an amazing combination of objects and details – the verbal equivalent of an inspired street photo.

Postscript: Two other Frazier "Talk" stories on LoBaido are "Don't Tread On Me" (October 3, 2016) and "Mr. 'T' " (November 28, 2016).

October 12, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Dana Goodyear’s absorbing “From the Ground Up,” a profile of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The tagline of the piece asks a question: “Will an L.A. project be Peter Zumthor’s masterpiece or a fiasco?” After reading the article, I’d have to say it could go either way. But fiasco is definitely a possibility. The project in question is the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Zumthor proposes to build “an elevated, single-story structure loosely shaped like a Matisse cutout.” The problem is that Zumthor appears not to like the site. Goodyear writes,

Zumthor is known to conduct exhaustive research into the conditions and customs of places where he builds. During the mine project, in Norway, he worked for years with local historians. But the emotional approach to learning permits a person to dwell only on what truly interests him. In the late eighties, Zumthor lived for a few months in Los Angeles and taught at SCI-Arc, an experimental architecture school. He went to all the Schindler buildings, learned to manage freeway interchanges, and explored the San Fernando Valley. But he seemed to view the place from a distance, and with some dislike. 

This doesn’t bode well for an architect who Goodyear describes as “an emotional, intuitive designer,” whose “earliest experiences remain his strongest aesthetic guides.” Zumthor doesn’t appear to be emotionally, intuitively connected to the LACMA building site, an intensely urban environment spanning Wilshire Boulevard. His masterpiece, the spa at Therme Vals, in the Swiss Alps, is “regarded as an exalted expression of regional modernism: site-specific, culturally grounded, made from local materials using traditional techniques.” Goodyear describes it beautifully:

The walls are made from elongated quartzite bricks, with gray-scale variations reminiscent of the larchwood slats of his atelier. Open seams in the ceiling allow sunlight to enter in ghostly lines—some defining an alternative volume within the space, others fanning out like an annunciation. A brass spout funnels water from the source, St. Petersquelle, into a brass basin with cups attached by chains. In one secluded pool, swimming around a corner reveals a chamber where the human voice harmonizes with the room so that humming creates a glorious Gregorian echo. 

Goodyear is a superb describer. Her depiction of Zumthor crossing Wilshire, “eating a green apple, his black shirt billowing behind him like a windsock,” is one of my favourite lines in the piece. 

CBC's Excellent "Who Killed Alberta Williams?"

Alexandra Schwartz, in her “Happy Listening” (The New Yorker, October 5, 2020), says of podcasting, “The power of the medium is immense.” I agree. Recently, I listened to CBC.ca’s “Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams?,” a spellbinding eight-part podcast investigation that unearths new information and potential suspects in the cold case of a young Indigenous woman murdered in British Columbia in 1989. You’ve likely heard of the term “police procedural”? Well, this podcast is a journalist procedural. Pursuit of the story is part of the narrative. It’s absolutely riveting.

October 5, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Steve Futterman, in his “Goings On About Town” review of Diana Krall’s new album This Dream of You, praises Krall’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s wonderful “How Deep Is the Ocean,” calling it “bravely refashioned.” Well, it’s certainly refashioned, but not in a good way. Krall practically destroys it, slowing it to a walk, draining it of its lyricism. Krall, of all people, should know better. She swung this tune beautifully on her 1997 Love Scenes.

2. Doreen St. Félix, in her “Not Quite America,” says of Luca Guadagnino’s HBO drama “We Are Who We Are,” “The attention to young bodies feels almost dangerous.” I agree. The series thrums with sex. I’ve been enjoying it immensely. 

John Lahr's Brilliant "Making It Real"

Mike Nichols (Photo by Bob Willoughby)

Simon Callow, in his absorbing “Charm Defensive” (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2020), a review of Ash Carter and Sam Kashner’s Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of his Closest Friends, refers to John Lahr’s New Yorker profile of Nichols, “Making It Real” (February 21, 2000; included in Lahr’s wonderful 2015 collection Joy Ride). Callow writes,

The final summing-up belongs to John Lahr, who in his New Yorker profile and in his many shafts of insight throughout Life Isn’t Everything seems to have penetrated him to the core: at the end of his interview for the profile, Mike expressed himself pleased. “I do well with the fundamentally inconsolable,” said Lahr. Mike closed his eyes for a second and sighed, then said: “We get a lot done, you know.”

Lahr’s profile is great. How does he achieve such penetration? What is the key to his art? I think it’s his powerful perception. He notices details of behavior and extracts meaning from them. His relationship with his subjects is not unlike that of an analyst to his patient. But he’s not a cold, dispassionate analyst – far from it; he loves his subjects and the show-biz world in which they live. For example, in one of my favorite passages in “Making It Real,” he describes Nichols’s laugh:

Nichols inspects a replay of the just completed scene in which Ben Kingsley, the leader of Shandling’s planet, taps him for the procreative mission. “The success of our planet’s domination of the universe rests in your hands,” Kingsley says, in his gravest British Received Pronunciation. “Now, if you’ll come this way we’ll arrange your transfer and attach your penis.” A big, chesty laugh rumbles through Nichols’s body. “Kingsley was put on earth to say that line,” he says, and laughs some more. Nichols has as many kinds of laughs as he does ironic inflections, but his high-pitched Big Laugh is like no other. His eyes widen, his body stiffens, his pale skin reddens as hilarity crashes over him. In that moment of wipeout, all of Nichols’s power, self-consciousness, and royal command vanish into childish delight. This wheezy collapse has been captured on record (“Nichols and May at Work”); and anyone who has been in its force field knows the strength of its infectiousness. “It’s incredible when you get it,” Neil Simon told me. “It inspires you to show him more material to get it again.”

That “A big, chesty laugh rumbles through Nichols’s body” is inspired! The whole passage is inspired! It gets at a defining aspect of Nichols’s character – his wonderful, crazy sense of humour.

Paul Muldoon's Delightful "Bramleys, Not Grenadiers"

John Russell, Peonies and Head of a Woman (c.1887)

Paul Muldoon’s poem “Bramleys, Not Grenadiers,” in the September 24, 2020, New York Review of Books, is delightful. I particularly like the lines about the use of pantyhose to tie the trees’ branches to the stake:

At the heart of the espalier is the stake
to which the branches are bound with pantyhose
to allow for a little give and take.

Lorna and I use old pantyhose to wrap her mother’s peony bushes tight so we can fit the wire cages over them. When the cages are in place, we undo the pantyhose and remove it. It’s an old trick we learned from her mother. I’ve often thought that “Peonies & Pantyhose” would make a great title for a poem or short story.

Muldoon’s use of pantyhose in his poem is inspired!

The Art of Cross-Examination

Cross-examination is tricky; so many ways to screw it up. It’s not taught in law school, not when I was there, anyway. You have to learn how to do it by trial and error. I’m talking about actual trials and errors. 

Janet Malcolm is a cross-examination fetishist. She’s written about it in her classic The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), and again in her great Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011). In the latter book, she says memorably, “A successful cross-examination is like a turn of the roulette wheel.”

Recently, in her “A Second Chance” (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2020), a fascinating account of her preparation for testifying on her own behalf in the second Masson v. Malcolm libel trial, she says of her lawyer Gary Bostwick’s cross-examination of Jeffrey Masson, “In his best moments, he played him like a matador playing a bull.”

Playing a witness like a matador playing a bull takes a lot of skill and preparation. It doesn’t just happen. Some lawyers never get the hang of it. During my early years of practice, I was one of them. I dreaded cross-examination. I didn’t understand it; I wasn’t ready for it; I couldn’t do it. Then, one day, I was reading Arlene Croce’s great The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (1972), in which she describes the “detailed minutage” that the director Mark Sandrich made for every one of his Astaire-Rogers musicals. Croce provides a sample of one at the back of her book. Looking at that chart, I wondered why I couldn’t do the same for my cross-examinations.

And so, in preparation for trial, I charted my cross-examinations Mark Sandrich-style. I drew a set of columns on my yellow legal pad – a column for witness’s statements to the police, a column for what the witness testified to at the preliminary inquiry, and a column for what the witness said in direct examination at trial. And then I divided these columns into rows, one row for each subject of cross-examination. For example, if the witness told the police that the accused was wearing dark gloves, and then at preliminary inquiry testified she couldn’t remember if he was wearing gloves, and then at trial testified in direct examination that she didn’t see his hands, that meant I had three different versions of testimony from that particular witness on the subject of gloves. A good cross-examiner can turn such contradictions into gold. That’s really what I was charting – contradictions, inconsistencies – the more the better.

These charts improved my cross-examination immeasurably. Armed with them, I found myself looking forward to cross-examination. Some might find it quite improbable that a book on Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals could help me hone my cross-examination skills. But improbable or not, it’s the truth, so help me God. Thanks to the chart at the back of Croce’s great book, I became, if not a Gary Bostwick-like matador, at least a competent cross-examiner. 

And by the way, Croce’s book is great. Here are some samples:

Up, over the furniture and down again, à deux. They dance up, he swings her down. Dancing on the furniture is Astaire’s own motif in this film. Only in Astaire musicals do we dream like this.

Two big Cossacks have to carry him protesting onto the dance floor, and there he does his longest and most absorbing solo of the series so far, full of stork-legged steps on toe, wheeling pirouettes in which he seems to be winding one leg around the other, and those ratcheting tap clusters that fall like loose change from his pockets.

The withheld impetus makes the dance look dragged by destiny, all the quick little circling steps pulled as if on a single thread.

Astaire and Rogers yield nothing to Garbo’s throat or Pavlova’s Swan as icons of the sublime, yet their manner is brisk. Briskly they immolate themselves.

The snow of Swing Time is as magical as the rain of “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?” and the white hotels of Venice. If you put Top Hat in a glass ball like a paperweight and turned it upside down, it would be Swing Time. And at the end of Swing Time, the sun comes out through the falling snow.

Vendler on Glück

Louise Glück (Photo by Webb Chappell)

Dwight Garner, in his “Louise Glück, a Nobel Winner Whose Poems Have Abundant Intellect and Deep Feeling” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 8, 2020), quotes my favorite literary critic, Helen Vendler. He says, “Helen Vendler, writing in The New Republic, said that Glück’s poems ‘have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither “confessional” nor “intellectual” in the usual senses of those words.’ ” The quote is from Vendler’s “Flower Power: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris” (The New Republic, May 24, 1993; included in Vendler’s 1995 Soul Says). 

Vendler wrote another great New Republic piece on Glück – “The Poetry of Louise Glück” (June 17, 1978; collected in Vendler’s 1980 Part of Nature, Part of Us. In this earlier essay, Vendler says of Glück, “She sees experience from very far off, almost through the wrong end of a telescope.” That strikes me as valid. I find Glück’s poetry remote, detached, cold – far removed from what Tolstoy called “the unconscious swarmlike life of mankind.” But as abstraction, it’s exquisite. For example, “Messengers”:

And the deer—
how beautiful they are,
as though their bodies did not impede them.
Slowly they drift into the open
through bronze panels of the sunlight.

September 28, 2020 Issue

Dan Chiasson makes an interesting observation in his “Critical Distances,” in this week’s issue. He says, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” Is this true? I recall Ian Frazier saying something similar a few years ago. In his “Carving Your Name on the Rock” [included in The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (1991), edited by William Zinsser], he writes, “What the travel writer is doing, in essence, is carving his name on the rock. He is saying, ‘I passed this way, too.’ ” Is that what I’m doing when I write this blog – asserting my existence? Blogito, ergo sum. I blog, therefore I am. No, I don’t think so. Blogging is too ephemeral and insubstantial for that.

Roger Angell, in his “This Old Man” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2014), writes, “I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.” That’s a perfect metaphor for blogging, conveying both its freedom and its ephemerality.

These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my motive for blogging. Last week, I was close to winding things up. Then along came the September 7th New Yorker containing Jay Ruttenberg’s wonderful “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette, and I felt rejuvenated. I listened to LaVette’s raw, croaky rendition of “Blackbird,” and I loved it, and wanted to say why. Right there, I think, is at least one reason I blog – to figure out why I’m drawn to a particular writing or artwork.

September 21, 2020 Issue

My favorite piece in this week’s issue is Julian Lucas’s “Death Sentences,” a review of Hervé Guibert’s writings on his battle with AIDS. Two passages in particular stand out:

1. Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light.

2. Perhaps it’s this mischievous affirmation of life’s mess and sensuality, even in the face of death, that will define Guibert’s contribution to the literature of illness. Rejecting its taboos, he scaled AIDS’ very long flight of steps and fearlessly recorded what he saw on the climb.

That last line is inspired!

Postscript: Another excellent essay on Guilbert is Wayne Koestenbaum’s “The Pleasure of the Text” (Bookforum, June/July/August, 2014; retitled “On Futility, Holes, and Hervé Guibert,” in Koestenbaum’s recent Figuring It Out). Koestenbaum says,

Futility and botched execution are the immortal matter of Guibert’s method. Futility and botched execution—combined, in Guibert’s work, with finesse, concision, and a heavy dose of negative capability, which includes curiosity about the worst things that can befall a body—are undying aesthetic and spiritual values, worth cherishing in any literature we dare to call our own.

Best of the Decade: #3 Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"

Photo by James Messerschmidt, from Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #3 pick – Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (May 3, 2010).

The tagline of this great piece is “Anatomy of a murder trial.” That’s essentially what it is. Malcolm analyses all the participants – judges, lawyers, witnesses, jurors, even her fellow reporters. She takes nothing at face value. But she’s far from an objective onlooker. She’s fascinated by the accused, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a doctor accused of murdering her husband after a family court judge awarded him sole custody of their only child. Malcolm says, “She looked like a captive barbarian princess in a Roman triumphal procession.” She says, “Borukhova’s otherness was her defining characteristic.” She describes the case – a case that most people would consider open-and-shut – as an “enigma”: “She couldn’t have done it and she must’ve done it.”

You’ll notice that I said “judges” in the plural. There are two hearings intertwined here. One is the custody case, presided over by Judge Sidney Strauss. Strauss, not Borukhova, is the villain of the piece. It’s his decision that, in Malcolm’s words, “drove Borukhova to her terrible expedient.” She calls Strauss “petulant” and “irrational.” She says,

Courts routinely remove children from homes where they are neglected, abused, malnourished, traumatized. I know of no other case where a well-cared-for child is taken from its mother because it sits on her lap during supervised visits with an absent father and refuses to “bond” with him. 

The other hearing is the murder trial, presided over by Judge Robert Hanophy (known as “Hang’em Hanophy”), who is even more repellent than Strauss. Malcolm writes,

Hanophy is a man of seventy-four with a small head and a large body and the faux-genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate. From his dais he looks out over the courtroom, taking in every spectator as well as every actor in the drama being played out under his direction. “You there with the cap,” he will raise his voice to say to a spectator. “Take it off. You can’t wear that in here.” In 1997, Hanophy was censured by the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct for making “undignified, discourteous and disparaging remarks” and being “mean-spirited” and “vituperative” during a sentencing. But a document of censure has no consequences. Hanophy’s absolute power remains unchanged, and he continues to exercise it with evident enjoyment, and without any sign of doubt.

Without any sign of doubt – what words could be said of a trial judge that are more damning than that? 

Malcolm views the trial skeptically. She sees it as “a contest between competing narratives.” We know from Malcolm’s previous work that she’s suspicious of narrative. “The true memory or dream or thought,” she says, in “Six Roses ou Cirrhose?” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983), "is often so unformed and murky and inchoate that it cannot be expressed except by resort to narrative description, which somehow falsifies it.” In “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” she says,

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

She calls the trial process “artificial” and “inhuman.” But she also finds it fascinating, and she makes it fascinating to read. The “malleability of trial evidence” fascinates her. Cross-examination fascinates her (“A successful cross-examination is like a turn of the roulette wheel”). And she devours contradiction (“If witnesses abided by the oath to 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' there wouldn’t be the contradictions between testimonies that give a trial its tense plot and the jury its task of deciding whom to believe”).

I think what makes this piece so memorable is Malcolm’s sympathy for Borukhova, a woman who, as Malcolm says, had "a way of getting under people’s skin and setting off serious allergic reactions.” Not many of us would have sympathy for such a person. But Malcolm does, so much so that she actually tries to intervene on Borukhova’s behalf (“Then I did something I have never done before as a journalist. I meddled with the story I was reporting. I entered it as a character who could affect its plot. I picked up the phone and called Stephen Scaring’s office”). The moment comes after Malcolm interviews one of the prosecution’s witnesses, David Schall, who is the court-appointed law guardian of Borukhova and her husband’s daughter. After the interview, Malcolm has such serious concerns about his mental stability that she calls Borukhova’s lawyer, Stephen Scaring. He asks her to fax him her notes of the interview. She does so, and next day in court Scaring moves for leave to recall Schall to question him concerning his mental health. Judge Hanophy denies the motion and the trial proceeds. But I’ve never forgotten the boldness of Malcolm’s move. It takes ovaries to do what she did. She damn near became a witness in the very trial she was covering.

Postscript: The book version of “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” published in 2011, is slightly longer than the New Yorker piece. It contains a scene - one that doesn't appear in the magazine version - that is one of my favorites in all of Malcolm’s writings. It’s a description of a mosaic in the lobby of the courthouse where Borukhova’s trial was held. Malcolm says,

The mosaic is a wondrous sight, but, as people hurry through the security barrier toward the elevators, they do not take it in. I noticed it only because one day, during a long recess, I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice.

Malcolm goes on to describe the mosaic in detail. But it’s that “I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice” that I love. It perfectly captures the flâneurial sensibility in action. It's one of my touchstones.

Bettye LaVette's Soulful "Blackbird"

Thanks to Jay Ruttenberg’s recent “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette (The New Yorker, September 7, 2020), I discovered a terrific rendition of one of my favorite songs – Lennon and McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Ruttenberg says of LaVette’s version, "She trades the song’s delicacy for gravity, flipping it into first person: 'All of my life, I have waited and waited and waited for this moment to be free.' " Beautifully put. LaVette’s “Blackbird” went straight into my personal anthology of great jazz songs.