Wednesday, June 28, 2023
June 26, 2023 Issue
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
June 19, 2023 Issue
Monday, June 26, 2023
June 12, 2023 Issue
The party that night began at ten, which meant more like midnight. Oontz, oontz, oontz, oontz. The projections of Marquardt’s portraits flashed on the walls, apparently to the beat but in random sequences. The revellers seemed unsure whether to watch or to dance. In the hall, Mosbeck, the gallerist, pulled on cotton gloves and rehung one of the eighties prints, which had been knocked off the wall by the heavy thud of the kick drum. Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene and said, “I am happy.” Then he went with Paetke to hang out by the entrance, as though he were working his own party. “Ja, I am at the door,” he said. “Maybe this is the normal situation.”
That “Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene and said, ‘I am happy’ ” is brilliant! The whole piece is brilliant – an inspired coda to Paumgarten’s superb “Berlin Nights.”
Sunday, June 25, 2023
June 5, 2023 Issue
Parker had swept in a few minutes earlier in black pants and a sunflower-yellow top, her shoulders wrapped in a jewel-toned silk scarf. Her hair was pure white and pulled back into a French roll, her round cheeks still unlined at seventy-six. “I’m responsible for the mood food,” she said. She took two bottles of strawberry Fanta from a shopping bag and plunked them on the table. “We’ll have to toast each other with red pop.”
He describes the session’s proceedings:
And so it went. Pawelski would play a demo, names would fly around the table—“David Porter!” “Byrd Burton!” “That’s Crop on the guitar!”—and a flood of reminiscences would follow. That jangly piano part must have been recorded in Studio C; it had an old brown upright in it. But that flabby bass sound was definitely from Studio B—it never had much bottom end. A high voice with a bit of a quaver came over the speakers, and suddenly it was as if Carl Smith, who wrote “Higher and Higher” and “Rescue Me,” was standing there in the room, with his oversized glasses and boyish grin. And that deep moan? It could only be Mack Rice, mouthing his improbable rhymes—thrown, gone, own, telephone. The longer they listened, the more the gallery around them seemed to fade, replaced by the dusky halls and echoing rooms of the old theatre. Every song was a memory palace, every instrument a key to a different door—though not always the same one for every listener.
Most memorably, he describes a Stax demo that no one at the session can identify:
The singer’s name wasn’t written down, and he never sang at Stax again. Pawelski suspected that the demo was taped at one of the “neighborhood auditions” that the studio held on Saturday afternoons, open to anyone with a song. “Was on a cold Saturday night and we just had a fight,” the singer began. “You walked out on me, knowing that you killed my heart with grief.” His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter. He sounded hopeless, abandoned, as if he knew that there was no point in begging, but he couldn’t help but do so. “Just walk on back,” he sang, and a pair of voices joined in to help carry the tune. “Walk on back. I don’t care how long it takes if you just walk on back.”
That “His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.
Friday, June 23, 2023
May 29, 2023 Issue
During previous reporting trips to Ukraine, I had encountered the Russian military almost exclusively as a remote, invisible source of bombs that fell from the sky. It was eerie to look across such a short gap at an actual Russian position—and to know that an actual Russian might be looking back.
The piece is about trench warfare. It begins and ends with digging. In the first scene, infantrymen dig a machine gun nest. In the last scene, four soldiers shovel earth into a fresh grave. Mogelson puts us squarely there, in the bunkers, dugouts, root cellars, observation posts, and trenches. For example:
The trench was still a work in progress: you had to crouch and hunch to hide from snipers. When I’d stopped by a couple of hours earlier, the men there had been busy digging. Now they were shooting. More high-pitched rounds were crossing overhead. The heavyset soldier was squatting near a machine gunner who was staring over the sunflower stalks while resting the barrel of his weapon on a horizontal log.
“Do you see them?” the soldier asked.
“No,” the machine gunner said. A voice came through his radio, announcing that a second drone had joined the first one.
“Copy.”
Both were circling straight above us: two black silhouettes against the blue, like a pair of buzzards. The machine gunner swivelled his muzzle almost vertically and unleashed a salvo, but the weapon was too unwieldy. I was grateful for the narrowness of the trench, which had initially struck me as a design flaw: the passage was so tight that when you met someone going the other way you had to flatten yourself against a side, briefly exposing your head. This was intentional. The wider the trench, the more likely it was that projectiles or their fragments would find their way into it.
A grenade detached from one of the drones. A small geyser of earth erupted a few yards away from us. Between the snug walls, I hardly felt the explosion.
The piece is also about Mogelson’s personal experiences on the Zero Line. He accompanies soldiers on their sorties. He goes out on a B.R.M. (Soviet-era combat vehicle with tracks and cannon). He accompanies medics on a M-133 (an American personnel carrier from the Vietnam War) to pick up a wounded soldier. He hitches a ride from the Zero Line on a B.M.P. (another Soviet-era armoured vehicle):
Student and I each hooked an arm around the cannon between us, and the B.M.P. sped across the fields, spitting red sparks and black exhaust, rising and dipping over the muddy craters and fallow rows like a ship plowing through choppy seas. In the distance, a bright incendiary munition was drifting slowly down; flames were dancing on a nearby ridge.
Most of all, “Underworld” is about the infantrymen on the Zero Line – the various ways they cope with the ordeal of combat. Mogelson talks with more than a dozen of them, identifying them by their code names: Syava, Pavlo, Bison, Odesa, Artem, Tynda, Kaban, Cadet, Volynyaka, Darwin, Oper, Ivan, Kyrylo, Leonora, Student. Here’s his description of Darwin:
The first time I accompanied them on this sortie, I rode behind the gunner, who was surprisingly compact in stature and stood in an open hatch wearing a black sweatshirt, a black beanie, black cargo pants, black boots, black gloves, black sunglasses, and a black neck gaiter pulled over his face, printed with the white teeth and jaw of a skull. When we got back to Kostyantynivka, the gunner removed his gaiter. Code-named Darwin, he was a baby-faced youth about the same age as Cadet.
One of my takeaways from this great piece is a realization of how resourceful Ukrainian infantrymen are using old Soviet and American military equipment. Here, for example, is Mogelson’s description of a soldier, code-named Kaban, operating a Soviet-era anti-tank gun called an S.P.G.-9:
There wasn’t much to the weapon—a bazooka on a tripod—and it was in decrepit condition. The trigger mechanism was broken. To activate each warhead, Kaban had to pry open the rocket’s gunpowder-filled cartridge with a pocketknife, twist together two wires at its base, connect those wires to a household electrical cable, then hook the cable onto a loop of bare copper that was attached to the gun with masking tape.
“Underworld” is a vivid portrait of Ukraine’s incredibly brave front-line soldiers.
Thursday, June 1, 2023
Taking a Break
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| Ferrara, April 28, 2013 (Photo by John MacDougall) |
Lorna and I are heading to Ferrara for three weeks to do some cycling. I’m taking the May 29 New Yorker with me. I’ll post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about June 26.
3 More for the Road: Place
This is the sixth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favourite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan's Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010). Today, I’ll focus on their sense of place.
In Along the Edge of the Forest, Bailey explores the border country that Germans call Grenzland, where people live in the presence of a three-meter-high metal fence (die Grenze), commonly known as the Iron Curtain, bristling with barbed wire, watchtowers, and armed guards, a grotesque barrier, built by the Soviet Union, that splits Europe into West and East – freedom on one side; totalitarianism on the other. To evoke such a place, he drives it from one end to the other, from Travemünde, on the Baltic Sea, to Trieste, on the Adriatic Sea, keeping as close to the fence as possible, visiting border towns, talking with border people, all the while logging his impressions in detail after vivid detail. For example, here’s his description of his visit to the West German town of Braunlage, “a bare kilometre from the border”:
With sweater, plastic raincoat and map stuffed into my nylon knapsack I walked through Bruanlage, which had something of New England about its houses – vertical siding, wooden shingles, even asbestos shingles. I walked past other hotels and big sanatoriums in parklike grounds and out of town, northward in the direction of the Wurmberg. In the woods, the wind in the pines sounded like the sea; occasionally there was a little shower of pine needles, and the smell of pine was strong. The ascent was steady and not oversteep. I was about two thirds of the way up before I saw the border – a watchtower to the east and an expanse of grass before the pine forest in the DDR [East Germany] began. Birds and butterflies flew across my line of sight.
Bailey has a keen eye for watchtowers. They appear frequently throughout his journey, marking the location of the border, emblems of Soviet oppression and the Cold War. Every time Bailey sees one, he notes it. Here’s another example:
I followed the road south from one such village, Mörbisch, a pretty place of white-washed houses with outside stairs, bright-painted shutters, and hanging pots of flowers or bunches of dried corn. The road ended in a small parking lot, with a vineyard on the long slope toward the lake, the long hedges of vines hanging from wires suspended between low posts, and the southern edge of the vineyard formed by a rusty barbed-wire fence about two meters tall. This was the Staatsgrenze, the Hungarian border. Here stood several Hungarian watchtowers, more like the Czech than the East German variety, small cabins on tall, outspread legs; one was built on a marshy peninsula by the lake. In a giant field on the Hungarian side two large red-painted combine harvesters were working down the slope toward the lake, which was gray, under low gray clouds. The grapes growing in this Austrian vineyard were small and green, hanging in secretive clusters under the vine leaves.
“Place” in Cross Country is the system of interstate highways that Sullivan and his family travel from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. It’s the “interstate-obsessed terrain” of gas stations, convenience stores, motels, and service areas. It’s the landscape they see through the windshield of their Impala. It’s the history of that landscape, indicated by place names, road signs, and historical markers. Sullivan evokes this world by describing it in fond, immersive detail, right down to the plastic lids on the many coffees he buys en route. Speaking of coffee, here’s his description of the bank of coffee dispensers at the Kwik Trip in Hudson, Wisconsin:
Today, except for that hour this morning in which I was chugging the fancy hotel’s delicious complimentary coffee, I have been coffee-free; I have been waiting all day to call upon the power of coffee and now I am calling. Thus, I am pleased to see an excellent selection of the magical dark liquid at Kwik Trip; it is a bank of coffee, in tall pump-on-the-top, self-service receptacles: nonflavored and flavored coffees, caffeinated and noncaffeinated, “Cinnful Cinnamon” flavored coffee, “Irish Crème Swirl” flavored coffee, “Hawaiian Chocolate” flavored coffee – it’s a flavored and not-flavored highway coffee oasis. The coffee norm on cross-country trips is well known: a clear glass coffeepot with a brown top or orange top, with a pool of blackness, simmering since hours before you arrived and in the hours after you leave, coffee that might be run through your car engine for lubrication, if your car engine were not so particular.
Unlike Bailey, in Along the Edge of the Forest, Sullivan doesn’t do much flâneurial walking around. Except for brief intervals, when he and his family stop for gas or snacks or to use the restroom or to view a roadside monument or, in one instance, to play a round of golf, they spend most of the trip in their rental car. Each night, they pull over and stay in a motel. It’s amazing how much fresh interstate detail Sullivan is able to glean from each of these stops. Here, for example, he scopes the Commodore Perry Service Area, I-80, Ohio:
For what feels simultaneously like the millionth time and the first time, we enter the Commodore Perry Service Area – we decelerate past an artificial hill, and while in the gradual turn, we see farms. We see a farm on the left and a farm on the right, and the service area itself seems like a farm of sorts, or maybe a trough – a brand-new food-producing, trash-making, gasoline-pumping, state-of-the-art service area bounded by a green corn-growing green. As we pull into the angled parking spot, we see it straight on. There are touches of Frank Lloyd Wright in the Prairie-style design, and it looks a lot like an airport terminal without runways, an obelisk making it feel like something picked up off the Mall in Washington, D.C., and put on the road in Ohio. There is the Ohio state flag, the American flag, the six fast-food logos. Entering the service area via a walkway, I feel as if I am entering a town hall in a suburb. We pass a mailbox, look over to see pets frolicking in the pet area, hold the door for travelers exiting the plaza, and then, as we enter its grand foyer, the Commodore Perry Service Area speaks to us.
And here’s the meaning he draws from that experience:
What the Commodore Perry Service Area speaks to me about is the nature of the road at the dawn of the twenty-first century, which pushes us on, which continues to express an optimism that may or may not be rooted in reality: the optimism that comes from the America that bows to the god that it sometimes believes has suggested it press on, the god that is sometimes substituted with the god of technology, the motion that finite can be reengineered into the infinite, that stresses, no matter what, that there is more than enough space, more than enough room, that there is more.
How do you evoke a place as massive as Siberia? Frazier, in his Travels in Siberia, starts with smell:
We came down some stairs into a hall leading to Passport Control [in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport]. On the floor at the foot of the stairs was a large, vividly red spill of liquid – possibly raspberry syrup, possibly transmission fluid. I tried without success to pick up its smell. Instead I was hit by the smell of Russia, one I’ve encountered often since, all over that country. The components of the smell are still a mystery. There’s a lot of diesel fuel in it, and cucumber peels, and old tea bags, and sour milk, and a sweetness – currant jam, or mulberries crushed into the waffle treads of heavy boots – and fresh wet mud, and a lot of wet cement. Every once in a while, in just the right damp basement in America, I find a cousin of the Russia-smell unexpectedly there.
That “or mulberries crushed into the waffle treads of heavy boots” is inspired! Frazier is a great nose writer. Later on, he encounters the “Russia-smell” again (this time at the airport in Provideniya, Chukotka):
When I entered the cold terra-cotta-tiled room where we were to fill out our customs declaration forms, I encountered an old friend: the smell of Russia. How do they do it? Here on the edge of the Bering Strait, five thousand miles from Moscow, almost within wafting distance of the U.S.A., the Russia-smell is exactly the same. I breathed it deeply. Yes, it was all there – the tea bags, the cucumber peels, the wet cement, the chilly air, the currant jam. About the only point of similarity between the smell and the one I’d just left in Nome was the overtone of diesel exhaust. But still fresh from America, I understood that America’s essential smell is nothing at all like Russia’s. America smells like gift shop candles, fried food, new cars. America’s is the smell of commerce. The smell of Alaska that stays with me the strongest is that of the Cinnabon sweet rolls shop in the Anchorage airport; I’m sure the scent of Cinnabon is set adrift everywhere in that space intentionally, in order to ensnare passersby. The smell of America says, “Come in and buy.” The smell of Russia says, “Ladies and gentleman: Russia!”
Reading Frazier’s pungent descriptions of the smell of Russia, I recall something Barry Lopez wrote: “It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our minds” (“The American Geographies,” included in Lopez’s 1998 essay collection About This Life). I think this is true. These three excellent books are prime examples of it.
Description of landscape is one way to evoke place. Another is description of people. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
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