March 4, 2024 Issue

I love these sentences:

1. Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works. [Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B.”]

2. In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge. [Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?”]

3. Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell. [Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds”]

All three are from this week’s New Yorker. Which one’s my favorite? Well, all three are great. And I don’t actually have to choose. But if I did, I’d pick Frazier’s surreal “cloud” description – such a surprising, delightful combination of words: “performance,” “cloud,” “off-stage,” “cloud-making machine,” “beams of light,” “vertical shafts,” “interrogation lamps,” “columns of a courthouse,” “bars of a prison cell.” You’d wonder how their combination makes sense. But it does, in the context of Frazier’s excellent Talk story about an opera for the wrongfully convicted. Bravo, Ian Frazier!

Postscript: I see the magazine has a new film critic – Justin Chang. Is this just for this issue, or is it permanent? Chang’s review of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” intrigues me, particularly its exotic setting (eastern Anatolia). If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.