The Urgency of Ephemerality

Jane Remover, Revengeseekerz (2025)

I still find myself thinking about Sheldon Pearce’s use of “ephemerality” in his dazzling “Goings On: Digicore” (May 5, 2025):

The hyperpop microgenre digicore—a chaotic, internet-forward mashup of music styles born on Discord servers for use in the video game Minecraft—might have vanished into the ether if not for the explosive artist Jane Remover. Inspired primarily by E.D.M. producers such as Skrillex and Porter Robinson and the rappers Tyler, the Creator and Trippie Redd, the Newark-born musician débuted at seventeen, as dltzk, with the EP “Teen Week” (2021), helping to define an obscure anti-pop scene moving at warp speed. Their music’s wide bandwidth now spans the pitched-up sampling of the album “dariacore” (under the alias Leroy) and the emo-leaning work of the side project Venturing. This all-devouring approach culminates in the ecstatic thrasher album “Revengeseekerz,” a maximalist tour de force that makes ephemerality feel urgent.

What does that mean – “makes ephemerality feel urgent”? Is ephemerality something that’s felt? You can feel the urgency of a moment, especially if there’s an emergency – something that calls for an immediate response. Does ephemerality call for an immediate response? Yes, absolutely. If you don’t capture it now now now! – it’s gone forever. That’s my interpretation, anyway. I love the phrase. The music is horrible.

I remember my first encounter with “ephemeral.” I was reading a dance review by Arlene Croce called “Hello Posterity, Goodbye Now” (The New Yorker, July 10, 1978; included in her Going to the Dance, 1982). In her opening line, Croce wrote, “Dance, the ephemeral art, is rebelling against its condition. Like mayflies who want to be cast in bronze, dancers are putting their dances into retrieval systems.” 

My most recent encounter with the word happened yesterday, in a wonderful London Review of Books piece by Dani Garavelli, titled “At the Whisky Bond.” It’s about an archive in Glasgow devoted to the preservation of Alasdair Gray’s legacy. Garavelli writes, “In the mid-2000s Gray’s visual work was still neglected, undermined by its ephemerality (his murals around the city were often just one step ahead of the wrecking ball); its ubiquity (he would draw pen portraits for almost anyone who asked); and what some saw as his ‘parochialism.’ ” 

Another word for “ephemerality” is “transience.” “For inherent in the magic moment is its transience” – one of my favorite lines. It’s by Hugh Kenner. He’s writing about Hemingway – Hemingway’s desire to perpetuate the perfect moment (A Homemade World, 1975). Transience is the key to Hemingway’s aesthetic, Kenner says. I agree. It’s the key to mine, too. Time is pouring through us, an unstanchable flow, and what memory and art and writing try to capture is the brief being of what never again will be. 

Jed Perl on Arlene Croce

Arlene Croce and George Balanchine, 1981 (Photo by Dominique Nabokov)

It’s interesting to read about a view of art that totally differs from mine. Arlene Croce, New Yorker dance critic for twenty-three years (1973-1996), believed that art-making is the process by which raw experience is transformed into aesthetic experience. “Croce was perfectly willing to go to the theater and witness the most agonizing scenes of pain, suffering, and death, but only with the understanding that the ‘realism-idealism equation’ was engaged, that real life had in some way been transformed.” I’m quoting from Jed Perl’s wonderful tribute to Croce, “Echoes of Eternity,” in the March 27, 2025, The New York Review of Books. Perl’s defence of this view is curious. He writes,

You can disagree with Croce, but to do so you must argue that art is little more than a frame through which to observe the lives we’re living—or to launch theories or even polemics about the meaning of our lives. That’s the position of the social realists who dominated Soviet culture through the Stalinist years and of some in the arts community today, but Croce didn’t see it as a plausible approach for either an artist or an audience in a free society. 

Well, I disagree with Croce, but it has nothing to do with social realism or Soviet culture. It has everything to do with literary journalism, street photography, and documentary work. I relish art and writing that bring me as close to reality as possible. Show me life as is, warts and all. To hell with transformation. That’s for escapists and ballet fans. 

Postscript: Arlene Croce 1934 - 2024

I don’t know how I missed it, but I just discovered yesterday, in the January 16, 2025 New York Review of Books, that Arlene Croce died last month. She was 90. 

Croce was The New Yorker’s dance critic from 1973 to 1996. I’m not a fan of ballet. But I do love movies. Croce wrote one of the great movie studies – The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (1972). Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, Shall We Dance – if you love these movies, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Croce’s book. Here are a few samples:

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.

Later on in the film there’s a dance reprise, the first formal romantic adagio to be created by Astaire for himself and Rogers – and for the beautiful supple back that let her arch from his arms like a black lily. The dance is almost humble in its brevity and simplicity – a few walking steps, a sudden plunge, a silky recovery, and it’s over. But the spell that blooms while you are watching it is powerful, and there are astonishing moments, like his very tender gesture of pressing her head to his shoulder as they walk.

The dance is one of their simplest and most daring, the steps mostly walking steps done with a slight retard. The withheld impetus makes the dance look dragged by destiny, all the quick little circling steps pulled as if on a single thread. 

What I find most moving in this noble and almost absurdly glamorous dance is the absence of self-enchantment in the performance. 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. 

Croce was a superb describer of dance. She’s gone now. But her enchanting The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book endures.

Credit: The above photo of Arlene Croce is by Duane Michals. 

Rereadings: Pauline Kael's "Reeling"

This is the fifth in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Pauline Kael’s splendid Reeling (1976).

Reeling is a collection of over seventy movie reviews that Kael wrote for The New Yorker, 1972-1975. It includes some of her best work: “Tango” (on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris); “Everyday Inferno” (on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets); “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” (on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye); “Love and Coca-Cola” (on Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us); “Fathers and Sons” (on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II); “Beverly Hills as a Big Bed” (on Hal Ashby’s Shampoo); and “Coming: Nashville” (on Robert Altman’s Nashville). 

Notice that three of those pieces are on Robert Altman. Kael loved Altman’s work. If you want to know what her governing aesthetic is, read her reviews of Altman. She praised him for his “glancing touch,” his “relaxed awareness,” his “organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot.” “He’s not a pusher.” “He finds his story through the actors” and “through accidents of weather and discoveries along the way.”

There are some undervalued gems in this collection, too. I love her review of Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express. She writes, “Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, the cars shimmer in the hot sunlight; in the dark, the red lights of the police cars are like eerie night-blooming flowers.”

Her dismissal of Terrance Malick’s Badlands is unforgettable: “Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it.” She concludes: 

And there’s a basic flaw in Malick’s method: he has perceived the movie – he’s done our work instead of his. In place of people and action, with metaphor arising out of the story, he gives us a surface that is all conscious metaphor. Badlands is so preconceived that there’s nothing left to respond to.

Reeling also contains two book reviews – both excellent. One is on Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book; the other is on Norman Mailer’s Marilyn. The Marilyn review contains several classic Kael zingers. Example: “Marilyn is a feat all right: matchstick by matchstick, he’s built a whole damned armada inside a bottle. (Surely he’s getting ready to do Norman? Why leave it to someone who may care less?).”

If you are new to Kael’s work and you are wondering where to start, I recommend Reeling. It covers a golden period of American movies, and shows Kael when she was really rolling, trying to get at what she responds to and why. As she says in her Foreword, “I may not have rendered justice to the best, but I’ve done my damnedest.”  

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.

June 23, 2014 Issue

Why read fiction? One reason, according to James Wood, in his "The Punished Land," in this week’s issue, is that “We enjoy watching the novelist play the game of truthtelling.” In so saying, Wood helps me understand why I prefer reading factual writing. I enjoy it because I know it isn’t a game; I can rely on it as a representation of real life. I like that phrase “real life.” Wood uses it in his great "On Not Going Home" (“But real life is a different matter”).

Some critics think that the representation of real life isn’t really art [e.g., Arlene Croce – she once criticized the costumes (“cowboy hats and splotched jeans”) in a ballet (American Ballet Theatre’s Rodeo) for being “too much like life”]. In order for it to be art (they say), there has to be distortion, heightening, dramatization, fabrication, transformation. In other words, in order to convert life to art, you have to fictionalize it. Wood holds this view. In “The Punished Land,” he compares Zachary Lazar’s nonfictional Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder with Lazar’s novel Sway, and says, “Sway is the stronger for Lazar’s confident but understated fictionalizing. The narrative doesn’t meekly copy the silhouettes of its research; it draws new, emboldened versions.”

Meekly copy the silhouettes of its research – is that what Wood thinks all factual writing does? Or is the application of his remark confined to Lazar’s nonfiction work? A writer’s research may disclose the outline (the silhouette) of the piece he or she eventually writes. But it may not. Talking about the composition of his classic The Pine Barrens (1967), John McPhee, in his "Structure" (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013), says,

I had done all the research I was going to do—had interviewed woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store. I had read all the books I was going to read, and scientific papers, and a doctoral dissertation. I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it. The piece would ultimately consist of some five thousand sentences, but for those two weeks I couldn’t write even one. If I was blocked by fear, I was also stymied by inexperience. I had never tried to put so many different components—characters, description, dialogue, narrative, set pieces, humor, history, science, and so forth—into a single package.

Making that single package involves more than just “meekly copying the silhouettes of its research.” It involves, at the very least, selecting and shaping. “Art is selecting and shaping,” Wood says, in his How Fiction Works (2008). It’s time he acknowledged that’s how factual writing works, too. 

In Praise of Criticism - II (Contra Brody)

I’m dismayed by some of the things Richard Brody says in his “How To Be A Critic” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012), e.g., “Criticism is a damned and doomed activity,” “Criticism is a parasitical operation.” I’ve never felt this way. For me, criticism, when it’s done well, is one of the most stimulating, satisfying, nourishing sources of reading pleasure – “done well” meaning brimming with analysis, description, quotation, argument, verve, cool, bliss, and fervor. Janet Malcolm’s deconstruction of Sylvia Plath biographies (The Silent Woman), Richard Ellmann’s tracing of the sources of Joyce’s “The Dead” (James Joyce), Helen Vendler’s analysis of the grammatical shifts in Seamus Heaney’s style (The Breaking of Style), Susan Sontag’s dissection of Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics (Under the Sign of Saturn), Pauline Kael’s analysis of Orson Welles’s directorial style in Citizen Kane (The Citizen Kane Book), Arlene Croce’s detailed descriptions of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance numbers (The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book), Michael Fried’s analysis of the structures of Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration), Svetlana Alpers’s argument for the importance of the distinction between description and narration (The Art of Describing), Whitney Balliett’s descriptive analysis of Big Sid Catlett’s drumming technique (Collected Works), James Wood's exquisite definition of thisness (How Fiction Works), Alex Ross’s explication of Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” (Listen to This), B. J. Leggett’s study of intertexts in Philip Larkin’s jazz poems (Larkin’s Blues), Howard Moss's list of eighteen instances of Proust memory (The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust), Carol Zemel's comparative analysis of Van Gogh's thirty-eight self-portraits (Van Gogh's Progress) – I could go on and on. These books, and many others besides, are every bit as artful and creative as the great works they take as their subjects. They are literature. I value them immensely. Brody’s view of them as parasitical is abhorrent!

Credit: The above photo of Janet Malcolm is by Kevin Sturman.

Croce's Contradiction

Comparing Arlene Croce’s recent “The Great Adventure of Sergei Diaghilev" (The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011) with her great “Inside the Ballets Russes” (The New Yorker, May 12, 1980; included in Croce’s 1982 collection Going to the Dance), I think I detect a contradiction. In “The Great Adventure of Sergie Diaghilev,” she says of Sjeng Scheijen’s Diaghilev: A Life, “Scheijen’s text avoids the overload of names, dates, and places that sank Richard Buckle’s Diaghilev in 1979, but his approach is nowhere as sophisticated, his interpretive skills never as refined as Buckle’s.” But in “Inside the Ballets Russes,” which is a review of Buckle’s Diaghilev, Croce repeatedly complains about Buckle’s lack of interpretation. She says:

One has no sense from Buckle of the dimensions of Diaghilev’s world, so much smaller than our own.

One feels that for Buckle just the record – facts that haven’t decomposed into legend – is enough.

But Buckle tracks down so many day-by-day minutiae that the movements and decisions become ends in themselves, and he never gets around to states of mind.

The jottings and cullings hardly ever turn into a line of thought. Buckle has trouble sustaining any single subject for more than a page.

A text so lacking in synthesis, in interpretation, can still be useful: future biographers will refer to the million and one checkpoints assembled in this source book.

Twenty-nine years after writing the above, Croce appears more favorably disposed to Buckle’s book. She now deems Buckle’s “just the record” approach to be “sophisticated.” She no longer complains about his lack of interpretation. Instead, she praises his “refined” interpretive skills. It’s too bad Buckle isn’t around to witness her change of opinion. He died in 2001.

I have no idea what accounts for Croce’s reappraisal of Buckle’s book. But anyone reading her review of it in “Inside the Ballets Russes” should do so in light of what she says about it now in “The Great Adventures of Sergei Diaghilev.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Morgan Elliott; it appears in The New Yorker (February 28, 2011) as an illustration for Joan Acocella’s “Critic’s Notebook.”

December 13, 2010 Issue

This week’s “Goings On About Town” (GOAT) is a cornucopia of verbal and visual pleasure, brimming with succulent details such as English Beat’s “punky edge,” Angie Wang’s stunning “Nellie McKay” portrait, “neo-fusion mashup” at Iridium, Warhol’s “tossed-off party pics,” Giacometti’s Montparnasse studio “overflowing with plaster dust,” a beautiful color picture of Rauschenberg’s 1955 “Short Circuit (Combine),” Joan Acocella’s “battle of the ‘Nutcracker’s,” Richard Brody’s memorable “depicts to the limits of consciousness” in his eloquent “Critics Notebook” tribute to “Shoah,” Andrea Thompson’s impeccably rhythmed “Whitewashed brick walls and green patterned wallpaper have the spare beauty of a homestead” in her superb “Tables For Two” review of Northern Spy Food Co., Bruce Diones on Cher (“her voice still has the roughness that can sandpaper the dullest lines to sharp finish”), and Laurie Rosenwald’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration, “Picasso’s guitars, at MOMA.”

Some of these great GOAT details triggered pleasant memories of past New Yorker pieces. For example, Joan Acocella’s mention of the possibility that the mice in Ratmansky’s “Nutcracker” will be “truly nasty-looking, with red eyes and yellow teeth” called to mind Arlene Croce’s “Baryshnikov’s ‘Nutcracker’” (The New Yorker, January 17, 1977), in which she describes the mice in Nureyev’s “Nutcracker”: “His mice were rats who tore off the heroine’s skirt.” Croce’s piece is included in her 1982 collection, Going to the Dance.

The illustration of Rauschenberg’s “Short Circuit (Combine)” took me back to Calvin Tomkins’ Robert Rauschenberg profile “Moving Out” (The New Yorker, February 29, 1964). I first read it twenty years ago in Tomkins’ 1965 collection The Bride and the Bachelor. It contains some great descriptions of Rauschenberg working, including this detail: “From time to time he paused to replenish a tall glass of vodka and orange juice.”

And Richard Brody’s powerful “Critic’s Notebook” on Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” in which he says the film “has transcended the cinema to become the primary record of the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War,” brought to mind Pauline Kael’s controversial 1985 “Shoah” review (The New Yorker, December 30, 1985), in which she dares to criticize Lanzmann’s technique, e.g., “Lanzmann’s closeups can be tyrannically close – invasions of the face.” Kael’s review is included in her 1989 collection Hooked.

Last week at newyorker.com, Brody posted a scathing critique of Kael’s “Shoah” review (see “‘Shoah’ At Twenty-Five,” December 7, 2010). In his piece, Brody comes perilously close to calling Kael’s review anti-Semitic. He says:

So when Kael charges that the movie ‘doesn’t set you thinking’ and adds ‘When you come out, you’re likely to feel dazed, and confirmed in all your worst fears,’ it’s clear that she simply doesn’t know what to think about it – and so, falls back on her own prejudices.

He also says, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of “Shoah” are so grotesque as to seem willful.”

Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the review. According to Craig Seligman, in his book Sontag & Kael (2004), Alfred Kazin considered Kael’s objections to the film and found her "incapable of responding to the material.” Seligman says that Leon Wieseltier also strongly objected to Kael’s review. He quotes Wieseltier as saying that her dissenting view of the film is a “dissenting view about the film and the catastrophe.” And Seligman quotes another angry objector, the film critic J. Hoberman, as saying, “Imagine, he [Lanzmann] actually found anti-Semitism in Treblinka. If he’s not tied up again, he could probably find it in The New Yorker.”

Seligman correctly points out that “Kael was reviewing a film – she wasn’t reviewing the Holocaust.” He says that Kazan and Wieseltier “ignore the core of Kael’s argument, which is that “Shoah” fails as a film.” He says, “To deduce from her misgivings about “Shoah” that she viewed the Holocaust with insufficient gravity is malignantly unfair. (And, by the way, untrue.)” Regarding the implications of Hoberman’s statement, Seligman says, “That sentence has haunted me ever since I first read it, in 1986. Could it possibly mean what it appears to mean – that Kael’s review is anti-Semitic?” Seligman concludes that Hoberman’s charge is “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.”

I agree with Seligman. Richard Brody’s statement against Kael falls into the same category as J. Hoberman’s; to borrow Seligman’s words, it is an accusation of astonishing coarseness.

Credit: The above portrait of Nellie McKay is by Angie Wang; it appears in “Goings On About Town” in this week’s New Yorker.