August 8, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Great cover! R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Double-Parked,” showing two bicycles, one blue, one orange, locked to a no-parking sign, is my pick for best cover of the year so far.

2. Calvin Tomkins’s “Becoming Modern,” a profile of painter Salman Toor, provides fascinating background on the evolution of Toor’s “virtuoso personal style.” I’ve been a fan of Toor ever since I saw his wonderful “Sleeping Boy”: see my “Salman Toor’s Sensual Apprehension of Life” (May 8, 2021). Tomkins’s description of that painting is excellent: “In 'Sleeping Boy,' a young man who resembles Toor lies on white sheets so lusciously painted that they look edible, his face and his naked body illuminated by light from an open laptop.”

3. John Seabrook’s “On Alert,” an absorbing report on acoustic car styling, contains several excellent sound descriptions, including this beauty: “Many prospective buyers’ first experience of a car or a truck is the CLICK ker-CHUNK that the driver’s-side door makes when they close it, followed by a faint harmonic shiver given off by the vehicle’s metal skin.” 

4. Speaking of inspired sentences, here’s one from Richard Brody’s capsule review of the 1928 silent film Show People: “Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound.”

October 25, 2021 Issue

Wow! Peter Schjeldahl is on fire! In this week’s issue, he rips MOMA PS1’s “Greater New York” for its “obeisance to supposedly unexceptional opinions.” He pens a truculent manifesto for our conformist times: 

Only doing things that one is not supposed to do and saying things that one is not supposed to say promise relief from a climate of stagnating sensibility. Being disreputable beckons. Open up. Reinstate surprise. ["Who's We?"]

Hah! I love it.

Speaking of saying things that one is not supposed to say, recall the 2017 controversy in which the artist Hannah Black requested that the Whitney remove Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Tilll’s body, Open Casket, from its Biennial show. Not only remove it; destroy it (see Calvin Tomkins, “Troubling Pictures,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2017). Black’s letter was widely condemned as an incitement to action that infringes artistic freedom. That was my own view of the matter, too. But recently I read a piece that changed my perspective. Charlotte Shane, in her review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Songs of Care and Constraint, in the current Bookforum, writes,

I, for one, found Black’s letter exhilarating, not because it filled me with vengeful glee but because it pushed against the status quo with exactitude and moral clarity. It expanded my sense of social possibility. It offered “magic—magic hard to come by elsewhere, and which can make life feel more worth living,” as Nelson writes of the art she implores us to leave alone. ["Free Fallin' "]

I don’t agree with Black’s request, but I admire her for having the ovaries to make it. Is this the kind of subversiveness that Schjeldahl has in mind? Probably not. He’s seeking “gratuitous transcendence,” “unforced pleasure.” But he is advocating “being disreputable,” and that’s what I relate to. Something Norman Mailer wrote many years ago (I’m quoting it from memory): “Better to expire a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.” 

September 2, 2019 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Calvin Tomkins’ “Surface Matters” and Nick Paumgarten’s “The Measure of Measles.” Tomkins’ piece profiles artist Vija Celmins. It contains a wonderful description of how Celmins makes her night-sky paintings:

Her layered painting process has become increasingly complex. After getting the initial image on canvas, she covers each star with a tiny drop of liquid cement, and when that hardens she paints the image again. She may repeat this process twenty times or more, sanding the entire surface, before she lays down the next layer of ivory black mixed with burnt umber, ultramarine blue, and sometimes a touch of white. When she decides that the background is sufficiently developed, she scrapes out the cement and, using the smallest sable brush, fills the little holes with white paint mixed with cerulean blue, or sometimes raw umber or yellow ochre. “I ruined a lot of paintings by sanding,” she told me. “It scared me. But it’s like building a relationship. You do it again and again, and you sense that the thing is beginning to have a form that looks strong. And all the time you’re thinking, and making decisions. The making, the devotion to making, is what gives it an emotional quality.”

Paumgarten’s “The Measure of Measles” reports on New York State's “largest measles outbreak since 1992.” Paumgarten says, “Because of the success of the anti-vaccination movement, measles cases have since turned up in twenty-nine other states, but New York has had by far the most cases: 1,046 as of last week, out of a national total of 1,203.” 

Paumgarten mocks the anti-vaxxers’ irrationalism. He writes,

You could say that many of the parents who send their children to Waldorf private schools and choose not to vaccinate them—for example, at Green Meadow, a Waldorf school whose immunization rate was so low that Rockland County officials banned unvaccinated students from attending—are declaring an allegiance to an ethos, or even bowing to peer pressure. They’re going with a different flow, even if it’s the one that says measles can be prevented by breast milk and bone broth. The Hollywood Reporter found that the rates of vaccination in some of the private schools in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills—Marianne Williamson country—are roughly the same as in Chad and South Sudan. Last year, at the Westside Waldorf School, in the Pacific Palisades, about four in ten kindergartners were fully vaccinated. At the Garden of Angels School, in Santa Monica, about half were. “We perceive each growing child as a precious cluster of unique treasure,” the school’s Web site reads. “Our Garden Ideology aspires to accurately mirror an environment where students are limited by nothing and liberated by everything.” Nothing says liberation like pertussis.

He quotes New York State commissioner of health, Howard Zucker:

“It’s shocking how strong the anti-vax movement is,” Zucker said. “What surprises me is the really educated people who are passionately against vaccinations. I see this as part of a larger war against science-based reality. We need to study vaccine hesitancy as a disease.” 

Paumgarten’s portrait of Zucker is a gem. He describes him as “an odd combination of child and old man, the latent proportion of the one increasing to account for the preponderance of the actual other. Colleagues have attributed his knack for pediatrics to his seeing the world through a child’s eyes.” 

My favorite part of “The Measure of Measles” is Paumgarten’s account of driving with Zucker to the Catskills to check in on some kids’ summer camps. This, for me, is the “action” of the piece. It includes this delightful detail: 

He [Zucker] had a brand-new red Volvo wagon, which he, a longtime car nut, considered a regrettable concession to fatherhood. He’d brought scones for the ride. He feigned nonchalance as we christened the interior with crumbs.

That last sentence made me smile. Reading it, I visualized Zucker and Paumgarten in the car eating scones as they talked (or, in Zucker’s case, “speed-mumbled”) about the medical response to the anti-vaxxers. It’s a vivid image. Paumgarten has a sharp eye for such things.  

August 27, 2018 Issue

Calvin Tomkins, in his absorbing “Painterly Virtues,” a profile of painter Alex Katz, in this week’s issue, says, “Many of Katz’s best paintings capture the light and the atmosphere of a specific time of day—none more hauntingly than his 1982 image of an adolescent girl, alone, in ‘Tracy on the Raft at 7:30.’ ” I don’t know about that. The use of “specific” to describe a Katz is surprising. He’s among the least specific painters I know of. Looking at “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30,” I see an image denuded of detail. Everything in it is massively simplified: the girl in her two-piece red-and-white bathing suit looks like a mannequin; an immense swath of slate green paint represents foliage; there’s a glimpse of sage green sky; the raft is a bar of white and a bar of grey; water is a bar of slate green with sage green splotches indicating reflections of sky. It’s the title that provides the specificity, not the painting. “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30” is an abstractionist’s idea of representation. As Tomkins says, Katz’s work was never realistic. “The faces of his subjects are smooth and unblemished, almost generic, and the background details, when they exist, are minimal.”

Alex Katz, "Tracy on the Raft at 7:30" (1982)

I relish details. Katz’s pared-down style isn’t entirely to my taste. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Tomkins’s piece immensely, especially his account of watching Katz paint:

Moving deliberately, Katz climbed five steps to the top of a creaky wheeled platform and started applying ultramarine to the upper-right section of the canvas, using a housepainter’s six-inch-wide brush. The paint went on easily, in smooth, unhurried strokes, back and forth and diagonally. One of his rules is “no noodling,” which means no fussy brushwork. He came down, moved the platform a few feet to the left, and climbed up again to do the next part. Every now and then he paused to consult the smaller sketch, which he had with him on the platform, or the warmup canvas. He kept going back over the painted areas, to adjust the tone. “I’m not sure the blue is right,” he said, at one point. “We’ll see when the black comes into play.” It took him about half an hour to finish the sky. Occasionally, between trips up and down the steps, he paused to wipe up drops of paint that had fallen beyond the brown paper he’d laid on the studio’s faded but immaculate linoleum floor.

Tomkins’s recent series of artist profiles, including “Somewhere Different” (on Peter Doig), “Troubling Pictures” (on Dana Schutz), and “Into the Unknown” (on Chris Ofili), are among the most pleasurable New Yorker pieces of the last five years. “Painterly Virtues” is a wonderful addition to the collection.

Best of 2017: 21 Inspired Lines

Rosz Chast, "Motherboard (Back)" (2017)

Shauna Lyon, describing the rich refinement of the Brooklyn bistro, Otway, notes “the natural shades of toffee, rhododendron, and sunlight filling the lovely corner space” (“Tables For Two: Otway,” June 26, 2017). That, for me, is one of the year’s most sheerly pleasurable lines. Here are twenty more to go with it:

1. A mustachioed violinist, in quasi-Edwardian garb, crouched almost fetally under water, his bow rising above the surface, like a shark’s fin, then falling below it. [Rebecca Mead, “Transformer,” September 25, 2017]

2. When I look at the back of a Datograph, one of Lange’s more complicated watches (it features a date as well as a chronograph, a kind of stopwatch), I see a small city of silver and gold gears and wheels, a miniature three-dimensional universe in which everyone is running to catch the next bus. [Gary Shteyngart, “Time Out,” March 20, 2017]

3. Rich saxophones and organs stood in for synthesizers, drums jangled and twitched, and vocalists like King Krule gave the beats another sheet of voice. [Matthew Trammell, “Step Out,” June 5 & 12, 2017]

4. The film’s images are filled with a pointillistic profusion of detail—wheat stalks at the roadside, a modern bridge’s metallic latticework, even the duo’s jazzily patterned shirts—that’s as alluring as it is nerve-jangling. [Richard Brody, “On the Wild Side,” July 3, 2017]

5. Save space, too, for malab iyo malawax, sweet crepes soaked in honey and dusted with cinnamon, and a mug of steaming qaxwo, pungent black coffee spiked with ginger. [Nicolas Niarchos, “Tables For Two: Safari,” September 4, 2017]

6. After the great pea-guacamole controversy of 2015, it takes cojones to add mint to an otherwise innocent, chunky scoop, which arrived, one afternoon, dramatically hidden under an elephant-ear-size purple-corn chip. [Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Atla,” June 5 & 12, 2017]

7. The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries. [Ian Frazier, “Drive Time,” August 28, 2017]

8. Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. [Nick Paumgarten, “Singer of Secrets,” August 28]

9. Even when she’s performing small steps, or no steps, you can still feel, across the auditorium, that astonishing engine, humming along like an Alfa Romeo, at the base of her spine. [Joan Acocella, “Dance: Alfa Romeo,” June 19, 2017]

10. I nibbled a small pie: it tasted like pumpkin, but with a weedy aftertaste, which brought back Proustian memories of high school. [Lizzie Widdicombe, “High Cuisine,” April 24, 2017]

11. When I went back again a few days later, the studio floor was littered with discarded paintbrushes, dozens of them, some still oozing paint—I got bright orange on one of my shoes. [Calvin Tomkins, “Troubling Pictures,” April 10, 2017]

12. His punch lines are not punched at all but flicked as casually as cigarette butts. [Anthony Lane, “Across the Divide,” June 26, 2017]

13. This is the “seashore at evening,” where lithesome mermaids on motorcycles whiz by, their “leather-clad calves” united with a “noir chassis.”  [Dan Chiasson, “Merry War,” September 4, 2017]

14. It causes the wasp-waisted barmaids in strappy green minidresses to grunt audibly as they muddle handfuls of cherries, and scoop ice as if shovelling a driveway. [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Fishbowl,” May 29, 2017]

15. Smeared, apocalyptic guitar riffs buoy Bryan Funck’s grim, screeching vocals, which invoke classic black-metal singers while sidestepping any hint of Dungeons and Dragons. [“Night Life: Thou,” January 9, 2017]

16. I’ve imagined a whole film just about the waitress who describes the chorizo and eggs in “Midnight Run.” [Patton Oswalt, “Deep Cut,” September 4, 2017]

17. Actually, the culprit was likely the Slow Reveal, which encourages anything but: a syrupy accelerant in a bisected brass pineapple, the round belly of the bottom half balanced on the stiff fronds of the top half. [McKenna Stayner, “Bar Tab: Super Power,” February 27, 2017]

18. They play a high-octane strain of rock and roll that’s best described as ripping, advancing a thread of brawny, pissed-off fight music hybridized by groups like the Dwarves and Fear. The effect is ideally experienced while pogo-dancing around a room of diaphoretic night owls. [“Night Life: Hank Wood and the Hammerheads,” July 24, 2017]

19. There’s usually sports on the TV, but the broad array of neighborhood bargoers watch indifferently; there are conversations to be had in big, gossipy groups, cold beer to be sipped, flirtations to be advanced in sly increments. [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Salud,” September 11, 2017]

20. Shroud-like disguises figure into her work from subsequent decades, too, counterbalanced by absurdly tailored pieces, including cinched whirlpools of deconstructed menswear and gingham frocks deformed by asymmetrical humps. [“Art: Metropolitan Museum: Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between,” September 4, 2017]

Enough already! Time to let go. Be off with you, old New Yorkers. Down to the basement you go. The new year’s first issue beckons. There’s a piece in it by Peter Schjeldahl I want to read. Let’s get started.

December 11, 2017 Issue

Calvin Tomkins’ “Somewhere Different,” in this week’s issue, profiles painter Peter Doig. The piece has an ingenious structure, consisting of eight sections, each of which focuses on a key Doig painting, and, in the process, illuminates a portion of Doig’s personal history. For example, the first section, titled “Pelican (Stag), 2003,” tells the story of Doig’s “Pelican (Stag)” (“As the painting developed, he felt that it was getting too dark, so he put in the abstract fall of whitish-blue paint—it came from his memory of a Matisse painting he had seen at the Tate in 2002, ‘Shaft of Sunlight in the Woods of Trivaux’ ”); the second section, “Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oaks), 2015,” tells about Doig’s painting of the same name (“’Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak),’ which is more than nine feet high and eleven feet wide, is dominated by a full-grown lion, pacing freely but somewhat glumly, head down, outside a yellow building with green doors and a barred green window. A ghostly human attendant approaches from around the corner”); and so on. Eight of Doig’s major works are discussed in detail, together with the backstories that led to their creation. My favorite is section eight, “Two Trees, 2017,” in which Tomkins attends the opening of a Doig exhibition at the Michael Werner Gallery. Tomkin’s “I,” which has been used sparingly in the previous sections, blooms in this one. Near the end of it, he says,

We returned to the front room, to have another look at “Two Trees.” The room is full of memories for me and for many others—this is where Leo Castelli showed Rauschenberg and Johns and the groundbreaking Pop and minimal artists in the nineteen-sixties.

“Somewhere Different” has an arresting, original structure, blending ekphrasis with biography, occasionally adding a dash of personal perspective. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: The striking color photo of Doig, by Daniel Shea, illustrating Tompkins’ piece, is a strong candidate for my “Top Ten New Yorker Photographs of 2017.”

Hilaire Belloc's Flawed Genius (Contra Calvin Tomkins)

Calvin Tomkins, in his “The Inexplicably Enduring Appeal of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales” (newyorker.com, September 5, 2017), says, “Belloc had the bad luck to mistake himself for a serious writer.” I think Tomkins is the one who’s mistaken. At the level of diction, rhythm, and syntax, Belloc was a genius. Wilfrid Sheed called him “a grand master of language” (The Morning After, 1972). This points us in the right direction. Consider these passages from Belloc's classic 1902 travelogue The Path to Rome:

It was in the very beginning of June, at evening, but not yet sunset, that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but instead of going straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right immediately along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the fortifications till I came to the road that goes up along the Moselle.

So I thanked him and went and found there a youth of about nineteen, who sat at a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf before him. He was waiting for the bread in the oven to be ready; and meanwhile he was very courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and offered me bread

When I awoke it was full eight o’clock, and the sun had gained great power. I saw him shining at me through the branches of my tree like a patient enemy outside a city that one watches through the loopholes of a tower, and I began to be afraid of taking the road. I looked below me down the steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing of the flies above it, and I noted that all the mist had gone. A very long way off, the noise of its ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, was a lazy barge and a horse drawing it. From time to time the tow-rope slackened into the still surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose. The rest of the valley was silent except for that under-humming of insects which marks the strength of the sun.

Then I came into the long street and determined to explore Epinal, and to cast aside all haste and folly

There are many wonderful things in Epinal. As, for instance, that it was evidently once, like Paris and Melun and a dozen other strongholds of Gaul, an island city.

Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century, with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers.

As this was the first really great height, so this was the first really great view that I met with on my pilgrimage. I drew it carefully, piece by piece, sitting there a long time in the declining sun and noting all I saw.

When I call up for myself this great march I see it all mapped out in landscapes, each of which I caught from some mountain, and each of which joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can piece together the whole road.

By the time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.

For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day, because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.

This book is endlessly quotable. Unfortunately, it’s marred by two or three passages of anti-Semitism. Belloc was both a considerable writer and a considerable anti-Semite.

April 10, 2017, Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue are Ben Taub’s “We Have No Choice” and Calvin Tomkins’s “Troubling Pictures.” Taub reports the desperate six-month journey of a Nigerian teenager named Blessing, travelling a perilous migration trade route from her home in Benin City to Agadez, on the edge of the Sahara Desert, to Tripoli, and then by dinghy out into the Mediterranean, where she’s eventually picked up by a rescue boat and taken to Messina, on the eastern coast of Sicily.

The piece brilliantly conveys a raw intimacy with Blessing’s circumstances, much of it based on first-hand observation. Taub visits Benin City and searches for Blessing’s mother, Doris:

One day, I went to the Uwelu spare-parts market, where adolescent boys lift car engines into wheelbarrows, and bare-chested venders haggle over parts salvaged from foreign scrap yards. A dirt path at the western end of the market leads to a shack where I saw a middle-aged woman dressed in purple selling chips, candy, soda, and beer. I asked if she was Blessing’s mother, Doris. She nodded and laughed, then started to cry.

He goes to Agadez and reports on the “connection houses,” migrant ghettos, and Nigerian brothels. He attends a meeting of a dozen of the biggest human smugglers in the Sahara – “half were Tuareg, half Toubou, and all had fought in recent rebellions.” He describes Blessing’s migration across the Ténéré, an expanse of sand roughly the size of California (“Their journey through the desert had been a blur of waiting, heat, thirst, discomfort, beatings, dead bodies, and fear”). He reports her fate in Brak (“One day in Brak, the madam sold Blessing and Faith to the owner of a connection house, to work as a prostitute”). He describes her rescue at sea (“Her feet were pruning; they had been soaking for hours in a puddle at the bottom of the dinghy”). He visits her at Palanebiolo, the makeshift migrants’ camp outside Messina (“We headed back up the hill, to Palanebiolo. Blessing moved with slow, labored steps. Her joints ached and were still swollen from her time in detention in Libya”). He visits Ballarò, an old neighborhood of Palermo, center of the Nigerian sex trade in Sicily:

One night in Ballarò, I met with a former drug dealer from Mali at an outdoor bar that smelled like sweat, weed, and vomit. Sex workers walked past in red fish-nets and six-inch stilettos. On the corner, two men grilled meat over a trash fire. Italians and Africans exchanged cash and drugs, unbothered by the presence of witnesses. “This is the power of the Nigerian mafia,” the Malian said. “It gives work to those people who don’t have papers.”

“We Have No Choice” has an inspired structure. It begins in medias res with the loading and launching of the tightly packed dinghy carrying a hundred and fifty migrants, including Blessing. It then expands its scope to report on the network of sex work that girls like Blessing, migrating from Benin City, get caught in. Taub was on the Médecins Sans Frontière boat that rescued Blessing. He appears to have listened to her story, retraced her steps from Benin City to Messina, and then woven her experiences with his own personal observations. It’s Taub’s first-person perspective that, for me, gives his piece its awesome power and authenticity.

Tomkins’s “Troubling Pictures” is also exhilaratingly written in the “I.” It’s about Dana Schutz’s paintings, particularly her controversial Emmett Till painting, “Open Casket,” currently on view at the Whitney Biennial. I enjoyed this piece for its vivid descriptions of Schutz’s studio. For example:

Large and medium-sized canvases in varying stages of completion covered most of the wall space in the studio, a long, windowless room that was once an auto-body shop, and the floor was a palimpsest of rags, used paper palettes, brushes, metal tubs filled with defunct tubes of Old Holland oil paint, colored pencils and broken charcoal sticks, cans of solvent, spavined art books, pages torn from magazines, bundled work clothes stiff with paint, paper towels, a prelapsarian boom box, empty Roach Motel cartons, and other debris.

And this delightful bit:

When I went back again a few days later, the studio floor was littered with discarded paintbrushes, dozens of them, some still oozing paint—I got bright orange on one of my shoes.

Tomkins’s “I” is much more prominent now than it used to be back in his The Bride and the Bachelor days. His recent pieces are more journal-like – records of his personal “art world” experiences. I enjoy them immensely.

June 22, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Nick Paumgarten’s "Hut!" is one of this year’s best Talk stories. It describes a recent evening excursion in New York Harbor carried out by members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Traveling in two Hawaiian-style canoes, “forty-five feet long and made of fibreglass, with outriggers (ama) connected by spars (iako),” they’re looking for possible moorings for the Hokule’a, “a working replica of a traditional Polynesian sailing vessel” that will be visiting New York City next summer. I like “Hut!” ’s brisk, vivid notation: “The boats skimmed out into the current”; “The harbor was a bedlam of gulls and boats”; “Unmenacing flotsam drifted past. Foam baseball bat, soccer ball, scrunchie”; “They flew on the tide, the city sparkling by.” The piece brims with open air immediacy. I enjoyed it immensely.

2. I devoured Calvin Tomkins’s "What Else Can Art Do?." It’s a profile of Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford. I relished its description of Bradford’s process:

He starts with a stretched canvas and builds up its surface with ten or fifteen layers of paper—white paper, colored paper, newsprint, reproductions, photographs, printed texts—fixing each layer with a coat of clear shellac. Sometimes he embeds lengths of string or caulking to form linear elements in the palimpsest. When the buildup reaches a certain density, he attacks it with power sanders and other tools, exposing earlier layers, flashes of color, and unexpected juxtapositions. Not until the first sanding does he begin to see where the painting is going. He works like an archeologist, rediscovering the past. The method seems haphazard, but it’s not, and the results can take your breath away.

And I enjoyed Tomkins’s personal perspective – the way he participates in his report, e.g., “It was nearly eight in the evening, time for dinner. Bradford locked up the studio, and we got into his silver Range Rover—he bought it last year, after sitting in a lot of other cars and deciding that it had the most headroom—and drove for fifteen minutes to a restaurant in another part of South Los Angeles, called Leimert Park”; “Bradford had recently installed a major sculpture at the Los Angeles International Airport, and we went to see it the next morning.” Tomkins has changed his style since his The Bride and the Bachelors days. Back then he wrote mostly in the third person major. I find his subjective, first-person approach, as exemplified in “What Else Can Art Do?” and last year’s superb "Into the Unknown," much more engaging, immediate, and satisfying.

3. I’m pleased to see that James Wood hasn’t lost his edge. I enjoy his appreciative reviews, but I like it when, every now and then, he takes the gloves off. His excellent "Story of My Life," in this week’s issue, is an assessment of Alejandro Zambra’s new story collection My Documents. In it, Wood takes aim at “self-reflexive fictionality.” Regarding Zambra’s story “The Private Life of Trees,” he says,

Julian, the protagonist of “The Private Lives of Trees,” described as “a professor, and a writer on Sundays,” waits up one evening for his wife, Veronica, to return home. To pass the time, and to keep his young stepdaughter distracted, he tells her a story that he has been improvising at bedtime, which he calls “The Private Lives of Trees.” But Julian is also writing a real book, which sounds a lot like Zambra’s own first novel—it’s “about a young man tending a bonsai.” This level of self-reflexivity can sometimes seem about as resonant as the prospect of repeatedly having to smell one’s own breath, and perhaps Zambra is knowingly protecting himself from such criticism when he has one of Julian’s friends complain to him that he’s been reading “too much Paul Auster.”

That “This level of self-reflexivity can sometimes seem about as resonant as the prospect of repeatedly having to smell one’s own breath” made me smile. It put me in mind of other Wood zappers, like the one in his piece on Sheila Heti, where he says of a passage in Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, “If I wanted to hear that, I could settle in at a Starbucks and wait for the schoolkids to get out at three o’clock.” Whoa! Watch out for Wood. He can dance, but he can also sting. It’s what gives his criticism its delicious acerbity.  

October 6, 2014 Issue

Quick comments on seven items in this week’s issue:

1. Emma Allen’s “Bar Tab: Blind Barber” – After dark, glowing barber pole, clandestine entrance, men draped with striped sheets, Mr. High Fade, Smoke & Dagger, Bellevue morgue, “the man under the clippers” – this noir capsule is like a surreal prose poem. I lapped it up and wished for more.

2. Jennifer Gonnerman’s “Before the Law” – This piece angered me. What a poor excuse for a defense lawyer! Gonnerman reports that in the three years Browder was in Rikers, his legal aid lawyer Brendan O’Meara never once made the trip out to the jail to see him. I find that appalling. Regarding Gonnerman’s piece on artistic grounds, I liked the way she steps into the narrative frame in the final section (“One afternoon this past spring, I sat with Browder in a quiet restaurant in lower Manhattan”). Her use of “I” turns cold facts into personal experience.

3. Masha Gessen’s “The Weight of Words” – This absorbing piece expresses exactly what I felt as I read Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” when it appeared in the May 12, 2014 New Yorker, that it is “storytelling reduced to plot.”

4. Gerald Stern’s “The World We Should Have Stayed In” – Stern’s run-on, associative style, when it’s really cooking, jiving, jumping, moving, as it is in this amazing poem, is inspired. His inclusion of a meal at Weinstein’s (“chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then / matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by / roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish / or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw /and Jewish pickles on the side and plates / of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel”) had me licking my lips.

5. Calvin Tomkins’s “Into the Unknown” is pure delight. It’s the best Tomkins I’ve read in a long time. What makes it so good is the way it gets inside Ofili’s creative process. “It was a morning in June, and we were looking at a dark nine-foot-tall vertical painting called ‘Lime Bar,’ which he had been working on since April.” I find such sentences thrilling. “Into the Unknown” contains several of them. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

6. Kevin Canty’s “Story, With Bird” – This is my first exposure to Canty’s work. It’s impressive. I like its brevity and its realism (“The world divided itself into the drinking and the hangover, day and night, and we lived for the nights, the ones that ended in a blank space, half a memory to wake up to”). It describes a world that I was once part of. Maybe that, for me, is its chief attraction.

7. Joan Acocella’s “Lonesome Road” – A great review, where greatness means subtle, penetrating, direct, fresh. Acocella’s analysis of Robinson’s use of “point-of-view narration” is excellent.     

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.