"Bar Tab" 's Last Call?

Jorge Colombo, "Super Power" (2017)

Looks like “Bar Tab” is kaput. The last one was Neima Jahromi’s “Bar Tab: The Uncommons,” in the November 19 New Yorker. Since then, there’ve been five straight issues sans “Bar Tab.” I miss it. I miss the fabulous cocktails: Diamond Reef’s The Penichillin, Et Al’s The Fuck You Steve, The Penrose’s Baby Zombie, Camp’s The Dirty Girl Scout, Rose Bar’s Notorious Nude, Existing Condition’s popcorn-infused rum-and-Cokes, Primo’s signature vodka Martini, “served with an anchovy skewered under an olive” (Colin Stokes, “Bar Tab: Primo’s”), on and on. I’m getting thirsty just thinking about them. 

I miss the vivid bar descriptions: “Visiting Super Power, with the gentle glow of a blowfish lamp, the fogged windows dripping hypnotically with condensation, and the humid, coconut-scented air, was exactly like being on a cruise, but everyone was wearing wool.” Remember that? It’s from McKenna Stayner’s wonderful “Bar Tab: Super Power.” Earlier this year, a “Bar Tab” appeared that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker writings: Elizabeth Barber’s “Bar Tab: Ophelia.” Here’s a taste: 

At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want. 

I miss “Bar Tab” ’s sensuous details. For example:

Lattes are served with delicate feathers etched in foam; the music is unobtrusive; and the soft glow from teardrop-shaped fixtures stipples drinkers’ faces with chiaroscuro.  [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Cocoa Bar”]

With eyes closed, one might mistake a flute of the honey-hued jasmine variety for a very dry prosecco, save for the intense floral perfume that lingers after each sip. [Wei Tchou, "Bar Tab: 29B Teahouse"]

Better yet was the Falling Up, with bourbon, apple brandy, Cynar, lemon, fresh ginger, and port. Served in a brandy snifter, piled high with pebbled ice, like a sno-cone, and garnished with an elaborately carved wedge of gala apple, it swirled cloudily in the glass, looking gloriously silly. [Sarah Larson, “Bar Tab: Wassail”]

I miss all that great stuff. Please, New Yorker, tell me it isn’t true. Tell me “Bar Tab” will soon be back, intoxicating as ever.     

Top Ten "Bar Tab" Drinks of 2017

Jorge Colombo, "Super Power" (2017)

If you relish “Bar Tab” drink names, as I do, you’ll likely appreciate the Baby Zombie and the Fuck You Steve, among other alcoholic highlights of 2017. These eminently drinkable concoctions, plus eight others, make up my Top Ten “Bar Tab” Drinks of 2017. Enjoy!

1. The Ancient Mariner (“Rum, grapefruit liqueur, lime”: Wei Tchou, “Cape House,” July 10 & 17, 2017).

2. The John Campbell’s Martini [“And a John Campbell’s Martini (twenty-five dollars) was smooth, with sumptuous olives”: Colin Stokes, “The Campbell,” June 19, 2017].

3. The Royal Mile (“Vodka, a grapefruity rhubarb purée”: Talia Lavin, “Highlands,” July 24, 2017).

4. The Starring Angelo (“In which oodles of Campari are mixed with bourbon and Italian vermouth”: Nicolas Niarchos, “Et Al.,” August 28, 2017).

5. The Penichillin [“Diamond Reef’s signature cocktail harks back to a darling of New York mixology: the Penicillin (Scotch, lemon, honey, ginger), invented by the co-owner Sam Ross when he worked at Sasha Petraske’s Milk & Honey, and now a classic worldwide. Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an age-old principle: anything is more fun when tossed into a slushy machine”: Wei Tchou, “Diamond Reef,” May 1, 2017].

6. Willie’s Frozen Coffee (“A decadent caffeine and whiskey sludge named for Willie Nelson”: David Kortava, “Skinny Dennis,” April 17, 2017).

7. The Moga (“The drink is very spirituous, comprising Japanese whiskey, rum, and aged plum liquor”: Wei Tchou, “Bar Moga,” May 22, 2017).

8. The Fuck You Steve (“Radiates with mezcal, pineapple, and Campari”: Nicolas Niarchos, “Et Al.,” August 28, 2017).

9. The Three Hour Kyoto Negroni (“Sitting permanently atop the counter is a tall and intricate Japanese cold-brew apparatus, in which the makings of a Negroni drip slowly through freshly ground coffee”: David Kortava, “Kobrick Coffee Co.,” September 4, 2017).

10. The Baby Zombie (“Applejack, pineapple rum, absinthe, served in a mug with the likeness of a glaring bird”: Talia Lavin, “The Penrose,” November 27, 2017).

Best of 2016: GOAT

Photo by Meredith Jenks

Here are my favorite “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Nicolas Niarchos, “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016 (“At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat”).

2. Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Bar Omar,” June 20, 2016 (“Shatter the shell of blistered sugar into pieces that look like stained glass and try not to smile.”)

3. Colin Stokes, “Bar Tab: The Ship,” May 16, 2016 (“One wore a single black latex glove and smashed a large ice cube with a wand-like spoon to make the gin-based Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and triple sec, from a recipe he’d ‘found in a book not too long ago’ ”).

4. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: The Lucky Bee,” October 31, 2016 (“On a recent Tuesday, one patron was about to call an Uber when the coconut tapioca pudding arrived, unassuming in a lowball glass. Beneath a cloud of golden-crusted marshmallows were banana-toffee gems, tapioca pearls, and an exquisite layer of liquid honey”).

5. Matthew Trammell, “Night Life: Under the Bridge,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“Compact and glowingly musical, the album reworked silent film scores and nimble kalimba phrases into a humming city tableau, on which the young rapper sulks through his writhing neighborhood with the moral baggage of an Arthur Miller lead”).

6. Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: The Johnson’s,” September 26, 2016 (“A first-time patron strolled in, looked around, and summed up the scene, rather approvingly: “Oh, so this is like a fake shithole, basically.” But, hey—it’s one with bathroom doors that consistently lock, if that’s worth anything to you”).

7. McKenna Stayner, “Bar Tab: Sycamore,” May 2, 2016 (“The crawlers, finishing a hot whiskey cider that tasted like the dregs of an overly honeyed tea, passed through a teensy smokers’ patio and into the booze-soaked main bar, attracted by a glowing yellow counter, its surface like the cracked crust of a crème brûlée”).

8. Michael Sragow, “Movies: The Deadly Companions,” April 4, 2016 (“Wills makes a terrific mangy villain; he sweats corruption through his buffalo-fur coat”).

9. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Subject to Change,” August 22, 2016 [“The show opens with ‘A Movie’ (1958), a free-associative pageant of found footage, which flashes both slapstick (a clip of a periscope cuts to a voluptuous pinup, then to a speeding torpedo) and tragic (executed bodies strung up by their feet, an elephant swarmed by its hunters, children beset by famine), compressing the thrill, dread, desire, hostility, and too-muchness of life into twelve stunning minutes”].

10. Richard Brody, “Movies: Hell or High Water,” August 22, 2016 (“Only Bridges emerges whole; with his typical brilliance, he leaps from the laconic to the rhetorical, making even the shady brim of his hat speak volumes”).

Credit: The above photo by Meredith Jenks is from Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: The Lucky Bee,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2016.

November 21, 2016, Issue

This week’s issue contains two scintillating pieces by Jill Lepore: “Esmé in Neverland,” an account of an unsuccessful attempt to make J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” into a movie; and “Wars Within,” part of the superb series “Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America.”

“Esmé in Neverland” begins with Lepore poking around an overgrown eighteenth-century Vermont farm:

Ruins were everywhere. The overgrown labyrinth; stone walls; the foundations of barns; a pine shack, collapsed; abandoned roads; a junk yard at the bottom of a ravine, a little village of bathtubs and glass bottles and old stoves and washbasins; dumped cars, a Plymouth of indiscernible vintage, a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, its hood and trunk popped open, like an upturned deerstalker cap. Grapevines climbed up the mopey branches of a willow. Wasps had lain siege to the barn. There was a wooden rocking horse in the shed, a faded Victorian settee in the attic, and, crammed in between the rafters, resting on plaster made of lime and horsehair, there were corncob husks that had been fashioned into Colonial dolls, folded and tied into the shape of skirted girls.

Note that Karmann Ghia; it appears again at the end of the piece. In between, Lepore tells the fascinating story of how J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” (The New Yorker, April 8, 1950) nearly got made into a movie. The man at the center of this project was a TV director named Peter Tewksbury. Lepore is a consummate rescuer of the dead (see, for example, her superb “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” The New Yorker, July 27, 2015); Tewksbury is one of her great rescues. He was a successful TV director, winning an Emmy in 1959 for “Father Knows Best.” But, as Lepore reports, “Toward the end of the nineteen-sixties, he threw his Emmy out the window of a car and left Hollywood.” He and his wife, Ann Schuyler, moved to a farm in Vermont, then to California, , then to Canada, then back to Vermont, where, Lepore says, “he lived very happily, until his death, in 2003, when he was nearly eighty.” One of the things he did during his Vermont years was make cheese. Lepore writes,

Tewksbury learned to make cheese by driving from dairy to dairy, talking to farmers. He got a job at the Brattleboro Food Co-op as a dishwasher. He worked his way up to the cheese counter. “I know the cheeses and I know the people,” he wrote, in his only book, “The Cheeses of Vermont.” In 2001, a reporter from the Times found him after calling every Tewksbury in the phone book. Tewksbury agreed to meet him at the co-op. He came out from behind the cheese counter with his hat on and sat down. He gave the reporter fifteen minutes, the length of his break. He did not mention J. D. Salinger.

Amazing! Here’s a guy who directed Elvis Presley, Fred MacMurray, and Danny Thomas, had two hit TV series (“Father Knows Best” and “My Three Sons”), and happily spent the last thirty years of life working at the cheese counter of the Brattleboro Food Co-op. I admire the hell out of him.

As for that Karmann Ghia with “its hood and trunk popped open, like an upturned deerstalker cap” that Lepore finds as she noses around Tewksbury’s old farm, it reappears in the piece’s brilliant final paragraph:

I left the labyrinth and went back to the barn. I laid my spade on the floor. I hung up my axe. I wondered who owned that Karmann Ghia. I crammed a jackknife into my pocket and went back to the woods. I figured I might be able to pry open the glove compartment.

Jill Lepore is among The New Yorker’s very best writers. “Esmé in Neverland” is one of her finest pieces. I enjoyed it immensely.

The other Lepore piece in this week’s issue, “Wars Within,” is part of the “Aftermath” series assessing the implications of Trump’s shocking election. Of the series’ sixteen essays, “Wars Within” comes closest to expressing my view. Lepore writes, “There are many reasons for our troubles. But the deepest reason is inequality: the forms of political, cultural, and economic polarization that have been widening, not narrowing, for decades.” What’s needed, in my opinion, is what Charles Reich advocated in The New Yorker forty-six years ago: a change of consciousness (“The Greening of America,” September 26, 1970). Peter Tewksbury’s life exemplifies such a change.

Other pleasures in this week’s issue: “Goings On About Town” ’s delightfully surreal description of Carolee Schneemann’s “Precarious” (“An associatively structured collage of degraded video footage, focused on the constrained movements of a caged cockatoo, a chained bear, dancing prison inmates, and the artist herself, wearing a blindfold”); Jeremy Liebman’s gorgeous photograph of Yeman Café’s kitchen stove, illustrating Nicolas Niarchos’s sensuous “Tables For Two” (“The liquid is murky but it sparkles with citrusy zest when it hits the tongue”); Colin Stoke’s vivid “Bar Tab” description of the “unironic” goings on at Kettle of Fish (“Choruses of ‘I Love My Green Bay Packers’ and ‘The Bears Still Suck’ bounced off wood-panelled walls like a ball off a receiver’s hand, and homesick Wisconsinites ordered delicious ‘imported’ brats buried in sauerkraut and mustard for five dollars”); Tad Friend’s inspired Talk story “The Undead,” in which cast members of “The Dead, 1904” rehearse for an “immersive re-creation” of the holiday feast in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (“O’Reilly sampled the petits fours and wondered whether the quinoa and Tabasco-flavored ones might not be anachronistic”); Gary Shteyngart’s brilliant “Aftermath” contribution, “Dystopia” (“The jump from Twitter racism to a black church set aflame on a warm Southern night is steady and predictable”); Dan Chiasson’s wonderful “Cross Talk,” a review of Ishion Hutchinson’s “punk-baroque” poetry [“His sound effects are exquisite: the clusters of consonants (hard ‘c’s, then ‘b’s and ‘p’s) and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words (‘iceberg-Golgotha’)”].

September 19, 2016, Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Richard Brody on Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (“Along the way, the film offers verse by Christina Rossetti; a record of Caruso; Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony; souped-up cars, and a man crushed under one; a woman on a meat hook; a whiff of narcotics; a primordial answering machine; bloody street fights; and nuclear catastrophe”), Becky Cooper’s “Lunch à la Mode” (“The real star, though, is the hot sauce. It’s the marigold color of a Buddhist monk’s cloak, with a complex bitter heat, and it should be spooned onto everything”), Colin Stokes’s “Bar Tab: King Tai” [“The #5 (Barr Hill gin, Cocchi Americano, Dimmi, grapefruit bitters) is a caustic confusion, but the #1 (Yaguara Cachaça Branca, apricot, Licor 43, grated nutmeg) was described by a drinker as ‘lovely stuff’ ”], Rebecca Mead’s “Costume Drama” (“The seductiveness of Michele’s vision was signalled by a barely subdued clamor among the guests over the emerald seat cushions, which were to be taken home as gifts”), Nick Paumgarten’s “Wild Man” (“Guilt and high principle mutate into marketing: this was the Patagonia feedback loop, on high screech”) – the most sheerly enjoyable, for me, is Ian Frazier’s “Patina,” an inspired reflection on the irreproducible color of the Statute of Liberty’s patina (“that elusive, flickering, familiar, sea-polished shade of copper-green”). There’s poetry in “Patina” (“When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes”) and lots of fascinating Statue of Liberty facts (e.g., The Statue’s copper is “only three-thirty-seconds of an inch thick and unusually pure”). “Patina” is this week’s Pick of the Issue.

Postscript: Another pleasurable piece in this week’s New Yorker is Jane Kramer’s “Eat, Memory,” a review of Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Kramer writes delicious long lines. For example:

Reading Paul Freedman about America, stalking myself through the taste of meals at eight of his ten restaurants, each sampled for different reasons at different moments in my life, I began to draw the outlines of a world I shared with other people, people more or less like me, and to wonder what “like me” meant when it came to expectations of inclusion, of common flash points of reference, of understanding and participating in the coded language of what we eat and how it is prepared and who is sitting at all those tables around us.

I relished Kramer’s recollections about eating in Le Pavillon, Antoine’s, Sylvia’s, Shrafft’s, the Grill Room, and Chez Panisse – all on Freedman’s list. But I wish she’d provided at least one extended quotation from Freedman’s book to help me decide whether I’d enjoy reading it. John Updike, in his “A Poetics of Book Reviewing” (included in his 2011 collection Higher Gossip), says, “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reviewer’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.”

May 16, 2016 Issue

Narrate or describe? I say describe. I relish description, particularly art description, e.g., Peter Schjeldahl’s superb rendering of Nicole Eisenman’s Under the Table 2 (2014), in this week’s issue: 

Jumbled heads share a bottle, which a single hand lifts and pours out, under a table that is topped with a stuffed olive, a cigarette emitting an arabesque of smoke, and a huge salami, its sliced end textured with psychedelic dots of color. ["Seriously Funny"]

From my collection of Schjeldahl art descriptions, here are three of my all-time favorites:

1. Agnes Martin’s The Sea (2003) – “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint.” ["Life Work," June 7, 2004]

2. Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Vertical-Horizontal Composition (1916) – “Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture.” ["Shapes of Things," January 7, 2013]

3. Laura Owens’s Untitled (2013) – “Gestural glyphs and splotches in white, black, green, and orange on a ground imprinted with a blown-up page of newspaper want ads.” ["Take Your Time," January 5, 2015]

Postscript: Another description in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely is Colin Stokes’s depiction of a bartender: “One wore a single black latex glove and smashed a large ice cube with a wand-like spoon to make the gin-based Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and triple sec, from a recipe he’d ‘found in a book not too long ago’ ” ("Bar Tab: The Ship"). What’s the key to great description? I think Schjeldahl nails it in "Seriously Funny": specificity.

April 25, 2016 Issue

I’ve commented before on the collagist aspect of James Wood’s art – how he selects details from the novel he’s reviewing and assembles them in gorgeous Rauschenbergian constructions (see here). His "Stranger in Our Midst" a review of Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs, in this week’s issue, contains a beauty:

O’Brien sees banal details and lingers over them, viewing them in the shadow of warfare and forced emigration, so that they are no longer banal. She tells us how quickly the workers leave the building when they are released: “In the mornings, after they had clocked out, they ran, recklessly, they ran as if they were fleeing catastrophes. The fear that governed their whole lives was now compressed into this urgency to catch a bus or a train to allow a husband or a mother or a cousin to go to work.” Fidelma is lonely in London, where the Thames has a strange “toffee colour, not like the silvery rivers of home.” Her fellow-workers, like her, long for home; like her, they cannot return. But they carry memories, “and the essence of their first place, known only to them.” (A beautiful phrase!) For Fidelma, Ireland is now becoming a memory, “such a small memory, young grass with the morning sun on it and the night’s dew, so that light and water interplayed as in a prism and the top leaves of an ash tree had a halo of diamond from the rain, the surrounding green so safe, so ample, so all-encompassing.”

Speaking of details, there are some delightful ones in this week’s “Goings On About Town”: a Studio Job lamp “whose base is a golden banana peel” ("Art: Museum of Arts and Design"); Ericka Beckman’s video “Hiatus,” in which “a cyber-heroine battles shock-haired scarecrows and buzzing electrical towers, only to be foiled by a Texas oilman with skin the color of Vishnu” ("Art: Ericka Beckman"); Joan Crawford’s “ferocious stillness and blowtorch stare” (Richard Brody, "Johnny Guitar"); Sofrito’s vanilla flan that comes “delightfully topped with lip-shaped sprinkles” (Nicholas Niarchos, "Tables For Two"); Ocean’s 8’s “eight-ball-embedded floor” (Colin Stokes, "Bar Tab").

My favorite sentence in this week’s issue? It’s a toss-up between Colin Stokes’s “In the cavernous hall, pool aficionados assembled cues that had been brought lovingly from home in leather cases, and a couple shared kisses and onion rings” ("Bar Tab: Ocean's 8") and James Wood’s “O’Brien tumbles into her characters’ voices; the prose has a life-filled, unstopping locomotion: ‘her little Mini, her chariot of freedom’ ” ("Stranger in Our Midst").

The Year In Review: 20 Memorable Lines

Here’s one more list – twenty memorable New Yorker lines of 2015:

1. It is the writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle with the aperture. – James Wood, "Look Again" (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

2. “This is about what you leave out, not what you take off. Writing is selection.” – John McPhee, "Omission" (September 14, 2015)

3. “Mayweather’s eyes get bigger when he fights: he seems intensely aware of his own vulnerability, which is precisely what makes him invulnerable.” – Kelefa Sanneh, "The Best Defense" (May 25, 2015)

4. “Dear God, the drinking.” – Anthony Lane, "Good Fights" (January 5, 2015)

5. “ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard.” – Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Shuko" (August 10, 2015)

6. “After straining for a sterner response to the works, I opted to relax and like them.” – Peter Schjeldahl, "Take Your Time" (January 5, 2015)

7. “This, this: this was the madness of the color line.” – Jill Lepore, "Joe Gould's Teeth" (July 27, 2015)

8. “Tastes differ, and Ishiguro is welcome to his Arthurian chain metal.” – James Wood, "The Uses of Oblivion" (March 23, 2015)

9. “Those who order the pear-and-kale salad, curiously wet, will get what they deserve. – Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Brooklyn Bavarian Biergarten" (October 12, 2015)

10. “Riefenstahl might have been both a considerable artist and a considerable Nazis.” – Claudia Roth Pierpont, "Bombshells" (October 19, 2015)

11. “The Wayback Machine is humongous, and getting humongouser” – Jill Lepore, "The Cobweb" (January 26, 2015)

12. “But Walden is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn….” – Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum" (October 19, 2015)

13. “I don’t like chocolate chips or see the point of vegan cookies.” – Michael Specter, "Freedom From Fries" (November 2, 2015)

14. “No better way to process a paradox than to have another drink.” – Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Nitehawk Cinema and Lo-Res" (September 21, 2015)

15. “But how deep can a truth be – indeed, how true can it be – if it is not built from facts?” – Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum" (October 19, 2015)

16. “Through their decades of vicissitudes, he referred to their marriage as ‘cloudless’—even to his mistress.” – Judith Thurman, "Silent Partner" (November 16, 2015)

17. “Mass violence was buried in the city like strata in rock.” – Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Century of Silence" (January 5, 2015)

18. “Chances are that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront before going out.” – Mary Norris, "Holy Writ" (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

19. “You could tattoo the entirety of Max’s dialogue onto his biceps.” – Anthony Lane, "High Gear" (May 25, 2015)

20. “Her spirit vibrates in the greenhouse air. But it can’t make you forget that, for twenty-two bucks at the gift shop, you can become the owner of a Frida oven mitt.” – Peter Schjeldahl, "Native Soil" (May 25, 2015)

Before I conclude, I’d like to give a special shout-out to the writers of “Tables For Two” and “Bar Tab.” These columns are tremendous sources of pleasure. I devour them.

And I want to salute David Denby. His distinguished run as New Yorker movie critic ended this year. I’ll miss his zingers (e.g., “Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque”). And I’ll miss his superb descriptive analyses – this one, for example, from his memorable "Influencing People" (October 4, 2010), a review of David Fincher’s The Social Network:

The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in. The revolution brews amid garbage.

That’s it! Time to clear the decks and make room for next year’s batch. Thank you New Yorker for another wonderful, absorbing, pleasurable, “unimpeachably interesting” (words stolen from Hannah Goldfield’s delectable "Tables For Two: Lupulo") year of reading. I don’t know how you do it, but you do. I love you.

But wait! I forgot to mention the Best Short Story: Martin Amis’s "Oktober" (December 7, 2015)

Best Poem: Meghan O’Rourke’s "Unforced Error" (October 26, 2015)

Best Cover: Mark Ulriksen’s “Streetball” (September 28, 2015)

I could go on. But I won’t. I’m going to mix myself a drink. If I had the ingredients, I’d try a Negligence (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust” – Colin Stokes, "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015), but I’m fresh out of basil syrup, damn it. My old standby, the Dark and Dirty (dark rum and Coke), will have to do. Here’s to you, New Yorker, you gorgeous creature. You take my breath away.

Best of 2015: GOAT

Here are my favorite “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Shuko," August 10 & 17, 2015). (“ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard.”)

2. Sarah Larson, "Bar Tab: Wassail," April 20, 2015. (“Better yet was the Falling Up, with bourbon, apple brandy, Cynar, lemon, fresh ginger, and port. Served in a brandy snifter, piled high with pebbled ice, like a sno-cone, and garnished with an elaborately carved wedge of gala apple, it swirled cloudily in the glass, looking gloriously silly.”)

3. Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Winnie's," February 9, 2015. (“One evening in Chinatown, a young woman in a Nirvana T-shirt took a break from mixing Hawaiian punches—a juggling act involving eight kinds of liquor, pineapple juice, and grenadine—to pull out a giant laser disk, grab a mic, and perform “Santeria,” by Sublime.”)

4. Andrea K. Scott, "Boxing Days," June 29, 2015. (“It’s a portable survey of Cianciolo’s career, revealing a hunter-gatherer of the flea market and an inveterate archivist of her own process. They’re the shamanic-punk heirs to a lineage of inside-the-box thinkers whose most famous son is Joseph Cornell.”)

5. Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Livingston Manor," March 16, 2015. (“So it is that such throwbacks as wood reclaimed from a Virginia elementary school and a bourbon-and-ginger-spiked egg cream called the Bugsville Fizz coexist with neoteric features like a hearty dark lager from Catskill Brewery (est. 2014), a duck-rillette banh mi, and a woman guilelessly confessing, ‘I never really got into Seinfeld, I think because I was too young.’ ”)

6. Richard Brody, "Bodies of Work," June 22, 2015. (“Fairchild, who performs like a counterculture Gena Rowlands, is irresistibly passionate and volatile even in repose, and Shults displays a bold visual and dramatic sensibility with his impressionistic rearrangement of time and his repertory of darting, whirling, plunging, and retreating camera moves, which seem to paint the action onto the screen.”)

7. Colin Stokes, "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015. (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust. ‘Your mouth might not be able to detect how strong it is, but your liver will,’ a server advised.”)

8. Nicolas Niarchos, "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills," November 2, 2015. (“Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel.”)

9. Jiayang Fan, "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," February 16, 2015. (“Hookah beer towers (strawberry, mint, melon) are hailed like cabs on a busy avenue.”)

10. Silvia Killingsworth, "Tables For Two: Timna," October 26, 2015. (“Kubaneh is a Yemenite-Jewish yeast loaf traditionally eaten on the morning of the sabbath, after it has baked overnight at a low temperature. Mesika’s version is served steaming hot in a clay flowerpot, freckled with sesame seeds. Its texture falls somewhere between brioche, challah, and croissant, and it pulls apart like cotton candy.”)

Credit: The above illustration, by Rebecca Monk, is from Jiayang Fan’s "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," The New Yorker, February 16, 2015.

The Year In Review: Images

Now, a few images from my 2015 New Yorker reading experience, in no particular order, montage-style:

BANANAS: I can still see in my mind’s eye those superbly noticed bunches of bananas hanging on plastic clothes hangers, in the Landsbjörg kitchen tent, at Landmannalaugar campsite, in Nick Paumgarten’s terrific "Life Is Rescues" (November 9, 2015).

KUBANEH IN A FLOWERPOT: One of the year’s most delectable images – Timna’s kubaneh, served steaming hot in a clay flowerpot, “freckled with sesame seeds,” (in Silvia Killingsworth’s wonderful "Tables For Two: Timna" October 26, 2015).

ROSE GOLD APPLE WATCH: I remember the color of the Apple Watch that Jonathan Ive wears, in Ian Parker’s masterful "The Shape of Things to Come" (February 23 & March 2, 2015) – “rose gold, with a band of white rubbery plastic.”

SEALSKIN BOOTS: I love sealskin boots and was delighted to see a pair mentioned in John Seabrook’s Talk story, "Free," February 2, 2015 (“Tagaq, who is thirty-nine and has jet-black hair and a girlish face, had removed her sealskin boots and was sitting barefoot on the floor of the Diker Pavilion, a large oval space on the museum’s ground level”).

RED DUTTON’S TEETH: Dutton, manager and coach of the New York Americans, the first team to play hockey in the old Madison Square Gardens, had teeth that, in Nick Paumgarten’s memorable words, “looked suspiciously like replacements for the set scattered on a frozen pond” ("Amerks," October 5, 2015).

PANTIES: I won’t soon forget those panties at Loosie Rouge, “petite enough to fit the models clustered around the bar, hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles” (Becky Cooper, "Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge," August 3, 2015).

JOE GOULD’S TEETH: I think they’re false. They appear as part of a vision that Jill Lepore has at the end of her extraordinary "Joe Gould's Teeth" (July 27, 2015): “I still sometimes picture a door with the word ‘Archive’ etched on smoky glass. I picture it like this: I open the door, sneak inside, and enter an enormous room, cluttered with notebooks stacked on the floor, on shelves, on desks. I reach into my pocket for what I’ve brought. It feels like porcelain. It opens like a clam. And then I back out of that room, as soundlessly as I came, having left behind: Joe Gould’s teeth.” 

FLOYD MAYWEATHER’S EYES: This stuck with me – Kelefa Sanneh’s description of Mayweather’s eyes: “Mayweather’s eyes get bigger when he fights: he seems intensely aware of his own vulnerability, which is precisely what makes him invulnerable” ("The Best Defense," May 25, 2015)

MILK BOTTLE FULL OF GRAVEL: That’s what was on geology professor Todd Halihan’s desk, when Rivka Galchen visited him, as reported in her terrific "Weather Underground" (April 13, 2015). According to Galchen (quoting Halihan), the gravel is from the Arbuckle, a geological formation under Oklahoma.

GLASS OF NEGLIGENCE: Mentioned in Colin Stokes’s wonderful "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015 (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust. ‘Your mouth might not be able to detect how strong it is, but your liver will,’ a server advised”).

STACKS OF PIZZA BOXES: Only Ian Frazier, with his jeweler’s eye for the overlooked and disregarded, would notice, “In out-of-the-way corners near the refreshment tables, stacks of empty pizza boxes rose to the height of a man” ("Bronx Dreams," December 7, 2015).

FURRY BIRKENSTOCKS: Sensuously described in Rebecca Mead’s delightful "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015 (“There was a Boston mule made from textured velvet in crimson or gold, inspired by a Persian-lamb coat that Haslbeck had discovered in a flea market. An Arizona sandal had a rose-gold leather foot bed and an upper made from pinkish-peach tweed threaded with iridescent silver. It looked as if it had been cut from the sleeve of a Chanel jacket. Another Arizona sandal, in black leather, had been lined in sapphire-blue shearling”).

STUFFED-SATIN STARS: They were among the contents of Susan Cianciolo’s curio-filled cardboard “kits” that were on show at Bridget Donahue’s gallery last June (see Andrea K. Scott’s marvelous "Boxing Days," June 29, 2015).

OLD WHISKEY BOTTLE FULL OF WATER: This comes from Dana Goodyear’s excellent "A New Leaf" (November 2, 2015). Its main “character,” ocean farmer Bren Smith, drinks water from an old whiskey bottle.

PLAINS INDIAN HEADDRESS: Just one of the more than a hundred and fifty artifacts on display in “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky,” a wondrous show at the Metropolitan Museum last spring, superbly reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl in his "Moving Pictures," March 6, 2015 (“Beadwork, metal cones, and cotton and silk cloth figure in a headdress from the Eastern Plains, circa 1780, along with local stuffs including bison horns, deer and horse hair, and porcupine quills”).

HOOKAH BEER TOWERS: I love this image; it’s from Jiayang Fan’s brilliant "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," February 16, 2015 [“Hookah beer towers (strawberry, mint, melon) are hailed like cabs on a busy avenue”].

Credit: The above photo (detail) is by Dina Litovsky; it’s used to illustrate Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timna" (The New Yorker, October 26, 2015).