October 10, 2022 Issue

“Filtration camps” – Russian euphemism for concentration camps. Russia is depraved! If you need more proof, read David Kortava’s “In the Filtration Camps,” in this week’s issue. It tells about the hellish ordeal of a young man called Taras (not his real name), taken from his home in Mariupol by Russian soldiers and detained in a so-called filtration camp for nearly six weeks. Taras was lucky; he was eventually released. Many prisoners in these camps die. Kortava writes,

The following weeks took on a bleak rhythm. The detainees had only what clothes they had been wearing on the day they were apprehended. Cases of what appeared to be pneumonia or COVID broke out, but the soldiers provided no aid or medicine. When one sick detainee started to fade away, the others pleaded for an ambulance to be summoned, to no avail. Several hours later, the man was dead. Guards ordered two detainees to move the body to the gymnasium. 

Russian soldiers have no regard for the sanctity of human life. They’re despicable. Damn them all! 

Best of 2021: GOAT

Photo by Shawn Michael Jones, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream"

Here are my favourite “Goings On About Town” notes of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream,” August 2, 2021 [“There are pints to take home, too; availing myself of an insulated bag outfitted with ice packs ($7), I toted several on the subway, including Panna Stracciatella, flecked with dark-chocolate shards, and Somebody Scoop Phil, the brainchild of the sitcom producer turned food personality Phil Rosenthal, featuring a lightly salted malted milk-chocolate base, dense with chunks of Twix and candied peanuts, plus swirls of fudge and panna caramel that oozed obscenely when I peeled off the lid”].

2. Richard Brody, “Movies: Despair,” August 2, 2021 ("In the crude and vulgar beauty of a society on the edge of violence, Stoppard’s ping-ponging witticisms freeze in the air with a ballistic grimness").

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Fan-Fan Doughnuts and El Newyorkino,” March 15, 2021 ["But it’s the basics I crave: Gerson’s yeasted, brioche-style dough, which contains flour, butter, and eggs and is fried to the color of honey, is a marvel in itself, not much heavier than cotton candy, and is perhaps best coated in an inky slick of Valrhona chocolate or braided and lightly lacquered with the simplest white icing. Chocolate comes in hot-beverage form, too: a rich, velvety Belgian-style mix of melted Guittard (both milk and dark), not so thick that you need a spoon, but thick enough that it’s nice to use one, to more easily consume the doughnut croutons and house-made marshmallow bobbing at the top"].

4. Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: LSDXOXO: ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect,’ ” May 24, 2021 ("The Berlin-based d.j. and producer LSDXOXO makes spiky, near-iridescent house music, full of distortion-heavy riffs and buzzing percussion that cuts through a room like a silver suit").

5. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Peter Luger Steak House,” March 29, 2021 ["At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun"].

6. Andrea K. Scott, “At the Galleries: Lee Lozano,” August 2, 2021 ["Lozano blazes through subjects, from the X-ray intensity of charcoal self-portraits, made during her student years, to cartoonish near-Pop (such as the untitled 1961 work pictured here), absurdly priapic gags, and muscular renditions of hardware and tools that strain at the edges of the paper on which they’re drawn, as if to say, Screw this"].

7. Anthony Lane, “Movies: Senna,” ("Asif Kapadia’s 2011 documentary, which should reward the attention even of those who would never dream of watching cars on a track, is filmed as an homage to velocity—it’s stripped of narration, talking heads, and anything else that might threaten to slow it down. What remains is a self-propelling drama, and the abiding image of Senna’s oil-dark eyes, gleaming through the letter box of his helmet").

8. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Becky Kolsrud,” March 8, 2021 ("In another, smaller landscape, bordered by a band of sky blue, a neon-pink skull rests on the curve of a green planet as a lemon moon blares from the corner").

9. David Kortava, “Tables For Two: Bathhouse Kitchen,” December 6, 2021 ("For the lovely butternut-squash salad, Sousa served the squash raw, thinly sliced, and tossed with golden raisins, pecans, onion, tarragon, and blue cheese. It was easily the funkiest dish I’ve ever consumed in a bathrobe").

10. Richard Brody, “What to Stream: Thomasine & Bushrod,” March 8, 2021 ("When, during a shoot-out, Bushrod—in a majestic closeup—reloads his revolver, the whispered click of metal on metal resounds like righteous thunder").

December 27, 2021 Issue

The New Yorker asked lots of great questions this year, none greater than the three contained in this passage from David Kortava’s delightful “Tables For Two: Tea and Crumpets,” in this week’s issue: 

If Lady Mendl’s takes liberties with the conventions of afternoon tea, Brooklyn High Low detonates the paradigm. Pastrami and Dijon mustard on rye? Guava and blue cheese on gluten-free bread? Twenty-nine tea varieties, including one infused with whole butterfly-pea flowers that turn the liquid a psychedelic indigo?

Best of 2018: GOAT

Jorge Colombo, "Ophelia" (2018)

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Elizabeth Barber, “Bar Tab: Ophelia,” April 23, 2018 [“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”].

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Art: Dike Blair,” November 26, 2018 (“A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life”).

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Miznon,” April 30, 2018 (“It seems almost unfair to compare Miznon pita to any other pita. Miznon pita is plush, Miznon pita is pillowy—I would happily take a nap on a stack of Miznon pita. It’s as stretchy and pliant as Neapolitan pizza dough, its surface similarly taut and golden brown, glistening ever so slightly with oil. It cradles whatever you stuff it with as supportively as a hammock, efficiently absorbing the flavors of herb-flecked ground-lamb kebab, roasted mushrooms, or spicy fish stew”).

4. David Kortava, “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” August 6 & 13, 2018 (“After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to ‘Celebration,’ by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene”).

5. Richard Brody, “Movies: Fig Leaves,” May 21, 2018 (“Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that viewers might swear they hear the intertitles spoken”).

6. Doreen St. Félix, “Art: ‘African American Portraits,’ ” August 20, 2018 (“But there is a depthless artificiality to the stock scenery, which makes the sitters seem as if they have been dropped into a placeless limbo. An altering occurs when an institution puts relics of real and recent life behind glass, making them into art objects. The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific stories”).

7. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Lee Krasner,” October 29, 2018 (“Linear geometries partner with biomorphic curves in a dominant palette of red, yellow, and blue. Zinging orange and chartreuse have guest-starring turns, and Léger-like black lines maintain order”).

8. Talia Lavin, "Bar Tab: Anyway Café," April 30, 2018 [“Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim”]. 

9. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“Oil paint lends itself to Thiebaud’s canvases like buttercream to cake, and his works on paper are every bit as delectable”).

10. Neima Jahromi, “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” July 23, 2018 (“On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut”).

August 6 & 13, 2018 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is David Kortava’s “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” a vivid account of what it’s like to don a “vintage Eastern Bloc military overcoat,” step inside a “glass-walled ice cage,” and attempt to knock back six shots of vodka in two minutes. Kortava writes,

After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to “Celebration,” by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene. 

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).

November 6, 2017 Issue

What was it like to be in Raqqa this summer during the fight to expel ISIS? Luke Mogelson’s extraordinary “Dark Victory,” in this week’s issue, tells us in detail after gritty detail. It puts us on the ground, near the front lines, with the Syrian Democratic Forces, amid the city’s bombed-out ruins:

Inside the city, the devastation was apocalyptic. Block after block of tall apartment towers had been obliterated. Every building seemed to have been struck by ordnance: either destroyed entirely, scorched black by fire, or in a state of mid-collapse, with slabs of concrete hanging precariously from exposed rebar and twisted I-beams. Bulldozers had plowed a path through heaps of cinder blocks, felled power poles, and other detritus. Up ahead, missiles hit: a whistle, then a crash, then a dark plume. Smoke and dust roiled over rooftops.

“Dark Victory” is riveting, and what makes it riveting (for me, at least) is Mogelson’s masterful use of “I,” which gives his reports the immediacy and authenticity of personal experience. Examples:

In August, in the living room of an abandoned house on the western outskirts of Raqqa, Syria, I met with Rojda Felat, one of four Kurdish commanders overseeing the campaign to wrest the city from the Islamic State, or ISIS.

One afternoon this summer, near a front line in West Raqqa, I sat in a requisitioned residence with Ali Sher, a thirty-three-year-old Kurdish commander with a handlebar mustache and the traditional Y.P.G. uniform: camouflage, Hammer pants and a colorful head scarf tied back pirate-style.

A few days after speaking with Ali Sher in West Raqqa, my translator and I followed two pickup trucks, crowded with about twenty Arab fighters, through the southern fringes of the city.

Another afternoon, on a street in East Raqqa, where the S.D.F. had pushed into the city’s old quarter, breaching a huge mud-mortar wall from the eighth century, I watched an armored bulldozer return from clearing some rubble nearby.

In another bedroom of the house, I found the ranking commander for the area, a Kurd, sitting on a box spring beneath a shattered window that overlooked the hospital.

These wonderful first-person sentences report war as lived experience. I devour them.  

The Mauricio Lima photos illustrating “Dark Victory” (especially the newyorker.com version) are transfixing, among the best to appear in the magazine in recent memory.

Photo by Mauricio Lima

“Dark Victory” is Mogelson’s third piece on the war against ISIS. The others are “The Front Lines” (The New Yorker, January 18, 2016) and “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017). Together they make one of the most brilliant series of war reports The New Yorker has ever published. I hope Mogelson collects them in a book. It would be an instant classic.

Postscript: Five inspired lines from this week’s New Yorker:

1. “Over here—put in potato—close—strong,” a centenarian named Anastasia instructed, pinching dumplings shut with practiced rhythm. – David Kortava, “Tables For Two: Streecha”

2. Three drinks in, a teetering twentysomething left most of his Up and Cumming—a frothy high-proof pineapple margarita—spilled on the bar. – H. C. Wilentz, “Bar Tab: Club Cumming”

3. The muralist packed up, leaving a half-painted Liza Minnelli to gaze out, smirking, on the besotted crowd. – H. C. Wilentz, “Bar Tab: Club Cumming”

4. The penumbral horse that Georges Seurat let loose with his black Conté crayon in 1882, on view here, might be up for a wild ride with Black Hawk’s “Buffalo Dreamers.” – Andrea K. Scott, “Paper Weight”

5. The cinematographer William Lubtchansky’s grainy black-and-white images have the feel of cold stone, and, when the pragmatic Lilie challenges François to get on with his life, the chill of hard reality is all the more brutal. – Richard Brody, “Movies: Regular Lovers”

April 17, 2017, Issue

I see in the “Briefly Noted” review of Richard Holmes’s new book, The Long Pursuit, in this week’s issue, that Holmes “swears by what he calls the ‘Footsteps principle,’ which entails going everywhere that ‘the subject had ever lived or worked, or travelled or dreamed.’ ” Reading this, I recalled Geoff Dyer, in Granta’s recent “Journeys” issue, describing travel writing that follows “in the footsteps of …” as “the literary equivalent of package tours in which destination and experience are so thoroughly predetermined that one is reluctant to make a booking.” I’m curious what Dyer would make of Holmes’s “Footsteps principle.” It seems to me that The Long Pursuit is worthy of more than just a “Briefly Noted” review. I wish The New Yorker would ask Dyer to review it. He’s a superb critic. He’d be an excellent sub for James Wood.

Other notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Maureen Gallace painting, “Sandy Road” (2003), in “Goings On About Town,” brought to mind Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful “America at the Edges” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), in which he describes Gallace’s art:

Gallace’s means are narrow: she employs uniformly quick, daubed brushwork and colors kept to a mid-range of tones that makes whites jump out. Her end is description, not of how things look but of how they seem. What is a breaking ocean wave like? Gallace answers with stabs of creamy off-white and gray-blue shadow. It’s her best guess, as is the specific blue of the sky on the given day. In one picture, single blue strokes approximate tidal pools. Elsewhere, a slight touch of green in the sea hints at fathomless deeps. Qualities of light, too, feel gamely speculative. (To me, they tend to evoke morning hours, when the visible world, well rested, has something almost eager about it.) The houses often lack doors and windows. Gallace is plainly shy of anyone or anything that might even seem to return her gaze. She conveys a vulnerable aloneness wholly given over to absorption in appearances. Looking at the paintings, I feel that I am always just beginning to look.

2. The William Mebane photograph, illustrating Jiayang Fan’s delectable “Tables For Two: Tim Ho Wan,” is one of his finest. I’m a Mebane fan. His photo for Silvia Killingsworth’s “Tables For Two: Babu Ji” was #6 on my “Best of 2016: Photos.” His “Tim Ho Van” is sure to be a candidate for “Best of 2017.”

3. I find “Bar Tab” drink descriptions irresistible. There’s a dandy in David Kortava’s “Bar Tab: Skinny Dennis”:  “If you are going to stay and drink, Willie’s Frozen Coffee—a decadent caffeine-and-whiskey sludge named for Willie Nelson—is a must.”

Postscript: I want to add that Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985) is, for me, a touchstone, particularly the first section, titled “1964: Travels,” in which he tells how his youthful journeys through the Cévennes, following the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, led him towards biography.