March 22, 2021 Issue

I like this sentence: “It’s demeaning, to be served this ham, but no amount of recoiling changes the fact that ‘Ginny & Georgia’ is mirroring a mode of cavalier speech on social media that compresses the ineffability of identity into a checklist of outwardly visible bona fides: what one eats, where one was raised, how well one twerks.” It’s from Doreen St. Felix’s capsule review of “Ginny & Georgia,” in this week’s “Goings On About Town.” That last phrase – “how well one twerks” – makes me smile. I have no intention of watching “Ginny & Georgia.” But I love St. Felix’s writing. Three of her pieces made my “Best of 2018: newyorker.com”: “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love,” March 12, 2018 (“Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so”); “The Eerie Anonymity of a Show of African-American Portraiture at the Met,” July 19, 2018 (“The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific personhood”); and “The Photographer Who Captured How Whiteness Works in the American South,” December 1, 2018 (“Looking at the stiffened old black couple standing on opposite ends of their doorway, emanating all the vitality of a Victorian corpse portrait, I wonder what alchemical effect Fox Solomon has on her black subjects in their black spaces. It’s one that seems to be built not on trust but on more candid, and more revealing, forces: secrecy and distance. The saxophonist clutches his instrument and glares, judgy, wary. Fox Solomon’s scenes telegraph the well-earned feelings of prejudice that blacks had toward photography and its threatening ability to reduce them to totems”).

October 5, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Steve Futterman, in his “Goings On About Town” review of Diana Krall’s new album This Dream of You, praises Krall’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s wonderful “How Deep Is the Ocean,” calling it “bravely refashioned.” Well, it’s certainly refashioned, but not in a good way. Krall practically destroys it, slowing it to a walk, draining it of its lyricism. Krall, of all people, should know better. She swung this tune beautifully on her 1997 Love Scenes.

2. Doreen St. Félix, in her “Not Quite America,” says of Luca Guadagnino’s HBO drama “We Are Who We Are,” “The attention to young bodies feels almost dangerous.” I agree. The series thrums with sex. I’ve been enjoying it immensely. 

Best of 2018: newyorker.com

Sarah Mazzetti, illustration for Calvin Trillin's "Nearby and Familiar: A Strategy for Picking Restaurants"

Here are my favorite newyorker.com pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Alexandra Schwartz, “Agnès Varda Is Still Going Places,” March 4, 2018 (“Varda, as the film’s title implies, is a gleaner, too. She loves the burnt edges of cinema, finding treasures in images or ideas that other directors might reject”).

2. Richard Brody, “How Garry Winogrand Transformed Street Photography,” September 15, 2018 (Winogrand didn’t take time tweaking and twiddling the camera’s rings and dials, and, above all, he didn’t take time to compose his images. When he flung his Leica to his eye, he didn’t study framing through the lens but composed instantaneously, impulsively, improvisationally, as if he were making a kind of pictorial jazz, or what Jean-Luc Godard called ‘the definitive by chance’ ”).

3. Doreen St. Félix, “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love,” March 12, 2018 (“Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so”).

4. Doreen St. Félix, “The Eerie Anonymity of a Show of African-American Portraiture at the Met,” July 19, 2018 (“The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific personhood”).

5. Doreen St. Félix, “The Photographer Who Captured How Whiteness Works in the American South,” December 1, 2018 (“Looking at the stiffened old black couple standing on opposite ends of their doorway, emanating all the vitality of a Victorian corpse portrait, I wonder what alchemical effect Fox Solomon has on her black subjects in their black spaces. It’s one that seems to be built not on trust but on more candid, and more revealing, forces: secrecy and distance. The saxophonist clutches his instrument and glares, judgy, wary. Fox Solomon’s scenes telegraph the well-earned feelings of prejudice that blacks had toward photography and its threatening ability to reduce them to totems”).

6. Calvin Trillin, “Nearby and Familiar: A Strategy For Picking Restaurants,” November 21, 2018 (“I had dinner at Casamento’s, on Magazine Street, where patrons consume astounding oyster loaves in an all-tile space that gives some the impression that they are eating in a drained swimming pool”).

7. Elizabeth Barber, "What Brooklyn Sees in Buffalo," March 31, 2018 (“ ‘It seems to me like one of those forgotten cities of New York State,’ a red-lipped lawyer said as she smoked in the cold sun outside the Bell House, the venue for the event”). 

8. Hannah Goldfield, “How To Eat Candy Like a Swede,” May 17, 2018 (“I plucked up, instead, a plain old sweet licorice pipe, and let it dangle from the corner of my lip as I chewed, pulling it up with my teeth until it disappeared”).

9. Charlotte Mendelson, “The Wonderful Insanity of Collecting Abandoned Treasures on the Street,” November 12, 2018 [“That’s the driveway where someone once discarded an entire wormery: four stories of perforated plastic through which my compost worms now romp happily among apple peelings. Isn’t that the house where they left a climatically challenged hibiscus plant in a plastic bag? (Yes, and I killed it. What’s your point?)”].

10. Amanda Petrusich, “The Bracing Sorrow of Sufjan Stevens’s Oscars Performance,” March 5, 2018 (“The Oscars telecast is a preposterous event, but occasionally something extraordinary happens: a brief, pure moment”). 

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”).

May 7, 2018 Issue

I relish photography writing. This week’s issue contains a beauty by Zadie Smith. Titled “Through the Portal,” it considers Deana Lawson’s transfixing portraits of “diaspora gods.” Smith writes,

Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa. Typically, she photographs her subjects semi-nude or naked, and in cramped domestic spaces, yet they rarely look either vulnerable or confined. (“When I’m going out to make work,” Lawson has said, “usually I’m choosing people that come from a lower- or working-class situation. Like, I’m choosing people around the neighborhood.”) Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.

Deana Lawson, "Baby Sleep" (2009)

Smith refers to a number of Lawson’s photos, including  “Sharon” (2007), “Otisha” (2013), “Living Room” (2015), “Kingdom Come” (2014), “Mama Goma” (2014), “Ashanti” (2011), “Nicole” (2016), “Wanda and Daughters” (2009), “Portal” (2017), “Cowboys” (2014), “Signs” (2016), “The Garden” (2015), and “Oath” (2013). Of  “Living Room,” she writes,

In “Living Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless, while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission, that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the viewer who ends up feeling naked.

Deana Lawson, "Living Room" (2015)

My favourite passage in “Through the Portal” interprets Lawson’s use of curtains:

Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable, thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration. There is “kinship in free fall.”

“Through the Portal” expands my appreciation of Deana Lawson’s extraordinary photos. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: “Through the Portal” is the second New Yorker piece on Deana Lawson’s photography. The first is Doreen St. Félix’s “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love” (“Photo Booth,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2018), a review of Lawson’s recent exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, in New York City. It, too, is a superb piece of descriptive analysis. Here, for example, is St. Félix’s description of Lawson’s great “Seagulls in Kitchen” (2017):

Looking around her new show, I kept returning to “Seagulls in Kitchen.” During her travels last year, Lawson encountered a man and a woman in Charleston, who were “basically strangers,” the gallerist at Sikkema Jenkins told me. They agreed to have Lawson shoot them as lovers. The title refers to the wall decoration, the kind of sweet ornament that, were the tableau real, would almost certainly be accompanied by a story. The couple’s prom pose, the man plaiting his hands over her soft torso. Tattoos on oiled brown skin are reminders of prior lives; food on the shelf of the present one. Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so. 

That last sentence is inspired!