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.

September 26, 2016, Issue

Rivka Galchen’s “Keeping It Off,” in this week’s issue, contains echoes of her great “Medical Meals” (The New Yorker, November 3, 2014), in which she recollects her first month of surgical training. The unit that she was assigned to did mostly bariatric procedures – weight-reduction surgeries. That’s what “Keeping It Off” is about, too – bariatric procedures. It follows a patient, Henry Roberts, who undergoes a sleeve gastrectomy. Galchen brilliantly describes the operation:

Large monitors were mounted above Roberts’s body, like sports-bar television screens. Inabnet and Taye Bellistri looked up at the monitors, rather than down at the patient, as they maneuvered the handles of tools threaded through the left and right incisions. On the screens, the image was so big and so clear that it was easy to read the tiny brand names—Covidien, Karl Storz—written on the slender surgical instruments. Roberts’s abdominal cavity looked like the inside of a mossy, yellow cave lit up by miners’ headlamps; vasculature appeared like streaks of mineral ore, the liver like a respiring troglobite.

Early in her piece, Galchen mentions two hospital vending machines: “Arriving early for Roberts’s surgery, I waited in a corner of the lobby by two vending machines, one that sold candies and chips and another that sold kosher food, mainly apples and bagels wrapped in cellophane.”

I smiled when I read that. It reminded me of “Medical Meals,” in which vending machines figure centrally:

The cafeteria would be closed, leaving only a corridor of six or seven vending machines. On illuminated display were pretzels, and chocolate bars, and potato chips that were baked, and potato chips that were made from superior root vegetables, and potato chips that were actually corn chips coated with a supernatural orange powder. There were bright-colored drinks full of “essential electrolytes,” which medical professionals knew basically just meant sugar and salt, but still. One machine was different. It hid its wares. Nothing was on display but a closed freezer unit and artistic renderings of ice-cream bars. The drawings recalled ice-cream trucks from a childhood before mine, with almond-like objects matted onto a chocolate-like substance, with a vanilla-like substance inside. The bars were a dollar and twenty-five cents, I believe, payable in quarters. Mike and I would listen to each coin fall. Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin. A robot arm descended, suctioned up glycerides on a wooden stick, then released the treasure into the dispensing slot of the machine. “I’m so glad I’m here,” Mike would say. 

That “Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin” is marvelously fine. Vending machines are to Galchen as sunflowers were to van Gogh.

Postscript: In addition to Galchen’s above-quoted surgery description, there are at least six other inspired passages in this week’s issue:

LVL UP sound-checks comfortably in the post-D.I.Y. nostalgia that has driven New York bands and their fans back toward the music that they heard at their first all-ages gig, but wistful thinking is the enemy of originality, especially when you’re sharing amps. – “Night Life: LVL UP”

Robinson is a Manet of hot babes and a Morandi of McDonald’s French fries and Budweiser beer cans, magnetized by his subjects as he devotes his brush to generic painterly description.  – Peter Schjeldahl, “Reality Principle”

Ceramics are umber-glazed snarls of curled and twisted slabs. – “Art: Lynda Benglis”

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. – Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: The Johnson’s”

When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of “Theories of Business Behavior,” by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas). – Mark Singer, “Bank Shot”

As “Eight Days a Week” springs from color to black-and-white, and as frenzied action is intercut with stills, we get a delicious sense of doubleness. – Anthony Lane, “Come Together”

August 1, 2016 Issue

For me, the most pleasurable items in this week’s issue are all, except for one, in “Goings On About Town”:

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Young Master,” a consideration of Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (“The coins—count ’em, thirty—lie strewn in a pool of light on the floor”);

2. Richard Brody’s capsule review of Andrzej Zulawski’s On the Silver Globe (“Zulawski films it all with a wildly gyrating camera that scampers across fields, vaults over hilltops, thrusts through phalanxes of warriors, and pivots to reveal soldiers dancing on the beach in front of orange flames”);

3. Becky Cooper’s “Tables For Two: Barano” (“End a meal with the panna cotta, cool and deeply vanilla, tucked under pistachio-hazelnut brittle and ribbons of basil, with slices of grapefruit just sanguine enough for you to pretend they’re blood oranges from Mt. Etna.”)

4. Emma Allen’s “Bar Tab: Northern Territory” (“Up on the pleasant roof deck, a Swiss gent ordered a pint of Narragansett lager with a healthy pour of Sprite, a take on his country’s panaché, or shandy: ‘The perfect thing for summer’ ”).

The exception is Marie Howe’s wonderful poem “Low Tide, Late August,” an evocation of a quiet coupling, floating in a bay’s “softly sucking and lapping water, / as the pulling out reached its limit and the tide began to flow slowly back / again.”

February 22, 2016 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jill Lepore’s "The Party Crashers," a sharp, sparkling report on the New Hampshire primary. Can political journalism sparkle? Yes, when it contains vivid imagery like this:

The clock on the wall in the cafeteria at Winnacunnet High School, in Hampton, New Hampshire, is mounted behind a wire cage that protects its face from the likeliest weapons (French fries, foam balls) deployed in the uprisings of adolescents (food fights, dodgeball). Or maybe that was to prepare it for politics. Two weeks ago, the day after the Iowa caucuses and one week before the New Hampshire primary, a makeshift stage had been built at the far end of the cafeteria, catercornered from the caged clock. Its backdrop was an American flag; a campaign poster, an “H” with an arrow running through it; and three rows of Granite State citizens, a political Greek chorus positioned behind the lectern, awaiting the candidate. Minutes passed. The slender black hand of the clock ticked and twitched, like an old man tapping and jerking his cane. Hillary Rodham Clinton was running late.

And this:

The instant Clinton began speaking, dozens of arms reached high into the air, all across the room, wielding smartphones. It was like watching a flock of ostriches awaken, the arms their necks, the phones their heads, the red recording buttons their wide, blinking eyes.

And especially this:

I watched Wednesday night’s Democratic Town Hall from inside the Halligan Tavern, an Irish pub housed in an old brick fire station across the street from the Derry Opera House. CNN had reserved the entire restaurant for the press, since there was no room inside the dollhouse-size opera house. CNN played on screens above the bar and on the walls. More than a hundred reporters huddled with their laptops at tables, upstairs and down. A few people followed the response on #DemTownHall. On side tables, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and potato skins were served from platters warmed by cans of Sterno, their blue flames flickering. Power strips rested on every table, like so many centerpieces. The coffee was free. So was the Wi-Fi. The password was the date, 02032016.

Lepore might’ve written that she watched Wednesday night’s Democratic Town Hall from inside the Halligan Tavern and left it at that, but she didn’t. She evokes the bar’s interior with life-giving specificity, and uses it to illustrate her point – the Internet has revolutionized our politics.
  

Other highlights in this week’s issue: Emma Allen’s inspired “The prodigiously bearded artist Gregory (Stovetop) McKighan dispensed Franzia boxed wine, beer, and soju-based cocktails (there’s a church next door, so no liquor) and the kind of snacks you wish you’d bought at Trader Joe’s (hummus bagel, cheddar pretzels) beneath TVs playing ‘Inland Empire’ and the ‘Cremaster’ cycle,” in her "Bar Tab: Flowers for All Occasions"; and the sublime closing paragraph of Alex Ross’s "Stars and Snow":

At the end, the music seems on the verge of resolving to G major, but an apparent transitional chord proves to be the last, its notes dropping out one by one. Underneath is the noise of paper being scraped on a bass drum—“like walking in the snow,” the composer says. At Carnegie, there was a profound silence, and then the ovation began.

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.

September 28, 2015 Issue

I’m pleased to see James Wood in the magazine this week. He’s been absent for the last four months, and I’ve missed him. His reviews are, for me, an essential part of The New Yorker. His excellent "The Art of Witness," in this week’s issue, considers The Complete Works of Primo Levi. The piece is noteworthy for at least three reasons: (1) Wood’s recurring use of “moral”; (2) the surprisingly high value he places on “story”; (3) his ongoing preoccupation with death. I can’t recall another Wood review that uses “moral” as often as this piece does. Wood usually takes a formalist approach to criticism. It’s one of the reasons I admire his work. But in “The Art of Witness” he repeatedly invokes morality: Levi’s friend, Sandro Delmastro, is described as being “physically and morally strong”; the clarity of poet and concentration-camp survivor, Dan Pagis, is “ontological and moral”; Levi’s storytelling is “a kind of ethics, when the writer is constantly registering the moral (which is to say, in this case, the immoral) novelty of the details he encounters”; “Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment and a moral astonishment”; “You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote”; “This is a classical prose, the possession of a civilized man who never expected that his humane irony would have to battle with its moral opposite”; “That emphasis on resistance makes its sequel, The Truce, not merely funny but joyous: the camps are no more, the Germans have been vanquished, and gentler life, like a moral sun, is returning”; “The philosopher Berel Lang, in one of the best recent inquiries into Levi’s work, argues that this moral optimism makes him a singular figure”; “And he does not exempt himself from this moral mottling: on the one hand, he firmly asserts his innocence, but, on the other, he feels guilty to have survived.” Has Wood exchanged formalism for moralism? No, I don’t think so. He’s describing a writing that is distinctly moral in nature. He says, “You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote.” His frequent use of “moral” is a way of conveying this feeling.

Another interesting aspect of “The Art of Witness” is Wood’s praise of Levi’s storytelling. He says, “Many of these horrifying facts can be found in testimony by other witnesses. What is different about Levi’s work is bound up with his uncommon ability to tell a story. It is striking how much writing by survivors does not quite tell a story….” And later in the piece, he observes, “But If This Is a Man and The Truce are powerful because they do not disdain story. They unfold their material, bolt by bolt.” There was a time not long ago when Wood praised “antinarrative” – the “reaching for what cannot be disclosed in narrative” (see his great "Life's White Machine: Ben Lerner," included in his 2012 collection The Fun Stuff). But lately, he seems to have developed a taste for old-fashioned storytelling – stories that “unfold their material, bolt by bolt.” In his recent "All Her Children" (The New Yorker, May 25, 2015), he says of Anne Enright’s The Green Road, “This is storytelling, with the blood-pulse of lived gossip….” And in “Using Everything” (included in his The Nearest Thing to Life), he says, “The good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading.” Wood has made a strong case for the merits of antinarrative, and he’s made a strong case for storytelling. Lately, he seems to favor the latter.

Like his hero W. G. Sebald, Wood is death-haunted. “Life is bounded by death,” he says in "Why?" (included in The Nearest Thing to Life). “Life is death-in-waiting.” “Toward becoming these old things, these old headstones in mud, we are all traveling,” he says in “Austerlitz” (The Fun Stuff). In “The Art of Witness,” he writes,

Repeatedly, Levi tolls his bell of departure: these vivid human beings existed, and then they were gone. But, above all, they existed. Sandro, in “The Periodic Table” (“nothing of him remained”); Alberto, most beloved among the camp inmates, who died on the midwinter death march from Auschwitz (“Alberto did not return, and of him no trace remains”); Elias Lindzin, the “dwarf” (“Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything”); Mordo Nahum, “the Greek,” who helped Levi survive part of the long journey back to Italy (“We parted after a friendly conversation; and after that, since the whirlwind that had convulsed that old Europe, dragging it into a wild contra dance of separations and meetings, had come to rest, I never saw my Greek master again, or heard news of him”). And the “drowned,” those who went under—“leaving no trace in anyone’s memory.” Levi rings the bell even for himself, who in some way disappeared into his tattooed number: “At a distance of thirty years, I find it difficult to reconstruct what sort of human specimen, in November of 1944, corresponded to my name, or, rather, my number: 174517.

But, above all, they existed – I relish that elegiac note. Perhaps Wood’s profoundest contribution to literary theory is his idea that “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself” (“Serious Noticing,” included in The Nearest Thing to Life). As Wood makes clear, Levi is one of literature’s great rescuers.

Postscript: This week’s issue contains three terrific Talk stories: Andrew Marantz’s "Paint Job" (“He uses Rust-Oleum paint, mostly five colors – black, white, red, blue, green – that are available at Bruno’s Hardware Center, on Court Street”); Emma Allen’s "Big Silky" (“She stepped outside to call Bruce Cost, of artisanal-ginger-ale fame, for black-chicken advice”); Jonathan Blitzer’s "Drive-By" [“He taught Chris Penn how to drive stick in ‘The Funeral’ (’37 LaSalle), and he drove Chloë Sevigny around in ‘The Last Days of Disco’ (’75 Checker Cab)”].

July 6 & 13, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Lawrence Wright’s "Five Hostages" is written in the third person – my least favorite perspective. Nevertheless, the piece totally absorbed me. It’s about five Americans kidnapped in Syria and their families’ fight to save them. It’s beautifully structured. But it has a political aspect I’m not sure I agree with. It’s rough on Obama for the “ineffectiveness” of his policy on terrorist kidnappings. But it wasn’t Obama who put these five people in harm’s way. They voluntarily assumed the grave risk of being kidnapped and murdered when they crossed into Syria. My take-away from this powerful piece is two-fold: (1) ISIS is one of the most barbaric terrorist groups the world has ever seen; (2) outsiders who venture into Syria should do so without illusion; they’re risking their lives.

2. Laura Miller, in her enjoyable "The System," a review of Don Winslow’s novel The Cartel, says of Winslow’s previous novel The Power of the Dog, “But none of it is a laughing matter.” Then, in the next line, she says, “Scratch that. Some of The Power of the Dog is funny.” Her sudden reversal made me smile. It’s an example of a critic winging it. Pauline Kael would approve.

3. And now here’s a collage of my favorite lines in this week’s issue:

The fibrousness of the paper and the uniqueness of each painstaking ridge turn the impassive gray or black surfaces of Park’s canvases into unexpected terrain (“Goings On About Town: Art: Park Seo-bo”) | The film’s good cheer seems less infectious than enforced; the cinematic embrace is stifling, and the good vibes feel overdone, like a present-tense trip of instant nostalgia (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: A Poem Is a Naked Person”) | Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: The Wrong Man”) | Once he’d been spotted, a glass of marmalade-colored Languedoc in hand, the music writers made quick work of a plate of prosciutto and calculated an intricate split of their bill (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: The Four Horsemen”) | By the time a late-night June rainstorm appears, and the subway’s lesser, more beige lines are being contemplated, Murphy has migrated from a table to the bar, where the bartender is pouring a quietly effervescent rosé out of a not so quiet magnum (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: The Four Horsemen”) | The distillery is in a brick building with the warm smell of a country club’s oak locker room (Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: Kings County Distillery”) | His breakfast companion, who had been enjoying the gentle intensity of his company—the Concorde doesn’t take an article in British English, he said; he was certain that left-handers were overrepresented in the pilot population; he loves the B and C gates of Heathrow’s Terminal 5; flying back from Vancouver in winter, you can see the Northern Lights almost every night; when a B.A. pilot shows up for work, his iPad must be charged to at least seventy-five per cent—was suddenly put in mind of an ancient activity of her own, going on dates in restaurants that had televisions (Lauren Collins, “Bird’s-Eye View”) | Out on the runway, a queue was forming: a Middle East Airlines A320, bound for Beirut; a KLM 737, heading back to Amsterdam; the state aircraft of the United Arab Emirates, a private 747, half snow goose, half tapir, its snout sniffing the sky (Lauren Collins, “Bird’s-Eye View”) | Schick’s interpretation, which he has been honing for forty years, is a sinuous audiovisual ballet in which hard-hitting, rat-a-tat drum solos intermingle with subtle, whispery sounds, as of a tapped gong or a brushed gourd (Alex Ross, “Outsiders”) | In the course of four movements, this evanescent material acquired mass: droplets of melody and harmony precipitated from the air (Alex Ross, “Outsiders”)

June 29, 2015 Issue

Italy is a wonderful place to bike. I was there a couple of weeks ago, cycling the Parco del Mincio and Parco del Ticino. I took the train to various cities (Trenitalia is an amazing system). One morning, at a packed café called Cuppi (est. 1934), on Via Matteotti, in Bologna, I watched the guy running the cappuccino-maker; he was like a virtuoso pianist, his hands flying over the machine, working the various knobs and handles. He produced the best cappuccino I’ve ever tasted. On another day, at a canteen overlooking the Mincio River, I drank a glass of iced, freshly squeezed pomegranate juice that was so damned good, I’ll never forget it. As I sat there savoring it, contemplating the beautiful Mincio, I suddenly realized I’d become an italophile. And so, when Jane Kramer’s "The Demolition Man," a profile of Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, appeared in this week’s issue, I devoured it. What a Tuscan feast of political detail! Renzi’s clothes (his work uniform consists of “jeans and a rumpled white shirt, open at the neck”), how he came to power (he struck a deal with Silvio Berlusconi; “In the matter of craftiness he was miles ahead of the man whom no politician in Italy had ever managed to outfox before”); his previous occupation (he was an “immensely popular” mayor of Florence); how he selected his cabinet (“he opted for youth and women – the obvious appealing things”); his conversation (“He has what could be called a peripatetic mind and, like any good performer, he uses it to keep you on the edge of your seat, not asking inconvenient questions, and also, perhaps, to impress himself when he is about to confront an obstacle in his path”); his enemies (Beppe Grillo, leader of the Five Star Movement, on the populist left, and Matteo Salvini, leader of the new “national” Lega party, on the populist right, “both competing for the same anit-Europe, anti-immigrant votes”); on and on – Kramer includes it all in a superbly structured report that, interestingly, begins and ends with Angela Merkel. Kramer’s level of access to Renzi is impressive. She even visits him in his New York hotel suite (“ ‘They love their past, their present, but they need a vision and an explanation of their future – in the possibility of a future,’ Renzi told me that night, flopping onto a couch in the living room of his hotel suite”). My take-away from this immensely absorbing piece is that Italy is fortunate to have, in Matteo Renzi, a young, spirited, dynamic leader who is determined to make real change. It will be interesting to see how he fares. I hope he doesn’t get worn down the way another young, spirited, dynamic leader, Barack Obama, has been worn down by relentless conservative stonewalling.

Postscript: Another attractive aspect of Kramer’s piece is Riccardo Vecchio's gorgeous illustration - a delicately hued portrait of Renzi with a jumble of Florentine rooftops, including the Duomo and Giotto's Campanile, in the background. Ravishing! 

Postscript #2: All four Talk stories in this week’s issue are beauties: Ian Frazier’s "Secuity"; Emma Allen’s "Landlord"; Dana Goodyear’s "Life With Father"; and Alec Wilkinson’s "Hands." Of the four, my favorite is Goodyear’s layered "Life With Father," about (1) the time in 1996 when Maya and China Forbes picked up their dad, Cameron, at McLean, the psychiatric hospital outside Boston, and took him to lunch; (2) Maya Forbes’s movie Infinitely Polar Bear (“The title comes from a phrase Cam once used to describe his condition on a McLean intake form”), which tells the story “of how Cam, recently recovered from a breakdown, took over the care of Maya and China, aged ten and eight, while Peggy [Maya and China’s mother], in order to support them, went to New York to get an M.B.A. and eventually, a job at the brokerage firm E. F. Hutton”; (3) China’s home life with her husband Wally (“Wally, who was wearing shorts and black socks with Birkenstocks, did a crossword puzzle”) and her three children, Clementine, Imogene, and Hackley. Goodyear has worked her text close to the compression of poetry.

June 1, 2015 Issue

Pleasures abound in this week’s issue – Richard Brody on Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (“Fuller’s pugnacious direction and his gutter-up view of city life romanticize both the criminal code of honor and the jangling paranoia of global plots; his hard-edged long takes depict underworld cruelty with reportorial wonder as well as moralistic dread”), Emma Allen on a cocktail called What the Doctor Ordered (“The rum made it taste like a mind-bending root beer”), Lizzie Widdicombe on Uber for helicopters (“The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, ‘Wow! I love this part!’ The pilot yelled, ‘Touchdown!’ ”), Nick Paumgarten on the end of Vin Scelsa’s “Idiots Delight” (“After ‘Goodnight Ladies,’ Scelsa signed off: ‘Thanks for your ears. I love you all’ ”) – but for me its most piquant delight is Dan Chiasson’s review of John Ashbery’s Breezeway (“These poems conjure a massive mental errata slip made up of what they almost say and nearly mean”). Chiasson is on a roll: four reviews this year, so far – all brilliant!

It would be perverse to say that I enjoyed Michael Specter’s "Extreme City," an account of a recent visit he made to Luanda. The inequality it describes is appalling. But I do relish it as writing. I like going (vicariously) where Specter goes. He’s always out and about, nosing around, seeing what’s to be seen. He says, “One afternoon, I visited Tako Koning, a Canadian petroleum geologist, who lives on the seventh floor of an older building in the center of Luanda,” and I’m right there with him. He says, “One day, I had lunch at Oon.dah, on the first floor of the Escom Center,” and I’m happy to tag along. Specter’s pieces afford the experience of first-person access. The payoff is readerly bliss.

The Bliss of Precision

Rereading John Updike’s wonderful review-essay "Journeyers" (The New Yorker, March 10, 1980; included in his great 1983 collection Hugging the Shore) the other day, I was struck by his observation that there is “a certain bliss of precision in a sentence like ‘Their tents are frog-shaped, constructed of hides and woven mats of goat and camel hair on a stick frame, the large mouth facing east.’ ” I agree. “Bliss of precision” exactly captures the literary quality I most crave. The New Yorker brims with it. Here are ten recent examples:

1. “The octopus cocktail is an agreeably blunt counterpoint, a lilac-colored soup with the consistency of drinkable yogurt, in which purple and blue corn and charred avocado bob alongside tentacled slices on the right side of chewy” (Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Cosme," February 9, 2015).

2. But, if you’ve paid any attention to the hype, the entire endeavor might be a very delicious excuse for dessert: a corn-husk meringue with its own hashtag, possessed of an intensely milky taste from the mousse of mascarpone, cream, and corn purée that spills out like lava from its core (Amelia Lester, "Tabels For Two: Cosme," February 9, 2015).

3. “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” (Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Winnie's," February 9, 2015).

4. “Instead, the music of Gallery 621 is largely one of color: the red of Paul’s tunic, in the Ribera, emerges from a dark background like a tone from silence” (Alex Ross, "Eyes and Ears," February 9, 2015).

5. “Inside the shed, I tried on a watch, and its stainless-steel chain bracelet, guided by magnets, fell into place with the click of someone stacking nickels” (Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015).

6. “The table previously covered with a flat cloth was now uncovered: it was a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap, like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane” (Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015).

7. “The most astounding is ‘Robe with Mythic Bird’ (1700-40), from an unknown tribe of the Eastern Plains: a tanned buffalo hide pigmented with a spiky abstraction, probably of a thunderbird, in red and black, which rivals the most exciting modern art” (Peter Schjeldahl, "Moving Pictures," March 16, 2015).

8. “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” (Peter Schjeldahl, "Moving Pictures," March 16, 2015).

9. “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” (Rebecca Mead, "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015).

10. “Driving outside Oklahoma City one evening last November, I ended up stopped in traffic next to an electronic billboard that displayed, in rotation, an advertisement for one per cent cash back at the Thunderbird Casino, an advertisement for a Cash N Gold pawnshop, a three-day weather forecast, and an announcement of a 3.0 earthquake, in Noble County” (Rivka Galchen, "Weather Underground," April 13, 2015)

Credit: The above artwork is by Andrea Kalfas; it appears in the February 9, 2015 New Yorker as an illustration for Emma Allen’s “Bar Tab: Winnie’s.”

February 9, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. I like a good argument. Kelefa Sanneh, in his absorbing "Don't Be Like That," takes issue with a new anthology called The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson (with Ethan Fosse), which faults black culture for, among other things, “suboptimal cultural traits,” such as devaluation of traditional coparenting and eschewal of mainstream styles of childrearing. Sanneh sees this as a form of “victim-blaming.” The real culprit, he says, is racism. He says of Patterson’s approach, “He contends that black culture can and must change while conceding, less loudly, that ‘thoroughly racist’ whites are likely to remain stubbornly the same.” In the aftermath of Ferguson, Sanneh’s conclusion – “If we want to learn more about black culture, we should study it. But, if we seek to answer the question of racial inequality in America, black culture won’t tell us what we want to know” – seems irrefutable.

2. Last year, Amelia Lester, in her review of Wallflower, wrote one of my favorite lines: “If you feel like eating a carrot-and-black-trumpet-mushroom salad with your second tequila cocktail, you’re in luck, and perhaps it’s the right call—the windows frame an obnoxiously bright Equinox gym, where Lululemoners reading Us Weekly on the elliptical pedal through the night in silent rebuke” ("Bar Tab: Wallflower," The New Yorker, March 31, 2014). This week, she scores another wonderful description, a representation of a Cosme dessert: “a corn-husk meringue with its own hashtag, possessed of an intensely milky taste from the mousse of mascarpone, cream, and corn purée that spills out like lava from its core.” "Tables For Two: Cosme is ravishing; every line surprises and delights.

3. Not to be outdone, Emma Allen, in her terrific "Bar Tab: Winnie's," constructs this verbal wunderkammern: “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.” Her review features a great opening line, too: “The narrative arcs of nights spent drinking are sometimes self-imposed (pub crawl begins here, ends there), sometimes forced upon us (I woke up in Ronkonkoma!).”

4. Alex Ross’s "Eyes and Ears" describes a marvelous effect – the way seventeenth-century music played amid Caravaggios brings the paintings alive. He writes,

Throughout the evening, I couldn’t escape the uncanny feeling that the people in the paintings were listening in, as in some spooky Victorian tale of portraits come to life. In the presence of the music, their eyes possibly glowed a little brighter, their flesh a little warmer. In Gallery 621, the effect was all but electric: chaste religious figures seemed on the verge of jumping out of the chiaroscuro shadows and joining the women of TENET, who, in turn, looked ready to step through the frames into the other world. Then, with the applause, the spell was broken: the living walked away, and the pictures fell silent for the night.

Ross’s piece is accompanied by a luminous, delicately hued Riccardo Vecchio illustration, the newyorker.com version of which beautifully shimmers on my computer screen.

Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

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.