Best of 2020: GOAT

Illustration by Juan Bernabeu, from Brian Seibert's "Argentine Dance"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” notes of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Brian Seibert’s “Argentine Dance,” February 10, 2020 (“Heads and torsos ride haughtily over legs that buck, twist, and beat out rhythms, often ostentatiously on the rims of boots. Drums slung over shoulders sometimes take up the beat, as do boleadoras, weights attached to ropes that are thrown to ensnare cattle on the run. These tools, swung like lassos or jump ropes or yo-yos, are visually spectacular musical instruments, whipping the air and striking the ground. Imagine a stage full of those whirring implements, some held between teeth, and you get a sense of why the roars of this troupe of twelve sexy, sweaty guys, directed by the French choreographer Gilles Brinas, are usually answered by whoops”).

 2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: HK Food Court,” February 3, 2020 (“A friendly cashier with a tattoo on her neck of a lipstick kiss carefully sealed a patterned bowl (for which I paid a five-dollar deposit) with plastic wrap to insure that it stayed hot. That proved unnecessary; it was many minutes before the dish cooled to less than scalding—which didn’t stop me from immediately plunging my flimsy spoon into the oily depths to find silky fillets of fish, tender cabbage, and chunks of cucumber, Sichuan peppercorns clinging to all, staining my rice with neon drips”).

3. Richard Brody’s “Movies: Kiss Me Deadly,” November 23, 2020 (“He crashes blindly through his case—a forbidden quest for a mysterious object of surprising importance—and leaves a trail of collateral damage, both human and cultural. Along the way, the film offers verse by Christina Rossetti, a recording of Caruso, Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, souped-up cars (with a man crushed under one), a whiff of narcotics, a primordial answering machine, bloody street fights, and nuclear catastrophe. The actors’ idiosyncratic voices, wrapped around such chrome-plated phrases as ‘the great whatsit’ and ‘va-va-voom,’ are as hauntingly musical as Aldrich’s images. In his vision of ambient terror, the apocalyptic nightmares of the Cold War ring in everyone’s heads, like an alarm that can’t be shut off”).

4. Anthony Lane’s “Movies: Lake Placid,” November 30, 2020 (“The actors seem to be having slightly too good a time, but thank goodness for the monster of the deep, who rolls up his sleeves and gets down to business; this may be no more than a squib of a B movie, and it remains about as frightening as a fish tank, but, if you have any poetry in your soul, you will surely thrill to a film that ends with a crocodile sticking its head in a helicopter”).

5. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Art: Sam Gilliam,” November 30, 2020 (“Bevelled edges flirt with object-ness, but, as always with Gilliam, paint wins”).

6. Jay Ruttenberg’s “Music: Seth Bogart,” October 5, 2020 (“The album’s lodestar is its lone cover, the feminist anthem ‘Oh Bondage! Up Yours!’ The original X-Ray Spex song scorched the earth; Bogart reads it as a downbeat postmortem in the mold of the Jesus and Mary Chain—a smutty kitsch princeling singing of sadomasochism and finding emptiness”).

7. Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Henni Alftan,” October 19, 2020 (“In ‘Hands Behind His Back,’ the artist is far more attentive to an expanse of black sweater, in which careful zigzagging lines of raised paint closely mimic the texture of knitwear, than to the peach-gold hands themselves”).

8. Michaelangelo Matos’s “Music: William Basinski: ‘Lamentations,’ ” November 23, 2020  (“His new album, ‘Lamentations,’ hangs in the air like a cobweb, reflecting new layers at every angle”).

9. Andrea K. Scott’s “At the Gallery,” March 2, 2020 ("Picture Alexander Calder weaving dream catchers at Stonehenge. The results might resemble the superbly weird sculptures of Michelle Segre. The native New Yorker’s colorful concatenations begin with yarn, metal, paint, wire, and thread, and extend to ingredients that are so sorcerous they might as well include eye of newt").

10. Rachel Syme’s “On Television: The Queen’s Gambit,” November 30, 2020 (“What makes 'The Queen’s Gambit' so satisfying comes in large measure from the character Taylor-Joy brings to the screen: a charming, elegant weirdo who delivers her lines with a cool, wintergreen snap, and never really reacts the way one might expect”).

September 28, 2020 Issue

Dan Chiasson makes an interesting observation in his “Critical Distances,” in this week’s issue. He says, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” Is this true? I recall Ian Frazier saying something similar a few years ago. In his “Carving Your Name on the Rock” [included in The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (1991), edited by William Zinsser], he writes, “What the travel writer is doing, in essence, is carving his name on the rock. He is saying, ‘I passed this way, too.’ ” Is that what I’m doing when I write this blog – asserting my existence? Blogito, ergo sum. I blog, therefore I am. No, I don’t think so. Blogging is too ephemeral and insubstantial for that.

Roger Angell, in his “This Old Man” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2014), writes, “I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.” That’s a perfect metaphor for blogging, conveying both its freedom and its ephemerality.

These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my motive for blogging. Last week, I was close to winding things up. Then along came the September 7th New Yorker containing Jay Ruttenberg’s wonderful “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette, and I felt rejuvenated. I listened to LaVette’s raw, croaky rendition of “Blackbird,” and I loved it, and wanted to say why. Right there, I think, is at least one reason I blog – to figure out why I’m drawn to a particular writing or artwork.

Bettye LaVette's Soulful "Blackbird"

Thanks to Jay Ruttenberg’s recent “Goings On About Town” note on Bettye LaVette (The New Yorker, September 7, 2020), I discovered a terrific rendition of one of my favorite songs – Lennon and McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Ruttenberg says of LaVette’s version, "She trades the song’s delicacy for gravity, flipping it into first person: 'All of my life, I have waited and waited and waited for this moment to be free.' " Beautifully put. LaVette’s “Blackbird” went straight into my personal anthology of great jazz songs.