August 7, 2023 Issue

This week’s issue launches the new “Goings On” section. The magazine calls it “evolution.” I’m not sure about that. It looks more like impoverishment. The loss is substantial. The number of pages is reduced from six to two. The lead photo is shrunk from full-page to quarter-page. “Tables For Two” is cut from three columns to two. Art writers Andrea K. Scott and Johanna Fateman have disappeared. Vince Aletti on photography is gone. So is Steve Futtterman’s weekly jazz note. I looked forward to reading these writers each week. The magazine’s pleasure quotient is considerably reduced. 

I’ve decided it’s time for me to evolve, too. Previously I tried to comment on some aspect of each weekly issue. No more. From now on I’ll blog about The New Yorker only when there’s a piece in it that really grabs me. 

Mid-Year Top Ten (2023)

Photo by Maxim Dondyuk, from Luke Mogelson's "Underworld"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Luke Mogelson, “Underworld,” May 29, 2023 (“On the Zero Line, there was only enough water for drinking, not for washing, and the men’s cracked fingernails and thickly calloused palms were so encrusted with dirt that it seemed to have become part of them”);

2. Luke Mogelson, “Trapped in the Trenches,” January 2 & 9, 2023 ("In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon"); 

3. Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

4. Burkhard Bilger, “Crossover Artist,” April 3, 2023 (“A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure”);

5. Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

6. Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

7. Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“The most memorable looks were the most demotic: shrunken puffers, blasted-out jeans, a leather gown spliced from old handbags, a series of hooded sweatshirts paired with tap pants so paltry that you could almost feel the goosebumps on the models’ scraggy legs”).

8. Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Perhaps she is thinking of neither love nor work, and is instead reflecting on how the slow, perpetual flow of milk serves as an endless measure of time—just as it appears to us now, as we regard her in her reverie”);

9. Merve Emrie, “Marvellous Things,” March 6, 2023 (“But the sheer loveliness and good humor of the vignettes transform each sliver of Mr. Palomar’s life into an expansive state of being. The rhythm of the waves, a flock of starlings, the blue veins in cheese, sunlight rippling on the sea—they hold a beauty and a mystery that Mr. Palomar contemplates with such intensity that he turns them into little universes of meaning unto themselves”);

10. Helen Shaw, “Out of Focus,” February 27, 2023 (“His pieces gleam with a baked Southern California palette: jacaranda light, golf-course-green carpeting, and the parents’ burnished, teak-dark tans”). 

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen's "About Time" (April 10, 2023)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Nick Paumgarten, “Ein Berliner,” June 12, 2023 ("The party that night began at ten, which meant more like midnight. Oontz, oontz, oontz, oontz. The projections of Marquardt’s portraits flashed on the walls, apparently to the beat but in random sequences. The revellers seemed unsure whether to watch or to dance. In the hall, Mosbeck, the gallerist, pulled on cotton gloves and rehung one of the eighties prints, which had been knocked off the wall by the heavy thud of the kick drum. Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene and said, “I am happy.” Then he went with Paetke to hang out by the entrance, as though he were working his own party. 'Ja, I am at the door,' he said. 'Maybe this is the normal situation' ”).

Best Illustration

Keith Negley's illustration for Idrees Kahloon's "Border Control" (June 12, 2023)

Best "Goings On About Town" Note

Johanna Fateman, “At the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler,” April 3, 2023 ("The show proves that Frankenthaler, who died in 2011, at the age of eighty-three, was still at the height of her powers in her sixties—a mercurial colorist moving between pours and the palette knife, translucent washes and clotted impasto. The oceanic drama of the eight-foot-wide “Poseidon,” from 1990, is achieved with layered pools of thinned-out acrylic color in aqua and fog. A flat brush loaded with orange has been dragged across the surface, leaving a fiery trail").

Best Photo

Ross Landenberger's photo for Charles Bethea's "Special Sauce" (April 17, 2023)

Top Five newyorker.com Posts

1. Karl Ove Knausgaard's “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless," April 26, 2023 ("All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house");

2. Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 ("I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished");

3. Jackson Arn, “The World-Changing Trees of Vincent Van Gogh,” June 5, 2023 ("It’s hard to study one of van Gogh’s motifs without misrepresenting him. He wasn’t really obsessed with cypresses or irises or sunflowers; he was obsessed with the world and burned through it, one object at a time. He kept painting and drawing. The world kept fluttering away");

4. Rivka Galchen, “What Is a Weed?,” May 26, 2023 ("The weed tasted like carrot? Like okra? Like broccoli, almost precisely");

5. Luke Mogelson, “Revisiting Portland’s ‘Summer of Rage,’ ” June 20, 2023 ("The diluted tones, high contrasts, and red-pupilled figures in “Protest City” combine to create a throwback aesthetic that also feels familiar. Dundon was initiated into photography as a high schooler, in the nineteen-nineties, by taking pictures of his friends skateboarding. Many people who grew up around that time will notice, in his work, the influence of skate magazines like Thrasher or Big Brother. This shows in Dundon’s raw, unflattering style of composition but also in his specific preoccupations: wanton vandalism, cheap tattoos, explicit graffiti—abrasions and abandon. This is not just the world of far-left activism. It is the world of wild, angry—and mostly white—urban and suburban youth").

Best Sentence

“No. 12 Special,” from 1916, is like a glossary of charcoal’s capabilities: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. – Jackson Arn, “Art: ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time’ ” (May 15, 2023)

Best Paragraph

It was pitch-black in the cellar. Even when three of us sat with our knees drawn up, the fourth person could fit only by standing next to the ladder. In the claustrophobic space, I could feel Herring debating what to do. He was lighting a cigarette when a loud whooshing noise, like a cascade of water, roared toward us. “Down!” Herring barked, though there was nowhere farther down to go. I bowed my head and pressed my palms into the dirt floor, which quaked as three successive impacts left a ringing in my ears. – Luke Mogelson, “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023)

Best Detail

You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. – Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles” (March 27, 2023)

Best Description

Gin tends not to agree with me, and yet I couldn’t help but steal sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023)

Best Question

How much is too much? Try “Babylon,” the latest film from Damien Chazelle. Within five minutes, we realize that excess is in the air—and, indeed, all over the camera lens, in the form of elephant dung. The ensuing half hour, an excursion into the orgiastic, brings us a woman peeing onto the bloated belly of a partygoer, alpine hills of cocaine, and a dwarf using a giant phallus as a pogo stick. Still to come: a movie producer walking around in the desert, at night, with his head stuck in a toilet seat, and, by way of a bonne bouche, toward the end of the feast, a guy who consumes live rats. Happy now? – Anthony Lane, “Top of the Heap” (January 2 & 9, 2023)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. The courthouse has a way of visiting indignities on all but the robed. – Ben McGrath, “Upstairs, Downstairs” (April 17, 2023)

2. They’ll be red-fleshed and globe-shaped and fist-size and grubby and hairy, and I usually roast them. – Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt” (March 20, 2023) 

3. Action and description were everything. – Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom” (June 14, 2023)

4. She knows just how to get her characters through the doorway and into a scene—all that they have to do, in order to sign their own moral death warrants, is start talking.  – James Wood, “Desperately Normal” (February 13 & 20, 2023) 

5. Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. – Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat” (February 27, 2023)

6. Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023)

7. O’Keeffe is nobody’s idea of a comedian, but the Strand trio could almost be a prank: the great black-and-white photographer gets thrown into a smeary rainbow dunk tank. – Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer” (May 8, 2023)

April 3, 2023 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his “Art: Tina Barney,” says of Barney, “Only when she realized she could get closer to the truth by staging it—by subtly combining fact and fiction—did her pictures really come together.” I’m not sure how staging pictures gets closer to the truth. For me, truth is based on fact, not fiction. Peter Schjeldahl said of Thomas Struth’s staged Pergamon photos, “There is a subtle but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for the camera”: "Reality Clicks" (May 27, 2002). I agree. 

2. Johanna Fateman’s description of Helen Frankenthaler - “a mercurial colorist moving between pours and the palette knife, translucent washes and clotted impasto” -  strikes me as perfect: see “At the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler.” 

3. Richard Brody notes the release of a new Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne film – Tori and Lokita. The Dardennes are among my favourite directors. Their The Kid with a Bike (2011) is a masterpiece. Brody says of their new film, it “has the ardour and the specificity of investigative journalism.” That appeals to me mightily. I think I’ll check it out.  

4. It’s great to see Burkhard Bilger back in the magazine. His last New Yorker piece, the excellent “Building the Impossible," appeared November 30, 2020. His new piece, “Crossover Artist,” begins and ends with an elephant orchestra (“But no one could hear what the elephants were humming to themselves, in the deep subsonic of their own frequency, as the drums clattered and gongs crashed”). It's a profile of neuroscientist and musician David Sulzer, brimming with interesting musicological facts and observations. Example: 

A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

I enjoyed “Crossover Artist” immensely.    

Robert Kushner's Gorgeous Paintings

Robert Kushner, For Betty (2022)

Johanna Fateman’s recent "Art: Robert Kushner" (The New Yorker, March 13, 2023) spurred me to visit dcmooregallery.com and view Kushner’s exhibition “Then & Now.” Wow! Kushner’s paintings are gorgeous! Fateman’s description of his recent works – “lusciously digressive elaborations and tributes to Matisse’s tabletop vistas” – is perfect. If I had the dough, I’d buy at least six. I think my favourite is For Betty (see above). Thank you to Fateman for leading me to this wonderful artist. 

Best of 2022: GOAT

Photo by Kenyon Anderson, from Jiayang Fan's "Tables For Two: Gugu Room"

Here are my favourite “Goings On About Town” notes of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: All’ Antico Vinaio,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged from the basement at regular intervals, shiny with olive oil and sparkling with coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from a dense landscape of air bubbles as the loaves were sliced horizontally, ends slivered off and passed to patiently waiting customers”); 

2. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett,” February 28, 2022 (“The quasi-functional sculptures—tables, chairs, cabinets, a bed—are anthropomorphized domestic objects, in which found elements combine with others that were hand-carved or upholstered by the artist. Millett’s not quite figures are at once goofy and strange. Fluted or cabriole legs alternate with puppet-like limbs; a slatted chair back, painted bright red, is inset with a pair of blue eyes; a china cabinet is topped by a smooth wooden head. In ‘Blue-Eyed Marble Box,’ from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples”); 

3. Richard Brody, “Movies: Show People,” August 8, 2022 (“Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound”);

4. Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Rosella,” January 31, 2022 (“For dessert, you can have that American favorite, carrot cake, here on the verge of savory, fortified with sunchoke miso and garnished with candied orange peel and marigold flowers. The cake is scooped into a bowl, its sides smeared with a generous whoosh of scrumptious white frosting. The star ingredient? The cult favorite Ben’s cream cheese, from Rockland County, just up the road”);

5. Andrea K. Scott, “At the Galleries: 'Court, Epic, Spirit,' ” February 28, 2022 (“Ask for a magnifying glass at the front desk, the better to lose yourself in the details: a pearl-and-gold piercing in an elephant’s ear at the coronation of Rama; a peacock in a tree overlooking a gang of drug-addled sadhus; the gray-flecked beard of 'A Man of Commanding Presence.' There are decorative flourishes, too, including a tall cotton panel intricately printed with flora and fauna in crimson and green, used to line what must have been a magnificent tent, pitched for royalty on the Coromandel Coast in the mid-seventeenth century—glampers, take note”);

6. Rachel Syme, “On Television: ‘The Resort,’ ” August 1, 2022 [“ ‘The Resort,’ a splashy new streaming offering from Peacock and the creator Andy Siara (‘Palm Springs’), feels like a slushy beach drink made in a blender using parts of other recent shows: take a dash of ‘White Lotus’ (for the tropical hotel setting), add a shake of ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ (for the air of campy, unhinged mystery among the palm trees), and top it off with the likes of ‘The Flight Attendant’ or ‘The Afterparty’ (for their good old-fashioned, soapy murder mysteries). But just because this show is a piña colada of frothy ideas doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying. The charm-oozing stars Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper play a couple on vacation in Mexico who become unwittingly embroiled in solving a crime that took place there years before. The cast is chock-full of shimmery character actors—Skyler Gisondo, Debby Ryan, Nick Offerman, Ben Sinclair, Becky Ann Baker, Dylan Baker—and the twists and turns are tense enough to keep you glued to the screen on a sweltering day. Think ‘Romancing the Stone’ meets a bottle of S.P.F. 50—this is made for high-summer bingeing”];

7. Vince Aletti, “In the Museums: ‘William Klein: YES,’ ” August 29, 2022 (“Klein’s best pictures are cinematic character studies, with every face and every figure singular, animated, and vividly present for his camera—a gaggle of kids with baseball cards and bubble blowers, a sidewalk full of distracted businessmen, a dapper young man sprinting through Harlem”);

8. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Gugu Room,” September 12, 2022 (“The most persuasive dishes unapologetically layer richness upon richness.” |”Around the room, skewers of meat were being delivered at a fast pace, some rapturously waved into the frames of gleeful selfies”);

9. Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: The Black Dog: ‘Brutal Minimalism,’ ” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“The grainy, gray-toned percussion, redolent of cracked concrete walls, and the low-mixed chimes, like faraway train signals, add to the verisimilitude. Even when the beats come forward, they amplify the background details”);

10. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Queens Lanka,” August 1, 2022 (“A plate of “rice and curry,” one recent afternoon, included four varieties of the latter—made with yellow dal, or split peas; batons of beetroot, almost chocolate-like in their melty richness; jackfruit; and pineapple—in addition to a tantalizing tangle of sticky-sweet deep-fried sprats, and a version of a traditional relish called gotu kola sambol, with finely chopped kale, red onion, and tomato.” | “A lush, enormous banana leaf was folded carefully around a tightly packed pie chart of delights, over rice: slippery, soft curried cashews; dark, crispy snips of zippy batu moju, or fried-eggplant pickle; seeni sambol, a relish of supple tamarind-and-chili-glazed shallots; a fluffy curried-mackerel-and-potato fritter”).

December 5, 2022 Issue

I see in this week’s issue there’s a show of Betty Woodman ceramic sculptures at the David Kordansky Gallery in Manhattan: see Johanna Fateman, “Art: Betty Woodman.” Woodman is one of my favorite artists. Her vases are among the glories of modern art. I first read about her in a piece by Peter Schjeldahl, called “Decoration Myths” (The New Yorker, May 15, 2006), a review of Woodman’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. He said of her, “At the age of seventy-six, she is beyond original, all the way to sui generis.” He described the colour of one of her works, a vase titled “Portugal,” as "an indigo like an organ chord, at once rumbling and clarion. It’s only décor, but what décor!” The Kordansky exhibition features an abundance of Woodman’s works. You can see many of them at davidkordanskygallery.com.

Betty Woodman, Seashore (1998)

Who Should Succeed Schjeldahl?

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick)

Peter Schjeldahl is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, The New Yorker needs to have an art critic. Who are some of the possibilities? I see Hilton Als had an “Art World” piece in last week’s issue. But I'm not sure he’s the right guy for the job. He's too caught up in identity politics. I’d like to see someone in the position whose values are governed more by pleasure than anything else. And I’d like to see someone who writes with an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal style. Here are some candidates I’d consider if I were picking the magazine’s new art critic: 

1. David Salle 

2. Wayne Koestenbaum

3. Gini Alhadeff

4. Susan Tallman

5. Johanna Fateman

The best living art writer is T. J. Clark. But his thinking might be a shade too metaphysical for the New Yorker job. The perfect choice is Salle: see his brilliant series of art pieces for The New York Review of Books. 

Mid-Year Top Ten 2022

Photo by James Nachtwey, from Luke Mogelson's "The Wound-Dressers"

It’s time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Top Ten Reporting Pieces

1. Luke Mogelson, “The Wound-Dressers,” May 9, 2022 (“A Ukrainian soldier approached me to say that he’d found another victim. I followed him into the basement of a yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood had leaked from his mouth and nose. The soldier crouched and felt under his skull. ‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ he said”).

2. Ed Caesar, “Sanctuary,” June 27, 2022 (“Inna, Sasha, and Oliviia loaded their bags onto the bus. Inna knew that it might be the last time that she and the girls saw Maksym, but there was no emotional soliloquy from either husband or wife. ‘It wasn’t a movie scene,’ Inna told me. ‘I was concentrated on what is coming—on my tasks. But we both knew what was going on’ ”).

3. Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege,” March 21, 2022 (“War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. I told them to fuck off,’ he said”).

4. Joshua Yaffa, “The Captive City,” May 23, 2021 (“An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. ‘This was happening one metre away,’ Fedorov said. ‘What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?’ ”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28, 2022 (“Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air”).

6. Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In,” May 30, 2022 (“I was two minutes late for my treatment. ‘Oh là,’ the therapist clucked, looking at her watch. She instructed me to undress—the spa provided a disposable G-string—and to sit on a table covered with a plastic sheet. Without further discussion, she began daubing my back at strategic points with steaming, tawny mud. When she had finished, she eased me into a reclining position and folded the sheet around me, forming a sort of Hot Pocket in which the mud was the cheese and I was the ham”).

7. William Finnegan, “Big Breaks,” May 30, 2022 (“The only time the waves seem to have any heft at all is when the rider gets deeply barrelled. Suddenly, we’re in a blue room with walls of rushing water, and we’re being pursued by a horizontal waterfall and a fire hose of mist”).

8. John Seabrook, “Green Giants,” January 31, 2022 (“The pits were a mechanical Pamplona of nitromethane bulls, their belching tailpipes and fiery exhaust wrinkling the air, and their pit crews almost feral with the oddly fruity aroma of the fuel and the acrid stench of the smoking, treadless tires that the guys called slicks”).

9. Rebecca Mead, “Norwegian Wood,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“I put my bag down on a blond-wood coffee table by the window, and settled into a low swivel chair, its comfortable backrest fashioned from bent-wood strips. In December, Brumunddal enjoys less than six hours of daylight; had I sat there long enough, I could have watched the sun rise and set with only the barest swivel to adjust my line of sight. The room was quiet and, despite the lowering skies, it was light. With its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a narrow blond-wood desk; a double bed made up with white linens and a crimson blanket—it had the virtuous feel of a spa”).

10. Joshua Yaffa, “The Great Thaw,” January 17, 2022 (“Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. ‘Look, its footpad is very well traced,’ Fedorov said. You can see its toenails’ ”).

Best Personal History Piece

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three,” February 7, 2022 (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”).

Best Cover

Faith Ringgold, “Jazz Stories: Somebody Stole My Broken Heart” (March 28, 2022)

Best Critical Piece

Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”).

Best “Talk of the Town” Story

Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 (“Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading ‘Alone Ave.’; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops”).

Best Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, "Postcard from Kyiv” (January 31, 2022).

Best “Goings On About Town” Review

Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: All’Antico Vinaio,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged from the basement at regular intervals, shiny with olive oil and sparkling with coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from a dense landscape of air bubbles as the loaves were sliced horizontally, ends slivered off and passed to patiently waiting customers”).  

Best newyorker.com Post

Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege of Chernihiv,” April 15, 2022 (“It was a gray, drizzling morning when I pulled up to the site of the attack. What was once the pharmacy was now a burnt-out shell of red brick. One building had taken a direct hit, leaving an entire wall ripped open, with apartments inside exposed like a doll house”).  

Best Short Story

Kevin Barry, “The Pub With No Beer,” April 11, 2022 (“ ‘It could be one of forty-two things that’s wrong with me,’ Frank Waught half whispered to a pint of Smithwick’s”).

Best Photo

Photo by Dina Litovsky, for Helen Rosner's " 'We Watch the News and We're Crying,' " newyorker.com, March 8, 2020.

Best Sentence

One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of it being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon. – Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup”

Best Paragraph

I braced myself. The water pressure was intense—almost strong enough to clean a sidewalk. I could taste the salt. The therapist was yelling instructions, but I could hardly hear them over the roar of the spray. She started with my ankles, working methodically up the line: calves, thighs, butt, triceps, shoulders. As she power-washed my back, I fixated on a single thought: Please don’t hit a mole! – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

Best Detail

In “Blue-Eyed Marble Box,” from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples. – Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett” 

Best Description

Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly. – Alex Ross, "Moonlight”

Best Question

Why did Laphroaig suggest thick-sliced bacon? – John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three”

Seven Memorable Lines

1. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said. – Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege”

2. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol. Merriment is medicinal. – Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere”

3. A barking fox kind of gags and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s enjoying it. – Ian Frazier, “Stir-Crazy”

4. Gorgeous? Oh, yeah. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out”

5. Any writer would have trouble wringing interest out of “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Titanic,” “Friends,” and Pauly Shore. – Frank Guan, “The Decade of Disquiet”

6. I filled a cup and tried it. Rotten eggs and cabbage soup—yes. But chalky, too. I felt like I had licked a blackboard. – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

7. There seem to be more kinds of foam mattresses than there are craft beers from Brooklyn, but don’t be fooled by proprietary terms like “Ambien-injected kosher crypto-foam.”  – Patricia Marx, “Tossed and Turned”

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").

Gordon Parks' "Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler"

Gordon Parks, Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler (1957)

Johanna Fateman, in her absorbing “Goings On About Town” review of the Jewish Museum’s “Modern Look” (The New Yorker, May 17, 2021), mentions Gordon Parks’ “incandescent staged portrait, commissioned in 1952 by Life magazine, envisioning the title character of Ellison’s novel Invisible Man." Unfortunately, that picture isn’t among the images available for viewing on the Museum’s website. But one that is available is Parks’ gorgeous Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler (1957). Interestingly, another version of this arresting photo illustrates the cover of Alexander Nemerov’s recent Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York. Nemerov describes the photo shoot:

When Parks came to her West End Avenue studio, Helen did not shrink from the occasion. In the images Parks took that day, she poses not only with her paintings but on one of them – Blue Territory. Her gaze variously pouty, confident, and serene, Helen gathers her legs up behind her, her blouse and skirt harmonizing with the pastel colors of her paintings…. Her simpering lips a beautiful shade of red, her dark hair a lustrous black, she looks up at the camera, Mountains and Sea over her right shoulder, her direct gaze suggesting a pride and power of ownership, a sense that she is the resident mermaid of this aqua-exotica, the maker of all the wall-to-wall shades of blue that translate so well to the magazine’s bright pages. 

Nemerov says, “Of course, these photographs were pieces of marketing.” Maybe. But just because they appeared in Life magazine, doesn’t spoil them as art. Parks’ Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler is a most original and striking picture. 

May 17, 2021 Issue

Johanna Fateman’s “Goings On About Town” note on the Jewish Museum exhibition “Modern Look,” in this week’s issue, describes a Saul Leiter photo, titled “Canopy,” as an “Ab Ex-inflected scene of a snowy New York City street almost entirely obscured by a jagged field of black.” Mm, I’d like to see that. I searched for it online at the Jewish Museum, but no luck. I found it at The Art Institute of Chicago.

It is an inspired shot. That “jagged field of black” is actually the edge of an awning that Leiter was standing under when he took the photo. 

Saul Leiter, Canopy (1958)

Leiter was one of the great flâneurs of the twentieth century. He roamed New York streets hunting for images. He often found them in the most unlikely places, like under that awning. Michael Greenberg, in his excellent “Catching Hold of the Devious City” (The New York Review of Books, July 9, 2015), says of Leiter,

Leiter photographed through windows, through rain, under awnings and canopies, and through the spaces between construction site boards to create (or more accurately, to show) a mystery of activity and simultaneous perspectives. Often his subject seems to be color and light itself. His pictures can be looked at as abstractions, but they never deviate too far from what is recognizably real. A blooming red umbrella materializes behind a yellow taxi in a storm; three Rothko-like panels of darkness frame an ordinary street scene with window-shoppers, walking pedestrians, and a passing white car. They seem to be instructing us in a new way to take in the city.

Salman Toor's Sensual Apprehension of Life

Salman Toor, Bedroom Boy (2019)

I first encountered the sensual art of Salman Toor last July as a result of reading Johanna Fateman’s excellent “Goings On About Town” note on Toor’s “How Will I Know” show at the Whitney. Fateman says of his wonderful Bedroom Boy, it “reimagines the trope of the reclining nude as a slender, hirsute young man snapping a come-hither selfie.” I like that. I found Bedroom Boy at Toor’s website. It is beguiling. 

Recently, another absorbing review of Toor’s work appeared – Sanford Schwartz’s “Young and in Love” (The New York Review of Books, April 8, 2021). Schwartz writes,

Whether he is showing blue jeans, a martini glass, or a person’s hair, Toor makes it seem as if he has brushed it in just a moment before. If he wants to show light descending from a lamp, he paints it in so many white, vertical, parallel strokes. If our sleeping nude has hairy legs, black flecks here and there will suffice. Every aspect of a given picture seems to breathe a little. 

That “If our sleeping nude has hairy legs, black flecks here and there will suffice” is delightful. 

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”).

December 7, 2020 Issue

Johanna Fateman’s absorbing “Art: Luigi Ghirri,” in this week’s “Goings On About Town” introduced me to a photographer I’d never heard of before. She says,

In his signature faded color palette, Ghirri captured signage, murals, and ads layered onto the surfaces of a city; his frontal, symmetrical compositions often flatten three-dimensional space, an effect that might be described as trompe l’oeil in reverse. In the dreamy, sunlit factory scene “Ferrari Automobili,” from 1985-88, an upright, glossy-red car hood recedes on an assembly-line track—but the view is oddly cropped by a metal archway. Some of Ghirri’s works might be easily mistaken for photomontage. 

Maybe “found photomontage” might describe Ghirri’s style? Check out the fascinating online exhibition of his work at matthewmarks.com. My favorite is this luminous night shot, “San Maritino Vallo Caudino” (1990):

Interesting Emendations: Peter Schjeldahl's "Shapes of Things"

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Vertical-Horizontal Composition (1916)

Reading Johanna Fateman’s recent “Goings On About Town” note on Sophie Taeuber-Arp, I recalled Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful “Shapes of Things” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2013), and decided to look it up. Its first paragraph is a beauty:

In “Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art,” a splendid historical survey at the Museum of Modern Art, the most beautiful work, for me, is “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916), a small, framed wool needlepoint tapestry by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. 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. The work bespeaks a subtle eye, a sober mind, and an ardent heart. If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it. You wouldn’t need any great reason. I was mildly shocked by how unshocking Taeuber-Arp’s work is, amid rooms of strenuous sensations from the epoch of abstract art’s big bang. But, in a show that raises the question “Why?” at every turn, I kept coming back to it.

I think that’s one of my favorite art-review beginnings. The instant focus on a particular work – Taeuber-Arp’s “Vertical-Horizontal Composition”; the beautiful description of that work; the equally beautiful appreciation of it (“If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it. You wouldn’t need any great reason”) – all these elements are delightful.

Schjeldahl included “Shapes of Things” in his splendid 2019 collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light under the title “Abstraction.” Comparing the book version with the New Yorker version, I notice that the description of Taeuber-Arp’s “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” is slightly different. Here’s the New Yorker version:

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.

And here’s the book version:

An irregular grid of rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the fabric’s’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture.

Notice that “arranged” and “pleasantly” have been dropped, “tapestry” has been changed to “fabric,” and the phrase “an irregular grid” has been moved to the front of the sentence. Both versions are lovely, but I think I prefer the New Yorker version slightly more. Its use of zero article (“Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid …”) enacts the abstraction it describes.

Postscript: I had difficulty finding online the “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” described by Schjeldahl. Taeuber-Arp created at least two in 1916, neither of which appear to fit his description. To illustrate my post, I chose the one that appeared to be the most “matter-of-fact, nubbly.”