Year In Review: One Last Caress

Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

Readers of this blog may wonder what this year-end flurry of lists – the best of this, the best of that – is all about. I sometimes wonder myself. I think it’s a way for me to prolong the pleasure of these wonderful pieces. The truth is I’m not yet ready to let them go. Yes, I’m looking forward to next year’s run. But I’m also fondly looking back at the many pieces that have afforded me such bliss. In a way, these lists are a last caress before bidding them adieu. But let’s not get too morose. I can always retrieve them from the New Yorker archive any time I want to.

And now I find my listing impulse is not yet exhausted. I want to make one more – a final inventory of 2016 New Yorker reading pleasure. Here goes.

Best Reporting Piece: Dana Goodyear’s “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016.

Best Critical Piece: James Wood’s “Scrutiny,” December 12, 2016.

Best “Talk of the Town” Piece: Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees,” March 21, 2016.

Best “Goings On About Town” Piece: Nicolas Niarchos’s “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016.

Best Illustration: Bendik Kaltenborn’s “Thundercat,” for Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Rock Bottom,” June 6 & 13, 2016.

Best Photograph: Pari Dukovic’s “Yuja Wang,” for Janet Malcolm’s “The Performance Artist,” September 5, 2016.

Best Short Story: Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Gender Studies,” August 29, 2016 (“Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps three per cent less hammered than she was down in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, ‘You’re pretty’ ”).

Best Poem: Julie Bruck’s “Blue Heron, Walking,” August 29, 2016 (“these outsized / apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole, / these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail / their risen bird like useless bits of leather”).

Best Blog Post: Lev Mendes’s “Philip Larkin’s Life Behind the Camera” (“Page-Turner,” January 29, 2016) (“Photography, like poetry, may have simply provided him a way of noticing and preserving”).

Best Cover: J. J. Sempé’s “Waves,” for the August 29, 2016, issue.

Best Issue: April 4, 2016 – The Food and Travel Issue, containing “Lauren Collins’s “Come to the Fair,” Dana Goodyear’s “Mezcal Sunrise,” Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” and Dexter Filkins’s “The End of Ice” – all excellent.

Now, a few images from my 2016 New Yorker reading experience, in no particular order, montage-style:

TEN-FOOT-TALL BALD EAGLE: “I went to see a ten-foot-tall American bald eagle, made entirely out of red-white-and-blue Duck Brand duct tape, on display in a parking lot.” [Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses,” August 8 & 15, 2016]

SURFBOARD WITH SKELETON: “Hanging just above the front door is a yellow surfboard with a skeleton clinging to it, bony limbs locked around the board for better purchase.” [Talia Levin, “Bar Tab: Otto’s Shrunken Head Tiki Bar & Lounge,” December 12, 2016]

SILVER ADIDAS WITH WINGS: “At ground level, herds of strange footwear scurried around: silver Adidas sneakers with wings sprouting from the ankles, fuzzy ones with tails and tiger stripes, high-tops with green Teddy bears for tongues.” [Lizzie Widdicombe, “Barbie Boy,” March 21, 2016]

MERMAID GOWN: “Her appliqués mushroom magically on the slope of a skirt. A mermaid gown that Charles James might have made for Gypsy Rose Lee is crossbred with a Ming vase; a cascade of ruffles evokes the waterfall in a brush-painted landscape.” [Judith Thurman, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” March 21, 2016]

SEBRIGHT CHICKENS: “The Sebrights were crazy-beautiful: proud-looking, with jutting breasts, each of their silver-white feathers edged in black, as though someone had outlined them with a Sharpie.” [Lauren Collins, “Come to the Fair,” April 4, 2016]

FLAME TREES: “Lipstick-red flame trees were in bloom, and the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of gasoline.” [Dana Goodyear, “Mezcal Sunrise,” April 4, 2016]

TEN-FOOT-LONG ICICLES: (“Pressing ourselves against the interior walls and shimmying along the narrow banks of the rushing water, we worked our way into a vaulting palace of ice, where ten-foot-long icicles hung from the ceiling like giant fishhooks. Underneath the roar, you could hear the drip of melting ice.” [Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice,” April 4, 2016]

SOVIET-ERA TRACTOR: “A Soviet-era tractor, spindly and goggle-eyed, gleamed within the shadows of a stone barn.” [James Lasdun, “Alone in the Alps,” April 11, 2016]

GOLDEN SKELETON ON BLUE HORSE: “Walk downhill along the path that leads away from the Sphinx, and you are confronted by a voluptuous golden skeleton—Death—riding a blue horse over a mirrored green sea, from which disembodied arms stretch up to cling to the world of the living.” [Ariel Levy, “Beautiful Monsters,” April 18, 2016]

CALLERY-PEAR TREE: “Elmore, the pro, then dazzled everybody by extracting a noxious blue plastic drop cloth from a sidewalk callery-pear tree in about half a second.” [Ian Frazier, “The Bag Bill,” May 2, 2016]

SKIN BOAT CONFERENCE TABLE: “At the headquarters, a three-story building near the ocean in Barrow, a whaling skin boat provides the center support for a glass-topped boardroom table.” [Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon,” September 12, 2016]

VOLKSWAGON KARMANN GHIA: “a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, its hood and trunk popped open, like an upturned deerstalker cap” [Jill Lepore, “Esmé in Neverland,” November 21, 2016]

DANGLING NECKTIE: “Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was dangling into the motel room within a few yards of the woman’s head.” [Gay Talese, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” April 11, 2016]

WHALE-LIVER MEMBRANE: “ ‘We believe if you follow these rituals, the animals will always come to us,’ Oomittuk said, as he pulled a drum made of whale-liver membrane from a carrying case.” [Tom Kizzia, "The New Harpoon," Septmber 12, 2016]

ORANGE MASON JAR WITH CREAM CLOUD: “The delicious budino arrives in a small orange Mason jar with a cloud of cream.” [Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Covina,” July 25, 2016]

PORCELAIN DOLL BEER TAPS: “The taps are porcelain doll heads, which stare like angelic witnesses to the evening’s festivities.” [Becky Cooper, “Bar Tab: Yours Sincerely,” June 6 & 13, 2016]

RICKETY GONDOLA: “Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one, while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.” [Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice,” April 4, 2016]

GOLDEN BANANA PEEL: “A lamp whose base is a golden banana peel suggests a knowing wink.” [GOAT, April 25, 2016]

SCARECROW OWL DECOYS: “Wherever you go, scarecrow owl decoys solemnly watch over you from the shelves above.” [David Kortava, "Bar Tab: The Owl Farm," November 14, 2016]

STAG BLADDERS: “He had just urged an audience of Silesian farmers to fertilize their fields with cow intestines stuffed with chamomile blossoms, and stag bladders filled with yarrow root (stag bladders being ‘almost an image of the cosmos’).” [Burkhard Bilger, “Ghost Stories,” September 12, 2016]

And on that pungent note, I’ll end. Thank you New Yorker for another magnificent year of reading pleasure.

Credit: The above illustration, by Bendik Kaltenborn, is from “Above & Beyond” (The New Yorker, January 25, 2016).

August 29, 2016 Issue

This week’s issue contains pieces by two of the magazine’s best writers – Nick Paumgarten and Dana Goodyear. Paumgarten’s “The Country Restaurant” probes the “myths” surrounding Damon Baehrel, a gourmet restaurant in Earlton, New York, that Bloomberg News calls the “most exclusive restaurant in the U.S.” The restaurant is named after its “presiding wizard and host, who serves as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper.” One of the “myths” is that the restaurant is booked through 2025. Another is that all the ingredients of the dishes it serves are derived from the “twelve acres of yard, garden, forest, and swamp” on which it’s located. The skeptical nature of the piece is expressed in its tagline: “You can’t get in. It’s booked through 2025. Or is it?”

Reading “The Country Restaurant,” I found myself cheering for Baehrel. I didn’t want him to be unmasked as a fraud. “Betrayal” journalism, in which the writer secures the subject’s trust and then proceeds to write an ugly portrait of him, gives me the creeps. Paumgarten comes close to writing such a piece, but, in the end, after noting all the “bogusness,” seems to side with Baehrel and his “sublime” cooking. He writes,

Later, back outside, as Baehrel led us [Paumgarten and a photographer] around the property and identified plants, my attention wandered, and I thought about my first visit, months before, and a particular dish, the sixth course, which had so engaged my attention that the only surreptitious photo I got of it was of a plate licked clean. It consisted of a small layered cube of wild daylily tuber and wild honey mushrooms—a phyllo of the soil. He’d sliced the tubers thin and soaked the mushrooms in fresh maple sap, then stacked them in more than a dozen fine alternating layers. He then roasted it on a slab of oak wood, dribbled it with grapeseed oil and wild-fennel-frond powder, and added a drizzle of dried milkweed pods cooked in fresh birch sap, which he’d mashed in a stone bowl with some rutabaga starch, and a second drizzle that he called burnt-corn sauce, made from liquefied kernels that he’d scraped off the cob onto a stone, dried, then thinned out with sycamore sap. Somehow I got all this down in the notebook. Beneath it, I’d written, “Sublime.”

Now, down by the road, near the gate, Baehrel guided us alongside his garden beds. In one of them, a single sprig of asparagus rose from the earth. He snapped it off and handed it to me. It tasted like—asparagus.

It’s a great ending. I confess I’ve read that last bit about the asparagus numerous times. What does it mean? It could mean that Paumgarten was relieved to find at least one thing at Damon Baehrel that was what it appeared to be. Or, it could signify that Paumgarten had decided to put aside all his doubts about Damon Baehrel’s authenticity and go with the evidence of his senses. It’s a fittingly ambiguous conclusion to an arresting, delicious piece. I devoured every word.

The authenticity of Dana Goodyear’s subject – seventy-one-year-old earth sculptor Michael Heizer – is never in doubt. What a wild, crazy, brilliant guy! Here, in Goodyear’s terrific “The Earth Mover,” is our first view of him:

At a crosswalk, Heizer—ravaged, needy, fierce, suspicious, witty, loyal, sly, and pure—leaned against a lamppost to rest, thin on thin. He wore a felt rancher hat whose band was adorned with the tips of elk antlers, and a jackknife in a holster at his waist. In the eighties, Andy Warhol photographed him wearing plaid flannel, his hands raised like claws and a vague, suggestive smile on his lips: Am I scaring you, honey? Now, with his hat casting an elliptical shadow on the pavement, he looked ready for another portrait.

That “thin on thin” is pure Goodyear; she’s a superb describer. And here, in one of the most memorable scenes of the piece, is Heizer painting in his New York City loft:

He picked up a can of paint that a studio assistant had mixed—imperial Venetian bronze blended with carbon black and dark brown to create a tone he called “volcanic”—and poured it through a net into a tin tray. Painting with a roller is physical work. With effort, he covered the roller with paint and stepped up to a canvas whose bottom-heavy angularity resembled an origami swan, banded with green tape. He climbed a ladder to the third rung from the top and started painting from the upper left in long, smooth strokes. Within a few seconds, something had gone wrong. “Arrrgh! Not good!” He got down from the ladder and inspected the painting for impurities. There was a fleck of white, which he picked out with the tip of his knife. On his knees, he went at the lower portion of the canvas, bending double with each stroke and pulling himself up again with the ladder.

“Fu-u-u-u-uck, I can’t breathe anymore,” he said after a few minutes of intense application. His tongue was hanging out, and his mouth was open like that of a parched man receiving rain. Los Lobos’s sax came through the wall. “Here it is! Yo! Ha, ha, ha, yo!” he laughed, suddenly revived. With saxophone, the painting looked better to him: twenty bucks’ worth of paint from Ace Hardware transformed into a cosmic offering. He bent over, hands on knees, panting, and looked up with a giddy smile. “That’s somethin’, huh?” he laughed. “Cuidado.”

My god, I love that passage – so many piquant details! And that drawn out “Fu-u-u-u-uck” is inspired.

Heizer’s art tool of choice isn’t a paintbrush or a paint roller – it’s a bulldozer. In “The Earth Mover” ’s final section, there’s a scene in which Goodyear rides with Heizer in a 996K Caterpillar loader, “perching on the armrest of the driver’s seat,” as he moves earth (“a specially formulated dirt that looked like turbinado sugar”) and packs it around an eighty-foot-long steel box to form a sculpture called “Compression Line.” Goodyear writes,

A wooden wall with I-beams anchored in concrete was making it hard to back up; there was nowhere to turn around. Heizer smashed his bucket deliberately into an offending beam. Rales stood under a shade tent, watching. “She’s all wired up, thinks I’m going to knock her building over,” he said, and wiggled his fingers at her—“Don’t worry”—then signalled for her to snap a picture. To me, he said, “Wanna see the loader work?” and went at the beam again. He took his hands off the controls like a bronco rider, swaying, and put his fists up—whoop, whoop. I hadn’t seen him happier. Three workers in orange vests looked away.

It’s a great scene – one of many in this excellent piece. And it’s Goodyear’s presence in the cab with Heizer that, for me, makes it extra vivid.

“The Country Restaurant” and “The Earth Mover” are wonderful pieces. I enjoyed them immensely.

Postscript: Other aspects of this week’s issue that I enjoyed: Andrea K. Scott’s description of Agnes Martin’s paintings – “whisper-pale shimmering grids” – in “Art: Fall Preview”; Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Fall Preview” (“with electric odes to evening chills and a timbre that clears storm clouds”); Richard Brody’s capsule review of Hell or High Water (“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”); the cocktails in Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: Pouring Ribbons” [“Complex cocktails arrive in ornate teapots or nestled in tiny chafing dishes: the Painted Veil (Scottish-toffee-pu-ehr-tea-infused Beefeater gin, Hong Kong Baijiu) is a frosted chalice of smoky caramel, while the Snake in the Grass (Tanqueray gin, coconut water, makrut-lime leaf) offers a compelling argument for pairing alcohol with Greek yogurt”]; Christaan Felber’s light-filled “Hao Noodles and Tea by Madame Zhu's Kitchen” photo illustration; Tad Friend’s description of Ben Foster – “his body a grenade, his face the pin” (“Out of Character”); Vinson Cunningham’s “A Darker Presence,” on the National Museum of African American History and Culture (“no one will leave without scores of wide-eyed did-you-know’s to share”); Julie Bruck’s beautiful “Blue Heron, Walking” (“these outsized / apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole, / these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail / their risen bird like useless bits of leather”); and Curtis Sittenfeld’s wickedly good short story, “Gender Studies” (“Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps three per cent less hammered than she was down in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, 'You’re pretty'").