GOAT Collage #1

From three months’ worth of The New Yorker’s vast, rich, layered, and loaded sensorium, “Goings On About Town” (GOAT), here’s an assemblage of choice (semi-surrealistic) quotations: In the mornings, mothers with children and scooters in tow line up behind subway-bound suits for dollar cups of Stumptown coffee – no lattes here, only drip (Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Jeffrey’s Grocery,” January 10, 2011); Exercising a tribal right passed down for generations, the Blackfeet artist Lyle J. Heavy Runner will paint a twenty-five-foot-tall tipi in a bleeding-buffalo-skull design at the Brooklyn Museum, as part of the exhibition “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” (“On The Horizon,” January 17, 2011); David Cossin was the star soloist in an energetic and – it must be said – splashy performance of Tan Dun’s “Water Concerto,” which employs tubs of water as percussion (Alex Ross, “Critic’s Notebook: Jersey Boy,” January 24, 2011); Instead, there’s a different kind of magic, as he lets Jackson’s vocals – drenched in echo and other effects, but still filled with the same strange baby-doll ferocity – loose on sexy, brassy covers of Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain,” Dinah Washington’s “Teach Me Tonight,” and more (Ben Greenman, “Critic’s Notebook: Kinda Fonda Wanda,” January 24, 2011); With her tall body and her long, grave, gorgeous face, she truly does look like a messenger from the beyond (Joan Acocella, “Critc’s Notebook: Vestal Virgin,” January 31, 2011); You’re likely to end up slumped in your lounge chair, gazing at the bongos (Lizzie Widdicombe, “Tables For Two: Bohemian,” February 7, 2011); Nostalgia cascades (Peter Schjeldahl, “Critic’s Notebook: Getting Clocked,” February 14 & 21, 2011); At regular intervals, a semi-transparent section of a rear wall slides open, and out come Lo’s ornate, succulent creations, sparked by her blended heritage (Mike Peed, “Tables For Two: Annisa,” February 14 & 21, 2011); It was a knotty time to make art, and Benglis literalized it in tangles of painted and glitter-flecked cotton bunting, which gave way to elegant arabesques of pleated metal and Zen-punk wonders in glass and ceramic (Andrea K. Scott, “Critic’s Notebook: Making A Splash,” February 28, 2011); If you like hand-pulled noodles, as much for their simplicity as for their artistry, you’d do best to stay south of Canal (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Hung Ry,” February 28, 2011); There is an ingenious beer ice cream, made with the clove-y Bavarian Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel, and beignets are like the Platonic ideal of childhood carnival-truck zeppole (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: Riverpark,” March 7, 2011); This is what Southern funk music looks like now: no big-time bling, only ambition and raw nerve, denim short shorts and chili dogs (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Michael Schmelling,” March 7, 2011); In the roofless remains of schools, blackboards and painted walls display fading alphabets and numbers for the edification of a stray goat (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Juan Manuel Eschavarria,” March 21, 2011); Birdcages and dog crates in storage become a meditation on the modernist grid, as does a shrinelike arrangement of vases (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Jonas Wood,” March 21, 2011); A Tuesday-evening special of fried chicken holds the promise of spice, but it requires getting to the Carroll Street F stop well before 8 P.M. (Silvia Killingsworth, “Tables For Two: Seersucker,” March 21, 2011); Skip the scoop and kick back with a carmel-nut lager from Laos – or a house cocktail, like the Phuket Fizz, made of vodka, Thai basil, and fresh pineapple, as low key a pleasure as Kin Shop itself (Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Kin Shop,” March 28, 2011).

Credit: The above artwork is by Olimpia Zagnoli; it appears in The New Yorker (January 17, 2011) as an illustration for “On The Horizon.”

April 4, 2011 Issue

There’s a terrific GOAT blurb in this week’s issue about Karen Kilimnik’s show at 303 Gallery. It’s so good – where goodness means rich, surprising, delicious, nearly abstract - I’m going to quote it in full:

Like no one except Cady Noland – but with sweetness, rather than menace – Kilimnik decisively altered installational art two decades ago, imbuing it with an emotive, storytelling force. Here an early “scatter” piece, “The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers” (1989), is reprised, along with never before seen drawings from the eighties, recent paintings, and some new painting-like photographs (a full moon tangled in branches of nocturnal trees). Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium. Everything about it is shabby and surprises. The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance.

"The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance" – how fine that is! I wonder who wrote it? My guess is Andrea K. Scott, who writes GOAT’s “Critic’s Notebook” on art. But that “Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium” is very Schjeldahlesque. The way the verb “elevate” is buried in the middle of the sentence is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style. For example, in a piece on Agnes Martin, Schjeldahl writes, “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint” (“Life Work,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2004; included in Schjeldahl’s great 2008 collection Let’s See). So … I think the “Kilimnik” blurb could’ve been written by Schjeldahl. It’s such a delectable piece that it intensified my appreciation of several other GOAT items this week, e.g., the “Joan Mitchell,” which features yet another of those gorgeous “buried verb” sentences - “Counterpoints of piled-up paint and blank surface convey that more is more and that less is heaven.” Now, that just has to be by Schjeldahl, doesn’t it? Either that or his piquant style is rubbing off on GOAT’s writers.

If you’re like me and you enjoy “catalog” sentences – exuberant compendiums of detail that bespeak love of life – you’ll like GOAT’s “Paul Ramirez Jonas” note, which describes the base of an equestrian statue that “doubles as a four-sided bulletin board.” On this board are pinned, “notes, business cards, ticket stubs, money, a dry-cleaning receipt, children’s art, a paper mobile, work-for-hire notices, and the inevitable ephemera of New York: a ‘no menus’ sign and a ‘Dan Smith will teach you guitar’ flyer.” Did I mention that I love lists like this? I devour them. John Updike, in his wonderful essay on Thoreau (in Updike’s 2007 collection Due Considerations), says, “It is the thinginess of Thoreau’s prose that excites us.” It’s the same for me regarding these great GOAT pieces: it’s the thinginess that excites me.

And the excitement continues, because there are at least two more dandy lists in this week’s GOAT: Mike Peed’s inspired “Tables For Two” description of Edi & The Wolf’s interior (“The inside holds what appears to be the hoard of an exuberant and undiscerning band of freegans: old wooden chairs affixed to the walls at curious angles, worn leather boots filled with dead flowers, a forty-foot rope salvaged from a Bed-Stuy belfry strung like crepe paper above the bar”); and a glorious passage in Richard Brody’s mini-review of Yasujiro Ozu’s wonderfully titled 1933 silent film Dragnet Girl – “His gleeful compositions put objects obsessively front and center – a drum kit, a set of dice, a row of Martini glasses, a billiard cue that pokes right at the camera – and presage the deep-focus symphonies of Orson Welles and even the vertiginous enticements of 3-D.” Great writing! I lap it up.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Steve Coll’s “The Casbah Coalition” and David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold.” They're both excellent – destined to be classics. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “A Murder Foretold” made into a movie. It’s absolutely gripping.

February 14 & 21, 2011 Issue

There’s no obvious Pick Of The Issue in this week’s New Yorker (“The Anniversary Issue”). But there are plenty of transfixing details. For example: the dining room at Annisa, where, “At regular intervals, a semi-transparent section of a rear wall slides open and out comes Lo’s ornate, succulent creations, sparked by her blended heritage” (Mike Peed, “Tables For Two”); the woman attending the George Eliot conference “who had upswept blond hair and wore teetering heels and a gash of red lipstick” (Rebecca Mead, “Middlemarch and Me”); Frank Gehry’s New World Center, where “high-definition projectors inside the hall can show slides and films on five separate ‘sails,’ gently curved surfaces floating above the stage” (Alex Ross, “Schubert on the Beach”).

How does this year’s Anniversary Issue stack up against last year’s? There’s no contest. Last year’s wins easily; it contains Susan Orlean’s great “Riding High.”

January 10, 2011 Issue

Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” in this week’s issue is interestingly structured. I didn’t really notice its form until near the article’s end when it suddenly jumps from Honduras back to Brisbane. Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but it was only then I realized that what Peed had done was show (as opposed to tell) the two approaches that the banana industry is taking to combat a devastating blight called Tropical Race Four that’s wiped out the Cavendish banana in Asia and Australia. One approach is genetic modification (inserting a gene into the banana that makes it Race Four resistant), which is being researched at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane; the other approach is traditional plant breeding (growing many different banana varieties in hope of finding a Race Four resistant one), which is being developed at a La Lima research station in Honduras. Obviously, Peed’s piece is not just an exercise in banana appreciation like the article that Berton Roueché wrote for the magazine thirty-eight years ago (“The Humblest Fruit,” The New Yorker, October 1, 1973; collected in Roueché's 1978 The River World). Nor is it solely about the market’s acceptance of genetically modified produce like, say, John Seabrook’s piece about Calgene’s Flavr Savr tomato is (see “Tremors in the Hothouse,” The New Yorker, July 19, 1993; collected in Seabrook’s 2008 Flash of Genius). Nor is it strictly about Tropical Race Four the way, say, Elizabeth Kolbert’s article “Stung” (The New Yorker, August 6, 2007) is about the phenomenon (colony-collapse disorder) that was wiping out the bee population a few years ago. Pead’s article is about all these things – banana, blight, and genetic modification. He does a good job laying it all out in a relatively tight design. His best move is the way he brings Race Four alive on the page. To do this, he leads with an arresting account of a visit he made to a banana plantation in Humpty Doo, near Darwin, Australia. The manager shows him around the plantation. Peed’s report contains this memorable passage, perhaps the most pungent of the piece:

As we walked through the fields, Tropical Race Four seemed abundant as the mosquitoes circling our heads. “There’s one,” Smith said, pointing. “That’s two. You can see that one there? He’s coming out. There’s another one.” Some plants were just turning yellow; others were a desiccated mass of raw umber. At one point, Smith unsheathed a cane knife, which is similar to a machete, but with a shorter, wider blade. An axe is not needed to cut down a banana plant, which is not a tree but, rather, the world’s largest herb. The part that is usually called the trunk is the pseudostem – a barkless staff composed only of leaves waiting to unfurl. In one stroke, Smith sliced through a diseased plant. The inside resembled a crushed-out cigar, and the fetid odor was overwhelming. Smith said, “You smell that, and you think, Ah, fuck.”

There’s a low-key, workmanlike quality to Peed’s writing that I like. There are no flashy metaphors or similes. He knows he’s got an interesting (and important) story to tell; he more or less gets out of the way and lets it tell itself. I like his use of the first-person (e.g. “That afternoon, Dale and I drove east of Brisbane to a state-owned greenhouse”), and I like the sharp, bright dabs of detail (e.g., “Dragon flies buzzed, and a stray cat pawed the dirt”). For all of these reasons, Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” is this week’s Pick Of The Issue.

Travels In Siberia - Part V

In Part V, the concluding section of this great book, Frazier makes his fifth (and shortest) Siberian journey, a trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009. Why Novosibirsk? Frazier says, “I had wanted someplace cold, dark, remote, and hibernating. Novosibirsk at five thirty on a November morning seemed to be all of those.” He describes coming out of the airport and smelling the air: “My lungs filled with a familiar, delicious Siberian combination of second-hand smoke and bitter-cold air. One basic purpose had been accomplished. I had breathed the air.”

During his first few days in Novosibirsk, he walks the city, visiting the Novosibirsk Regional Museum, the Novosibirsk State Art Museum, the Pobeda (Victory) Theatre, the Museum of Siberian Communications (displaying, among other interesting things, a “1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water”) and a giant shopping mall called the Mega-Ikea (“The only part of the mall I really liked was right at the door, in the rush of heated air that pushed back against the exterior cold”).

He takes the bus to Akademgorodok to meet Ivan Logoshenko, a friend of his brother-in-law. He gets off the bus in Akademgorodok and, while waiting for Logoshenko to come pick him up, observes a group of boys horsing around. His description of this scene is one of the best passages in a book brimful with great writing:

The boys continued to play all around me, oblivious, like fish around a scuba diver. One kid climbed partway up a nearby fir and began to shake snow down on his companions. This got a laugh. Then a boy who was hopping here and there doing karate kicks happened to kick an aluminum light pole. Atop the light pole was a shade like a broad, flat hat, carrying a tall accumulation of snow. The kick sent some snow down on another kid’s head. Great hilarity. All the kids then began karate kicking the light pole, which responded with satisfying dull bongs and cascade after cascade of snow. Meanwhile, several mothers pulled up in their cars and were chatting with one another, occasionally interrupting themselves to tell the boys to quit kicking the light pole. The boys only kicked more, and finally one of the boys, with high exuberance, began singing “Jingle Bells,” in English, in time to his kicks. Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, “Jingle Bells,” bong, bong, bong, great laughter. He knew the words and sang them perfectly, without accent.

How fine that “Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, ‘Jingle Bells,’ bong, bong, bong, great laughter” is! Frazier works his magic, strings these words together, and – presto! – a slice of Novosibirsk life springs into being.

Frazier ends his book on a humble note. Even though he’s shown us a huge, rich chunk of Siberia, its people and its history, he says, “What I’d seen of Siberia was only a tiny part.” He then proceeds to identify some of the things he didn’t see: bears, hydropower dams, reindeer herds, forest fires, climate scientists, a drunken forest (“a forest in which the thawing of the supporting permafrost causes the trees to lean every which way”), and so on. It’s quite a list and an effective way of emphasizing Siberia’s hard-to-comprehend complexity and vastness.

In “Acknowledgments” at the back of the book, Frazier says of Mike Peed, of The New Yorker’s fact-checking department, that he “pursued factual accuracy with rigor while never neglecting to listen for the poetical – a rare skill.” It seems to me that these words could be used to describe Frazier’s work, as well.

I think Travels In Siberia is a masterpiece. I can easily imagine someone fifty or a hundred years from now reading it and being so inspired that he or she tries to follow in Frazier’s footsteps, retracing his routes, searching for the places that he visited (e.g., Severobaikalsk’s amazing winter garden, with its “ficuses, banana plants, wild grapevines, cacti, pineapple plants, and lemon trees growing this way and that in the bath of the heat”), just as Frazier himself was inspired by George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia, and tried to find the pillar – “this grief-consecrated pillar,” as Kennan described it - that marked the spot where exiles walking the Trakt officially crossed into Siberia.