December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Richard Brody, in “Goings On,” reviews Jim Jarmusch’s new movie Father Mother Sister Brother. I’m a fan of Jarmusch’s minimalist style. Brody calls this new film “an unusually plainspoken entry in the Jarmusch cinematic universe.” I think I’ll check it out.

2. Sheldon Pearce, in “Goings On,” praises Bill Charlap and Dee Dee Bridgewater’s new album Elemental. He says, “The music is charming and jaunty, its looseness and zest owed to an alchemical balance between these two performers.” Charlap is one of my heroes. Pearce calls him “an impressionist pianist,” but he’s much more than that. His invention and technique are phenomenal. He’s an amazing improviser. He’s a genius! On the other hand, my taste for Bridgewater’s singing is still developing. At times, I find her delivery halting and discordant. I credit Pearce for noting this album. Anything by Charlap is worth listening to.

3. Remember Babbo? I do. I’ve never eaten there, but as a result of reading Bill Buford’s two brilliant “Babbo” pieces – “The Secret of Excess” (August 19 & 26, 2002) and “The Pasta Station” (September 6, 2004) – I feel I know it intimately. That Babbo is gone. Its wild, ingenious co-owner and chef, Mario Batali, is gone, too. But, as Helen Rosner tells us in this week’s “Tables for Two,” there’s a new Babbo with a new chef – Mark Ladner. Rosner is not impressed. “Can you have Batali minus Batali?” she asks. Her answer is no. She says,

On my first visit to the original Babbo—God, it must have been twenty years ago—I remember being stunned at my first bite of the beef-cheek ravioli. (“Of all the pasta dishes—indeed, of all the dishes—on the menu, this is probably the one most associated with Babbo,” Batali writes of the recipe, in “The Babbo Cookbook” from 2002.) I froze. I think I stopped chewing. I was astounded that a mouthful of food could be so forceful and so silken at once. I wish I could say that I felt the same way about the version at the new Babbo. Some of the disappointment, I’m sure, had to do with the difficulty of measuring up to memory, but it was also right there on the plate. On one evening, the filling was oddly crumbly and dry, and on another the ravioli’s thick chicken-liver ragú—a striking departure from the light, buttery emulsion that dressed Batali’s original—was broken and greasy.

Rosner’s verdict may seem harsh. But that’s what I like about her. She doesn’t pull her punches. 

4. Bruce Handy’s “Talk” story “Shadow Boxing” tells about the re-creation of Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway studio in a Gagosian gallery in Paris. Handy writes,

With the exhibit opening in just a few days, a team of eight workers was beavering away inside the gallery, moving stacks of old magazines, rearranging tchotchkes on shelves, applying a patina of grunge to new jars and boxes to make them look as if they’d been sitting in a cellar since the Eisenhower Administration. The gallery’s normally pristine white walls had been painted to resemble water-stained cinder blocks. A professional set decorator had added fake cobwebs to the corners. (Fine steel wool does the trick.) One could almost smell the mustiness.

Cornell is one of my favorite artists. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

5. A special shout-out to Lawrence Wright for his delightful “Takes” tribute to A. J. Liebling. Wright says, 

For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth.

I totally agree. Liebling is one of the New Yorker greats. 

March 31, 2025 Issue

Anytime Richard Brody comments on Pauline Kael – beware! He doesn’t like her. His hostility goes back to his “Shoah at Twenty-Five” (December 7, 2010), in which he comes perilously close to calling Kael anti-Semitic because she dared to criticize Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In this week’s issue, Brody has a “Takes” piece that revisits Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” (January 23, 1971). He appears to praise it. But don’t be fooled. His knife is out. He calls it “something of a manifesto” that “reveals why, despite Kael’s status as the foremost critic of her era, she was also sharply at odds with it.” He notes “the rise of the New Hollywood era that Kael would celebrate as a golden age,” and says, “she was hostile to many of its masterworks.” This is false. For one thing, “Notes on Heart and Mind” is not “something of a manifesto,” not even close. It’s a collection of rants she wrote out of frustration with how bad the movies were at that time. If you want to read her manifesto, read “Trash, Art and the Movies” (1969) – one of the great critical essays of the twentieth century. 

But the main reason Brody’s claim is false turns on his use of “many” (“she was hostile to many of its masterworks”). Okay, name one. Name one masterwork of the New Hollywood era, the so-called golden age of American cinema, that Kael was hostile to. I can think of at least a dozen that she celebrated: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Cabaret, The Godfather, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Phantom of the Paradise, The Godfather, Part II, Shampoo, Nashville, Carrie, Taxi Driver. Kael wasn’t at odds with these revolutionary new American movies. She loved them!

The “Takes” series invites New Yorker writers to “revisit notable works from the archive.” Brody’s choice of Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” is odd. It’s one of her weakest pieces. She wrote it when she was in a funk. She included it in her final collection For Keeps (1995), but she cut it drastically. With so many great Kael reviews and essays to choose from, why did Brody pick this one? I think it goes back to his hatred of her Shoah review. He’s exacting his revenge. 

August 14, 2023 Issue

Anthony Lane, in his review of Ira Sachs’s new movie Passages, in this week’s issue, says, “It’s the unhappiest film I’ve watched in a long while, steeped in Freudian pessimism—that is to say, you can meet the demands of the libido, in full, but don’t expect your world not to fall apart. Once satisfaction is guaranteed, so is chaos” [“Most Wanted”]. In contrast, Richard Brody finds Passages “exhilarating.” Instead of pessimism, he finds “positivity”: 

The positivity of “Passages” is inseparable from its sex positivity. There are sex scenes of a rare dramatic power, whether in the animal athleticism that marks the erotic bond of Martin and Tomas (Sachs films their scenes in long, tense, extended takes), in the howling delight that Tomas finds in his relationship with Agathe, or in his tender and wonderstruck gaze at her face as he caresses her to orgasm. [“ ‘Passages’ and an Art Monster’s Fierce Purity,” newyorker.com, August 8, 2023]

Lane disagrees. He says of the movie’s sex scenes, 

Here and there, “Passages” has been described as “sexy,” but that’s the last thing it is. To be sure, there are writhings on view, gay and straight, but the sex has the animus of violence: a desperate grapple, with one person’s legs wrapped around another’s back. Agathe keeps her heavy boots on, and almost bangs her head on the edge of a desk. Nothing here is solved or softened by the making of love. Rather, the effect of all the lusting is to hammer people further into unwisdom and despair. 

So which is it – positive (Brody) or negative (Lane)? Sexy (Brody) or unsexy (Lane)? Exhilarating (Brody) or despairing (Lane)?  My interest is piqued. I guess I’ll have to watch the film and make up my own mind.

April 10, 2023 Issue

I see in this week’s issue that Kelly Reichardt has a new movie out. Titled Showing Up, it’s about a sculptor in Portland, Oregon. Richard Brody calls it “an instant classic of life in art.” He says, 

Working with the cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, Reichardt films as if in a state of rapt attention, reserving her keenest ardor and inspiration for the art itself: as Lizzy sculpts and assembles and glazes and even just ponders, the film’s visual contemplations seem to get deep into Lizzy’s creative soul. ["Goings On About Town: On the Big Screen"]

Sounds good; I think I’ll check it out. Reichardt directed one of my all-time favorite films – Wendy and Lucy (2008). Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott listed it as one of their “25 Best Films of the Century So Far” (The New York Times, June 19, 2017). See also Jonathan Raban’s excellent review of it, “Metronatural America” (The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009; included in his great 2010 essay collection Driving Home). 

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.    

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”).

2022 Year in Review

Illustration by Seb Agresti, from John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa 3"

Begin with a drink. In tribute to the brave people of Ukraine, I’ll have one of those borscht Martinis that Talia Lavin wrote about a few years ago: “Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim” (“Bar Tab: Anyway Café,” April 30, 2018). Mm, that hits the spot! Slava Ukraini! 

The top story of 2022 was Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The New Yorker covered it superbly, publishing at least a dozen pieces, including Masha Gessen’s “The Devastation of Kharkiv, Ukraine” (March 22, 2022), Jane Ferguson's "A Search for Survival Outside Kyiv" (March 15, 2022), Keith Gessen’s “The One Place in Lviv Where the War Was Never Far Away” (March 29, 2022), Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege of Chernihiv” (April 15, 2022), Luke Mogelson’s “Collecting Bodies in Bucha” (April 6, 2022), and David Kortava’s “In the Filtration Camps,” October 10, 2022. I devoured them. If I had to recommend just one, it would be Luke Mogelson’s brilliant “The Wound-Dressers” (May 9, 2022). Here’s a sample:

To prevent the Russians from penetrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had destroyed the main bridge over the fast-moving Irpin River. Several buildings on the south side of the river had been hit by Russian shells, which had also killed some fleeing civilians. To the north, explosions sounded and smoke filled the sky above another nearby suburb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled there, and waves of residents were now arriving—abandoning their vehicles at the edge of the caved-in bridge, clambering down a high embankment, and crossing the icy currents on a treacherous walkway composed of pallets and scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled, ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to downtown Kyiv. People advanced single file, lugging bags and suitcases; some hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their chests. Elderly men and women with canes and walkers staggered haltingly over the rickety planks.

For me, the #1 literary story of the year was the loss of Peter Schjeldahl. He died October 21, 2022, age eighty. He’s one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on his name in the “Labels” section, and you’ll find 138 references to his writing. Schjeldahl spun his special brand of magic right to the end. Here’s an excerpt from his wonderful “Dutch Magus” (October 3, 2022), a delectable review of Hans Janssen’s Piet Mondrian: A Life:

Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch.

That “Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral” is inspired! 

Another highlight this year was the appearance of Volume 3 of John McPhee’s on-going personal history “Tabula Rasa.” These pieces are ingenious assemblages of time and space – memories interwoven with story ideas that McPhee never got around to developing. For example, in Volume 3, there’s a wonderful section called “Citrus, Booze, and Ah Bing” that begins with how he came to write his 1967 classic, Oranges, segues to a fascinating account of a 2004 road trip he took in central Kentucky, checking out distilleries (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”), and ends with a visit to an Okanagan Bing cherry orchard (“Dessicated. Lovely. Irrigation-green. Trees punctuated with deep-red dots”). If you relish McPhee’s writing, as I do, you’re sure to enjoy this latest “Tabula Rasa” instalment. 

One of my favourite New Yorker writers, Rivka Galchen, had a great year, producing three marvellous pieces – “Change of Heart” (February 22, 2022), “Who Will Fight With Me?” (October 3, 2022), and “Sound Affects” (October 17, 2022). “Who Will Fight With Me?” is a fond remembrance of her father. Here’s an excerpt:

It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did.

And while we’re at it, let’s give a huzzah for my favorite section of the magazine – “Goings On About Town” – a weekly smorgasbord of delectable notes on, among other things, art, movies, music, and restaurants. Here, for example, is Richard Brody on King Vidor’s 1928 silent film Show People:

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.

Other highlights: Five book reviews by my favourite literary critic James Wood, including his recent "The Numbers Game" (December 19, 2022); two wonderful pieces by Joy Williams (“Mine Field,” July 11 & 18, 2022, and “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future,” August 5, 2022); Hannah Goldfield’s sublime “Tables For Two”; and Laura Preston’s delightful “Talk of the Town” stories “Incidental Masterpieces” (April 4, 2022) and “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). 

Any disappointments? The only one I can think of is the absence of Dan Chiasson. He hasn’t appeared in the magazine since May 31, 2021. Not sure if he quit or was fired or is just taking a break. But I miss his subtle close readings.

Enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I enjoyed most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another glorious year of reading bliss. 

December 12, 2022 Issue

This week’s issue contains an excellent Richard Brody capsule review of Janicza Bravo’s brilliant Zola (2021). Brody refers to the movie’s “exquisite stylization.” For a detailed description of that stylization, check out Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” (The New York Review of Books, July 21, 2022). Serpell writes,

Zola is at its best when it lets this archetypal plot lie and plays with its filmic form instead. Its aesthetic, like other films produced by A24, has an air of gentrified graffiti, a palette like a neon bruise. But Bravo beautifully contains the sun-shot pastels of Florida in the manner of a David Hockney painting, and the film deftly references its origins on social media. With a camera-shutter sound, the screen freezes into a snapshot that shrinks into a corner, like on an iPhone; with a cha-ching of change, hearts flash or rise up the screen, like in an Instagram Live; with clickety-clicks and emoji bursts, texts are typed into being; the date and time appear at the top of the screen in a thin white font, then vanish—both with a click; and we occasionally hear the Twitter whistle, as the screenplay explains, “to pay homage when a line in the script is identical to one of @_zolarmoon’s tweets.”

That “palette like a neon bruise” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” is my choice for best critical essay of 2022. 

September 5, 2022 Issue

Not a whole lot in this week’s issue to get excited about. Richard Brody reviews an old movie, Pretty Poison, that I recall seeing when it first came out in 1968. I can’t remember a thing about it, other than that Pauline Kael liked it, and that’s probably why I went to see it. Brody likes it, too, calling it “a hectic pastiche that takes off from Psycho and grafts tropes from spy thrillers, teen romances, domestic melodramas, and police procedurals onto the highly textured realism of life in a small New England town, complete with its narrow-minded moralism.” I might give it a second look, although that "pastiche" isn't exactly enticing.

There’s a line in Anthony Lane’s review of Fernando León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss that made me laugh. The film stars Javier Bardem. Lane says, 

Think of the parts that Bardem played last year—the expansive Desi Arnaz, lording it over a broadcasting fiefdom in “Being the Ricardos,” and the sapphire-eyed chief of the Frenemy tribe, or whatever it was called, in “Dune.” Bardem has confessed that, in the sequel to the latter, he would very much like to ride a giant sandworm. Wouldn’t we all?

Best sentence in this week’s issue also belongs to Lane: “His hand alone is enough to fill a room, and my favorite shot shows his wandering finger, as big as a canoe, brushing against the keyboard of a laptop, which, with a soft pdoing, powers up” (“What You Wish For”). 

August 8, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Great cover! R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Double-Parked,” showing two bicycles, one blue, one orange, locked to a no-parking sign, is my pick for best cover of the year so far.

2. Calvin Tomkins’s “Becoming Modern,” a profile of painter Salman Toor, provides fascinating background on the evolution of Toor’s “virtuoso personal style.” I’ve been a fan of Toor ever since I saw his wonderful “Sleeping Boy”: see my “Salman Toor’s Sensual Apprehension of Life” (May 8, 2021). Tomkins’s description of that painting is excellent: “In 'Sleeping Boy,' a young man who resembles Toor lies on white sheets so lusciously painted that they look edible, his face and his naked body illuminated by light from an open laptop.”

3. John Seabrook’s “On Alert,” an absorbing report on acoustic car styling, contains several excellent sound descriptions, including this beauty: “Many prospective buyers’ first experience of a car or a truck is the CLICK ker-CHUNK that the driver’s-side door makes when they close it, followed by a faint harmonic shiver given off by the vehicle’s metal skin.” 

4. Speaking of inspired sentences, here’s one from Richard Brody’s capsule review of the 1928 silent film Show People: “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.”

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").

Zeina Durra's Ardently Attentive "Luxor"

I want to thank Richard Brody for leading me to Zeina Durra’s beautiful movie Luxor. I saw it last night on iTunes and enjoyed it immensely. Here’s Brody’s capsule review in full:

The tension between the grip of memory and the power of immediate experience is poignantly portrayed in this documentary-rooted drama, written and directed by Zeina Durra. It stars Andrea Riseborough as Hana, a British doctor who checks into a grand but faded hotel in the Egyptian city of the title, where she has gone to recover from the trauma of her work in Jordan with victims of the Syrian civil war. She has history with the city—two decades before, she took part in an archeological project there—and runs into an Egyptian archeologist named Sultan (Karim Saleh), a former lover who attempts to rekindle their relationship. Hana is open to his friendship but may be too unsteady for love; her self-healing involves extended wanderings through the city, as if to rediscover lost aspects of herself. The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s travels—and the places that she visits—with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration.

That “ardent attention” perfectly captures Luxor’s essence. 

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”).

Brody Distorts Kael

Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz

I see Richard Brody is at it again – distorting Pauline Kael’s great “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 1971). In his “Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael, and the Battle Over Citizen Kane” (newyorker.com, November 14, 2020), he says that Kael “argued that much of what’s great about Citizen Kane in fact arose not from Welles but from the contributions of Mankiewicz and the rest of the cast and crew.” Wrong! Kael never said that. What she said is this: “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” That’s the exact opposite of what Brody says she said. In case there’s any doubt about Kael’s position, she went on to say, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he [Welles] took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.” Where are The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checkers? Anytime Brody refers to Kael, he should be checked. He seems incapable of accurately stating her views. 

March 9, 2020 Issue

Here are some of the things in this week’s New Yorker that I enjoyed immensely:

1. The delectable description in Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Shannon Cartier Lucy": “The creamily painted, crystalline image of goldfish whose bowl rests, alarmingly, on the lavender flame of a gas stove.”

2. Steve Futterman’s wonderful “Night Life: Andy Statman”: 

An Orthodox Jew walks into the back room of a bar and proceeds to play avant-garde jazz on the clarinet and bluegrass on the mandolin, among much else. Welcome to the manifold musical world of Andy Statman, who, in his frequent visits to this long-standing Park Slope watering hole and music space, proves that New York has always been the place to be if multiculturalism is the air you breathe.

3. News of a new French film that might be worth checking out - Rebecca Zlottowski’s An Easy Girl – described by Richard Brody, in his capsule review of it, as “passionate and finely observed.” 

4. Nick Paumgarten’s excellent Talk story “Pointillism,” a mini-profile of W. Ian Lipkin, “one of the one of the world’s leading infectious-disease epidemiologists,” commenting on the spread of COVID-19:

On Central Park West, he pointed out a painted railing and said, “That, I wouldn’t worry about. You’ve got ultraviolet light, wind.” But on the C train he wrapped an elbow around a pole and said, “I look at the world differently than you do. I see surfaces in a pointillistic ­fashion.” 

5. Alexandra Schwartz’s Talk piece, “Lady from Shanghai,” an encounter with movie director Cathy Yan, the last paragraph of which is superb:

Outside Wu’s Wonton King, Yan struggled to light some sparklers she had just bought. An elderly passerby stopped to cup his hands around Yan’s, shielding the flame from the elements. “He says it’s raining and it’s windy,” Yan said, when he’d left. “There’s a metaphor in here somewhere.” She produced a party popper from a bag and began to twist. Tiny hundred-dollar bills shot into the air. Yan squealed and took a photo. Then she headed off, shedding miniature Benjamins as she walked. Maybe there was a metaphor in there, too.

6. Rivka Galchin’s excellent “Complete Trash,” reporting on South Korea’s progressive approach to waste-processing (“Interspersed among the windrows were truck-size machines that looked like toys: a bright-orange Doppstadt Inventhor ground up trees, an emerald-green Komptech Multistar sorted waste by size, and a white-and-yellow SCARAB turned and aerated the windrows with its inner spokes”). 

7. Vinson Cunningham’s absorbing “Test Case,” an account of his education at a wonderful non-profit school called Prep for Prep and the far-reaching impact it had on his life: 

So Prep recommended me as a tutor for the teen-age son of a black investment banker who was on Prep’s board of directors. The banker paid me directly, by the hour, and I sent him occasional e-mail updates on his son’s progress. We read plays and short stories and articles from the sports pages, and ran through long sets of simple algebra. The kid didn’t like to concentrate; I could relate. One day, I got a call from his stepmother, who was from Chicago. She was supporting a young Illinois senator who was preparing to run for President. His campaign was setting up a fund-raising office in New York, and they’d need an assistant. I knew that I was stumbling into another unmerited adventure.

8. Peter Schjeldahl grappling with the meaning of Donald Judd’s benumbing artworks: “They aren’t about anything. They afford no traction for analysis while making you more or less conscious of your physical relation to them, and to the space that you and they share” (“The Shape of Things”). 

  

9. And Anthony Lane’s description of sex in two new movies, The Burnt Orange Heresy and The Whistler: “vanilla but vigorous, like a frothing milkshake” (“Lying Together”). 

February 3, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Richard Brody’s “In Revival” note on Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 Stranger Than Paradise contains this superb line: 

Jarmusch lets time run free in stylized and static long takes that blend his characters’ Beckettian inertia with the quasi-documentary fascination of the idiosyncratic performers just being there.

Interestingly, Pauline Kael mentioned Beckett in her 1984 review of the same movie: 

The images, like the characters’ lives, are so emptied out that Jarmusch makes you notice every tiny, grungy detail. And those blackouts have something of the effect of Beckett’s pauses: they make us look more intently, as Beckett makes us listen more intently – because we know we’re in an artist’s control. But Jarmusch’s world of lowlifers in a wintry stupor is comic-strip Beckett. [“Faked Out, Cooled Out, Bummed Out,” The New Yorker, November 12, 1984; included in her 1985 collection State of the Art]

2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: HK Food Court” brims with sensuous description, including this scrumptious paragraph:

I knew what to get at a seafood stall called Chili Boiled Fish, where live ones flopped around in a tank. 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.

That “staining my rice with neon drips” is wonderful. The whole piece is wonderful. I devoured it.

Best of 2019: newyorker.com

Nancy Liang's illustration for James Marcus's "A Dark Ride"

Here are my favorite newyorker.com pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Shock of Robert Frank’s The Americans,” September 10, 2019 [“Frank had exalted photographic form by shattering it against the stone of the wonderful and (oh, yeah) horrible real”].

2. Alexandra Schwartz’s “ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing,” March 30, 2019 (“Her films, which celebrate the art of the foraged and the found, can be like associative essays, or like poems”).

3. Chris Wiley's “How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams,” April 7, 2019 (“In the picture that came out of that poolside photo shoot, we see that behind the elder Sultan is a rolling expanse of tightly cut grass soaking up the water from an automated sprinkler system, which passes for rain in those parts—a landscape on life support. His father is tan, but he is also old, his body clearly heading toward its twilight, and he looks somewhat melancholy—despairing, even—as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets”).

4. Lauren Collins’ “On the Roof of Notre Dame, Before It Burned,” April 15, 2019 (“The omniscient of the Internet told us not to fret, that cathedrals had been built and burned before. But Parisians watched with the supplicant helplessness of the ages, singing hymns on their knees as the firefighters battled to save the north belfry on the second day of Holy Week”).

5. James Marcus's “A Dark Ride,” October 29, 2019 (“Nat held my hand and we exited the meticulously groomed reality, with its 1,838-foot-long channel and four hundred thousand gold pieces of eight, all of them fake”).

6. Charlotte Mendelson’s “Seeds, The Gateway Drug to Gardening,” April 23, 2019 ("To the unafflicted, seeds may seem like nondescript black dots, distinguishing themselves only once they’ve blossomed. But look closely and you’ll see that they are quietly astonishing in their variety, particularly when they’re patiently waiting in the dried remains of last year’s flowers: the papery discs of hollyhock, neatly arranged in doughnut rings; glossy nigella specks in spiky spheres; the fat succulence of apples; the pony flank of chestnut; speckled borlotti or elma beans, black and white like baby killer whales; poppies like salt shakers; and calendula, my favorite, an explosion of prickly crescents, dry brown springs tight with life”).

7. Chris Wiley's “Jack Davison’s Throwback to a Golden Age of Editorial Portraiture,” July 21, 2019 ("A hovering dot painted on an alley wall appears transformed into a luminous moon, propped up by a rusted wire trellis and cradled by a shadow hand, and a wild-eyed dog, all Tic Tac white teeth and blurred fur, is a living incarnation of our rapacious anxieties”).

8. Richard Brody's “Watching The Irishman on Netflix Is the Best Way to See It,” December 2, 2019 (“The movie’s silent gazes—whether the fearful silence that protects criminals whose retaliation would be devastating, or the loyal silence of criminals protecting each other, or the symbolic silence of criminals communicating with each other—are sublime to observe, and they’re the mark of Cain”).

9. Peter Hessler’s “My House in Cairo,” May 7, 2019 (“In Egypt, time is accordion-like. Certain moments seem to last forever, but then everything is compressed and an era disappears in a flash”).

10. Charlotte Mendelson’s “The Stunning Grounds, and Tragic History, of the Lost Gardens of Heligan,” August 2, 2019 (“Now any ignorant city-dweller can nod knowledgeably at the charcoal burner and beehives, admire the Technicolor banks of dahlias in the cutting garden, and covet—in my case, quite violently—the brass watering cans and elaborate glasshouses, with their beaver-tail glazing and delicious levers”).

Best of 2019: GOAT

Jessica Pettway's photo for Shauna Lyon's "Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl's “Art: T. C. Cannon,” September 9, 2019 ("One of his last paintings, 'Two Guns Arikara' (1978), blazes with special promise: a stern man wearing a mixture of traditional and contemporary garb sits holding a pair of long-barrelled pistols. The picture’s uniformly intense hues—purple, red-orange, burnt orange, lilac, terre verte, sienna, cerulean, golden yellow, violet, black, and white—generate a visual cadenza, violently serene").

2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Barca,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearl-shaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared”).

3. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: ‘Maya Lin,’ ” January 14, 2019 (“As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded”). 

4. Richard Brody’s “Movies: Under the Silver Lake,” April 29, 2019 (“A zine traces long-ago Hollywood scandals; a friend finds the secrets of the world on the back of a cereal box; clips and names of classic movies and video games hint at vast secret connections; a popular band fronts a cult; and a reclusive old songwriter claims to be behind all modern culture and its labyrinthine conspiracies”).

5. Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Heidi Bucher,” May 20, 2019 (“Among the nine stunning pieces in this exhibition, which have yellowed and become more scab-like with age, is a drooping mold of one of that building’s windows, its slightly bowed shutters suggesting the wings of an enormous insect”).

6. Briana Younger’s “Night Life: Ari Lennox,” June 3, 2019 (“Her love-struck tales are consistently gorgeous, but it's when she weaves in the mundane details—a new apartment, watching ‘Adventure Time,’ shopping at Target—that the silken muscle of her voice makes itself most evident, a reminder that there is soul to be found in even the most prosaic life events, that just having breath can be worth singing about”).

7. Michaelangelo Matos’ “Night Life: Wata Igarashi,” May 20, 2019 (“As synth patterns shape-shift in slow motion and crisp percussion slumps into slurping timbres, his mixes find the sounds' edges melting into one another”).

8. Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: The Fulton,” July 29, 2019 (“Two words: chocolate mousse. The tiny tower of decadence, so elaborately layered with peanut caramel, chocolate crunch, passion-fruit sorbet, and vanilla ice cream that it appears almost indecent, represents the restaurant in a few ostentatiously luscious bites: a routine dessert spruced up into something needlessly sumptuous, but also unimpeachably satisfying”).

9. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: Aki Sasamoto,” April 22, 2019 (“Blown-glass tumblers the color of whiskey spin on a trio of round barroom tables, powered by gusts of air from H.V.A.C. tubes, whose nozzles suggest empty bottles of booze. The mood matches the circular logic of an alcohol-addled mind. Screening in another room is video of the artist performing a cryptic ritual; it was commissioned by Triple Canopy, a vital downtown nonprofit as uncategorizable as Sasamoto’s art. The enticing setup: a forest, a doughnut, an ant”).

10. Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana,” September 16, 2019 [“For some reason, there are peas and corn, too, but also beans and guacamole (thank God), and the chips are nicely crunchy”].