Sasha Frere-Jones on T. J. Clark

I’ve just finished reading Sasha Frere-Jones’ Bookforum review of T. J. Clark’s new essay collection Those Passions: On Art and Politics. For several weeks now, I’ve been considering buying this book, but the “politics” part of the title puts me off. I love Clark’s writings on painting. But I’m allergic to his Marxist politics, particularly his obsession with class. The tagline of Frere-Jones’ piece – “An art historian locates the political in paint” – seemed a red flag to me. And yes, according to his review, Those Passions does contain a lot of politics. He says, “Clark’s latest collection of essays, Those Passions, continues a project that stretches (at least) back to 1999’s Farewell to an Idea, slowly x-raying the paint to find the fingerprint of capital.” But he also says this: “In “Sex and Politics According to Delacroix,” Clark sees a world in the vortical bodies in Delacroix’s 1855 painting The Lion Hunt.” Wait a minute! Could this be the same piece that appeared in the October 10, 2019 London Review, the one called “A Horse’s Impossible Head”? I believe it is. It’s one of my all-time favorite Clark essays. Its political content is minimal; its ekphrasis is extensive and ravishing. Later in his review, Frere-Jones refers to another Clark essay in the new collection – “Madame Matisse’s Hat.” That’s another one of my favorites. It appeared in the August 14, 2008 London Review. That clinched it. These two essays alone are worth the price of the new book. I’m buying it.

May 9, 2016 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The text under Goings On About Town’s "This Week" photo (portrait of Chelsea Wolfe by Parker Day) contains a piquant line: “But it’s the layers of dissonant, cold embellishments, like the acidic bass line on ‘After the Fall,’ from her 2015 album Abyss, that have prickly experimentalists and jet-black metal fans flocking to her sets.” Who wrote that? Is Sasha Frere-Jones back with the magazine? He has an ear for “layers of dissonant, cold embellishments” and “acidic bass lines.” I remember his "Brighter Tomorrow," in which he describes the Fuck Buttons’ first album as “ill-tempered and thrilling—long, sharp drones accompanied by vocals that sounded like they’d been driven through a small speaker to the point of disintegration.”

2. Lauren Collins’s description of the Trumps' marriage made me smile: “it is as blinged-out with male dominance as their penthouse is with Louis XIV furniture” ("The Model American").

3. I relished the brilliant Bendik Kaltenborn illustration for Emily Nussbaum’s "Hive Mind."

4. I made a note to see Luca Guadagnino’s new movie A Bigger Splash, which Anthony Lane describes as “fiercely unrelaxing and impossible to ignore” ("On the Rocks"). I enjoyed Guadagnino’s previous I Am Love immensely. 

January 19, 2015 Issue

This week’s issue contains an extraordinary piece of reporting called "When the Fever Breaks" by Luke Mogelson. It’s a firsthand, front-lines account of how communities in Liberia and Sierra Leone are fighting the spread of Ebola. Mogelson visits slums, hospitals, holding centers, jungle villages. He talks to “survivors” (people who catch Ebola and don’t die), local organizers, health officers, social workers, ambulance drivers. At one point, he accompanies a county burial team to the Liberian village of Jene-Wonde. “Ebola victims are most contagious when they are no longer alive,” Mogelson says, “and in West Africa—where burial rituals, for both Christians and Muslims, entail anointing the deceased—many people have contracted the virus from a corpse.” The wife of Jene-Wonde’s chief has died of Ebola. Her body is inside the village general store. The chief gives permission to retrieve her body. Mogelson describes the procedure:

The sprayers went first—a pair of minesweepers clearing a path. Then the others entered with the bag and the stretcher. They emerged several minutes later and loaded the corpse into the back of the truck. As the truck made its way across the square, women and children spilled out of their houses, sat down in the dirt, and keened. I followed on foot, along with a few locals, all of whom turned back when the truck stopped at a wall of trees. The team filed down a narrow trail, carrying the stretcher through dark jungle. After about a hundred yards, unmarked mounds of rich orange soil rose here and there from the grass. Beside a shallow, rectangular hole, an elderly man in flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a white skullcap leaned on the handle of an old spade. He had dug all the graves. No one else from the village, he told me, was willing to tread in that place.

The team lowered the imam’s wife into the grave. On top of her, they dropped a heap of freshly hacked branches and leaves. Then they stripped off their suits, gloves, and masks and deposited them in the grave as well.

Mogelson’s writing style is factual, unostentatious – well suited to the hard reality he describes. But it has its artful aspects. At one point, describing a trip in Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone, he says, “To get there, we followed barely discernible tire tracks, for miles, through grass so tall and close you feel as if you were in a car wash.”

“When the Fever Breaks” can be read as a companion to Richard Preston’s brilliant "The Ebola Wars" (The New Yorker, October 27, 2014), which describes the work of scientists at the Broad Institute to sequence Ebola’s genome and track its mutations. But the two pieces differ from each other. “The Ebola Wars” is written in the third person; “When the Fever Breaks” is a first-person narrative. It abounds with sentences like “One day in early November, I followed several young men down a warren of sand alleyways, veined by rivulets of sullage, that wound through West Point, the slum to which Fahnbulleh and her husband had been taken,” and “When I visited the quarantine center, in Monrovia, a group of children sat in plastic chairs inside the gate, near a metal seesaw.” I relish such sentences: the observer becomes a participant; reporting becomes experience.

Postscript: I delight in thisness, i.e., “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008). Thisness is palpability, specificity, concreteness. New Yorker writing brims with it. For example, in this week’s issue, it’s there in the description of the Goldschmied & Chiari mirrors on show at Lorello Gallery: “Composite photographs of billowing smoke transferred to reflective glass, have been tinted petal pink or storm-cloud gray” (“Goings On About Town: Art”). It’s there in Amelia Lester’s representation of the Via Carota’s pumpkin-and-sage ravioli: “fluffy, beautiful, and fleeting, an exercise in virtuosity equivalent to a concert pianist running up and down a scale very fast” ("Tables For Two"). It’s there in Jiayang Fan’s description of Nitecap’s Key Lime Fizz “with a lit candle suspended in its froth” ("Bar Tab"). It’s brilliantly there in Sarah Larson’s capture of Bill Murray’s line to the waitress at Tao when she brought him two rum-and-waters: “He took one and said of the other, ‘You give that to the kids at the orphanage’ ” ("Cinephiles"). Sometimes thisness can be in the form of a piquant fact, e.g., “KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking credit card” (Rebecca Mead, "When I Grow Up"); “Recently, researchers at the University of Southern California built a prototype 'virtual human' named Ellie, a digital therapist that integrates an algorithm similar to Affdex with others that track gestures and vocal tonalities” (Raffi Khatchadourian, "We Know How You Feel"). It’s hard to say how useful all this is. But in terms of writing as pure writing, I devour it. My favorite example of thisness, in this week’s issue, is Sasha Frere-Jones’s description of the Sleater-Kinney band’s guitar tones: “fuzzed, doubled into octaves, thin, then soaked, overloading” ("Sister Saviors"). “Sleater-Kinney” is itself an inspired bit of thisness. It comes, Frere-Jones says, from the name on a highway exit ramp in Olympia, Washington.

December 16, 2013 Issue

Maybe I’m just in a pre-Christmas funk, but I find this week’s New Yorker remarkably uninspiring. Maybe it’s the price of those spicy Red Snappers at The King Cole that turned me off. Sixty dollars for two of them, according to Shauna Lyon’s “Bar Tab.” Obscene! Or maybe it’s the dull prospect of plowing through two pieces on Washington politics (Evan Osnos’s “Strong Vanilla” and “Ryan Lizza’s “State of Deception”). Do I want to read about Cuvier’s proof of extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Lost World, Part One”) or “The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise” (Nicholas Schmidle’s “A Very Rare Book”) or what happens when God first unleashes Satan on Job (Joan Acocella’s “Misery”) or Britney Spears’s latest career move (Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Brit Pop”)? No, no, no, and definitely no. I’ve got better things to do, like shovel the snow from in front of the woodshed door. But there’s always a bit of nourishment in every New Yorker, no matter how unpromising its contents may first appear. This week, I found it in David Denby’s marvelous “Grand Scam,” a review of David O. Russell’s American Hustler. In a parenthesis worthy of the Master herself (Hail Kael!), Denby writes, “In a dizzying touch, suits hanging on a garment conveyor whirl past them as they kiss.” Ah, the surreal reality of that garment conveyor! I love it. Thank you, Mr. Denby. With one sentence, you breathe life into a moribund New Yorker.  

March 25, 2013 Issue

Dogs, hip-hop, punk, opera, TV, “failure memoir,” paranoid billionaire – at first glance, the contents of the March 25^th New Yorker appear most unappetizing. But there’s always something in every issue – a line of sharp description, a piquant observation, a pungent detail – to appreciate. This week’s issue is no exception. I enjoyed William Finnegan’s “The Miner’s Daughter” for its description of Port Hedland (“Ancient-looking, iron-covered conveyor belts lattice the badlands”; “Bulk-carrier ships hunker like squared-off stadiums beyond the evaporation ponds”). And Anthony Lane’s review of Spring Breakers contains a line that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker questions: “Who, you want to ask, can possibly be the magus behind this bacchanal – this forthright sucking of Popsicles, this spume of beer hosed across bare flesh, this char-grilled day?”

What, you may ask, are some of the other “great New Yorker questions” in my collection? Here are three:

To the palate of a traveling Martian – which would be more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye? – John McPhee, “The Encircled River – I” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977)

How radical can you be in a town where the locals shop in leopard-skin bikinis at 4P.M.? – Sasha Frere-Jones, “Critic’s Notebook: South For Winter” (The New Yorker, March 20, 2006)

But does the nation's capital of artisanal bitters really need another nostalgia-soaked outpost for herb muddling? - Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Maison Premiere” (The New Yorker, September 26, 2011)

June 25, 2012 Issue

What a pleasure to read this issue! From Hannah Goldfield’s delectable “Tables For Two” (“But the Pok Pok Affogato – tiny scoops of rich, creamy condensed-milk ice cream floating in black Vietnamese coffee, served with the type of crispy Chinese crullers usually eaten with congee for breakfast – is nothing short of heavenly”) to Richard Brody’s "Critic’s Notebook" celebration of one of my favorite films, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (“a signal work of first-person cinematic modernism”) to Tad Friend’s richly detailed profile of Ben Stiller (“Onscreen, Stiller’s face is an unmade bed of comic distress, but his daily aspect, in a black Ralph Lauren T-shirt, black Simon Miller jeans, and black Nikes, is ascetic and pensive”) to four immensely stimulating, satisfying critical pieces (James Wood’s “True Lives,” Jill Lepore’s “Obama, The Prequel,” Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Revelation Road,” and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Young and Gifted”) - the whole gorgeous assemblage is blazingly extraordinary!

May 14, 2012 Issue

The Innovator Issue is here, loaded with amazing items. I hover over it like one of those Nano Hummingbirds that Nick Paumgarten so vividly describes in his excellent “Here’s Looking At You” (“Keennon removed the Hummingbird’s dappled magnetic shell to show off the innards: tiny cables and pulleys and pushrods”), scanning for thisness. (Thisness is “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion”: James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008.) I find at least a half-dozen prime specimens: (1) the Kees van der Westen espresso machine at Thirstbaràvin, “as sleek and sexy as a motorcycle” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two”); (2) Pedrito Martinez thumping on the conga, “abandoning the subtle math he’d been sketching for almost a minute” (Sasha Frere-Jones, “Beat Happening”); (3) the “dozens of Puma drones in black caskets the size of guitar cases” on the shop floor at AeroVironment (Nick Paumgarten, “Here’s Looking At You”); (4) the young woman “with a lug-nut washer tattooed on her shoulder … daubing aquamarine paint on a cascade of small wooden dowels” (Andrea K. Scott, “A Million Little Pieces”; (5) Daniel Nocera’s ingenious “artificial leaf” – “a cheap, playing-card-size coated-silicon sheet that, when placed in a glass of tap water and exposed to sunlight, split the water into hydrogen and oxygen” (David Owen, “The Artificial Leaf”); (6) the “humongous metal lizards” that The Avengers’ Banner slings around the canyons of Manhattan (Anthony Lane, “Double Lives”). My favorite line of the whole, rich issue is Nick Paumgarten's delightful, surprising, quasi-surrealist, “As a visitor, you must present your passport and surrender your phone, which is a shame, because you come across skunk-work marvels that make you itch to text smartphone snapshots to gadget-geek friends.” Now there's a sentence that enacts the innovation it describes!

April 30, 2012 Issue

In order for me to enjoy Sasha Frere-Jones’s pop music reviews, I have to treat them as abstractions. The reason for this is that I cannot abide electronic music, which is what Frere-Jones mostly writes about. But Frere-Jones’s writing, considered as pure writing, is wonderful. His “Sound Machine,” in this week’s issue, contains a number of marvelous descriptions (e.g., “After a brief spray of notes, a white scrim fell, revealing the band members, each wearing a skintight bicycling outfit covered with luminescent white lines in a grid formation, as if they were being tracked on a green screen for later animation”). Frere-Jones says that Kraftwerk is “the Warhol of pop.” That analogy is valid, in my opinion, only if Kraftwerk’s electronic sound has an element that is equivalent to the painterly look of Warhol’s silk-screens. Yes, Warhol said he wanted to be a machine. But, as Peter Schjeldahl points out in his 2002 review of the Tate Modern’s Warhol retrospective, he also “wanted to be Matisse” ("Warhol In Bloom,"The New Yorker, March 11, 2002). Schjeldahl says, “Warhol was a supreme colorist who redid the world’s palette in tart, amazing hues such as cerise, citron, burnt orange, and apple-green.” It’s not clear to me from Frere-Jones’s review that Kraftwerk’s music has this Warholian aspect. In fact, his inspired description of the arpeggio in Kraftwerk’s “Computer World” as feeling “a bit like bubbles rising through mercury” points the other way - towards monochrome and monotone. 

April 19, 2010 Issue

Reading this incredibly rich “Journeys” issue is like gobbling up (say) five bowls of Haagen Dazs dulce de leche ice cream, one right after the other. Three of my favorite writers are present: Alec Wilkinson (“The Ice Balloon”), Peter Hessler (“Go West”), and Burkhard Bilger (“Towheads”). Lauren Collins, who is verging on becoming one of my favorites, is also represented (“Angle of Vision”). Elif Batuman contributes a delightful piece called “The Memory Kitchen.” And there are reviews by Jill Lepore, Dan Chiasson, Lauren Collins (showing signs of Updikean prolificness), and Peter Schjeldahl that I consider to be “must” reads, either because of the writing, as pure writing, or because of the subject matter. But before I discuss any of the foregoing, I’m going to single out some GOAT “details” that I found particularly delectable: Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Snoop’s sense of words landing is unerring”; Andrea Thompson’s “And then, finally, there’s a glimpse of the flirt behind the name: affogato, served ‘adult’”; and this beautifully rhythmed passage from a capsule review of Eileen Quinlan’s photographs – “still-lifes of mirrors and their reflections, mesh representation and abstraction so seamlessly that the distinctions dissolve.” I also like the Demetrios Psillos’s lime-black (with ravishing red dabs) illustration accompanying Hilton Als’s “Critic’s Notebook” column.

Okay! Those were just appetizers. Now for the main course. And what a feast it is! I’ll proceed in the order I followed when I read the magazine. First up is Batuman’s wonderfully titled "The Memory Kitchen." This is my first encounter with Batuman’s writing. Let me say instantly that I loved it – I loved the theme (to quote the tag line: “A chef recovers the foods that Turkey forgot”), I loved the opening lines (“To get to the restaurant Ciya Sofrasi from the old city of Istanbul, you take a twenty-minute ride to the Asian side of the Bosporus. On a cold Monday night last November, a friend persuaded me to make the trip with him”), I loved the visit to the turkey farm in Bozburan. Most of all, I loved the writing – this description of turkeys, for example: “There were seven or eight of them sitting in a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury.” I confess I worried a bit when early in the story, Batuman says, “Food, I should clarify, has never played a large role in my mental life.” I wondered, what kind of piece is this going to be when the writer does not relate to food sensuously. But it rapidly became apparent that I had nothing to worry about. Batuman’s piece may not get at the taste and texture of food the way (say) M. F. K. Fisher does, but what she lacks in sensuousness, she more than makes up for in her exploration of the workings of what she calls “collective food memory” – her true subject. For example, here’s her description of the mnemonical experience of eating kisir at Musa Dagdeviren’s restaurant Ciya Sofrasi: “The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make.” I could go on and on extolling the virtues of this great article. Suffice it to say, I’m hugely impressed with Batuman’s writing and I look forward to reading lots more of it in the magazine.

Another tremendous piece this week is Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision." I’m rapidly becoming a Collins devotee. (See my effusions a few weeks ago regarding her lovely "Check Mate.") What I like about her work is her unhesitating willingness to write in the “I” – to present her stories as personal experiences. “Angle of Vision” is an example par excellence of her subjective approach where she not only profiles paraglider flyer/photographer George Steinmetz; she actually straps on a paraglider (Steinmetz calls it a “flying lawn chair”) and flies it herself, reporting back on what it felt like: “In dreams – mine, at least – flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor.” “Angle of Vision” is a big, gorgeous multi-paneled mural of a story. Time jumps around. The opening section introduces us to Steinmetz on expedition in southeastern Algeria. Collins is there with him. The next piece describes the paraglider and how Steinmetz uses it to take aerial photographs. The third part (the Sefar flight) cuts back to Algeria and shows us Steinmetz and his crew attempting unsuccessfully to photograph an isolated plateau. The fourth part takes us back to the Sahara and talks about the Tuareg people. The fifth section takes us back to the expedition in Algeria and shows us Steinmetz discovering a prime camera subject – the high dunes of Tin Merzouga. Here’s Collins’s wonderful description of the dunes: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.” That “eskered spines” is inspired! The sixth part is a biographic sketch of Steinmetz and an overview of his photographic accomplishments. The seventh section takes us to Steinmetz’s home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where Collins joins him and they review some of Steinmetz’s photos. Collins’s description of Steinmetz’s aerial shot of the fortified village of Beni Isguen is worth quoting: “Captured at sunrise, in warm light, the houses were the color of seashells. At sunset, they were bleached out, shards of bone. Their roofs, invisible from the street, had been painted in aquas and turquoises, so that from above, they looked like swimming pools.” The eighth and final section of “Angle of Vision” is a mini-history of flying. It concludes memorably with Collins’s own twenty-second paraglider flight.

The foregoing is my separation of Collins’s story into its constituent parts. As she’s written it, there’s no sectioning, no numbering; the whole thing flows seamlessly from the first scene to the last. I’ve taken time to describe its structure because I like how it starts out by plunging us directly into action, into Steinmetz’s desert expedition. Only after we’re caught up in Steinmetz’s struggles in the desert, do we receive the background facts about him, his work, his flying machine, etc. The classic template for this type of narrative structure is, of course, John McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia” (The New Yorker, April 28, 1973). See also McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977). I wonder if Collins has used this particular structure in any of her previous pieces. I’ll have to check.

And with that, I’m going to have to quit for now. There are so many other aspects of this amazingly good issue that I would like to discuss if time permitted, chief amongst which is Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads." I will conclude for now by saying that this particular “Journeys” issue is one of the best editions of the magazine I’ve read in a long time. It’s right up there with the September 5, 2005 “The Food Issue” – my all-time favorite New Yorker. That’s the one that contains, among other succulent items, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.” Maybe someday, I’ll do a retrospective review of that issue and try to put in words why I think it’s so great.