August 7, 2023 Issue

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

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

June 26, 2023 Issue

Another week, another great jazz note by Steve Futterman. This one is on the George Cables Trio, performing at the Village Vanguard. Futterman says, “With many of his peers gone, Cables is among the last of a gifted generation, still panning gold from his keyboard.” He calls Cables “a genuine national treasure.” I agree. If I lived in NYC, I’d go hear him. And if Cables asked for requests from the audience, (unlikely, but you never know), I’d ask for “In Your Own Sweet Way,” a superb Dave Brubeck song that Cables interprets sublimely on his 1998 album “Bluesology.” 

June 19, 2023 Issue

I was reading Steve Futterman’s “Goings On About Town” note on Vision Festival (“heartily committed to free jazz”), in this week’s issue, when the name Dave Burrell leaped out at me. Futterman identifies Burrell as one of the "luminaries" of the free jazz genre. I didn’t know that. I know Burrell for his wonderful, passionate, lyrical, melodic rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” on his 1978 album of the same name. It’s my favorite version of that superb song. It’s at the opposite end of the spectrum from free jazz. I’m not arguing that Burrell isn’t a free jazz master. But I am submitting that he’s also an exquisite interpreter of at least one great jazz standard – Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”  

June 20, 2022 Issue

The only piece in this week's issue that appeals to me is Steve Futterman’s delightful “Goings On About Town” note on jazz pianist Alan Broadbent:

The pianist Alan Broadbent is likely known to a wider audience as the astute arranger who helped finesse popular recordings by Natalie Cole and Diana Krall. But he was also the not-so-secret weapon behind Charlie Haden’s “Quartet West,” providing both bopping and rhapsodic keyboard work and offering such romantic, noir-inspired originals as “Hello My Lovely” and “Lady in the Lake.” A trio that joins him with the bassist Don Falzone and the hypersensitive drummer Billy Mintz is a textbook vehicle for Broadbent to display his multifarious gifts as an improviser.

Postscript: Please, no more blurry photos by Ioulex. Looking at them is like looking through a lens smeared with butter. Seek clarity and sharpness, e.g., that extraordinary black-and-white image of the horse by Vanessa Winship, illustrating André Alexis’s short story “Houyhnhnn.”

Photo by Vanessa Winship

October 4, 2021 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. A special shout-out to Steve Futterman for alerting me to the Bill Charlap Trio’s upcoming album “Street of Dreams.” I love this trio’s work. I have all its albums. Futterman writes, 

The pianist Bill Charlap, united as a working unit with the bassist Peter Washington and the drummer Kenny Washington for nearly a quarter century, has pulled off a very neat hat trick. By blending two unrelated strains of popular piano-trio traditions—the spit-and-polish drive of Oscar Peterson and the probing lyricism of Bill Evans—the Charlap triumvirate has established its own distinct voice, smoothly morphing into the premier mainstream jazz-piano trifecta. [“Goings On About Town: Music: Bill Charlap Trio”]

2. I relish this line in James Wood’s excellent “Connect the Dots”:

Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as “the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,” or this taut description of an Idaho winter: “Icicles fang the eaves.”

3. Alexandra Schwartz’s absorbing “Tell Me What You Want” contains this wonderful quote from Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Right to Sex”: 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after, or love.

I know exactly what she means.

October 5, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Steve Futterman, in his “Goings On About Town” review of Diana Krall’s new album This Dream of You, praises Krall’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s wonderful “How Deep Is the Ocean,” calling it “bravely refashioned.” Well, it’s certainly refashioned, but not in a good way. Krall practically destroys it, slowing it to a walk, draining it of its lyricism. Krall, of all people, should know better. She swung this tune beautifully on her 1997 Love Scenes.

2. Doreen St. Félix, in her “Not Quite America,” says of Luca Guadagnino’s HBO drama “We Are Who We Are,” “The attention to young bodies feels almost dangerous.” I agree. The series thrums with sex. I’ve been enjoying it immensely. 

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”). 

November 26, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Antony Huchette's snowy illustration for “Goings On About Town” ’s “Celebrating the Holidays” is delightful.

Antony Huchette, "Celebrating the Holidays" (2018)

2. Also in GOAT, Steve Futterman’s note on Carol Sloane at Birdland caught my eye, reminding me of Whitney Balliett’s 1987 Sloane profile, in which he describes her singing as “conversation put to music” (“Carol Sloane and Julie Wilson,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1987).

3. Frédéric Bazille’s gorgeous “Young Woman with Peonies” (1870), illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Galleries: ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today’ ” helps offset Janet Malcolm’s startling opinion, expressed in her recent “Six Glimpses of the Past,” that open peonies are “blowsy and ugly.”

Frédéric Bazille, "Young Woman with Peonies" (1870)

4. Peter Schjeldahl’s GOAT note on Dike Blair is a beauty, and is worth quoting in full:

Blair has been painting coolly beautiful little still-lifes of ordinary things in ordinary places for so long that, by now, they seem almost to paint themselves, for their own enjoyment. A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life.

5. Richard Brody reprises his brilliant capsule review of Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” in this week’s “Goings On About Town,” and why not? It’s one of his best pieces. The last line is sublime: 

And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols to conjure the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key.

6. Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “Degrees of Freedom” tells about an extraordinary neuroscientific experiment in which a paralyzed woman’s brain is directly connected to a robotic arm. Khatchadourian is a superb describer of complex technological devices and procedures. His description of the implanting of the microelectrodes in the woman’s brain is unforgettable. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” is every bit the equal of his great “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely.