November 11, 2019 Issue

Three pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely: Johanna Fateman's “Goings On About Town: Art: Howardena Pindell”; Nick Paumgarten’s “The Symptoms”; and Dan Chiasson’s “Make It Old.” 

Fateman’s note contains a wonderful description of Howardena Pindell’s paintings:

Punctuating the surfaces of these handsome abstractions are seams—fissures, really—bridged by stitches resembling little teeth, and fragments of photographs and postcards. They lend the paint-toughened surfaces a pieced-together fragility and form their swirling and fanning interior structures. The found imagery, emerging from dense areas of acrylic color, includes disembodied hands, a frog, and a statue of Shiva. Neither random nor coherent, the fragments seem to represent the impressionistic puzzle pieces of partial recollection, which the compositions dynamically integrate into a meaningfully illogical whole.

Paumgarten, in his “The Symptoms,” writes about three concussions he suffered playing “beer league” hockey. Here’s his description of the first one:

I didn’t lose consciousness, or even my footing. When it was over, I skated away, with a ludicrous grin but without every item of my equipment or all of my wits. I had a sudden headache and a sense already of an alteration in the fabric of the world beyond the confines of my skull. Teammates leered at me. Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks. The referee bent to report the infractions to the timekeeper, through a slot in the glass. In the penalty box, I fought the urge to lie down.

That “Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks” is excellent.

Chiasson’s piece reviews Charles Wright’s new collection Oblivion Banjo. Chiasson says of Wright’s poetry, 

Within the repetitive cycles of his verse we find the loveliest surprises: an afternoon in the cupola at Emily Dickinson’s house, the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, the “sizzle like E.T.’s finger,” the “afternoon undervoices” of kids playing red rover.

Adorning the piece is a delightful portrait of Wright by Tom Bachtell, who for many years illustrated “Goings On About Town.” It’s great to see him back in the magazine. 

Tom Bachtell, "Charles Wright"

Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #9 "Swarm"

Tom Bachtell's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Swarm"

Nick Paumgarten has written dozens of “Talk of the Town” stories, several of them masterpieces of the genre, including “Little Helper” (“Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day”); “Request Line” (“Still, voices rose from the audience, barking requests, and the shushing kicked up, like a sudden breeze”); “Up and Away” (“It was a gorgeous, seemingly low-particle evening. You could clearly see both Manhattan and Philadelphia, and miles of farmland, forest, and sprawl”); and “Bong Show” (One object widely admired by the other lampworkers was a pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass”). 

My favorite is “Swarm” (January 24, 2011), a visit with the Dewan brothers in New Rochelle, inventors of an electronic synthesizer called the Swarmatron. Paumgarten writes, “The Swarmatron, in the center of the room, had a pitch ribbon and a swarm ribbon, and an array of unlabelled knobs and switches, which Brian began manipulating in a way that produced something that your own first cousin once removed might recognize as music.” 

But the part I love about “Swarm” isn’t about the Swarmatron; it’s about the bassoon. Paumgarten begins his piece with a consideration of how the bassoon got its name:

It is hard to think of a musical instrument that doesn’t have a great name. Tuba, oboe, clarinet. The word “bassoon” comes from Pleury de Basseau, a vice-admiral in the French Royal Navy who was stationed aboard a paddle frigate off the German colony of Kamerun. Basseau ordered his crew to hollow out the ship’s bowsprit and take turns playing Schubert lieder on it in a flowery Francophonic style that he hoped would annoy the German spies hidden in nearby shrimp boats. The Germans called this sound schwachsinnige Musik, but the vice-admiral’s name for it—“bassoon”—was the one that stuck.

All very interesting. But then, in the next paragraph, Paumgarten pulls a surprise:

Actually, no. “Bassoon” is merely “basso” (Italian for “bass”) with an augmentative suffix. The names of most instruments arise out of the sounds they produce or the feature that produces those sounds. So what about the Swarmatron? 

“Swarm” ’s transition (with reverse pivot) from bassoon to Swarmatron is one of Paumgarten’s coolest moves. The whole piece is cool – one of Paumgarten’s best.

Best of 2018: Illustrations

Bendik Kaltenborn, illustration for Andrew Marantz's "Friends in High Places"

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2018:

1. Bendik Kaltenborn, illustration for Andrew Marantz’s “Friends in High Places” (January 9, 2018).

2. Chris Gash, illustration for Alexandra Schwartz’s “Margin of Error” (October 29, 2018).

3. Icinori, illustration for Andrea K. Scott’s “Goings On About Town: In the Museums” (July 2, 2018).

4. Jeff Östberg, illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Extralegal Actions” (September 17, 2018)

5. Tom Bachtell, illustration for Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16, 2018).

6. João Fazenda, illustration for Michael Schulman’s “Grasshopper” (October 15, 2018).

7. Jorge Colombo, illustration for Neima Jahromi’s “Bar Tab: Marie’s Crisis” (May 7, 2018).

8. Roman Muradov, illustration for Russell Platt’s “Goings On About Town: Rites of Spring” (April 2, 2018).

9. Paul Rogers, illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Courting Disaster” (January 15, 2018).

10. Richard McGuire, illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Sounds of Music” (August 27, 2018).

11. Ariel Davis, illustration for Steve Smith's "Goings On About Town: Gesamtkunstwerk" (October 22, 2018)



12. Ben Kirchner, illustration for Ian Frazier's "Airborne" (February 5, 2018)

July 23, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. David S. Allee’s radiant “Naumburg Orchestral Concerts” night shot for “Goings On About Town” is transfixing. And what makes it transfixing is that raccoon sitting in a tree fork, looking at Allee as he takes the picture. Allee is a superb photographer. I admired his “Domino Sugar Factory” series immensely: see Jessie Wender, “Inside the Domino Sugar Factory,” newyorker.com, May 19, 2014.

David S. Allee, "Naumburg Orchestral Concerts" (2018)

2. And let’s give a huzzah for Neima Jahromi’s excellent “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” containing this sparkling line: “On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut.”

  

3. “Talk of the Town” ’s new illustrator, João Fazenda, debuts this week with three images, including a dandy double portrait of Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short. It’s too early to say whether Fazenda is as good as Tom Bachtell. Bachtell is a master. He illustrated “Talk” for over twenty years. I’m going to miss him.

João Fazenda, "Catherine O'Hara and Martin Short" (2018)

4. The passage in Sam Wasson’s Talk story “Yes, And” in which Eugene Levy impersonates a “lugubrious rabbi” and says, “What a place to lose a cow,” made me laugh. The whole piece is terrific. It’s spurred my interest in Wasson’s writing. I think I’ll take a look at his Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2011).

5. I found David Remnick’s “Left Wing of the Possible” a refreshing change from the magazine’s usual Trump-bashing. Yes, the bastard deserves it. But it’s also important to spotlight politicians who offer a positive alternative to him. That’s what Remnick does in his absorbing piece, profiling twenty-eight-year-old democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, Remnick says, is “almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.” In the Democratic primary, she soundly defeated the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, on a platform of “Medicare for all, a tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.” I like the cut of her jib. I hope she wins.

6. I’ve previously commented on the connection between “journey” and “journalism.” They both share the same sematic root, “jour,” which is French for “day” – a day’s travel, the record of a day’s experience. But the connection is more than just sematic. The best journalism, for me, involves travel – an excursion of some sort. Such a piece is Jiayang Fan’s “Delivering Modernity,” a report on how Chinese tech companies like JD.com are transforming rural China. Fan visits a JD depot in Xinhuang, in the far west of Hunan Province.  She accompanies a JD courier as he makes deliveries to nearby villages (“We got stuck behind a truckload of squealing pigs whose rickety pen threatened to spill them onto our windshield”), visits a restaurant in Xinhuang (“I asked the proprietor, an aproned woman in her forties, if there was a menu, and she nodded, moving to the back of the room, past baskets of unwashed leafy vegetables. She yanked open a refrigerator door to display plastic containers of pig intestines, ears, and other offal. A pig’s head rolled slightly on the bottom shelf”), visits JD headquarters in Beijing (“Outside, in the parking lot, the company tests its fleet of self-driving cars”), talks with JD’s founder and C.E.O., Liu Qiangdong (“Fashion is among the company’s fastest-growing areas, and when Liu extended his hand I glimpsed a watch by Audemars Piguet, which recently partnered with JD to launch its first online boutique”), watches a drone arrive at a JD landing pad (“As it drew closer, the first thing I could make out was a red box under the belly of the drone. A minute later, I saw three spinning propellers, which seemed improbably small for the size of their load, like the wings of a bumblebee”), visits a training center for drone pilots (“The screens displayed animations of quadcopters that looked vaguely drunk as they wove through the sky toward landing pads”), and accompanies a “white-glove courier” on his rounds (“Shang makes his deliveries in a small electric car painted with bursts of JD red”). Drones, squealing pigs, expensive watches, self-driving cars, white-glove couriers – just some of the ingredients of Fan’s absorbing piece. I enjoyed it enormously. 

7. John Lanchester is a brilliant critical writer. I enjoy reading his arguments. In his “Doesn’t Add Up,” he takes on three recent economics books, contending that they “overreach,” i.e., extend their theories further than they usefully go. For example, he says of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, “There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.” I relish Lanchester’s succinctness (e.g., “Our motives are often not what they seem: true. This explains everything: not true”). “Doesn’t Add Up” shows him in bracingly sharp form. 

Best of 2017: Illustrations

Bendik Kaltenborn, "RJD2" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2017:

1. Bendik Kaltenborn’s “RJD2,” for Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: New Routes” (January 9, 2017).

2. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Bill Knott,” for Dan Chiasson’s “The Fugitive” (April 3, 2017).

3. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Fernando Pessoa,” for Adam Kirsch’s “Voices from the Void” (September 4, 2017).

4. Edward Sorel’s “Sketchbook: Whack Jobs” (September 11, 2017).

5. Andrea Ventura’s “Jenny Erpenbeck,” for James Wood’s “Strangers Among Us” (September 25, 2017).

6. Bob Staake’s “Philip Kerr,” for Jane Kramer’s “The Plot Thickens” (July 10 & 17, 2017).

7. Tom Bachtell’s “Michel Houellebecq,” for Lauren Collins’ “Sideline” (June 19, 2017).

8. Vincent Mahé’s “The Tank,” for Alex Ross’s “Tank Music” (July 24, 2017).

9. Gizem Vural’s “L. A. Rhapsody,” for Alex Ross’s “Classical Music: L. A. Rhapsody” (March 20, 2017).

10. Byron Eggenschwiler’s “The Dead,” for Hilton Als’s “Memento Mori” (December 4, 2017).