August 17, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. My eyes devour the thick luscious texture of Wayne Thiebaud’s “Two Scoops” – certainly my choice for best cover of the year (so far).

2. My favorite part of Peter Hessler’s absorbing “How China Controlled the Virus” is the first section in which he describes trailing a robot on his bicycle. Here’s a sample:

Now I waited with the robot, looking around at the silent dormitories. Finally, three students approached from different directions, masked and holding cell phones. Each of them entered a code on a touch screen at the back of the robot, and a compartment popped open, revealing a package inside.

3. Pick of the Issue is Jon Lee Anderson’s “Wanderlust,” an account of his 1978 trip to Nunivak, Alaska, to collect musk-ox wool (qiviut). Here’s his description of his arrival on the island:

The only other passengers were residents returning from a wedding on the mainland. When we landed, they offered me a lift into Mekoryuk, so I climbed into the back of their pickup truck and rode on a dirt track into town.

Anderson hikes across Nunivak’s interior (tundra, muskeg, lakes) to a place called Musk Ox Hill; shoots salmon (“A minute later, a big pink salmon—a humpy,’ they called it—poked its bulging back and head from the water, and I pulled the trigger. The fish thrashed and then turned dead on its side. When I pulled it from the water, I saw that my lucky shot had hit it cleanly in the head”); encounters musk oxen:

As I made my way toward them, one of the musk oxen, a hulking bull, appeared in my path. He was clearly scouting for trouble, and though he couldn’t see me or smell me, he’d heard me, and he was taking off fast back toward the others. I moved cautiously, hopping from tussock to tussock, keeping myself downwind of the bull. By the time I was sixty feet from the group, I was close enough to see their sunstruck hair, the qiviut sweeping off their massive shoulders and into the wind. I waited, hoping that they’d move, so that I could check their resting spot. To rouse them, I attempted some birdcalls: one that I hoped would sound like a kookaburra, and one like an owl. The oxen lay there, oblivious. A stork on a nearby slope strutted about scornfully.

The piece reminded me of my own Arctic travels. I enjoyed it immensely.

Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman

Wayne Thiebaud, "Nine Jelly Apples" (1964)

A special shout-out to Johanna Fateman for her “Goings On About Town: Art: Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman” (The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2018), which begins, “Oil paint lends itself to Thiebaud’s canvases like buttercream to cake, and his works on paper are every bit as delectable.” That’s a great opener, perfectly evoking the thick luscious texture of Thiebaud’s iconic cakes, pies, and ice-cream cones. He’s the creator of at least eight New Yorker “Food Issue” covers, including the superb “Food Bowls” for the September 5, 2005 issue – my choice for the best single New Yorker of the last twenty years. It contains, among other gems, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.” 

   

Fateman’s note tells of a new exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, titled “Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” exploring Thiebaud’s works on paper, from quick sketches to pastels, watercolors, and charcoal drawings. Some of these items are on display at the Morgan’s website, including the deliciously colored “Nine Jelly Apples” (1964) shown above.  

November 10, 2014 Issue

There are four dandy “Talk” stories in this week’s issue: Tad Friend’s "Rembrandt Lighting," Ian Parker’s "Oldies But Goodies," Ian Frazier’s "Tracks," and Mark Singer’s "Showrunning." Friend’s piece is about a visit with the movie director Dan Gilroy, at the Steven Kasher Gallery, in Chelsea, as he sifts through a box of Weegee photographs from the forties. Gilroy uses the collection “to explain how Weegee – connoisseur of the blood-spattered corpse – had inspired his new film, Nightcrawler, about a feral loner who roams Los Angeles, filming scenes of mayhem for the local news.” Friend says Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss, with a sepulchral face and milky-blue eyes.” The story brims with pungent details. At one point, Gilroy looks at the circular stamp (“Credit Photo by Weegee”) on one of the photos and says, “He used a Speed Graphic camera, had a ten-foot focus, and shot with flash to create what he called Rembrandt lighting.” I delight in the way this piece combines so many seemingly incongruous elements – “a human coyote who comes down from the hills to feed,” “a wild-eyed woman resisting being frog-marched by a man in a trenchcoat,” “Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh and Lady Decies, imperious in white furs,” the Metropolitan Opera, a horrific car accident, Marilyn Monroe – in such a concentrated frame. It’s like a surreal, noir prose poem.

Ian Parker’s “Oldies But Goodies” wonderfully describes an encounter with the ninety-three-year-old painter Wayne Thiebaud in an inspired setting – a table at Lady M, “on East Seventy-eighth Street, a minimally decorated boutique-y place selling ‘confectionary delights.’ ’’ The setting is inspired because Thiebaud is famous for his “confections” paintings. Although Parker doesn’t say so, Thiebaud also happens to be the creator of some of the New Yorker’s yummiest “Food Issue” covers. A couple of lines in the piece made me smile: “As Thiebaud put it, there are still days that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie”; “I was interested in the Americanism of gumball machines.” And there’s this arresting sentence, incorporating a Thiebaud quotation: “He also painted crudités, fanned out on a plate, such as ‘you see over and over at everything you go to, that same stuff, in a circle – a Kenneth Noland abstraction.’ ” For me, the best part of “Oldies But Goodies” is the ending, when Parker attentively picks up on a nearby conversation: “At the counter, a woman used the tone of someone choosing between careers to ask for help deciding between a strawberry cake and a banana cake. ‘It depends on whether you like strawberries or bananas,’ the sales assistant replied.” I like this ending because it shows a virtuoso Talk writer artfully using a seemingly stray bit of reality to help make his story.

Ian Frazier's “Tracks” tells about a plan to convert a three-and-a-half-mile section of abandoned railroad tracks in central Queens into a linear park called the QueensWay. It takes the reader on a tour of the site in the company of three proponents of the project (Andrea Crawford, Marc Matsil, and Andy Stone) and a “visitor” (stand-in for Frazier, who in accordance with Talk tradition, refrains from using “I”). One of the hallmarks of Frazier’s style is his superb urban nature description, and in this piece he notes a place “where now the trunk of a large tree grew over a rusted rail like a potbelly over a belt.” Another distinctive feature of Frazier’s writing is the list. In “Tracks” he lists the names of businesses near or under the elevated section of railway at the QueensWay’s southern end: “RC Forklift Co., R & H Industrial Fabricators, Punjabi Brothers Auto Repair, Arco Electrical Contractors, United Propane, Hart Truck Refrigeration, 3 Kings Collision.” There’s poetry in those names! My favorite part of “Tracks” is when, late in the afternoon, after Crawford, Matsil and Stone leave the site, Frazier “found himself walking there alone.” This, to me, is such a Frazierian thing to do – to go back, explore the tracks again by himself, see what impressions he might gather. Sure enough, his contemplation of  “the vaulted spaces beneath the elevated tracks” yields this beautiful detail: “Slabs of rusted corrugated iron wall off the spaces, coils of barbed wire discourage burglars, and curbside ailanthus trees shoot upward until they meet the track overhang, which causes them to curl out over the street.”

Like Frazier, Mark Singer has been writing Talk stories since 1974. He, too, is a master of the form. His Mr. Personality (1989), one of the most beautiful collections of New Yorker writing ever published, contains twenty-five Talk pieces, including such classics as “Yabba-Yabba, Doodle-Doodle” (in which Mr. Blatford memorably says, “You get your change from a change machine, put your dog in the Doggie Washer, do your yabba-yabba, doodle-doodle – you know, whatever you do while you’re waiting in a Laundromat – and then go home with a clean dog”) and “Pigeon Mumblers” (“Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer’s irascible moods say that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably hatch a baseball”). Singer’s “Showrunning,” in this week’s issue, is about Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist and executive director of the TV series Alpha House. Trudeau, sitting at a table in the “imprecisely named Excellent Dumpling House,” on Lafayette Street, after a day of jury duty, discusses “the difference between spending days alone drawing and being an executive producer responsible for a cast and crew of a hundred and twenty people and one bloodhound (Gil John Bigg’s look-alike best friend).” He tells about a theatre group he formed when he was seven years old:

I just rounded up all the neighborhood kids, and we put on these productions in our basement. I think even then I understood that I really didn’t have the performance gene. But I did have the impresario gene. I wrote the plays, I wrote the music, I did the scenery, I made the tickets, I directed, I manned the light board. For one of my birthdays, I asked for a curtain. My mother got red curtains that divided the basement in half. We packed the basement. There were some bunk beds down there. We turned those into balconies.

That last bit about turning the bunk beds into balconies made me smile.

So there you have it – four great Talk pieces by four great Talk writers. Proof, if proof is needed, that the Talk of the Town story, invented eighty-nine years ago by Harold Ross, is still vibrant.

November 4, 2013 Issue

This week’s issue – The Food Issue – brims with wonderful, sensual, tactile writing, e.g., “the cymbal clang of heat” that occurs when a flake of Trinidad Scorpion Butch T chili pepper hits the tongue (Lauren Collins, “Fire-Eaters”); Spanish gooseneck barnacles that look like “tiny dinosaur claws” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Toro”); air that is “warm and moist and pungent with the scent of soured milk, like the cleavage of a nursing mother on a warm day” (Rebecca Mead, “Just Add Sugar”); “the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I’m-on-the-way smell of the rising loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bred smell that comes from the oven as it bakes” (Adam Gopnik, “Bread and Women”); “air of rosemary so delicate and light that it’s almost invisible; you know it’s there by the burst of flavor on your tongue” (Jane Kramer, “Post-Modena”); “a dish of raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful” that – “quiver on quiver on quiver – was almost impossible to swallow, but it rewarded you with a briny, primal rush” (Dana Goodyear, “Beastly Appetites”).

That “quiver on quiver on quiver” is inspired!

All five pieces are admirable for the subjective, experiential approach their authors take to their material. Collins, Mead, Gopnik, Goodyear, and Kramer not only observe; they participate. Here, for example, is Collins, sampling one of the “superhots” she describes, a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T (no less):

Taylor took a knife and whittled off a flake no larger than a clove. I put it in my mouth and chewed. The capsaicin hit loud and fast, a cymbal clang of heat. My face flushed. My eyes glassed over and I started pacing the kitchen, as though I could walk off the burn. It took twenty minutes and a can of Dr Pepper to banish the sensation of having sort of tinnitus of the mouth.

Of the five features, I think my favorite is Gopnik’s “Bread and Women.” It’s the most richly sensuous (e.g., a fresh-baked loaf of his wife’s bread is “braided like the blonde hair of a Swedish child”; broissants “crumble, with a spray of soft crumbs, under the lightest touch”; “real bagels, as produced in the Montreal bakeries, with a large hole, a bright sesame glow, and a sweet, firm bite”).

My least favorite is Goodyear’s “Beastly Appetite.” Reading about eating cod sperm, cut-in-half live lobster, horse tartare, scorpions on toast, yak sausage, and other “new things” is almost gag-inducing. I couldn’t read it fast enough and be done with it. Gross!

And – one more cavil - please, New Yorker, next year, return to using Wayne Thiebaud for The Food Issue cover. Ivan Brunetti’s liney, textureless, Pac-Man-like cartoon is an anemic substitute for Thiebaud’s gorgeous, creamy, thick-painted creations. (Googling Thiebaud’s name, I see he’s age 92; perhaps he’s no longer painting? But, as a replacement, Brunetti is so obviously not the answer. Only sensualists need apply. Maybe Maira Kalman? See the scrumptious bowl of tomato bisque soup in her The Principles of Uncertainty).

Retrospective Review: The Food Issue, September 5, 2005

To sharpen my taste buds for the feast that The New Yorker’s Food Issue is serving up next week, I revisited what is, for me, the greatest Food Issue of them all – the September 5, 2005 issue (with Wayne Thiebaud’s delectable, painterly “Food Bowls” on the cover), containing, among other succulent items, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.”

Thurman’s piece is about Japan’s artisanal-tofu masters. She says, “When a tofu master offers you a slice of bean curd he has just unmolded, he is inviting you to partake, insofar as a stranger can, of what it means to be Japanese.” “Night Kitchens” brims with superbly noticed details – “the accoutrements – even the sink – are handmade of cedar,” “the stove is a slab of lava,” “adobe walls of clay mixed with rice straw are sheathed in bamboo,” “the ceiling is tented in thatch,” “the floor is cobbled with sea stones,” “a ginkgo counter with ten seats,” “parchment walls decorated in drippy ink by an inebriated artist,” “pottery on which breakfast is served – rust-and-ash-colored vessels with a dark under-glaze and a primal beauty,” “an ivory-colored attar of bean curd that arrives on a turquoise plate, with a coral drop of sea-urchin (uni) purée.” My favorite sentence in the piece is the simple, sensuous, “The windows of the shed were open, and the sea breeze carried a scent of rain, wildflowers, and algae.” “Night Kitchens” is included in Thurman’s splendid Cleopatra’s Nose (2007).

Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears” is about arboreal archeology – “the pursuit and recovery of old varieties of fruit”– as practiced by Umbrian agronomist, Isabella Dalla Ragione. Of its many pleasures – a trip to a Perugian mountain valley to visit an old pear tree (“Its black bark had deep crevices, and the trunk and lower branches were covered with scabrous white lichen”), a visit to a villa near Florence to view the fruit paintings of Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648-1729), attendance at a fruit show staged by Dalla Ragione in an old palazzo (“The seeds rattled inside some of the apples, like natural castanets”) - the most piquant is Seabrook’s sketch of Dalla Ragione’s eighty-four-year-old father, Livio, the “genius loci” of the Dalla Ragione orchard (“Livio has a long white fringe of hair around his bald, speckled. Shakespearian dome, and he has the hopeful expression that very old men get in their eyes. He is gruff and blustery, and Isabella treats him as she does the fruit trees – tenderly but firm”). My favorite sentence in “Renaissance Pears” is a description of the flavor of one of Livio’s winter pears: “The taste was so clean – not buttery, which is the standard by which the commercial pear is bred – that it was almost metallic.” Seabrook is like the Medici still-life painters he mentions in his piece - a wonderfully precise, sensuous describer of fruit: see also his excellent "Crunch" in last year’s Food Issue, and his brilliant “The Fruit Detective” (in Flash of Genius, 2008).

Bilger’s “The Egg Men” is about Las Vegas short-order cooks. I’ve extolled its abundant pleasures before (see my post "Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger's 'The Egg Men,'" January 30, 2011). I think it’s destined to be a New Yorker classic, ranking with such masterpieces as John McPhee’s “Atchafalaya,” Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” and Arthur Lubow’s “This Vodka Has Legs.” I’m pleased to see that Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker’s new Archive Editor, recently named it one of his favorites ("Staff Favorites From The Archive," “Double Take,” newyorker.com, November 26, 2012). Suffice it to say here, it’s one of my favorites, too.

All three of these pieces are gloriously subjective. Pursuit of the story is part of the narrative: “So at five o’clock one morning, I rolled off my futon in a lovely old ryokan, the Yoyokaku, near the beach in Karatsu, ready for research” (Thurman); “Earlier this summer, I accompanied Isabella on a trip to visit the old pear tree” (Seabrook); “On early mornings, well before the first rush, Gutstein would let me work at the over-easy station for an hour or two” (Bilger). It’s one of the ingredients I’ll be looking for when I’m devouring next week’s Food Issue. I can hardly wait to get started. 

November 21, 2011 Issue

Mmm, my favorite themed New Yorker, The Food Issue, is here. I love the Wayne Thiebaud “Turkey Dinner” cover. Thiebaud lays on the paint in such delicious thick strokes that I almost want to eat it. John Seabrook’s piece about the SweeTango apple (“Crunch”) is excellent. I particularly liked its last paragraph:

I bought as many SweeTangos as I could carry, walked out onto Broadway, and stood on the sidewalk with an apple in my hand, my fingers not quite encircling its girth, feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm. I stared at the skin, and the lenticels gazed indifferently back at me, as I contemplated man’s long and sometimes discordant relationship with this fruit. Then I set my teeth on its skin, and crunched.

That “feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm” is inspired!

Lauren Collins’s “The King’s Meal” brims with inspired lines (e.g., “‘The only way you can eat like a king is to eat like a king,’ Meltonville had said, liberating a gleaming ladle , part of Hampton Court’s collection, from its bubble-wrap cocoon”).

I smiled and chuckled my way through Calvin Trillin’s wonderful “My Repertoire.” At one point, I read a passage out loud to my daughter, and we both laughed. Here’s the passage:

One of my sons-in-law was not crazy about my salmon hash – I won’t say which one; that sort of thing will come out in good time at the reading of the will – but just about everybody else seemed to like it.

I like the boots that René Redzepi is wearing in the vivid photo by Alfredo Cáliz that illustrates Jane Kramer’s superb “The Food At Our Feet.” When I say “superb,” I’m referring to the second half of the piece. The first part, concerning Kramer’s preparation for her foraging excursion with Redzepi, didn’t grab me. It contains too much information about her “distinguished” friends and their bourgeois surroundings. But at the point where Kramer writes, “I met Redzepi at Noma early the following afternoon,” her piece really takes off. I savored Kramer’s beautiful long lines. For example:

But, at the moment, the food he cherishes is cabbage – from the big, pale cabbages that he slices and steams, at home, in a knob of butter and a half inch of his wife’s leftover tea, to the tiny, vividly green-leaved wild cabbages that sit in pots, basking in ultraviolet light, on a steel counter in the middle of one of Noma’s upstairs kitchens, waiting for the day they’re ready to be wrapped with their stems around a sliver of pike perch and served to customers on a beautiful stoneware plate, between a green verbena sauce and a butter-and-fish-bone foam.

Kelefa Sanneh's "Sacred Grounds" is factually interesting. But in terms of style, it suffers from the same weakness that afflicts all his pieces - an impersonal, almost godlike objectivity that leaves me cold. I much prefer the subjective approach in which the writer establishes his or her presence in the material.