Mid-Year Top Ten (2019)

Katy Grannan, illustration for Ian Frazier's "Pumper's Corner"

It’s time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Reporting

1. Ian Frazier, “Pumper’s Corner,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. “The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,” Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there”).

2. Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Range,” February 11, 2019 (“The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “The Descent of Man,” April 29, 2019 (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”).

4. James Lasdun, “Glow,” April 29, 2019 (“A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain”).

5. Douglas Preston, “The Day the Earth Died,” April 8, 2019 (When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay open in front of us: a desolate hump of gray, cracked earth, about the size of two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece of the moon had dropped there. One side of the deposit was cut through by a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the other ended in a low escarpment. The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. A couple of two-by-fours, along with various digging tools and some metal pipe for taking core samples, leaned against the far side of the hole. As we strolled around the site, I noticed on DePalma’s belt a long fixed-blade knife and a sheathed bayonet—a Second World War relic that his uncle gave him when he was twelve, he said”)

6. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“Flying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them. Beyond was open water or patchy marsh. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and are now rectilinear lakes. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below”).

7. Rivka Galchen, “The Eighth Continent,” May 6, 2019 (“When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns, seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at that moment, the rocket seems sentient, intentional”).

8. Joshua Rothman, “What Lies Beneath,” March 25, 2019 (“Sacks bent down and selected another strip of linen. Using his brush, he glued it to the wooden shingle, half obscuring its red eyes. The fabric flowed vertically down the canvas. Leaning in, he used his fingers to adjust its path, creating ridges and folds so that it would be open to oxygen. Then, from a nearby worktable, he retrieved a box of kitchen matches. He struck one of them and set fire to the linen. The flames rippled upward, serpentine. He watched them climb, then, after a few seconds, used his brush to snuff them out. Some of the linen was gone. We stood looking at the materials, colored by smoke, now joined by a scar”).

9. John Seabrook, “Machine Hands,” April 15, 2019 (“It was only at the very end of the eight-second window that the Pitzer wheel dropped down and—in a blur of motion that recalled Doctor Octopus, the Spider-Man villain, attacking one of his victims—the claws grabbed and picked the ripe berries in a fraction of a second, pop-pop-pop, and deposited them, apparently unbruised, on a shelf at the top of the machine’s chassis. Then the robots moved on to the next plant in that row”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “The Perfect Paint,” March 18, 2019 (“When I was visiting, a batch of Hague Blue was being stirred to completion. The enormous vat of paint shimmered like a luxurious pool in a Turkish hammam, and I almost wanted to climb in”).

Personal History

1. Anne Boyer, “The Undying,” April 15, 2019 (“I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins”).

2. Robert A. Caro, “Turn Every Page,” January 28, 2019 (“There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me”).

3. James Marcus, “Blood Relations,” March 11, 2019 (“I peeled a yellow leaf away from the stone. It occurred to me that, as I got older, the beautiful, booming abstractions were becoming real. When I was young, eternity was too big to grasp. The years were elongated, shining, countless. But my father, I now understood, was gone forever”).

4. Kathryn Schulz, “The Stack,” March 25, 2019 (“My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s”).

5. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Hereafter, Faraway,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Then his camera captures us from behind, me clinging to my mother’s hand as we walk toward a rendezvous with our future selves”). 

The Critics 

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Exposed,” May 13, 2019 (“You see the comprehensive capture of scenes on the wing. If the camera tilts, it’s not for arty effect but to squeeze in the relevant details of, say, a group of women bustling forward between a beggar in a wheelchair and a small group of people standing or sitting at a curb—three rhythms in flashing counterpoint”).

3. James Wood, “Escape Velocity,” April 1, 2019 (“Hempel, like some practical genius of the forest, can make living structures out of what look like mere bric-a-brac, leavings, residue”).

4. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“Gunaratne’s powers of observation are so acute and extractive that he can trust his material to generate its own human significance”).

5. Dan Chiasson, “A Still Small Poem,” April 8, 2019 (“His forms vary depending upon what his senses perceive: jagged and tense around a mountain lion, long and languid next to a butterfly”).

6. Alex Ross, “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

7. Anthony Lane, “Adrift,” February 4, 2019 (“But the noir is beige at the edges, and the sex is hopelessly brisk and coy; if Baker wanted it steamy, he should have put the kettle on to boil”).

8.  Anthony Lane, “Awkward Ages,” May 27, 2019 (“It’s a sumptuous performance from Burke, whom I’ve seen on TV playing the nefarious Dolokhov, in the BBC’s “War and Peace,” and onstage as the agonized pastor in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” and who gives off an aroma of loucheness as if it were expensive cologne”).

9. Sarah Larson, “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

10. Lauren Oyler, “Sex Ed,” April 1, 2019 (“These sentiments, which sever intellect from feeling or mind from body, are decidedly not Dworkinesque, and the ease with which we’ve pulled out what is useful or prophetic about her work suggests that we’re still not reading her writing the way she would read it: closely, actively”). 

Talk of the Town

1. Mark Singer, “Man vs. Mouse,” January 7, 2019 (“He arranged “a Maginot Line of glue traps” and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”).

2. Patricia Marx, “New Shade,” January 14, 2019 (“It was a clear morning—the sky was a shade of blue that resembled Benjamin Moore’s Icing on the Cake”).

3. Ben McGrath, “Boom,” January 28, 2019 (“The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown”).

4. Patricia Marx, “Viewing Party,” April 1, 2019 (“There, among the chintz furniture and cucumber sandwiches that could have come over on the Mayflower, was “1076 Madison,” an exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge’s paintings depicting the Campbell building. The art works were displayed on easels that on other occasions had supported wreaths, photo collages, and, in one case, a deceased’s cherished dartboard”).

5. Mark Singer, “The Anti-‘Godot,’ ” April 15, 2019 (“Lean and nimble, he has dark brown hair that aimed in various opposing directions, a horseshoe mustache, a graying goatee, and scruffy extra-in-a-saloon-scene cheeks”).

Goings On About Town

1. Andrea K. Scott, “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”).

2. Hannah Goldfield, “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. Johanna Fateman, “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”).

4. Briana Younger, “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”).

5. Richard Brody, “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”).

6. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: O:n°,” April 15, 2019 (“Servers, wearing chic indigo smocks, operate as carefully as cat burglars, slipping inconspicuous timers in and out of their pockets as they glide around the room”).

7. Peter Schjeldahl, “At the Galleries: Matvey Levenstein,” March 4, 2019 (“Layered grays, orange-flavored sepia, and the odd palely simmering pink or blue constitute—or conjure, or exhale—spectral woods, clouds, a snow-covered ancient graveyard, and a storm at sea”).

8. 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”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Szechuan Mountain House,” June 3, 2019 (On a recent Tuesday, two Gen X-ers and one millennial, all Sichuan natives, sat down under silk lanterns and poured themselves jasmine tea from a cast-iron pot into bone-china cups so fine they resembled the pearly inside of seashells.

10. Richard Brody, “Movies: Enthusiasm,” March 18, 2019 (“He films with a wild, expressive energy, panning rapidly to follow the swinging clapper of a bell and depicting electric wires as ecstatic striations of the sky”).

newyorker.com

1. Chris Wiley, “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”).

2. Chris Wiley, “Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage,” January 11, 2019 (“Looking at these pictures, it is impossible not to feel the palpable tug of time’s undertow, its inexorable movement toward we-know-not-what. This is underscored in the show by a handful of purposeful echoes. Here, a young Lee with his uncanny, icy eyes and lolling forelock is nestled close to Maria, her face a vision of benign tolerance; there, on a windswept Oregon beach, Lee cranes his head away from his camera awkwardly to nuzzle in adoration against Maria, who is elegance personified, and now thirty years older. Here is photography’s ultimate irony: it can freeze time, but never stop it”).

3. Alexandra Schwartz,“ ‘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).

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. Charlotte Mendelson, “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”).

Favorite Short Story

Han Ong, “Javi,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Hard to credit that the figure in front of him is a woman. The silhouette is huge and partly obscured by the screen door. He, on the other hand, is in plain sun, right in the middle of the gravel path—hesitant to go any closer—all of the New Mexico sky on top of him”).

Favorite Poem

Daniel Halpern, “Catch,” April 15, 2019 (“the sound of the ball popping the leather / in the silence below the summer Valley trees, / an occasional pale-colored car sliding // past us, unnoticed / down Vesper”).

Favorite Issue

April 29, 2019 (“The Travel Issue”), containing Lauren Collins’s “Kitchen Companion,” James Lasdun’s “Glow,” and Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man” – all excellent.

Favorite Cover

Malika Favre, “Summer Hours” (May 27, 2019)

Favorite Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Concerto Challenge” (March 25, 2019)

Favorite Photograph

Immo Klink, illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019)

Favorite Sentence

Listening to Bone, Wells realized that his story was etched into the very sound of his voice: a slow, dehydrated drawl, thick with Southern heat and vocal fry, the indolence of small towns and the drag-footed pace of a heart slowed by heroin. – Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Range” (February 11, 2019)

Favorite Paragraph

My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward. It was a terror that all I’d ever written would sit data-mined but not read in Google’s servers until even Google’s servers were made of dust, and in the meantime I would become that unspeaking thing, a dead person, leaving too soon everyone and everything I loved the most. – Anne Boyer, “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

Favorite Detail

When she came out of her house, she was brushing her teeth. The arrival of a stranger at her door at nine-thirty in the morning did not faze her, and she continued to brush for a few minutes as we talked. – Ian Frazier, “Pumper’s Corner” (February 18 & 25, 2019)

Favorite Description

But my favorite dish might be the karsod, another soup. With a putty-pale sheet of lightly oiled dough stretched over the top of the bowl, it resembles an uncooked potpie, a broadcast of blandness. To pierce the surface and access the piping hot broth inside is to be reminded that mild does not necessarily equate to boring. In a version with lamb, the simple, slightly gummy pastry and the clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato, provide an optimal canvas for the gently gamy flavor of the simmered meat—as humble yet surprising as the restaurant itself. – Hannah Goldfield, "Tables for Two: Lhasa Fresh Food" (May 20, 2019)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. At a certain point, I found myself trapped in a vortex of flashbulbs, loden, jawlines, and boobs. – Nick Paumgarten, “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019)

2. He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass. – Douglas Preston, “The Day the Earth Died” (April 8, 2019)

3. Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future. – Elizabeth Kolbert, “Under Water” (April 1, 2019)

4. Andria was wearing a three-piece suit, accented by a scarlet pin that glowed like a pomegranate seed. – Lauren Collins, “Kitchen Companion” (April 29, 2019)

5. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch. – Anne Boyer, “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

6. There would be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality. The world would come to an end, as it always does, one world at a time. – James Marcus, “Blood Relations” (March 11, 2019)

7. “You’re no more than a hooker,” she says, and Baker retorts, quick as anything, “A hooker who can’t afford hooks.” Zing! Who said the age of wit was over? – Anthony Lane, “Adrift” (February 4, 2019)

June 24, 2019 Issue

Nick Paumgarten’s deliciously nasty “Unlike Any Other,” in this week’s issue, mocks the mythology of Augusta National, home of the hallowed Masters. He calls Augusta “an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines.” At one point, he writes, “Years of watching the Masters on television had not prepared me for the smell of shit.” He mercilessly skewers the place as an “oligarch’s playground,” “a club for the rich and powerful.” He takes us inside Berckmans Place, “the Oz within Oz, a lavish dining-shopping-and-drinking complex accessible only to those who have been approved by the club to buy passes, at a cost of ten thousand dollars for the tournament.” He writes,

In some ways, Berckmans is just a food court, but exclusivity can be mind-altering. A badge holder pays for nothing. People who can afford a meal at any restaurant in the world derive a thrill from dining without being handed a check. There are five restaurants: Ike’s; Calamity Jane’s, named for Bobby Jones’s putter; MacKenzie’s Pub, for the course architect; the Pavilion, outside; and Augusta’s, a sprawling Art Nouveau palm-frond-and-tin-ceiling seafood emporium, where you can get raw oysters, étouffée, and bananas Foster. For breakfast, our host chose Ike’s. There were hooks under the table on which to hang our ball caps. “The little things,” he said. A TV on the wall carried a live feed of Jim Nantz, off air but on site, having his hair strategically restructured. At the buffet, we heaped our plates with biscuits, grits, eggs, French toast, and candied peaches. I thought guiltily of my colleagues at the press center, having to make do with omelettes and no hooks for their hats. As I hid in a john to jot down a few notes, I noticed that the restroom attendants cleaned the stalls after each patron’s use. (Later, I overheard a man talking to his wife on a courtesy phone: “Guess what: every time you go, there’s a guy who runs in and cleans the toilet.”)

That image of Paumgarten hiding in the john “to jot down a few notes” made me smile. But other parts of  “Unlike Any Other” struck me as a shade too cynical. Its treatment of Tiger Woods is borderline snark. 

Andrew Wyeth's "Helga" Paintings: Schjeldahl v. Updike

Andrew Wyeth, "Farm Road" (1979)

Peter Schjeldahl’s specialty is rhapsody, not annihilation. But he can be annihilating when he wants to be. Look what he says about Andrew Wyeth:

Wyeth isn’t exactly a painter. He is a gifted illustrator for reproduction, which improves his arid originals with slick surfaces and kicked-up color. In person, the works present expanses of moisture-starved pigment. Moving your eyes across them is like sledding on gravel. [Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 2019]

Andrew Wyeth isn’t exactly a painter? Come on! Look at his superb Farm Road (1979). It’s among the works – the Helga paintings – Schjeldahl is referring to. Look at the absorbed way that massive braided head is painted, every glowing filament laid on in painstaking tempera.

Andrew Wyeth, "Black Velvet" (1972)

Look at Black Velvet (1972), another Helga picture. John Updike said of it,

Among the finished paintings, Black Velvet seemed to me a triumph: a long nude, tawny white, reclines in space as black as the velvet ribbon around her neck. She is an American Venus, with something touchingly gawky in her beautifully drawn big bare feet, bent elbow, and clenched hands. [Just Looking, 1989]

I agree with Updike. Wyeth’s avid, detailed rendering of Helga is a mimetic tour de force. Schjeldahl’s opinion is shockingly wrong-headed.

Peter Schjeldahl's Incendiary Criticism

Perhaps the most significant essay in Peter Schjeldahl’s great new collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light is “Fireworks,” a sparkling consideration of his enjoyment of things incendiary – bottle rockets, firecrackers, “all manner of blazing gizmos that jump and spin, and fireball-spitting (thup thup thup) Roman candles.” Of bottle rockets, he writes,

A contemporary bottle rocket (“Air Travel” brand, made in Kwangtung) is a two-inch-long cylinder of paper-wrapped propellant and explosive attached to a splinter-thin, nearly foot-long, red-dyed stick. Stand it upright, ideally in a beer bottle, and ignite. Fss. Swish, trailing sparks and smoke. A hundred feet or so up, a flash followed by a crisp bang. Then, if it’s daylight (who can wait for night?), you see the bare red stick drift innocently down.

That last sentence is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I think “Fireworks” is significant because there are traces of its influence scattered throughout Schjeldahl’s oeuvre. In Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light alone, I detect at least a dozen fireworks-related metaphors. For example:

The buzz of a Friedrich occurs when what have seemed mere tints in tonal composition combust as distinctly scented hues – citron lights, plum darks – and you don’t so much look at a picture as breathe it. [“Caspar David Friedrich”]

Aesthetic sensation inhered in every particle of a world like an explosion, things flying and tumbling. [“Andy Warhol”]

The painting’s violent intelligence detonated pleasure after pleasure. [“Willem de Kooning”]

And none other boasts perhaps his single most satisfying work, the songful One: Number 31, 1950, more than seventeen feet wide: interwoven high-speed skeins in black, white, dove-gray, teal, and fawn-brown oil and enamel bang on the surface while evoking cosmic distances. [“Jackson Pollock”]

I fancied an irritable shudder in the Frick’s sensitively indefinite Chardin, Still Life with Plums (circa 1730), at the blazing Zurbarán’s sudden proximity. [“Zurbarán’s Citrons”]

Looking more than twice her age of twenty-six, the slinky erotic dancer, prostitute, and notorious bisexual preens in a skintight scarlet dress against a blood-red ground – a one-woman general-alarm fire. [“Otto Dix”]

Matisse cross-wires sight with other senses, sparking phantom thrills of taste and smell. [“Henri Matisse – I”]

The show starts slowly, like damp kindling smoldering into fitful flames. [“Henri Matisse – I”]

Matisse burns with resentment for subjects that resist being schemetized. [“Henri Matisse – I”]

His art is fuelled by sex, and it burns clean. [“Henri Matisse – I”]

Cradled in a hammock the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I would rather be, tracking subtle variations in the changing slides: for example, a matchbook first closed, then open, then burning, then, finally, burned. [“Hélio Oiticica”]

The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires. [“Peter Hujar”]

And, of course, there's this memorable line in Schjeldahl's great "Édouard Manet": "The painting goes off like buried erotic dynamite."

Once you’re aware of the “fireworks” motif, you see it everywhere in Schjeldahl’s work. He's pyromaniacal!

On Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning, Composition (1955)

Stephen Ellis, in his excellent “Willem de Kooning: Acrobat with a Paint Brush” (NYR Daily, June 1, 2019), says that de Kooning’s paintings “refuse to be defined as either ‘representational’ or ‘abstract,’ flitting restlessly between these notional polarities.” This connects with a memorable observation that Peter Schjeldahl makes in his essay “Willem de Kooning,” included in his new collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: “His art is not abstract, just relentlessly abstracting.” 

Molly O'Neill's "Home for Dinner"

Jacques de Loustal, illustration for Molly O'Neill's "Home for Dinner"

I see Molly O’Neill died last Sunday (June 16, 2019). She wrote one of my favorite New Yorker food pieces – “Home for Dinner” (July 23, 2001), a profile of Sottha Khunn, a leading New York chef, who’d recently quit his job at the famed Le Cirque restaurant and gone home – back to Siem Reap, the town in Cambodia, where he’d grown up. O’Neill visits Khunn in Siem Reap. Her piece begins vividly:

One morning last winter, Sottha Khunn – the chef whose fourteen-year reign at Le Cirque earned him international fame and a four-star rating from the Times – sat on his mother’s terrace in Cambodia, wearing Yves Saint Laurent boxer shorts and peeling mangoes. It was not yet 5 A.M., the temperature was already ninety degrees, and the landscape was silent and still, as if swept by a hurricane that had long since moved on. Below, in the predawn light, was a jungle of a garden and a high locked gate; the trees that fringed the scrubby field across the road were violet silhouettes.

I read that and just kept going, absorbed in the narrative (a great chef trying to reconcile himself to his past with one perfect meal), devouring the delicious prose. Here’s a sample, a description of some of the dishes that Khunn’s mother, a key figure in the piece, cooked for him and O'Neill:

She made tiny spring rolls stuffed with crab, frogs stuffed with minced pork and lemongrass, curried fish with bamboo and water lilies. She made pork stewed in carmelized palm sugar, peppered beef with peanuts, and stir-fried chicken with pea-sized eggplants. She made vegetable broth with banana blossoms and fish balls, and pork broth soured with tamarind, thickened slightly with rice starch, and chock full of tiny shrimp and greens. She viewed the food she cooked for her firstborn as a mother’s conversation with an amnesiac. She often spoke about Sottha – usually within his hearing. “I wonder if food tastes like he remembers,” she said to me one day, “or if he doesn’t remember, or if the cooking changes because we change.”

O’Neill is gone now, gone too soon, at age sixty-six. But she lives on in her writings, including her wonderful “Home for Dinner.”

Notes on Peter Schjeldahl's "Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light"

1. I'm a big fan of Peter Schjeldahl's writing. Reading his new book, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, is pure nirvana. Among its many pleasures: forty-five of the best New Yorker pieces he’s written since the publication of his last collection – the superb Let’s See; twenty-nine Village Voice pieces – all new to me; twenty 7 Days pieces, including his great “A Van Gogh Portrait” (originally titled “Portrait of Joseph Roulin”); two wonderful artist profiles (“Laura Owens” and “Rachel Harrison”); and his excellent “The Ghent Alterpiece” on the conservation of a fifteenth-century masterpiece. 

2. Of the forty-five New Yorker pieces, I think my favorites are “Zubaron’s Citrons” (originally titled “Bearing Fruit”), “Henri Matisse II” (originally titled “The Road to Nice”), and “The Ghent Alterpiece” (originally titled “The Flip Side”). All three of these pieces contain bravura descriptions of specific artworks. For example, here’s Schjeldahl’s description of Matisse’s The Piano Lesson:

The brushy, big canvas (eight feet high by nearly seven wide) represents Matisse’s son Pierre at an oddly pink-topped piano, his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow, in a schematized room: cornerless gray wall; the pale-blue frame of a French window opening onto triangular swatches of green and gray; a salmon rectangle of curtain; and a black window grille that echoes the curlicues in a music rack bearing the instrument’s brand name, Pleyel, spelled out in reverse. There is a lighted candle (indicating that the time of day is dusk), a metronome (indicating time itself), and two earlier Matisses: a small sculpture of a sensual odalisque and a large image from a painting of a stern-seeming woman seated on a high stool, floating free on the gray wall. The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch. Like any successful art, “The Piano Lesson” generates tensions of antithetical qualities—lyrical and harsh, mysterious and blatant, intimate and grand—and resolves them. It’s terrific, but the past century affords many paintings (and not all of them by Matisse and Picasso) that are as good or better. My preference for it is not a considered judgment. It’s a reflex, like the one that twitches when I’m asked my favorite movie, and I automatically, helplessly, say “Psycho.” [“Henri Matisse II”]

That “his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow” is ravishing. I relish the way the passage moves from description to commentary (“The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch”). The surprising mention of Psycho at the end makes me smile every time I read it.

Henri Matisse, "The Piano Lesson" (1916)

3. The Village Voice pieces brim with piquant observations. For example: “De Kooning’s keynote is a self-engulfment in painting that demands every resource of wit and skill not to become a mess” (“Willem de Kooning”); “Scanning the details is like being knocked down and getting back up to be knocked down again” (“Picasso and the Weeping Women”); “I left the show with smells of makeup, sweat, and alcohol in my mind’s nostrils and a conviction that Toulouse-Lautrec is now the most living of fin de siècle Frenchmen” (“Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec”); “He activates the occult handshake of aesthetics and sex” (Henri Matisse – I”). Some of the comments are quite funny (e.g., on Lucian Freud: “To tax Freud with misogyny seems pointless, given that he obviously despises and in some sense wants to fuck everybody, himself included”). But if you relish descriptive analysis of specific artworks, as I do, you may find the Village Voice essays somewhat less satisfying than the New Yorker pieces. For instance, compare Schjeldahl’s Village Voice “Caspar David Friedrich” with his New Yorker “Caspar David Friedrich.” In the Village Voice piece, he says,

The buzz of a Friedrich occurs when what have seemed mere tints on a tonal composition combust as distinctly as scented hues – citron lights, plum darks – and you don’t so much look at a picture as breathe it.

That is very beautiful. But in Schjeldahl’s artful hands, it’s just the beginning. Look at what he does with it, ten years later, in The New Yorker:

The pictures don’t give; they take. Something is drawn out of us with a harrowing effect, which Friedrich’s use of color nudges toward intoxication. What at first seem to be mere tints in a tonal range combust into distinctly scented, disembodied hues: drenching purples and scratchy russets, plum darks and citron lights. One doesn’t so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine. Friedrich is an artist of dusky fire, of twilight that sears. It is well worth sticking around for his shuddery pleasures, laced with something cold and weird.

That is mind-blowingly gorgeous!

4. “A Van Gogh Portrait” is unquestionably one of Schjeldahl’s greatest hits. I first read it in his slim 1990 collection The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990. Now, twenty-nine years later, it reappears, subtly revised, in Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light. It’s interesting to note the changes. Here’s the brilliant opening paragraph of the 7 Days version:

From a distance, the face is closed, hieratic, and perhaps intimidating. Up close, the eyes seem frightened – they stare without focusing – and the features spread, threatening to lose track of each other. It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius, or something. Maybe just by the craft of painting. Decide for yourself when you make the welcoming visit to Portrait of Joseph Roulin by Vincent van Gogh, a new acquisition of the Museum of Modern Art.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

From a distance, the face is closed, hieratic, and a bit intimidating. Up close, the eyes seem frightened. They stare without focusing. The features spread, threatening to lose track of one another. It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius invested in the craft of painting. Decide when you make your welcoming visit to Portrait of Joseph Roulin (1889) by Vincent van Gogh, a new acquisition of the Museum of Modern Art.

“Perhaps intimidating,” in the first line, has been changed to “a bit intimidating.” The second line has been reconstructed: the dashes have been converted to periods; the phrase “and the features spread, threatening to lose track of each other” is now a separate sentence (“The features spread, threatening to lose track of one another”). “Unified by genius, or something” and the next sentence (“Maybe by the craft of painting”) have been combined and revised: “It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius invested in the craft of painting.” “For yourself,” in the next sentence, has been deleted; “the” is changed to “your.” 

The paragraph is now more concise. Concision is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style. His wonderful description of the Portrait of Joesph Roulin has also been made more concise. Here’s the 7 Days version:

Painted in van Gogh’s Japanese inspired mode, Roulin is boldly contoured against a floral-patterned background. The composition is rife with spiral motifs (rousing the sympathy of the nearby spiral-happy Starry Night) and is keyed to a clash of fresh blue in the uniform and moody green (the background). Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, the forthright yellow-gold of his buttons, and the rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping. The overall design is about as hyperactive as relative symmetry can get. Roulin’s flesh is rendered in medievalish green and red hatchings.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

Painted in van Gogh’s Japanese-inspired mode, Roulin is boldly contoured against a floral-patterned background. The composition is rife with spiral motifs (rousing the empathy of the nearby spiral-happy Starry Night) and is keyed to a clash of fresh blue in the uniform and moody green in the background. Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, forthright yellow-gold in the buttons, and rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping. The overall composition is as hyperactive as relative symmetry can be. Roulin’s flesh is rendered in medieval-ish green and red hatchings. 

“Sympathy” has been changed to “empathy.” The brackets around “the background” have been dropped. “Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, the forthright yellow-gold of his buttons, and the rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping” has been trimmed to “Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, forthright yellow-gold in the buttons, and rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping.” “The overall design is about” is now “The overall composition is.” “Can get” is now “can be.” These are all subtle improvements, illuminating Schjeldahl’s approach to style.

Vincent van Gogh, "Portrait of Joseph Roulin" (1889)

My favourite part of “A Van Gogh Portrait” is the baseball figuration at the end. Here’s the 7 Days version:

So make your first visit to Roulin count. Then observe the work’s action on its peers. The pictures in the same room by Gauguin, Seurat, Munch, Redon, and Rousseau may seem as elated as the teammates of a slugger who, having hit a home run, returns to their midst, with high fives all around.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

Make your initial visit to Roulin count. Then observe the effect on its peers. Gauguin, Seurat, Munch, Redon, and Rousseau flock like teammates of a slugger who, having homered, returns to their midst with high fives all around.

“So” and “the pictures in the same room” have been deleted. "Effect" has been substituted for "work's action." “May seem as elated” has been changed to “flock like”; “hit a home run” shortened to “homered.” An inspired image has been sharpened.

June 10 & 17, 2019 Issue

This week’s issue (“The Fiction Issue: Border Crossings”) has an interesting section called “Another Country” comprising five pieces: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Hereafter, Faraway”; Orhan Pamuk’s “Geneva, 1959”; Min Jin Lee’s “Stonehenge”; Jennifer Egan’s “Hard Seat”; and Dinaw Mengestu’s “Poorly Mapped.” Each piece is an account of an experience that the writer had while living or traveling in a foreign place. All are terrific. Here are a few samples:

In the photos, I look like the son I will have forty years later. We are walking between two rows of rubber trees, their monumental trunks and canopies forming a natural cathedral. They tower over my mother as my mother towers over me. We are unaware that within a year or so, fleeing the Communist invasion, we will be walking again, this time for hundreds of kilometres, with thousands of others. I will become a refugee for the first time, my mother for the second. [“Hereafter, Faraway”]

It had been a happy time for me since I’d learned to read and write, the year before. I’d read aloud every advertisement and piece of graffiti that my eyes landed on. I had kept this up in Geneva, reciting any agglomeration of letters I came across: MARTINI, PICON, ESSO, HELVETIA. Words like these, and numbers, had been the foundation of my mother’s French lessons that summer. But I was having trouble now picking any of them out from the language that was spoken in the classroom. At home, every word had been like a strange and unique bird. But at school the words seemed to swoop across the sky like a flock, no single bird distinguishable from the whole. [“Geneva, 1959”]

It can’t be true that the whole class had light-colored eyes, but, as I remember it, a dozen pairs of lovely blue, green, and hazel eyes looked at me with surprise and pity because I hadn’t heard of the prehistoric stone configuration. They didn’t mean to be unkind. I’m sure of that. But, in their attractive, polished faces, I saw that Stonehenge was as familiar to them as having a gun held to my face was to me. [“Stonehenge”]

Ah, the hubris of the young English speaker whose knowledge of Chinese consisted, in my case, of being able to count to ten. Not a word, or even a letter, much less a brand name, in English was to be seen in Guangzhou. To buy train tickets to Kunming, we had to ask someone at our hotel to write “Kunming” in Chinese on a slip of paper, which we slid through a mousehole-shaped opening to a ticket seller, along with some yuan, in exchange for tickets whose multiple pages evinced an ominous complexity. [“Hard Seat”]

The guards made me delete the photos I had travelled seven thousand miles to take. They shooed the crowd and me away and then disappeared behind the palace gates. Rather than turn toward home, I followed the man who had come to my aid down a long, winding road. I had no idea where I was going and was soon lost in an intricate network of unnamed streets, alleyways, and footpaths that my map would never have been able to account for. When I finally reached home, long after the sun had set, my aunt wasn’t angry so much as amused by my misadventure. “I told you,” she said, “not to leave alone.” [“Poorly Mapped”]

Another absorbing piece in this week’s issue is Han Ong’s short story "Javi." It’s about a fourteen-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant who persuades a famous eighty-two-year-old painter living alone in New Mexico to hire him as a helper. He soon becomes her companion. The painter is identified only as “the painter,” but she’s a dead ringer for Agnes Martin. Ong’s conjuring of the painter's thinking, talking, and painting is transfixing. He puts us squarely there in the studio with her and Javi. Here’s his description of her painting:

She is following some internal prompt that comes out as stacked lines, equidistant from one another, all the way from the top to the bottom of the canvas. You’d think, given the narrow range of her material and motifs, that the paintings would look like the same thing over and over, but it’s striking how much variation can be wrung out of a subtle shift in color, or a different spacing between the parallel lines, or even the thickness of the lines. Sometimes, drawing these lines, she becomes so mesmerized that her tongue hangs out like a dog’s, and her eyes glaze over, as if some inner spirit had become dominant.

That “She is following some internal prompt that comes out as stacked lines, equidistant from one another, all the way from the top to the bottom of the canvas” is brilliant. The whole piece is brilliant, blending life and art, or, as Ong says, "life-life" and "art-life." 

Interesting Emendations: Peter Schjeldahl's “Zurbarán’s Citrons”

One of my favorite pieces in Peter Schjeldahl’s superb new essay collection Hot, Cold, Heavy Light is “Zurbarán’s Citrons,” a review of the 2009 exhibition Masterpieces of European Painting from the Norton Simon Museum, at the Frick Collection. The piece originally appeared in the April 6, 2009 New Yorker under the title “Bearing Fruit.” Comparing the two versions, I notice several interesting differences. For example, Schjeldahl’s description of Francisco de Zurbarán’s exquisite Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) has subtly changed. Here’s the New Yorker version:

“Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” (1633), the artist’s only signed and dated still-life, amounts to three pictures, side by side, in one: a silver plate holding four citrons (baggy, nubbly cousins of lemons); several oranges with stems, leaves, and blossoms, heaped in a basket; and a two-handled gray ceramic cup, apparently filled with water, on another silver plate, with a pale-pink rose facing it from the plate’s lip. The objects rest on an oxblood-brown table against a pitch-black ground; sunlight rakes them from the left. Scholars speculate that they allegorize virtues of the Virgin Mary (citrons for faithfulness, water for purity, and so on—allegory bores me). Certainly, there is a sense of conceptual rigor in the work’s rebuslike presentation, which invests ordinary comestibles on a piece of domestic furniture with the gravitas of a sacrificial altar. I was overwhelmed when I saw the citrons in the picture, many years ago, at the Simon, in Pasadena, California (inch for inch, the finest collection of European paintings west of the Mississippi). Ever since, they have served me as a touchstone of painterly potency. I was pleased to discover, at the Frick, that my mental image of them had been close to photographic. No nuance of the dusky russet shadows and tiny green inflections, in the fruit’s soprano yellow, surprised me. But the other objects registered with a jolt: I didn’t remember any oranges, basket, cup, or rose. My recollection had amputated two-thirds of a tour de force.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

“Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” (1633), the artist’s only signed and dated still-life, amounts to three pictures, side by side, in one: a silver plate holding four citrons (baggy andnubbly kin of lemons); several oranges with stems, leaves, and blossoms, heaped in a basket; and a two-handled gray ceramic cup, apparently filled with water, on another silver plate, with a pale-pink rose facing it from the plate’s lip. 

The objects rest on an oxblood-brown table against a pitch-black ground. Sunlight rakes them from the left. Scholars speculate that they allegorize virtues of the Virgin Mary (citrons for faithfulness, water for purity, and so on—but allegory bores me). Certainly, there is a sense of conceptual rigor in the work’s rebuslike presentation, which invests ordinary comestibles on a piece of domestic furniture with the gravitas of a sacrificial altar. I was overwhelmed when I saw the citrons in the picture, many years ago, at the Simon, in Pasadena, California (inch for inch, the finest collection of European paintings west of the Mississippi). Ever since, they have served me as a touchstone of painterly potency. I was pleased to discover, at the Frick, that my mental image of them had been close to photographic. No nuance of the dusky russet shadows and tiny green inflections, in the fruit’s soprano yellow, surprised me. But the other objects registered with a jolt: I didn’t remember any oranges, basket, cup, or rose at all. My recollection had amputated two-thirds of a tour de force.

I count at least five changes: (1) the New Yorker version is all one paragraph; the book version is two; (2) “baggy, nubbly cousins of lemons” is now “baggy and nubbly kin of lemons”; (3) the sentence “The objects rest on an oxblood-brown table against a pitch-black ground; sunlight rakes them from the left” is now two separate sentences: “The objects rest on an oxblood-brown table against a pitch-black ground. Sunlight rakes them from the left”; (4) “citrons for faithfulness, water for purity, and so on—allegory bores me” has been changed to “citrons for faithfulness, water for purity—but allegory bores me”; (5) “I didn’t remember any oranges, basket, cup, or rose” is now “I didn’t remember any oranges, basket, cup, or rose at all.”

Later in the piece, Schjeldahl describes his response to Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose. Here’s the New Yorker version:

In fact, this work still strikes me as principally about those citrons, never mind their impeccable companions. The fruit’s fierce materiality and celestial beauty channel the essence of the artist’s national, historical, and personal genius. The distinctly Iberian black background is part of it. (Any painter who uses black as a color should have to pay a royalty, for the privilege, to Spain—as Manet effectually did, in his forthright emulations of Velázquez.)

And here’s the book version:

In fact, this work still affects me as principally about those citrons, never mind their impeccable companions. The fruit’s combined fierce materiality and celestial beauty channel the essence of the artist’s national, historical, and personal genius. The distinctly Iberian black background is part of it. (Any painter who uses black as a color should have to pay a royalty to Spain.)

Note the change of “strikes” to “affects” in the first sentence, the deletion of “essence of the artist’s national, historical, and personal” in the second line, and the deletion of “for the privilege” and “as Manet effectually did, in his forthright emulations of Velázquez” in the parenthesis.  

I find such changes fascinating. They afford a glimpse of a master stylist fine-tuning his composition. 

June 3, 2019 Issue

If you admire Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain paintings, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Peter Schjeldahl’s “Of Nature,” in this week’s issue, in which he reviews a new exhibition, “Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain Studies,” opening June 9 at ‘T’ Space in Rhinebeck, New York. Schjeldahl writes,

The drawings vary restlessly. Some array glyphic marks in typically Chinese, parallel vertical columns, with blank spaces between them. In others, the marks skitter sideways, entangling the columns with one another. Then, there are hyperactive webs of line that sacrifice any graphic order to another kind: the allover force fields of New York School abstraction, with spiky decisiveness in each mark—as if the instrument in Marden’s hand had ideas of its own, in a rushing sequence of Zen contradictions. The pictures never suggest design. They are phenomena. Nor are they quite expressive. Rather, they are like transits of impulse from somewhere beyond the artist to somewhere beyond the viewer. A formal discipline of picture-making presides, as prosodic sophistication does in Han Shan—governing a flow that recalls Jackson Pollock’s response when a visitor remarked that he didn’t work from nature. He said, “I am nature.”

I relish that “spiky decisiveness in each mark”; it catches the subtle deliberateness of Marden’s sublime improvisation. 

Brice Marden, Cold Mountain Study (20) (1988-91)

May 27, 2019 Issue

Hannah Goldfield’s “Kitchen Shift,” in this week’s issue, profiles the chefs (David McMillan and Fréderic Morin) behind Joe Beef, a Montreal restaurant famous for its “exuberant immoderation, a blend of the haute and the gluttonous.” The piece is a shade too puritanical for my taste, impugning McMillan’s and Morin’s new-found sobriety as just a “marketing maneuver,” using guilt by association to implicate them in the Norman Hardie sexual assault case, carping about there being only one woman in the Joe Beef kitchen. I wonder if McMillan and Morin knew what Goldfield’s intentions were when they agreed to be the subject of her piece. Did they realize, as they fêted her at Le Vin Papillon and Joe Beef, that she was actually writing a castigation of them? I doubt it. “Kitchen Shift” is an example of betrayal journalism. Other examples: Lillian Ross’s profile of Ernest Hemingway; David Remnick’s profile of Gary Hart. I’m not a fan of it.