October 22, 2018 Issue

The best writing in this week’s issue is in “Goings On About Town: Art.” Two notes, in particular, stand out: Peter Schjeldahl on the Met’s Delacroix retrospective and Johanna Fateman on the Trish Baga exhibition at Greene Naftali. Schjeldahl’s piece, based on his longer “Performance” (The New Yorker, October 1, 2018), contains this brilliant passage:

A frontal, tumultuous scrum of two big cats, three horses, and five Arabian hunters threatens to burst from the canvas. Claws, hooves, teeth, and scimitars contend. Primary colors blaze. Black resounds. It’s a dazzling picture, but Delacroix’s open competition with Rubens, who was denied a riposte by virtue of being two centuries deceased, gives it the air of an elephantine bagatelle.

Fateman’s capsule review is worth quoting in full:

A motley assortment of enchanting ceramic sculptures fills the first room of Baga’s installation “Mollusca and the Pelvic Floor.” A half-dozen glazed poodle heads accompany melting guitars, volcanic islands, and fossil-like abstractions; two busts—a self-portrait and a deft rendering of RuPaul—house virtual-assistant devices. In a darkened interior room, a video spills off the wall onto clusters of rocks, cardboard file boxes, a bottle of salad dressing, and an oscillating fan. We glean, from the fragmented narrative, that Amazon’s Alexa has been rechristened Mollusca. Baga takes viewers on a strange philosophical journey—an extended hallucination in a messy bedroom—to elucidate her curious relationship with her nonhuman helper.

That “In a darkened interior room, a video spills off the wall onto clusters of rocks, cardboard file boxes, a bottle of salad dressing, and an oscillating fan” is marvelous! The whole passage is inspired.

October 15, 2018 Issue

This week’s issue contains one of the coolest, neatest, most delightful Talk stories I’ve ever read – Michael Schulman’s “Grasshopper.” It’s about a visit that actor Daniel Radcliffe recently paid to The New Yorker’s offices “to try his own hand at fact-checking.” Radcliffe is currently playing a fact-checker in the Broadway play The Lifespan of a Fact, based on Jim Fingal and John D’Agata’s book of the same name. (I haven’t read this book, but I know of it through a memorable review by Jennifer B. McDonald, published in the Times a few years ago, in which she called D’Agata’s championing of belief over fact “hogwash”: see my post here.)

In Schulman’s piece, Radcliffe reports to the office of New Yorker head fact-checker, Peter Canby. Canby gives him “a soon-to-run review of Oxomoco, a Mexican restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn” to fact-check. I smiled when I read that; I recognized the piece – Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Oxomoco,” which appeared in last week’s New Yorker: see my brief comment here.

My favorite part in “Grasshopper” is Radcliffe’s fact-checking phone call to Oxomoco chef, Justin Bazdarich:

He took a breath. “Moving along: you also serve a beef-tartare tostada? (Correct.) “And that has some fried grasshopper on it?” (Actually, the insect is toasted over a wood fire, Bazdarich said. Radcliffe, his pencil trembling, scribbled “toasted.”) “And is that a whole grasshopper you get with each one, or is it sort of segments?” (Whole, but sometimes they break apart.) “Would it be correct to say that meat is a major theme?” Bazdarich seemed skeptical. Radcliffe, panicking, added, “Don’t worry, it is also made mention of that vegetarians or pescatarians can be very, very happy at your restaurants.”

That passage made me laugh out loud. The sentence that Radcliffe fact-checked, changing “fried” to “toasted,” is the very one I selected in my post last week as the only inspired sentence in the entire issue: “Its garnish of identifiable segments of toasted grasshopper was not for the faint of heart, but it rewarded the brave, with a flavor that went from nutty to bitter to honeyed.”

“Grasshopper” ends brilliantly:

Radcliffe hung up and exhaled. “I just fact-checked a fucking article!” he said. “Nothing I do today will be harder than that.” A few days later, a New Yorker fact checker called Radcliffe to verify the above account. “Very meta,” he said. Everything checked out, except that he had been drinking a cappuccino, not a latte, and he has, in point of fact, been to Mexico.

Move over Ian Frazier’s “Russophilia,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Bong Show,” Mark Singer’s “All-Nighter,” Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees,” Robert Sullivan’s “Say Cheese,” make room for another Talk classic – Michael Schulman’s superb “Grasshopper.”

Morten Strøksnes’s Wonderful "Shark Drunk"

I want to thank The New Yorker’s Dylan Kerr for recommending Morten Strøksnes’s Shark Drunk
(2015). What a great book! Part memoir, part natural history, part adventure story, it’s an account of Strøksnes’s and his friend Hugo Aasjord’s quest for the Greenland shark in a tumultuous Norwegian fjord called Vestfjorden. I’m about half way through it, and I’m savoring every line. Here, for example, is Strøksnes’s description of a sperm whale:

In front of us is one of the largest of all toothed whales. As we approach, it starts to arch its back. When we’re a hundred feet away, it blows one last time and then lowers its head into the water. The flukes and hind part of the body stick vertically up from the surface, iconic as a rock carving, before the sea closes around them. The whale is gone, as if someone had pulled a string, drawing it down into the abyss.

Here’s his depiction of water: 

All is quiet around me and Hugo, except for a soft, musical sound from invisible currents lapping against the boat. Elsewhere around us the water licks at the underside of its own surface, which gleams above the hollows and high shoals.

That “licks at the underside of its own surface” is inspired! Shark Drunk brims with such descriptions. I’m enjoying it immensely.

October 8, 2018 Issue

Not much of note in this week’s issue. There’s Hannah Goldfield’s description of the taste of toasted grasshopper: “a flavor that went from nutty to bitter to honeyed” (“Tables For Two: Oxomoco”). That’s about it. Maybe it’s time to stop doing this. 

October 1, 2018 Issue

If you relish “road trip” narratives, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy Nick Paumgarten’s “Border Ballads,” in this week’s issue. It’s a profile of singer-song writer Alejandro Escovedo, in which Paumgarten accompanies Escovedo on a three-day drive (“a kind of sentimental journey”) from Dallas to Austin “and beyond, backward through time, down to the border of old Mexico.” In Austin, Escovedo performs at a benefit concert:

Clara the bartender climbed atop a speaker case and began go-go dancing, which seemed to send a current through Escovedo. He has an infectious way of spurring his band, barking “Come on!” and “Let’s go!” with a barrage of guitar chords. Suddenly, what had seemed a local favorite’s perfectly nice presentation of well-made songs to a friendly, graying audience became a raucous, sweaty rock show. Escovedo, who’d appeared wistful and weary toward the end of the drive, seemed to shed decades. 

In Laredo, they attend a baseball game:

Outside the chain-link fence between the lot and the field, Escovedo removed his hat and stood still for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then, as the Mexican anthem played, we bought, for eight dollars apiece, a pair of third-row seats behind the plate. The Tecos’ uniforms were trimmed in the green and red of the Mexican flag. The visiting team was from Monclova, in Coahuila. The public-address announcements were all in Spanish. By the second inning, the stands had almost filled up, amid the cicada rattle of ratcheted noisemakers known as matracas, and the call-and-response taunts of fans along the first- and third-base lines. Above the visiting dugout, a man in an ape suit made lewd gestures and led chants of “asshole” and “puto,” in an unfolding feud across the field with a chubby güey in a giant sombrero. Between innings, an owl mascot did the merengue. Escovedo, in big square sunglasses and a new Tecos cap, sipped a Tecate and declared that this was the best time he’d had in ages.

That marvellous passage made me smile. Paumgarten is a superb describer. 

Postscript: James Wood, in his “Departure Lounge,” a review of Olga Tokarczuk’s encyclopaedic novel Flights, in this week’s issue, continues to elaborate his wonderful “detail” theory. Wood writes,

Chopin’s heart is information, which anyone can possess; a memory of stove fumes is not information but a particular, personal memory, which is likely to prompt one of our own. There is the utopian theory of mobility and endless curiosity, and there is our daily reality, which is composed of a billion familiar details, most of them indescribable—the rooms we sit in, and the dimmer rooms we were once raised in; the streets we live on, and the old streets we grew up on, which truly exist now only in our heads. There is the desirable horizon, but there is also the furrowed field, which we know so well and which has made us who we are.

Expressing his preference for subjective specifics (“the furrowed field”) over abstract conceptions (“the desirable horizon”), Wood reaffirms his deep love of thisness. 

September 24, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The newyorker.com version of Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Sofreh” features six images by my favorite New Yorker photographer, William Mebane, including a wonderful portrait of Sofreh’s chef and owner, Nasim Alikhani, that is sure to make my 2018 “Top Ten Photos” list.

2. Great to see illustrator Angie Wang back in the magazine (see “Goings On About Town: Modern Dance” by Brian Seibert). Her portrait of the singer Nellie McKay, in the December 13, 2010 issue, is one of my all-time favorites.

3. Neima Jahromi, in her “Bar Tab: Apothéke,” mentions an alluring drink called the Devil’s Playground (gin, absinthe, local dragon fruit, prickly pear) I’d love to taste.

4. What’s the most interesting line in this week’s issue? Three contenders: (1) “His late-July set for the Australian radio station Triple J’s ‘Mix Up’ series is a sauntering, slow-burn disco workout, highlighted by a reëdited version of the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s eternally goofy ‘Troglodyte (Cave Man)’ ” (Michaelangelo Matos, “Night Life: Tim Sweeney”); (2) In a saffron vesper, mixed with gin, vodka, and Lillet, it’s too intense—like taking a glug from a perfume bottle in your grandmother’s bathroom—but in desserts it’s more subtle, an intoxicating footnote” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Sofreh”); (3) “The picture has time in it, the residue of innumerable side-to-side shifts of scrutiny” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Only See”). And the winner is: Hannah Goldfield for that inspired “like taking a glug from a perfume bottle in your grandmother’s bathroom.”

September 17, 2018 Issue

In this week’s issue, Anna Russell scores another Talk triumph, her third this year. The others are “Caffeinated” (March 19) and “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16). In her new piece, “Reunion,” she accompanies virtuoso cellist Matt Haimovitz on his way to a repair shop to pick up his beloved Matteo, a rare, multimillion-dollar cello, which Haimovitz has owned and played for thirty years. Matteo required fixing because fifteen months earlier, Haimovitz accidentally dropped it while teaching a student. Russell writes, 

He had played it for thirty years, until, fifteen months earlier, while giving a lesson to a promising Canadian student, he dropped it, and the cello’s neck snapped. Since then, the instrument had been undergoing extensive repairs by a team of five luthiers at Reed Yeboah Fine Violins, near Columbus Circle. Now the shop had called to say that Matteo was ready for release.

The piece builds suspense: Will the rebuilt cello sound the same as the original? At first the answer appears to be no:

Haimovitz sat down and played a few hoarse scales, before launching into a jaunty tune, the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. He ended on a long note, and then sat in silence. “Hmm,” he said.

But then a new bow is provided and Haimovitz plays the cello again: 

He leaned in, listening. “Yeah,” he said. He played a mournful tune, Philip Glass’s “Overture,” and came up smiling: “Very cool!” Everyone applauded.

The ending is inspired:

Afterward, flushed, Haimovitz was more circumspect. While playing, he said, he couldn’t help thinking about the old Matteo. “There were moments where it was, like, I’m missing certain things, where’s that?” But then something changed. “Gradually, the vibration felt the same.” He accepted a glass of prosecco. “It’s a process,” he said.

September 10, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Emily Witt’s “What Is New?,” a profile of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The newyorker.com version’s tagline says, “For three decades, the photographer has explored the fragility of the political consensus on which his personal utopia depends.” Maybe that’s true, although, to me, his explorations are as much hedonistic as they are political. The print version’s succinct “The life and art of Wolfgang Tillmans” is preferable. But I do like that “personal utopia.” It conveys Tillmans's cocoon-like cosmopolitan world – the Panorama Bar, his Berlin studio, galleries such as Nairobi’s GoDown Arts Centre – all superbly described by Witt. Here’s her depiction of his studio:

The space occupies an entire floor of a building originally intended as a department store, designed by the Bauhaus architect Max Taut. It has unfinished concrete floors and long rows of windows. Tillmans cultivates a small wilderness of houseplants—sculptural cacti, papyrus, greenish-purple-leafed begonias, delicate ferns—which he grows from cuttings that he gets from friends and collects on his travels. Walls are decorated with maps, exhibition posters, and protest signs, shelves are lined with records and books. Tillmans takes still-lifes, and I was reminded of one composed from half-smoked packs of Gauloises, decks of Post-it notes, and tape dispensers scattered between computer monitors and plants. He encourages a careful selection of visual clutter, which, he said, “keeps it interesting for the assistants and myself.”

Witt also gets at Tillmans’s creative process. My favourite passage is her description of his “casual, and barely noticeable, often in motion” way of taking pictures:

In Berlin, he took photographs of a building under renovation across the street from his studio, and of his friends dancing at Clausen’s fortieth birthday party. In Kenya, I saw Tillmans reach around a driver’s head to take a photograph through the driver’s-side window of people assembling wheelbarrows. After a radio interview at Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, he took a portrait of the host, Khainga O’Okwemba. As we were walking out of the building, he photographed a pink wastebasket in the corner of someone’s office, a spider plant placed underneath the stairs, and a sign declaring the corporation “a corruption-free zone.” In New York, three months later, walking north from the Whitney Museum to the David Zwirner gallery, in Chelsea, where Tillmans has a show this fall, he led me along the West Side Highway. As we walked past construction sites, open-bed trucks loaded with building material, and construction workers sawing amid showers of sparks, he took photographs. I saw the things that I have mentioned, but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph, if it became one at all. “People are so unable to talk about what makes a picture, because technically they’re all the same, they’re all pigment on paper, and we are using the same cameras,” Tillmans told me. “The reason why a photograph I take can be recognized is literally beyond words.”

That “but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph” is excellent, a variation on Garry Winogrand’s inspired “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” 

September 3, 2018 Issue

Simon Schama is a superb word-painter. His “Blue as Can Be,” in this week’s issue, contains a bravura passage that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker writing. Inspired by his tour of Harvard’s Forbes Pigment Collection, he writes,

Gazing at Vincent posed against his poisoned teal, his jacket edged with the bright-blue trim of his imagination, I thought of the laborers behind all those Forbes pigments: the women who rinsed, kneaded, sieved, and dried the pulverized lapis lazuli that Giovanni Bellini used for the Virgin’s ultramarine robe; who stood waist-deep in horse manure, the vapors of which hastened the flaking of lead that produced the “lead white” used by Frans Hals and Rembrandt to capture folds of linen and lace. I thought of van Gogh claiming to recognize more than twenty black pigments in the portraiture of Frans Hals, the best of them created from charred bones. And of the bright pigments made in grim captivity: the North African slaves and the forzado convicts condemned to work in the mercury mines of Almaden so that the Spanish crown could sell cinnabar; the Caribbean slaves who grew and harvested indigo; the inmates of the Amsterdam House of Correction, rasping away at brazilwood.

Schama’s brilliant piece not only celebrates paint; it reminds us that paint is a product, sourced in rocks, roots, oxides, and, yes, even horse manure and charred bones.

August 27, 2018 Issue

Calvin Tomkins, in his absorbing “Painterly Virtues,” a profile of painter Alex Katz, in this week’s issue, says, “Many of Katz’s best paintings capture the light and the atmosphere of a specific time of day—none more hauntingly than his 1982 image of an adolescent girl, alone, in ‘Tracy on the Raft at 7:30.’ ” I don’t know about that. The use of “specific” to describe a Katz is surprising. He’s among the least specific painters I know of. Looking at “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30,” I see an image denuded of detail. Everything in it is massively simplified: the girl in her two-piece red-and-white bathing suit looks like a mannequin; an immense swath of slate green paint represents foliage; there’s a glimpse of sage green sky; the raft is a bar of white and a bar of grey; water is a bar of slate green with sage green splotches indicating reflections of sky. It’s the title that provides the specificity, not the painting. “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30” is an abstractionist’s idea of representation. As Tomkins says, Katz’s work was never realistic. “The faces of his subjects are smooth and unblemished, almost generic, and the background details, when they exist, are minimal.”

Alex Katz, "Tracy on the Raft at 7:30" (1982)

I relish details. Katz’s pared-down style isn’t entirely to my taste. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Tomkins’s piece immensely, especially his account of watching Katz paint:

Moving deliberately, Katz climbed five steps to the top of a creaky wheeled platform and started applying ultramarine to the upper-right section of the canvas, using a housepainter’s six-inch-wide brush. The paint went on easily, in smooth, unhurried strokes, back and forth and diagonally. One of his rules is “no noodling,” which means no fussy brushwork. He came down, moved the platform a few feet to the left, and climbed up again to do the next part. Every now and then he paused to consult the smaller sketch, which he had with him on the platform, or the warmup canvas. He kept going back over the painted areas, to adjust the tone. “I’m not sure the blue is right,” he said, at one point. “We’ll see when the black comes into play.” It took him about half an hour to finish the sky. Occasionally, between trips up and down the steps, he paused to wipe up drops of paint that had fallen beyond the brown paper he’d laid on the studio’s faded but immaculate linoleum floor.

Tomkins’s recent series of artist profiles, including “Somewhere Different” (on Peter Doig), “Troubling Pictures” (on Dana Schutz), and “Into the Unknown” (on Chris Ofili), are among the most pleasurable New Yorker pieces of the last five years. “Painterly Virtues” is a wonderful addition to the collection.

August 20, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man,” an extraordinary profile of an extraordinary man – Virgin Galactic’s ace pilot, Mark Stucky. Schmidle puts us squarely there, in the cockpit of SpaceShipTwo, with Stucky and his co-pilot, Dave Mackay, as they fly into space:

Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue.

He describes what Stucky sees:

The Earth’s bright-blue surface filled his porthole. It was a stupendous sight: the outer edge of the atmosphere was dancing with wispy tendrils. The spaceship was now at eighty-four thousand feet—higher than he’d ever been. He could now testify to the awesome power of the “overview effect.”

He shows us Stucky’s poised reaction to an in-flight emergency (Schmidle calls it “a vertiginous surprise”): 

Hurriedly, Stucky attempted to right the ship by blasting thrusters of high-pressure air, which was stored in the wings and was used to orient the vehicle in low-gravity environments. Then he instructed Mackay to unlock and raise the feather. As it went up, the spaceship righted itself, just as it had on Stucky’s harrowing glide flight seven years earlier. The same innovation that had contributed to the 2014 crash was, when properly deployed, a godsend.

That 2014 crash haunts Schmidle’s piece. He describes it magnificently:

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo zoomed off the runway. They flew about a hundred and fifty miles northeast, alongside a craggy mountain range streaked with purple and green mineral deposits. After reaching Death Valley, and still ascending, they looped back toward the release point. Stucky, in mission control, was watching the cockpit video and listening over the radio as Siebold and Alsbury ran through their checklists.

Alsbury: “Seat belts and shoulder harnesses?”

Siebold: “Snug.”

Alsbury: “Rocket burn timer?”

Siebold: “Set and verified.”

Alsbury: “Stick?”

Siebold: “Stick is forward.”

The pilots flooded their masks with oxygen, in case of an emergency. Neither was wearing a pressure suit.

Alsbury armed the release switch, and the spaceship dropped from WhiteKnightTwo. He fired the rocket. “Good light,” Siebold said, his voice reedy from the onset of g-forces. A moment later, following Stucky’s protocol, Alsbury announced their airspeed: Mach 0.8. They were in the transonic zone. Everything was going well.

“Yeehaw!” Siebold cried out.

Then Alsbury did something inexplicable. “Unlocking,” he said. He began reaching for a lever that controlled the locks on the feather.

Stucky hoped that he’d either misheard Alsbury or failed to notice that the spaceship had passed the transonic zone. He checked the Machmeter on the main display screen, and saw that the speed was still below Mach 1. His body seized: without the locks in place, aerodynamic forces would push the feather up, creating a tremendous amount of drag and shredding the spaceship in midair.

He lunged at the call button, intending to scream, “Don’t!”

Siebold grunted in agony. The audio feed stopped, and the video froze mid-frame. An engineer looked up from his console and gave Stucky a searching look.

Stucky said, “They’re gone.”

“Rocket Man” begins and ends with Stucky’s successful piloting of SpaceShipTwo into space. In between, it chronicles his personal history and how he became involved in Virgin Galactic’s amazing quest to make commercial space travel a reality. It brims with fascinating details – the way SpaceShipTwo is “attached like a marsupial to the belly of a mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo”; the labor-intensive construction of SpaceShipTwo’s frame (“you had to bind together sheets of honeycombed carbon by applying resin, cut the sheets into shapes with laser-guided precision, and bake each piece in a Celotex oven”); the technique suggested by Virgin Galactic’s flight doctor for avoiding passing out while experiencing extreme gravitational forces: “‘Pretend like you’re squeezing a walnut down there,’ she said, referring to my glutinal muscles.”

Schmidle's “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011) and “In the Crosshairs” (June 3, 2013) are New Yorker masterpieces. Now he's produced a third - “Rocket Man.” He's become one of the magazine's best writers.

Updike's Exquisite Word Paint (Contra Christine Smallwood)

Christine Smallwood, in her “State of Affairs” (Bookforum, Summer 2018), says of John Updike, “He could describe a barn well enough, but to what end?” If you have to ask that about Updike, chances are you’re not going to appreciate his art. For Updike, things are interesting in themselves. Like Dürer and Vermeer, artists he admired immensely, he describes the physical world in close avid detail: 

Shed needles from the larches had collected in streaks and puddles on the tarpaper and formed rusty ochre drifts along the wooden balustrade and the grooved aluminum base of the sliding glass doors.

The lilac leaves, flourishing, flowerless, had reached the height of Nancy’s window and, heart-shaped, brushed her screen.

Her brown eyes, gazing, each held in miniature the square skylight above them.

Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion.

He was sitting on the brittle grass, his feet in their papery slippers stinging. 

He called; she held still in answer, and appeared, closer approached, younger than he had remembered, smoother, more finely made – the silken skin translucent to her blood, the straight-boned nose faintly paler at the bridge, the brown irises warmed by gold and set tilted in the dainty shelving of her lids, quick lenses subtler than clouds, minutely shuttling as she spoke. 

These lines are all from Updike’s Couples (1968), a novel that Smallwood calls smug, pompous, and silly. She doesn’t get Updike’s writing. His art is the art of description. Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her “The Book of Laughter” (The New Yorker, October 7, 2013), calls him “a painter in words.” This seems exactly right.