May 3, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker Review: May 6, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 6

"‘My imitation of a nonintrusive, permanent bannister.’"

(shakes off the rust…) We’re back!

Must-Read:

Both must-reads this week are imperfect tributes to heroic figures. They pair well.

“On Native Grounds” - Casey Cep assesses Deb Haaland’s Department of the Interior designs. Haaland is a true leader in a political system that has rarely granted leaders much power. Her often-silent style comes from a legacy which is foreign to the settler-colonialist norms of “U.S.” culture (“‘We hear our people out’”), and her politics have been shaped by a difficult working-class upbringing (“She went to work full time at a local bakery where she’d been picking up shifts, for less than two dollars an hour.”) Other than one emailed Nancy Pelosi quote, Cep avoids focusing too much on Haaland’s political allies, instead using the voices of her family and the Native community to present her as a remarkably successful force for good. This is mostly quite successful – although a few moments, like the anecdote where she notices a disabled person that needs assistance, feel stump-speech-y, as true as they must be. Cep balances these personal-interest moments with the right amount of background on Native American oppression, which isn’t nearly past – there’s not enough to overwhelm Haaland’s story, and the focus is kept on legal matters, which still allows for stories like the federal judge who is gradually radicalized by the government’s obvious disrespect and contempt for Native Americans.

I wish Cep touched a bit more on the arguments over how best to effect change as a native in a settler society – Haaland is subtly presented as a walking counterargument, albeit an “improbable” one, to the fairly widespread leftist disillusion with electoral politics, so her own views on mass movements seem highly relevant. But this is a sincere and touching tribute to a politician that is willing to use her power with others, and to deeply listen, not as some performance of empathy, but because people deserve more than a voice – they deserve to be heard.

“The Phantasm” - Parul Sehgal receives Judith Butler, and returns her, changed. There’s no time, really, for Sehgal to deeply delve into Butler’s ideas, except to outline the ways they’re misunderstood. That’s probably fine – that’s left as an exercise for the reader. Instead, Sehgal’s focus is on how Butler receives their reception – which happens to dovetail with Butler’s work, which is all about reception of self. Sehgal doesn’t underline that connection too forcefully, she’s more interested in allowing Butler’s sly sense of humor to reveal itself, and in showing how they embody “generosity” in both life and work. Butler’s quotes are always sagacious (“‘I am open to a world that acts on me in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled in advance, and something about my openness is not, strictly speaking, under my control’”) but not too baroque – Sehgal includes one famously convoluted line, then compensates with Butler’s most visceral paragraph. The piece resists being taken over by Butler – it is never, itself, philosophical; it never becomes a hall of mirrors. But Sehgal matches Butler’s generosity with her own.

Window-Shop:

“Triple Fault” - Justin Chang cups Luca Guadagnino’s balls. Sorry about that mental image, but Chang made my life difficult by using up every tennis-related pun known to man in his piece. He’s clearly having a blast, and it’s mostly charming, because he’s also committed to a more serious analysis of the film at hand, in which the characters’ “coruscating erotic energy” is “clarifying”. With all respect to Anthony Lane, Chang matches him stylistically and holds serve structurally: The reference to “Jules and Jim” is entirely pertinent and earned, and things otherwise stay focused and clear (even while discussing the “elastic,” non-chronological plot), with welcome reference to Mike Faist’s “live-wire physicality” in West Side Story. He’s reluctant to give enough of the ending away to make its flaws at all comprehensible, but before then this review is nothing but net. Wait, sorry… everything but net? No net? Me do tennis good.

“Night Music” - Helen Shaw listens close to two period-piece transfers. I’ve already praised Stereophonic in these digital pages; Shaw does it justice, praising it as a “magnum opus”, though her interpretation didn’t necessarily deepen my own. The glory of the play is not its depth, anyway; it’s its transporting surface. On the new Cabaret, Shaw’s takedown is absolutely hilarious; I almost made this a must-read just so I could have the quote up top be “look, it’s the half-naked tubercular imps again.” The production is clearly misbegotten, and Shaw’s pretense that something has been lost in transit is both giving and, for being so, all the cattier. Just another delightful day’s work for Shaw.

“The Battle For Attention” - Nathan Heller enters a staring contest. Not entirely sure what to make of this. It initially presents as a pop-psych exploration of our dwindling focus, complete with ad execs bloviating about their ability to track eye contact. Not my favorite thing – but Heller does explain the argument against technological determinism as elegantly as I’ve seen. (“…people’s priorities underwent a sea change with the onset of the modern age, turning to efficiency, objective measurement, and other goals that made such inventions worthwhile. The acceleration of life isn’t an inevitability, in that sense, but an ideological outcome.”) Then… something delightfully strange happens. The story tips surreally into an extended exploration of a twee group of (mostly) academics who gather to stare at under-loved paintings in a predetermined fashion. It’s a bit goofy, but Heller’s journey through the looking-glass is undeniably fun. (Though this crowd’s twee cosplay can’t match the magic of a full-time performance artist – say, a Zardulu.)

Still… Does it have much at all to do with the ostensible topic of the article? I’m not convinced. For me, there is a vast difference between art appreciation, in which focus is essentially for focus’ sake, and most other forms of attention-paying, in which you derive some other benefit from your focus. Meanwhile, a tiktok of kinetic sand and Subway Surfers falls into a third category – its pleasure is in its reliable kinesthetic simplicity; it gives the sensation of touch without actual touch. If anything, it’s less a substitute for focus and more a substitute for being held. Maybe students can’t focus on their work because they don’t feel safe enough, or heard enough, in the classroom to trust that their full attention – a valuable thing – won’t be exploited. Maybe the real goal shouldn’t be the ability to focus on the lesson – it should be the ability to focus others’ attention on their world, what Paulo Friere called conscientização and earlier activists called consciousness raising. This isn’t a stretch: the goal to “focus… attention” is at the very top of the Wiki page.

Look, I’m a huge fan of art appreciation: Reader, do you have any idea how much time I spend gallery-hopping? It’s a sickness. I’m well aware of the glory of sustained attentive practices – look, for example, at this newsletter! But I’m skeptical of the neat line Heller draws between the Birds’ devotion to looking and the cure for what ails the rest of us. The real problem isn’t attention – it’s alienation.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Beastly Matters” - Kelefa Sanneh isn’t pleased to meat you. Sanneh does a good job unpacking the issues with each of these three works advocating, in very different ways, for animal welfare – before limply concluding, at the end, that they’re all sort of worthwhile and have much in common. Huh?! This is such a weird place to land, and feels disconnected with all that came before. It’s as though Goldilocks sampled all three bowls of porridge, found none of them to her liking, and then said fuck it, and polished off all three. All of these thinkers are objectionable: Singer is flatly inhumane, Nussbaum doesn’t have the courage to follow the most radical conclusions of her own statements, Scully is such a patsy he can’t even see that the entire problem he’s fighting is caused by the deregulation his politics are based in. This doesn’t mean that the cause of animal welfare is unworthy, it just means that these three stooges shouldn’t be leading the fight. Personally, I limit my meat consumption for broader environmental reasons – meat, especially beef (which I don’t eat at all – and you shouldn’t either), is wildly inefficient – the same way I try to limit my consumption of any environmentally harmful product. It’s as simple as that. Who needs some philosophical argument about saving each individual cow when it’s so painfully obvious that industrial agriculture is destroying our world? The house is flooded with porridge, girl: start bailing!

“Tower in Flames” - Louis Menand shows what kinds of freedom the Academy awards. A bit divorced from the realities of the moment, both in the sense that a publication like this can’t be quite up to date on such a developing story, and in the sense that conflating this movement with the Title IX-adjacent push against discrimination – what has been called “coddling,” which Menand rightly mocks – is confusing. Apparently, since academic freedom gets invoked both in “classroom speech, where instructors are witnessing a lot of self-censorship, and campus speech, chere students chant, carry banners, and exercise civil disobedience,” it makes sense to jump back and forth between the two topics as if they’re synonymous or even similar. There are lots of euphemisms for the campus protests – they’re a “powder keg” which has provoked a “crisis”, a “problem” of “public relations”. Menand isn’t exactly wrong about any of that, but his halfhearted defense of administrative bloat, which boils down to “Congress did it!”, is in line with a general sense that he’s writing to an audience of university bureaucrats and their sympathizers. Sure, he’s a voice of sanity in that context, but the call is still coming from inside the ivory tower.

“Design for Living” - D.T. Max finds the stock market is now a housing stock market. Like the apartments it surveys, this piece is somewhat bland and shaped awkwardly. Nathan Berman seems like a totally average real-estate prick who happened to be in the right place (renovating office towers into apartments) at the right time (the Covid-era work-from-home boom); he’s not much of a character. Max lightly insinuates that some of his apartments may be less than ideal (they’re “‘slums for the rich’”, jokes one architect) but there’s no particular point of view on Berman’s project. Halfway through, Max lands on an interesting question: “If no one wanted to work in a glum, out-of-date building, why would anyone want to live there?” But it turns out the answer is glaringly obvious – location, location, location – and Max doesn’t have much to add. A late-breaking attempt at psychoanalyzing Berman (he’s “the child of a Holocaust survivor, and the niche he occupies in the city’s real-estate ecology makes sense for an immigrant with a mistrust of government,” apparently) lands awkwardly – it’s just not the piece Max has been writing up to that point. If Max wanted to assess FiDi as a new, albeit characterless, neighborhood, he could’ve talked to its residents; as a real-estate story, there’s too much bull and it’s a bit of a bear.

“Little Old Her” - Amanda Petrusich says: Taylor? I hardly know her! [^1] I get it, I really do: You have to write a review of the new Swift drop, which is both a transcendental pop phenomenon and, by most accounts, a deeply shit album – but you have not even one original thought about Swift, whose public presence is a mineshaft you’d be foolish to jump into. So you write what you can see – a gaping void – and imagine you’re looking at a real person. It’s not an approach that works – you either need to already be at the bottom of the mine, or you need to drop the persona analysis and focus entirely on songcraft – but it’s understandable. Less understandable is the second half, an extended gripe about how mercenary pop stars are. They’re pop stars, lady – mercenary is the whole thing! Swift is often the target of this gripe because part of her pop persona is paradoxically folk-inflected; there’s a performance of sincerity and artiness that it’s easy to assume is the “real person” peeking out from behind the pop-music “mask.” This is false; it’s all part of the mask. The Spotify branding that so rankles Petrusich is, if anything, the most honest part of that pop-up event.

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Letters:

Michael points out that Alex Ross already wrote the book about noise I suggested his piece felt like an intro to: “It's titled The Rest is Noise and is pretty good. This article touched on at least some of the same topics.” I believe that book is relatively more concerned with music up to the sixties – maybe Ross is planning a new book on noise’s present and future. I’d read it!

A reader working on “Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors,” covered by Rebecca Mead in a Talk of the Town I highlighted, was kind enough to comp me a ticket. The show was very good, especially when addressing the astonishing complicity of the companies who manufactured the insulation used on the tower.

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Please to put a penny in the old man’s hat?

I’m immersed in the playoffs. Go Nuggets! Jokic remains perhaps the greatest human body I have ever witnessed in motion.

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[^1]: (Jack Antonoff? I hardly know Anton!)