Last Week's New Yorker Review: December 16
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 16
Thanks for your patience, gentle scholars. Time waits for no man, but thankfully the magazine does take a week off in December. I’ll chug up to date during the winter break and we’ll be back on schedule shortly. And of course: A very happy whatever to you and yours.
“an often musically superfluous ballet of jabbing, pointing, bouncing, and crouching.”
Must-Reads:
“The Orchestra is the Star” - Alex Ross makes a mass movement with the Berlin Philharmonic. Thank goodness I didn’t name Ross’ excellent Kali Malone piece a must-read, only because three consecutive picks from the same writer would risk things getting redundant, and at the same time this week’s effort is, unignorably, one of the best-written reviews in the magazine this year, in both show-offy moments (“a spectral solo that glowed through the murk and then was swallowed up in it”) and subtler ones (an “unexpectedly rollicking Bruckner Fifth”.) There’s hardly a word here which isn’t describing some quality of sound; because the Berlin Philharmonic allows and even demands its players take on individual qualities, there’s much for Ross to expound upon – if nothing is too blended, anything can be picked out. Even in such a short piece, all this beauty isn’t just for its own sake; Ross is making the point that conductors whose “charisma is indistinguishable from that of the orchestra itself” achieve a better balance than personally-branded showmen. This lesson may also apply a bit closer to home.
“The Battle for France” - Lauren Collins stands in the middle of the Fifth Republic and shoots somebody. A propulsive tale because it finds an angle more compelling than “here’s what’s going on in France” – namely, “here’s what the French media (and by proxy the French body politic) thinks about what’s going on in France.” Collins returns, again and again, to the press environment; when Macron impulsively dissolves his own government, we aren’t in the room where it happens but in “the control room at BFMTV”, monitoring the news onscreen. This is a counterintuitive conceit, distancing us from the subject of the story – but it strengthens the point that nobody can really get inside Macron’s head; his hermetic qualities, never absent, have ramped up. Our protagonist won’t sing his I Want song, so we’ll listen to the chorus instead. Collins also spends some time untangling the R.N. from MAGA (not hugely persuasively) and chronicling the French left-wing’s surprising moment of unity, and though not all the material is new, Collins makes sure it’s at least snappy. Grouille-toi!
Window-Shop:
“Head Case” - Benjamin Kunkel says Paul Valéry is the very model of a major Modernist, in general. Breaks open its subject with one of the better introductory sections I can remember – Valéry is Modern not in subject but in method, approaching his closed-off figures with a cooly scientific gaze. He’s a new figure to me, and Kunkel could probably indulge in a few more quotes and a few more dinner-party-appropriate anecdotes, but as a capsule analysis of Valéry’s style, this is very strong. His work is “arid”, focusing on the “anticipation of life” above and beyond the thing itself; the more he moves away from the passion of embodied pain, the more he finds pain at the heart of things. There is a quality of avarice to Valéry, a desperation to retain his own thoughts, that I find relatable for some reason; it’s key to his project, though it might also be the reason he’s not more widely known. Modern love walks on by.
“Love For Sale” - Rebecca Mead salutes the Unregulated Sex of America. Basically just a selection of anecdotes from a new book on American regulation of prostitution circa the turn of the century – but who needs a sweeping thesis with anecdotes this fascinating? Did you know 1870s St. Louis legalized prostitution in the most convoluted and bizarre way possible? Mead rightly focuses on American “schemes” that drew from its “often confused sense of itself as a nation built upon red-blooded masculinity and upon high-minded righteousness.” When they go low, we go dumb! (Afraid the French will teach soldiers about blowies? Surely a pep talk will do the trick.) Mead could give more space to the racial politics of all this; they seem to be fairly central to author Eva Payne’s argument, and they’re dismissed pretty quickly here. Otherwise, Mead successfully flips a dry academic history into a breezy general-interest article – the modus operandi around these parts.
“No Room for a Masterpiece” - Calvin Tomkins knows Rashid Johnson has conceptual artworks of a plan. Happy 100th birthday to Tomkins, who continues to crank out profiles of artists that are, if a bit formulaic, also reliably wonderful – and in this case genuinely moving – with no marks of visible effort. (I’d be fascinated to learn a bit about the invisible effort behind such a thing – is Tomkins still schlepping to gallery openings?) It’s nearly disingenuous the way Tomkins begins and ends with the question of Johnson’s understanding of Duchamp, given that Tomkins’ whole art-world career began by interviewing Duchamp; indeed, he’s one of three or four people that could reasonably be called The Duchamp Guy. Who cares what Johnson has to say about Duchamp when Calvin Tomkins is holding the microphone? (The sliver of Duchampiana we do get is weirdly desultory, though.) I think Johnson’s work is pretty fantastic, but it is notable how easily sold it all is – a far cry from his hero Hammons’ snowballs – especially when he’s pictured buying “a vacation place on Minorca” and such. Johnson’s work is circling theory-inflected ideas about figuration as it relates to Blackness, but this heady brew feels, in the end, nearly apolitical – his work is literally embedded in the side of a museum; he’s not breaking down those walls. He does well with structure; his breakout works, gorgeous and repetitious, coincided with his moving through the A.A. process, and while Tomkins doesn’t draw this line, I think the rigid program of recovery may have lead to a more rigid program of art-making. On the other hand, Johnson’s first foray into filmmaking, which seems to have had almost no one with filmic expertise involved, mostly went off the rails. (But what first film doesn’t?) I’m also unconvinced by Tomkins’ descriptions of Johnson’s recent work – perhaps I’ll be won over in person. It’s good that Tomkins at least gets into the deeply iffy self-dealing involved in Johnson’s Guggenheim show – one certainly should not receive a retrospective at an institution where one served on the board of trustees – even if it’s mostly to allow Johnson to half-heartedly excuse himself. Today he’s an institution man, tomorrow he’s an institution, man.
“Each Other’s Back” - Richard Brody is heads-over-tails for Nickel Boys. Always a thrill to hear Brody truly flip for something, and this isn’t merely his movie of the year, he credits it with finding “a new way of capturing immediate experience cinematically.” He’s so awed that he has trouble doing more than pointing; there’s a lot of plot synopsis here, which seems especially superfluous when the film’s formal work is really what Brody’s flipping for, and even the analysis mostly amounts to saying what the film is going for, and not precisely why it succeeds. That may be too tall an order, though; when a film is truly speaking a new language, it’s petty to ask why it’s merely being translated and not analyzed.
“Leg Work” - Rivka Galchen limns a lifelike limb. Mostly a straightforward tech-advancement story, given a little extra juice by the central character’s backstory – he lost a limb in a near-death accident. Initially I thought it was too much to try to give us all this detail about Herr; the surprising new advance, which concerns a new model of amputation which allows patients to have significantly more control over their limbs, is topic enough. But really that topic is fairly simple; the advance isn’t hard to understand, and the main reason it hasn’t already happened seems mostly to be medical hubris and the power of negative vocabulary. (An amputated limb was a “failure” – as in, “failure to save the limb” – and thus not worth fretting over.) Robotic prostheses may always be a luxury anyway, which is depressing, though obviously not Herr’s fault. I suppose some of that empathy is what Galchen was looking for with the late tangent into a doctor’s practice dealing with disabled people; it’s not uninteresting, but it’s a bridge too far, as is the ending, which gets into Herr’s slightly uninformed-feeling take on eugenics – what is this story even about, again? I guess we’re on a knee-to-know basis.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Basic Instinct” - Alex Barasch doesn’t find Babygirl so confusing. Not a bad profile, by any means; I always assign at least one piece a “Skip” (because otherwise, what even are we doing here?) and this is a fairly uncritical look at a figure I’m mightily skeptical of; therefore, it was basically doomed to fail by no fault of Barasch’s. Reijn’s work double-underlines themes instead of developing them; she’s all mood-board, no substance. Is she making an erotic thriller or an erotic thriller pastiche? It’s not clear which she’s going for or which she’s achieved, and at times the former actress seems mostly to be concerned with giving Kidman some boards on which to tread. There is an awful lot on Reijn’s childhood and early career; none of it feels mandatory, though certainly it’s well-written and, you know, diverting – seeing nudity-filled dramas with her mother, writing teenage fan notes to the head of the company she ends up acting for. It’s charming enough, but Reijn seems like an average Euro pink-diaper kiddo who internalized patriarchy as an annoying force from without that stifled her soul – but not as something that could really harm her. Her provocations feel empty because they aren’t coming from a place of pain, just of negative curiosity. If Barasch is being snarky, though, I’m not seeing it – is the title calling her style “basic”? Maybe… But if there’s snark it’s awfully subtle. Barasch seems like a big fan. Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
Letters:
Zoë Beery writes that Jeannie Suk Gersen’s piece on converting to Judaism “was the first one I read because I knew it would be a hate-read, but it was worse than I expected. We don't need stories right now about American Jews, unless they're truly new and impactful, which this wasn't. …it's selfish to continue making it about us as Israel uses the world's diminishing attention to ramp up the genocide and begin implementing what was always the original plan - ethnically cleansing and fully annexing Palestine. …The time for using or highlighting our Judaism to push back is long over, especially given that Israeli officials have repeatedly made clear that Christian Zionists, not American Jews, are their true allies and audience.” Yup.
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I believe Tomkins just turned 99, not 100. Still, it's a miracle that he is still producing feature-length profiles at an age when Roger Angell was mostly just blogging (no shade, of course). As for how he's able to do it, Tomkins's recent profiles often mention his wife, Dodie Kazanjian, accompanying him on studio visits. I suspect she may be playing a bigger role than that.