Last Week’s New Yorker, weeks of March 30

“hapless and jinxed”

Must-Reads:

“Is Cuba Next?” (Letter from Havana) - Jon Lee Anderson isn’t Soy Cuba facing. Just more of the best-in-class usual from JLA, whose previous pieces on Cuba with three word titles include 2016’s A New Cuba¹ and 2021’s A New Cuba? – which kinda sums it up. Anderson is a former resident of the country, and he demonstrates that its needs for rehabilitation will not be a quick fix, nor one that private sources can or will provide. (“It could cost ten billion dollars to reconstruct the grid” might as well be a SimCity Game Over screen.) Cuba has been languishing for a very long time, and Anderson’s need for narrative urgency has him structuring the piece around Trump’s regime change elsewhere, and what it might portend for Cuba, before delivering what is more an examination of Cuba’s decennium horribilis than an attempt to guess what Trump will do next. Fine – not even the orange man himself knows that – but the story feels rooted more in a recent past of causes (2022 is mentioned more than every subsequent year combined) than a present of consequences. It’s still worth pondering Cuba’s “humanitarian disaster”, which is terrible and could easily get worse; Anderson is an expert guide.

“Safe at Home”2 (Books) - Adam Gopnik does his best nyc guido voice. The new-book review is really only the first section here; it’s quick and fun, with Gopnik running his usual routine of disagreeing with leftist ideology while justifying pretty much all its ideas. His real search is for a way to justify baseball not politically but “humanely”, perhaps through the philosophy of Alva Noë, whose book Infinite Baseball asserts that the sport is closer to a social practice than a game, full of linguistic battles (what is a ‘strike’?) that mirror his interaction-based model of consciousness. (Trying to summarize Gopnik’s summary of Noë’s ideas reveals how elegantly the former keeps things clear and fun.) He outlines a mistaken move – a slide executed because a slide is what’s done in that situation (“cultural custom is simply muscle memory widely shared”) – a complication which certainly isn’t unique to baseball, as the instant immortalization of Cayden Boozer’s entirely needless picked-off pass illustrates. In the final section, he articulates sports as an “aesthetic inquiry” into “irrational faith”, which is beautifully put and seems essentially correct. When the odds are saying you’ll never win, that’s when the grin should start!

Window-Shop:

“Bateman Rules” (On Television) - Vinson Cunningham will dance the hoochie coochie watching D.T.F. St Louis. I greatly enjoy the meditation-on-a-particular-actor approach to a review, and though I don’t think Cunningham changed the way I view Bateman, I’m happy just to soak in his vivacious language. (“Batemanian sangfroid can cloak a quotidian sociopathy that only grows as bloody trouble grows, too.”) The new show sounds absolutely bizarre, and though Cunningham tells us more than shows us of its “even odder than you might think” style, and winds toward a men-aren’t-alright conclusion that everyone is sick of, his joy is persuasive. Powerhouse!

“Copy That” (Books) - Anthony Lane bids us welcome to his crib. Lane’s irony is at pea-soup levels from the jump, when telling us to rely “on our own wits” instead of A.I. is compared to “suggesting we learn to ride a penny-farthing, inhaling the sweet scents of the hedgerows as we pedal along.” If his Violet Crawley-scented style has you in stitches, you’ll adore the rest of this; I find it a bit trying, but not a dealbreaker. I’m a bit obsessed with the streamer Ludwig’s secret to creative and popular success, which he’s termed the “Yoink and Twist”; it’s as simple as taking someone else’s core idea or formal structure and putting your own stylistic twist on its execution. (In case you weren’t aware, this very newsletter is in fact a conceptual yoink from the late lamented Tilly Minute, a newsletter which ran on and off from 2015-18.) Lane’s best point is that this type of adaptation can be seen in Raphael’s improved reproductions of scenes by lesser painters and Shakespeare’s new takes on old and not-so-old plots. The difference between a riff and a rip-off is often a matter of perspective. It’s also a matter of citation, though, a facet Lane overlooks, and one that speaks to the outrage over LLMs – these programs make all sorts of attribution difficult to impossible, because the blur between sources is the very source of their power. Lane gets lost a bit in confusing what is just and right with what is legally enforceable, and the ending defense of self-plagiarism as “style” is the sort of dumb but witty-sounding thought that an overabundance of style can lead to.

🗣️ “Queuer’s Paradox” (Between the Lines) - Zach Helfand will queue anon. A meditation on lines, surprisingly (and groovily!) weed-scented for something so etymologically coked-up: “…there’s something egalitarian about an unadulterated line… Biblically speaking, the first line was Noah’s. You wanted to be in that one.” Followed by a quick interview with a rightfully frustrated man who’s been waiting on line for thirty-four hours. Someone grab the Quadruplex, we need linear editing, stat!

“On Her Own” (Profiles) - Jia Tolentino is Robyn Sweden to play polyrhythms.³ A surprisingly surface-level take on Robyn, mostly interested in formal analysis – Tolentino is a bit overawed by the classic pop music technique of making happy-sounding songs about sad subjects. Robyn’s new album is her second consecutive very skimpy effort after a long hiatus; even the cringe-rap song is hard to have especially strong feelings about. So Tolentino mostly focuses on her past, which is undeniably one of the great stories in pop, the original flop-star journey from bubblegum singles to cult recognition. The pop music nerds among us will have to get through such pro-forma topics as “Why are so many of these people from Nordic countries?”, and Tolentino’s presentation of poptimism as mainly the result of the music getting better, and not of changing cultural and critical norms, is hard to agree with, especially when her evidence seems to be because-I-said-so-that’s-why. (She really puts the techno in technological determinism.) Still, it’s easy enough to get lost in the rhythm of Tolentino’s language and end up grooving for an hour, and perhaps that’s the perfect metaphor for what Robyn does best.

Add’l Note: Due to an editing error, my review of Emily Flake’s Spring Bingo card (Sketchbook) did not make the Cartoon and Poem Supplement. (Which you can receive every week if you subscribe.) “Sidewalk Goo Pungent Again” is excellent, as is “Toddlers Emboldened”; both of those could easily be Onion headlines. The rest I can take or leave.

Skip Without Guilt:

“We, the Robots” (Annals of Technology) - Jill Lepore has principle concerns. Lepore’s heart is in the right place, and she’s correct to raise the point that these private companies have not actually written a constitution, and ought not to be in charge of our country’s moral judgement. It’s just that the point is extremely obvious, and Lepore makes us wade through a lot of other people’s stupidity before she gets there. There are enough Sam Altman quotes in here to kill a protein shake. Mostly, Lepore is like a professor in a hospital, continually expressing confusion that her doctorate is useless here. That’s not what the word means in this case!! (With the important difference that Anthropic is being obviously disingenuous in using the term ‘constitution’ and claiming after the fact that they meant it only in the broad sense of ‘composition’. Lepore shouldn’t have to point that out, though, and certainly not at this length.) The constraints on Claude aren’t “nearly enough”, Lepore concludes, but at least they’re trying. I’d say the same thing about Lepore.

“Body Doubles” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross isn’t ‘solde. Everyone already knows the Met Opera basically sucks as an institution. What behemoth doesn’t, though? The art form is still glorious, and the Met’s ability to produce spectacle should be lauded, not grumpily scoffed at. Ross says the Met “mandates” spectacle that verges on clutter, but perhaps it’s merely that they’re one of the last places around that can pull off spectacle. Ross is in a very bad mood throughout, and although he admits the director “has passed the… challenge”, all his praise is begrudging or backhanded, and he ends on an exceptionally sour note, sounding the alarm for impending disaster despite signals I’d call mixed at worst. Maybe he was tired? Four and a half hours is a lot for anyone.

“The Last Generation” (Portfolio) - Bob Miller and Paige Williams put the horse before the cartelization. I guess these high-contrast B&W photos of a young horse rider and her farmer father are pretty enough, but I wouldn’t call them exceptional, and the brief text gestures toward a valorization of the white working class that seems odd at a time like this. It’s not even clear what Bob Miller’s investment in this family is, and that ought to be where the story starts.

“The Origin Story” (The Art World) - Hilton Als doesn’t Bi- it. I wish this were at least fun to hate, but it’s more like Utica’s roast on Drag Race: Cringe-inducingly nasty while landing hardly a single point. Very weird to read this immediately after the Anthony Lane piece it follows in the magazine, because Als’ main critique is basically that all these people are copycats – or, as he calls it, ChatGPT artists, “makers who have little if any relationship to what they’re putting out there”. One quickly realizes that he’s playing the @whos____who matching game, without any of that account’s dry wit. It’s already a curmudgeonly, probably wrongheaded approach, but it’s made a lot worse by how many of Als’ comparisons are off-base.⁴ He’s operating as though everyone shares his exact canon, but in fact that canon is rather narrow, especially when it comes to contemporary art. As Aruna D’Souza pointed out on IG, the comparison of Aziz Hasara’s “prints of residual images from US military night vision goggles” share at most some aesthetic affiliation with Wolfgang Tillmans, while the idea that Cameron Rowland has some kind of monopoly on structure-based social practice art like that of David L. Johnson, leaving that artist at risk of getting “caught up in what are by now received ideas”, puts a ludicrously short timeline on those artistic receipts. Rowland is only 38, and had his breakthrough exhibit in 2014. The Salon des Refusés was held in 1863, does this mean that by the time of the First Impressionist Exhibition, eleven years later, the style was closed to newcomers?! Don’t tell Cassatt! Als does like a few things, and he’s right to like them; I especially hate hating on this review since it doubles as a memorial to the astonishing Agosto Machado, one of the most giving artists in our city, who just passed and deserves the sanctification he lent to so many others. (The glass sculptures he cites, by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, are indeed superb, while the Sarah Rodriguez aluminum sculptures he likes struck me as some of the most derivative work in the show, a kind of Arte Povera riff, but what do I know?) Als should chill. A little yoink-and-twist might smart, but it never hurt nobody.

Letters:

A person on the inside informed me that the recent Talk of the Town enfreshening may be due to Jane Bua taking over as junior editor. (Susan Morrison remains the senior editor.) Disconcertingly, Bua was born in 2000, so “fresh” really is the operative word.⁵ Great work so far!

Serena liked last week’s edition of the ‘sletter. Always nice to hear – to be honest, I can almost never tell which editions are ‘the good ones’. I never know what’ll come out of my face!

forgot to change this bit before i pressed send

so i’m changing it now but it will probably not be right in the email version