June 1, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker Review: June 3, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 3

"‘killah grinds’"

For the second time in three weeks, my print edition of the magazine simply never arrived. I usually wait for the print edition to read the features, but this has once again made me late, so I suppose I’ll have to stop that practice. A bit frustrating!

Must-Read:

“Desert Island” - Hannah Goldfield bets on Hawaiian food in Las Vegas. A delightful journey to a pocket of culture I knew nothing about. Goldfield balances cultural anthropology and food description very well here, untangling the “collision of cultures” already central to Hawaiian food and their further collision with Vegas culture. If we’re going to get culinary postcards from outside the city, I’d prefer they come from relatively less heralded destinations like Vegas, rather than L.A, again and again. It helps that Goldfield doesn’t ignore the exploitation behind this story – the “‘Gentrification. Developers. Inflation.’” that’s driving natives away from the island, and, of course, the omnipresence of gambling that defines Vegas – but neither does she turn that into the whole story; she finds the “strip-mall” realness behind the gloss. What truly makes this a must-read, though, are the truly delectable food descriptions: “a glistening, fragrant broth brimming with carrots, celery, and hunks of oxtail bone, from which supple shreds of purple meat loosened easily,” for one. I want to go to there.

Window-Shop:

“Maxed Out” - Justin Chang goes faster and Furiosa. I’m the kind of nerd that gets very excited about a movie review in the magazine that’s longer than usual – I can’t remember the last time one stretched to four sections. Chang devotes most of the extra space to a film-by-film recap of the Mad Max franchise, focusing specifically on their female characters. It’s a compelling approach, a way of combining service journalism (read: fanservice journalism) with a critical review. I’m not sure Chang quite finds a compelling enough thesis to make all that backstory interesting for those who aren’t planning on seeing the newest film – the series’ “prescience” is not enough. His strength is still in wry plot-synopsis (“Don’t suffer the little children to come unto him” – I giggled) and thoughtful critique. He doesn’t depart from consensus regarding this film – it’s ambitious, but is in some ways a plotty rehash. But by reminding us of the times Miller was initially misunderstood, Chang makes his own take’s fallibility very clear. Thar be war rigs.

“Noodling” (Talk of the Town) - Alex Barasch gets a direct injection of Stereophonic’s rock. Sometimes the most obvious possible setup – a play about a rock band? Cover the recording of the cast album! – can still get excellent results. Every detail is fun, everyone seems like a very good hang. I also just adore this show, which I saw for the second time last night. This is basically a bonus feature – full of disco-ball bliss.

“Old English” - Helen Shaw sees “close and well-lit” London. Three “theatrical reappraisals”, handled very briefly but with ginger and snap. One is an “ochre-and-shadow production”, one captures a “nauseating sensation,” in the last, “the whole theatre seems to be on a raft.” Does it really do justice to any of these shows to rush through them at this speed? Maybe not. Is it still whirlingly enjoyable? But of course. It’s a bright-red triple-decker bus the size of a custard cream biscuit.

“Notice of Security Incident” (Shouts and Murmurs) - Jay Katsir doesn’t mean to bug you. Fairly funny, and never feels one-note. Just the right length.

“The People’s Graduation” (Talk of the Town) - Andrew Marantz attends the Columbia “counter-commencement.” Well worth covering.

Give a Glance:

I feel basically the same way about all four features this week: They’re entertaining to read, but they aren’t that structurally sound, and their stakes are ultimately pretty low. I’d have a very hard time putting one above another – so I’m just making a new, temporary category, somewhere in between the usual slots, and shoving them all in so I don’t have to decide. Listed in order of publication:

“Showstoppers” - Rachel Syme wipes the flop sweat from Rachel Chavkin’s brow. Not really that concerned with Lempicka, which Syme can’t help but criticize even in a fairly laudatory profile. The online title, “Behind the Scenes of a Short-Lived Broadway Musical,” is not only inelegant but totally misleading – we barely go behind-the-scenes at all; compare one scene of rehearsal to multiple scenes just hangin’ with Chavkin. She proves a charming subject, a pink-diaper baby who’s managed to make boundary-pushing theater that’s still commercially viable. I loved Natasha, Pierre (though I was pretty biased – I went to school with Denee Benton), I also saw Chavkin’s little-noted I’ll Get You Back Again in D.C, which was very compelling if deeply flawed. I do think it’s odd that this piece focuses entirely on Chavkin’s musical work – The Thanksgiving Play, which was on Broadway just last season, doesn’t even get a mention. I appreciate Chavkin’s willingness to get in trouble – she states her salary, she says that she’s trying to share her Hadestown royalties; both worthwhile things to share and also surefire ways to make everyone angry with you. I just wish Syme found a more comprehensive thesis regarding Chavkin’s work – it’s odd how little interest she has in drawing thematic, as opposed to practical, links across Chavkin’s oeuvre. Much of that is probably just the nature of theatrical direction, which is fairly managerial and removed, especially compared to film’s direct eye-imprint. (Syme maybe gives Chavkin too much credit for a “collaborative ethos” that’s largely part-and-parcel with the profession.) Still, one wonders if the focus on Chavkin’s personal life isn’t, kinda-sorta, a focus on her gender, in an awkward women-can-have-it-all way. I suppose it’s good to hear about the support Chavkin receives with childcare, the sister-in-law upstairs and all that. But if she were some brash boy wunderkind, would anyone care?

“My Father’s Court” - Molly McCloskey dunks on her dad. Two stories, which McCloskey clearly sees as tightly connected but are actually a bit more distant. There’s the stuff on her troubled relationship with her absentee father, and there’s the stuff on her father’s success as a coach of the Detroit Pistons. Both are compelling reading, and McCloskey’s prose styling is excellent. Still, the conclusion that her father’s distance had much to do with his hyperfocus on basketball seems mainly to come from her belief in his self-justifications, which I definitely don’t buy. You can be devoted to two things at once – there’s something else there, something McCloskey can probably never know. This is so short and elegant there’s no reason not to read it – but it never reverberates enough to be moving.

“Land of Make-Believe” - Evan Osnos flubs the lines with Hollywood Ponzi-schemer Zach Horwitz. This is, fundamentally, a very lightweight true-crime tale about a slick, sociopathic, cologne-drenched con man. It’s a riveting tale, though it’s pretty clear what’s going on from the very start – Osnos probably doesn’t need to attempt a twist-reveal. Whenever Osnos tries to imbue the story with poetic panache (“Something had to work. Fake it till you make it.”) he falters; this is a shallow tale about a shallow person, the probing psychoanalysis just comes across as strained and even a bit dense – isn’t it obvious who this guy is, Evan? Like a bad movie, you can know whether you’ll get a kick out of this from the elevator pitch. Not every story needs depth.

“The Stasi Files” - Burkhard Bilger pieces together the papers East German spies left behind. Consistently compelling, with prime, never flashy prosecraft (as one always gets with Bilger) – but it’s never clear what this story is actually about. At first it looks like a spy story, complete with in-medias-res opening; then it looks like a story about complicity; then it’s about document preservation and restoration; then it’s sort of a tech-development story; then it’s a meditation on the nature of archives… and then it just sort of ends, with none of these threads paying off in a meaningful way. What are we meant to get out of this story? There are some fairly commonplace ideas about “‘how close we are to being captured’” in evildoing – a narrative often told about the Holocaust’s perpetrators, and not given much extra depth when applied to this later era. What that has to do with piecing paper records together with various technologies, in any case, is beyond me. Genin does seem like a non-obvious choice to tell that story about, since she very actively sought out an East German spy’s life; it still applies, of course, as Bilger makes clear. The connection between Genin’s story and the story of the papers is just too literal, though, and Bilger gets sidetracked too much. Nothing coheres: The paper practically crumbles in your hands.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Perfectionist” - Jackson Arn soars for Brancusi. If Brancusi doesn’t do it for you – and he’s never really appealed to me – Arn’s point-and-gasp approach (“Just savor it, already”) won’t convince you of much. I know Brancusi isn’t a direct affiliate of the futurists, but I look at all those emblems of sleekness and sheen and see something fascistic. Arn just thinks they’re neat, which is his right, but he doesn’t find much that’s unexpected to point out about them. They look like penises, they pare down reality with “ruthless sport”, they look different from different angles. Find a new slant – Brancusi did!

“Thoroughly Modern” - Alex Ross follows Yuja Wang’s star. If Ross thinks we’re paying too much attention to Wang’s outfits, perhaps he ought not to spend the whole first half of his review talking about the reactions to Wang’s outfits – just saying. I don’t have a big problem with that, really; it’s just that when Ross gets around to discussing the music, his prose is oddly muted and first-draft-ish. He uses “moments” twice in very close succession; he says Wang “viscerally inhabited” one piece’s “conflicting moods” – a strangely evasive description of what she’s actually doing. The worst part is the college-essay concluding line: “In the end, Wang’s flair for spectacle doesn’t diminish her gifts; it heightens them.” Webster’s Dictionary defines “pianist” as…

“Higher and Higher” - Idrees Kahloon is a big boy. Yowch. Kahloon’s argument that growth will save the world is based in blind faith in decarbonization and other green-tech solutions and an insistence, uncoupled from any evidence at all, that the self-destructive nature of economic growth “has become less and less plausible.” His counterargument to Greta Thunberg is that saving the world would be “cruel to the striving masses” (let’s hear what they have to say about it, eh, Harvard boy?) and unrealistic given the nature of “democratic politics” – what he really means is capitalist politics. He tries to obscure the viciousness of his argument by writing, confusingly and at length, about the history of GDP as a system. Ignore all that – its obscurantism is just trying to confuse you. Kahloon’s argument is simple, vicious, and profoundly inhumane. But who needs humanity when you can have stonks?

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Letters:

a moth flies out of the empty mailbag…

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Song of the week! (Now with fancy embed so you can listen and scroll!)

Alms? Alms?

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