Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 4

“It turns out that Sundström was something of a maritime spammer.”

Must-Read:

“Signed, Sealed, Delivered” (Our Far-Flung Correspondents) - Lauren Collins writes a bottle episode. Whether or not you’re inherently charmed by the concept of a message in a bottle, Collins can probably win you over by the end of this piece, which is largely a profile of a collector of bottle-messages. (He often destroys the bottles to get at the messages, so I wouldn’t call him a message-in-a-bottle collector.) Her prose has to do a lot of the work here, as Buffington is friendly but slightly recalcitrant and the actual anecdotes about found messages are… about what you’d expect from the world’s least efficient social media platform. (There’s even one story that proves, once again, that every app will eventually become a dating app, albeit one where sailors interface with fifteen-year-old girls’ fathers. It’s a less charming anecdote than one would hope.) A good chunk of the story – and its best sections – consist simply of Collins and Buffington wandering around a beach together, hoping to spot their preferred prize. Collins defers her ending, and I dreaded that this would become one of those longreads that builds to nothing – but eventually, luck – and, even rarer, profound coincidence –shines her way. I couldn’t keep my tears bottled up.

Window-Shop:

🗣️ “Earthalujah!” (Doomsday Dept.) - Jake Offenhartz lets a preach exceed his grasp. I was lucky enough to attend a wedding officiated by Reverend Billy a few years ago, and he’s obviously an original and a real NYC denizen; Offenhartz gets his deal and captures its mix of activist-provocateur sincerity and bug-eyed goofiness.

🗣️ “A Life in Poems” (Retrospective) - Michael Schulman is Burstyn with poems. She’s hugely charming and a totally sincere poetry lover; there’s nothing even a bit manufactured about her poetry anthology-cum-memoir, which is made clear by her effortless recitation of a variety of verses. Whether or not you read the memoir, this covers a few of its best anecdotes.

“Roman Holiday” (Books) - Becca Rothfeld keeps all quiet on the West German front with Wolfgang Koeppen. It’s very hard to get the aura of experimental literature across on the page, and Rothfeld makes her task extra-difficult by including so few quotes. Still, if she doesn’t totally capture Koeppen’s “febrile”, “fractured” style, she at least captures his stories, rife as they are with negation, erasure, and incompleteness. Often “nakedly accusatory” regarding a German politics still filled, post-war, with “Nazi sympathizers and casual antisemites”, Rothfeld ends by showing us how often Koeppen is drawn toward “grace” and, in a great contradiction, our “outrageously beautiful” world. For him, it’s all and nothing.

🗣️ “Big Break” (The Boards) - Rachel Syme can’t throw Ball. Watching the first season of The Pitt, I had no idea Ball was a new discovery; telling his story by way of his casting director is a nice way to make what can be a cliché feel sincere.

“Attention Must Be Paid” (Profiles) - Michael Schulman shouts into a Metcalf-phone. Profiling Metcalf, who’s delivered two of the signature performances of the season amidst an extended run of heaters (in theaters!), is a smart idea. And Schulman, naturally, does his thing with minimal exertion; it helps that Metcalf’s whole deal is beyond explication, so nakedly present is it in even just a photograph. She is among our greatest indicators. She’s also fairly uninterested in anything but the craft, with a “monastic aversion to the trappings of fame” and an interest in physicality – knitting, birthing calves – that suggests we’ll probably never see her pivot to directing. So much the better. Her come-up is tied so directly to Steppenwolf that we get more of the troupe’s history than hers specifically; her scene-stealing part in Roseanne never became show-stealing – even after the title character got the boot. (Schulman entirely skips past the spinoff’s very long run, which ended just last year; I guess there weren’t any stories there, but the effect is strange – it’s her most recent mainstream project!) But the story is overwhelmed by the encroachment of a larger and more timely narrative, the return of known abusive boss Scott Rudin. Is Metcalf required to answer for him? I guess not. But she tries, and doesn’t do a very good job – Schulman calls it an “uneasy scene”. She’s propping up a powerful abuser, which may be par for the course in our country, but is still unjust. (Frankly, it’s more blinkered and harmful than anything Patti said.) The commercial failure of Little Bear Ridge Road, which was perhaps too intimate for a Broadway run yet which just won the biggest critics’ award for the best play of the season, is depressing, and frankly a good producer should have found better ways to sell tickets. Salesman is both doing better and drowning a bit at the massive Winter Garden, which is an obviously awkward venue for any play. That’s not to say that success would personally redeem Rudin, but the idea that he was filling a needed role as the guy that fights for art is transparently ridiculous when he’s pulling punches. Does Metcalf want him in the fight, or does she just want to keep getting cast? If it’s the latter, she should shut up and act.

🗣️ “Taxicab Confessions” (Here to There Dept.) - Emma Allen keeps it medallion the family. Definitely an enticement to see the video piece!

Skip Without Guilt:

“Breaking Ground” (Dancing) - Jennifer Homans checks the pro-Graham. Happy to get more Homans without six months passing! Here she writes herself into a corner: Martha Graham felt that “dances quickly become dated”, and Homans points out all the ways Graham’s work reflects its era’s politics, and the trouble with approaching her works with too much “reverence”. Thankfully Homans doesn’t take the usual approach of acting as though interspersing newly composed dances by other composers is sacrilege, unfortunately she has to confront the usual fact that those dances just aren’t very good. It makes one long to see a Homans review of some more “radical” dance, the kind she longs for; I know for a fact it’s being done in the city, but almost never at the major, well-resourced venues she frequents. Her assignment doesn’t match her taste. That’s worth crying over.

“Burning Man” (The Political Scene) - Elizabeth Kolbert knows that he’s toxic. I so wish Kolbert had written the piece suggested by the excellent, though brief, section beginning “Environmental regulations are…”, in which she visits a town sickened by a local sterilization plant. It would be easy enough to give us all the needed political context but center direct reporting and narratives. Instead, the whole first half of this piece is a fairly bland biography of a man who is ideologically antisocial in precisely the same way as any other fascist in leadership, hard to distinguish from any of the similar pieces the magazine publishes every single week. The second half is too scattershot to land many points, skipping between MAHA and court and the aforementioned Virginia scene, and the piece wraps up by affirming that Zeldin has been successful via the exact tactics this administration has used everywhere: Destruction über alles.

“Brotherly Love” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang does buy halves. Nice to see Kang actually enjoy a television program. This is just too much synopsis, not enough analysis; specifically, if there’s a single word of formal analysis or even description here I can’t find it. But for a scant few words on the performances, we might as well be reading a book review of the script. Oh, brother.

“Pardon Me” (Letter from Washington) - Ruth Marcus begs pardon; pegs bargain. Presidents have almost always used the pardon power in overtly self-serving ways; previously, they’ve usually had the good sense to try to hide this. Trump, as usual, derives his strength from his disdain for shame. He is openly mercenary, and has thus been able to gain much more power and money from use of the pardon. If what was obviously broken had been fixed, he couldn’t do this; that’s also true, of course, about the entire Trump phenomenon, as has been pointed out again and again. This just feels like perhaps the literal least of my concerns regarding Trump; a tiny offshoot of his rampant and widespread subversion of the justice system, only interesting insofar as it’s especially literal and happens to involve some celebrities. If Marcus has a scoop here, I missed it; this feels like a long recap of recent news on a subject that will always be covered elsewhere – see: literal; celebrities. That’s just not why I read this magazine.

“The Trickster” (The Art World) - Hilton Als Duchamps at the bit. Manages to be both so heavily reliant on Calvin Tomkins’ writing about (and interviews with) Duchamp that one wonders whether Als even read this particular show’s catalogue, yet insistent on reading Duchamp as, basically, affirming all the things Als is usually saying; also, both uninterested in analysis of any particular piece, yet relatively surface-level in the more philosophical discussion of modernism it wants to bring us. Als barely bothers to review the show, and his view of Duchamp is neither as radical as he thinks nor even any fun to wrestle with. It’s a pane in the glass.

“Growth Narrative” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield swears it’s still good. Goldfield can’t decide whether to bury Jessica Koslow, of moldy-gentrification-café-Twitter-scandal infamy, or to praise her; my guess is that Goldfield set out to write her redemption arc but found a woman who does come across as annoying and clueless, frankly, and ended up having to toe a weird middle ground; as her friend (who’s left anonymous, annoyingly – this isn’t a blog) remarks, she was “heralded more than she should have been. Shamed more than she should have been.” But in that case publicizing her now can only serve to make the situation worse, and the piece is left with no reason to exist.

Letters:

Michael B. has “two thoughts on this issue's discussion of obsolete, failing, or failed technology” – the first concerning Lauren Collins’ Talk about a French show of flops, which I didn’t include largely because I felt the topic had been covered back when it was called the Museum of Failure and toured the states. Michael focuses on “transparent playing cards”, which he “strongly disagrees” belong in an exhibit of bad ideas: “In high school, we found a great use for them. They were an easy way to up the difficulty in our favorite lunchtime activity, playing Egyptian Ratscrew. …With transparent cards (which generally still have the rank and suit opaque on the back), all the cards in the stack start to blend into each other. You need to have a good memory to not get confused by a 6 five cards back still staring you in the face.”

He also relates to Julian Lucas’ mention of old I.M. logs in his piece on lost data: “I too recently found a (still working) old hard drive, filled with a couple years of conversations before we all gradually moved off of AIM. I've had to [keep] myself from going deep into these out of both embarrassment and a sense of privacy for myself and my [past] friends.”

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