Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 24

“a raver’s feces, which contains traces of LSD”

Must-Read:

“The Searchers” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang raves. Back-to-back must-reads from Chang, who here delivers probably his most unalloyed celebration since he started at the magazine. (It was his favorite thing at “one of the strongest” Cannes festivals; that says a lot.) His job is to describe the magic without killing it; his approach is to focus on the seeming conflict between Laxe’s apocalyptic thematic material and his “defiantly compassionate” tone, and to show how Laxe mirrors the juxtaposition by shooting a “wind-scoured Purgatory” with “cinematic sweep”. (I could’ve used a tiny bit more formal analysis – perhaps Chang could describe a shot or two?) Whether or not the film’s found-family narrative is as revelatory as Chang feels, he makes an entirely convincing case that we should see for ourselves.

Window-Shop:

“Wire Mother” (The Art World) - Julian Lucas is alive wire. I already know Asawa’s story pretty well, and the ethos of humanism and connectivity Lucas constructs this capsule around is not exactly a novel reading of her aims. His prose is strong enough to make this a treat anyway: The “Cambrian explosion” of “permutations” Asawa discovered in wire (“Asawa worked from the inside out, stopping just short of closing a form’s navel so she could reverse course and spin a second skin around it”) or her later bas reliefs forming “a knobbly, exuberant portrait of the city” (“the medium mattered less than the fact that she was always making, and always devising ways to include others”). The last paragraph is a better-than-average looping in of the political situation – still predictable, but galvanizing. (That’s helpful when it comes to metal.)

Abdurraqib on Willis (Takes) - I’m barely familiar with Willis, so I appreciate Abdurraqib’s appreciation. There is something a little silly, though, about trying to get from “I don’t care about Elvis at all” to “actually, wait, I just remembered I do care about Elvis” in a span of five paragraphs. I suppose he’s trying to mirror Willis’ journey, but that’s a bit too cute. Still excellent as a close reading.

“Effigies of Me” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Jack Handey is a burn bookie. Clever idea, plenty of decent riffs, just enough political pertinence (profiting off protest?) to not feel goofy for its own sake. Inessential, but that’s sort of the idea.

“Possession” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Alice Gregory writes the abstract. Totally fails at choosing the most interesting of the handful of stories to focus on here, which doesn’t mean that the story it is telling is entirely without merit. The story Gregory chooses boils down to a narrative concerning control of Hilma af Klint’s estate in which no one comes across especially well; the Anthroposophists are a bit loony and one secretly sold work into private hands (I saw that Zwirner show – regardless of context, the work was great), while af Klint’s family are inartistic people determined to characterize her practice as solely religious. Almqvist, the researcher at the story’s center, is certainly fastidious and committed; he’s also so embedded in the af Klint world that he can’t really be a neutral arbiter. I would have loved some contextualization from scholars of art that exists at the fringes of the spiritual; how has this sort of thing been handled elsewhere? Anyway, the really compelling material here – which I knew of previously, in part from a Zachary Small Times article (less grounded in place and anecdote than Gregory’s effort, but much quicker) – concerns the multiple hands responsible for creating the art that’s been credited to af Klint, especially those of her lover Anna Cassel. It appears that many of af Klint’s most ambitious works were not created by her hand. The degree to which her vision versus a collective process shaped them, though, is not entirely clear; Gregory hardly touches on the philosophical and art-historical questions raised by this revelation, instead focusing on the minutiae of the research done to unveil this fact. Weirdly, many of the figures in the story seem to think that a communal process would hurt the public perception of af Klint; on the contrary, the idea of collective-community esoteric practices is totally in vogue in our self-consciously alienated age; trying to stifle the story betrays a total lack of imagination. (And Gregory is too willing to go along with that narrative unquestioningly.) Again, more contextualization of collaborative processes in art would have helped: Is this more like Kehinde Wiley outsourcing most of the labor of painting, more like John Ahearn long being credited to the exclusion of Rigoberto Torres, or more like one of the artist collectives that had a recent, brief bloom as a way to put leftist principles into action, but have a long, fragmented history? For an article about the Arts, it’s a shame Gregory is too concerned with business to suggest any answers.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Hatchet Man” (Annals of Law Enforcement) - Marc Fisher sees contract riders in the sky with johnny-come-lately Kash. Well-researched, but far too dry to really hammer home how crazy Patel is. The beginning of the article has the correct dropped-jaw affect, as Patel goes on Rogan to chat about conspiracies; it’s pretty clear that Patel is a figurehead while the agency is drained of its talent, but it’s remarkable, given Trump’s usual fetish for ‘central casting’ figures, that nobody who looked more convincing and less like they were holding an egg in their mouth was willing to lead the agency, even ceremonially. Remarkable, but not especially riveting; Fisher doesn’t seem sure if Kash is a college-douche-turned-scammer or a true believer with nothing behind the eyes. (He’s both; see also my constant references to Il Conformista. But at least Marcello Clerici looked good in a suit, man.) Even when he’s not doing anything evil, he acts like a twelve-year-old, lying on his resumé, telling his boss to fire him on the spot if he’s wrong, and, in the most telling detail, crossing out assassinated terrorists “‘using one of President Trump’s famous sharpies that he gave me personally’”. Still, I don’t need a longread to tell me this guy is a sycophant, and probably also a συκοφάντ.

“The Heat of the Moment” (Dept. of Science) - Rivka Galchen isn’t just blowing smoke. Very weird to frame geothermal as “the green energy source that Republicans might be willing to fund!” throughout. The framing Galchen finds in the last few paragraphs makes more sense – it’s an energy source that’s worth looking into for the edge cases where other sources don’t work. Galchen’s style is dry; that works well in her fiction but often just seems juiceless here. After an Iceland tour, the piece gets bogged down in sciencey problem-solving (fracking technology proves useful) which can be fun when it’s in the moment, but is rendered here in past-tense quote (“‘I was, like, “I’m a drilling engineer. I actually have a skill that can make a direct impact on this.”’”), and in too-sunny reminders of geothermal’s potential ability to act as a “landing place for oil-and-gas workers”. As much as it’s worth considering how to begin the fight against climate change under consumer capitalism, it’s naïve to think that fight can be won under consumer capitalism, and Galchen’s framing – what if geothermal could be the one weird trick that wins over the fascists? – is all smoke and mirrors.

“Second Acts” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw burns the scandal from both ends. Is Shaw afraid to critique the new Anne Washburn play because it’s compelling work staged with competency? She spares only the following critical adjectives: The cast is “pitch-perfect”, the music is “stirring”, the writing is “rich”. I agree with all that, and I think the show never really comes together, for reasons that e.g. Sara Holdren expertly unpacked in her dual review of, coincidentally, the exact same two shows. And I think Shaw might feel similarly, judging by a blurb that feels distinctly as though it’s skirting the edges of saying what she thought. Shaw’s review is so cursory it is useful only if you’d like the first ninety minutes spoiled before you see the show. As for the Chenoweth show, her disgust is palpable but the inevitable Trump reference continues this magazine’s decade of groan-worthy shoehorning. The show is not relevant because of “certain recent events” unless said events are meant to have occurred in the mid-eighties. Trump does not add any additional resonance to the theme of ‘hideous overcapitalized real estate scams.’ Again, Holdren’s acid is a funnier, punchier take on this “bizarre bon-bon” – which, by the way, is already closing; oof! Part of the problem is scale – Shaw spends about 800 words on Versailles and 400 on Fiery Fire; Holdren has 1,500 for the former and another thousand for the latter.¹ When it comes to a mansion, bigger is better.

“Wilde at Heart” (Profiles) - Rebecca Mead is an empty Earnester. I’m not sure what this is supposed to be. It’s listed as a profile, but there’s very little of Fry in it; he mostly acts as a central testimonial for the genius of Oscar Wilde. Of course, Wilde’s genius is pretty self-evident; what isn’t is his status as a queer martyr, which has been undermined by both Adam Gopnik and Clare Bucknell in these very pages. (Even if you disagree with them on points, as I do, you must concede there is more room for argument than Mead allows. The final section does touch on this line of thought, but in a very half-assed and exculpatory ‘there are many perspectives’ way.) The quotations from Fry go on and on; if he wanted to write a personal essay about Earnest, he could have been granted that opportunity, but Mead adds too little to even be called an interlocutor; she’s really just arranging his thoughts on the page. That’s editing, not journalism. Who needs it?

“The Trial That Wasn’t” (Books) - Amy Davidson Sorkin gets tricked by a Trump l’oeil. I considered giving this a Shut the Fuck Up heading, but I doubt it’s either pertinent or convincing enough to be harmful. By the looks of things, Davidson Sorkin is desperate to go against the conventional wisdom regarding the attempts to put Trump in prison, and has decided that blaming the Democrats rarely ages badly. That’s correct, and it doesn’t mean that one can claim, for instance, that a ton of people voted for Trump because they thought the legal case against him was unfair. (Who are these supposed independent-minded voters who closely monitored the trials and their fairness before rationally choosing to vote for Donald Trump? And who benefits from pushing the narrative that reactionary backlash is a conscious response to actual tangible events and not essentially a delusion cemented by a toxic media ecosystem?) Sorkin’s concern with hypotheticals ignores the cultural ecosystem that rendered those hypotheticals irrelevant. She is so concerned with whether various cranks were yanked at precisely the right time, she doesn’t check whether the crank machine is attached to anything at all. Weighing hypotheticals – as opposed to articulating history – is useful largely insofar as it suggests future actions. What is Sorkin pushing here, besides regret?

Letters:

Carole says: “Your reviews have become my go to guide before I dive into the print magazine. My reading time is often in short supply so, Thank You for helping me focus on pieces that deserve a closer look. I particularly enjoy your comments about productions you have seen and more than once you have led me to explore a venue that is new to me. Loved the Bushwick Starr for example!” Thank you! I really appreciate it. Isn’t the Starr a great venue?!

Next issue is gigantic. I will probably be late. Hang in there.

i’m O.K.

you’re O.K.