Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 14, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 14
“‘My mind should be on Mosul / Not Eric’”
Must-Reads:
“The Sighted World” - Sage Mehta looks her father up and down. Add this to Ada Calhoun’s “Also A Poet” and call it a trend of two: “I looked up to my mercurial father who wrote for the magazine, but he rarely showed me the kind of literary approval I craved.” This material is fine, given a bit of depth by Ved Mehta’s disability and his deeply internalized shame over it. But the story deepens as it goes, taking on an investigation of Ved’s harassing treatment of the women who worked for him, and his trickiness in other arenas. Mehta is not an instantly masterful prose stylist (here’s a clunker: “Hearing about my father from the women who’d worked for him was like watching him hit his head against door after door after door, but now he was the one causing, not feeling, the pain”) but her strength is in the gestalt analysis of her father’s landscape – his “manner of speaking that put you in your place” isn’t just everyday assholery but “related to a tone inherent to the Raj – the British ruled the subcontinent not only by strength but through an attitude of unassailable superiority.” Ved’s life is too complex for a reader to slot him into the category of “art monster” and move on; his privilege is so tightly bound to his escape from one controlling force and his denial of another that it can’t possibly be read as entirely blithe. Of course, there’s also the autoethnographic aspect – the magazine reckoning with its past self. I like that sort of thing; any institution that survives long enough ought to reflect on where it’s been; to become, at least partly, about itself. There’s a right way and a wrong way to embark on such a venture, and this piece is a good example of a thoughtful but unafraid approach.
“Downward Spirals” - Alex Ross hums apart at the seams. I couldn’t wait for Ross to tear into Grounded; he delivers, and his review is all the more vicious for its brevity – it feels less like he’s editing to a word count and more like he doesn’t want any more of his time to be wasted. The Philadelphia show sounds fascinating, and Ross delivers his description of Mazzoli’s style like a knighting: “sinuously songful vocal lines; furtively expressive instrumental solos, especially for the woodwinds; a harmonic language that finds newness and strangeness in the interstices of traditional tonality; unerring narrative pacing.” I dub thee hot shit.
Window-Shop:
“It Takes a Village” - Jackson Arn shakes, shakes, shakes, señora; shakes a drawing’s line. The Shakers are far enough away from established art history that we’re spared any Arnian hot takes, which is a blessing; plus, it gives him more time for close looking, which he’s extremely good at. He finds the Shaker ideology in the Shaker drawings, but not in any easy one-to-one way; it’s not just that things are simple, it’s that “clean, simple things are made of an endless wriggle of parts” – simplicity is “complexity well tended”. Arn probably could have addressed more than two of the drawings in this show; it’s hardly a review, it’s just his own meditation on that show’s themes. There are worse things; it’s essentially the art-review equivalent of many of the magazine’s book “reviews”, which are essays loosely pegged to a book or two. Actually, a number of the critics’ columns have been moving in this direction. I’m not sure whether to find that dispiriting – but it’s notable.
“Silicon Valley’s Influence Game” - Charles Duhigg punches the numbers into a supercomputer PAC. Refreshingly outraged at a kind of pay-for-play politics that it’s easy to become inured to. Sure, sometimes scumbags like Lehane run an especially gross ad and there’s a negative news cycle; yes, there’s been a shift in public perception away from the bizarre image of Silicon Valley as full of starry-eyed innovators which reigned in the early 2010s. Duhigg doesn’t have much new to say here, especially if you’ve been keeping up with your Money Stuff emails. Mostly this is a summary, but Duhigg points out the self-interest behind pretty much everything the techies say (even when they disagree with one another), satisfyingly puncturing all their balloons. There’s a little bit of blurriness between Crypto causes and AI causes, which reflects reality but still could’ve been avoided: Surely there isn’t about to be a vast wave of political support for deregulating cryptocurrency. Whether the political influence they’re aiming for will get these people any of what they want, I’m not sure. Their causes are so stupid and their means so slimy they may end up being their own worst enemy. But money talks – more eloquently than any chatbot.
“The K-Pop King” - Alex Barasch runs with Hitman Bang, Bang, into the room. Leans into a presentation of this world as grim and mercenary, in keeping with the tone of unspoken disapproval Barasch also brought to his piece on the Mattel Cinematic Universe. The difference between BTS and Conrad Birdie may just be one of scope, but the digital cast does make things seem grosser. Bang mostly speaks in platitudes, and the lack of conflict hurts the piece; when one finally emerges, in the form of NewJeans’ semi-mutiny, a spark is lit – then quickly fizzles when it becomes clear that Barasch was unable to get anyone to talk on the record about the conflict, which is still boiling. Bang generally speaks in platitudes, but they aren’t the L.A. platitudes one’s used to; they have a more sinister, political feeling – at one point he speaks of creating many acts in order to “achieve the ultimate goal of cultural change”, which obviously prompts the question: Change into what? Barasch hasn’t quite found the answer, but he shows us enough that we can guess it wouldn’t be bright for anyone but Bang and his billionaire buddies.
“The Long Con” - Alexandra Schwartz prefers the real Creation Lake. A surprising pan, which is always fun – it’s not as though there are that many contemporary fiction writers big enough that hating their newest would be a whole thing, but Kushner certainly qualifies. Schwartz doesn’t even approach cattiness, though; she mostly just sounds disappointed, which, fair enough, but this certainly isn’t written to go viral and inspire lots of discourse about whether Kushner is overrated. And accidentally win Pulitzers, as one does. Partly that’s because Schwartz likes Kushner’s work; she dislikes the “disparagement of realism” she finds in the newest effort, which seems to her to be a diss of Kushner’s own previous canon. Call it the reverse Zadie Smith.
“Reggae, Rock, Roots” (Talk of the Town) - Nick Paumgarten carves up Lee Jaffe. Interesting guy!
“When the Ice Melts” - Elizabeth Kolbert identifies the core problem. Very happy to see Kolbert back in the field; everything here that’s essentially about her going on a little adventure is great fun and excellent writing. (“Would the car get stuck in glacial silt, which sometimes acts like quicksand? From Tedesco, I learned a new word in Greenlandic: immaqa, meaning ‘maybe.’”) But she didn’t find anything new there. The idea of escalating feedback loops is already a familiar one, and while it’s worth hammering the climate crisis in as much as possible, surely taking us to the same kind of ominous ice cores as every global warming doc has for the past twenty years won’t open many eyes. This is written strictly as a nature story, but climate change is really a society story. The end of the world, here, is strictly theoretical; really, obviously, it’s all around us.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Take Two” - Helen Shaw does double duty. I’m surprised Shaw is mixed-to-positive on Hills, which I already caught and found to be a by-the-numbers melodrama with zero thematic depth and a number of actively bad performances (especially Leanne Best’s – what Shaw calls “stunning dragon mode” I might term “grating banshee mode”). She’s right, at least, that the third act collapses, and that’s a big fault for her to so casually forgive. The Yellow Face review – I saw that one, too1 – is so brief Shaw has only one sentence to sum up the entire production, but somehow she nails it (“rigorously unspectacular” – yup). I wasn’t awed by the performances she praises, but that may just be the downside of previews.
“If Memory Serves” - Kelefa Sanneh wins some, John Lewis some. Stunningly sour and cynical, and not in any particular direction. That’s interesting, at least, and it’s probably a realistic stance when it comes to US politics, but it’s still weird to read a biography of a civil rights hero written in the style of dialogue from Sweet Smell of Success. Per Sanneh, Lewis was a non-intellectual careerist party man (when Sanneh says he was “often led by his moral intuition: he was an early supporter of gay rights, and a lifelong supporter of Israel”, there’s an especially sour note, though I’m not sure who Sanneh means to jab at), Stokely Carmichael was an incompetent rabble-rouser (he “was wrong to think that… SNCC could prosper by… alienating so many of its supporters”, by whom Sanneh appears to mean white people with money), MLK was pious and quickly out of touch with the mood (although I think Sanneh pretty much agrees with him when it comes to that mood.) In Washington, Lewis was more celebrity than politician. How activists become co-opted by the party establishment is a fascinating topic, but Sanneh touches more on the “that” than the “how” – it’s strange that he doesn’t respect Lewis enough to really question his priorities.
Letters:
Susan “really liked the collection of letters from Oliver Sacks, maybe because I just finished reading his Musicophilia. Highly recommended, especially if you are interested in music, and even if the neurology is from the 1990's and surely must have progressed since then.”
What did you think of this week’s issue?
anyone remember Rocketboom? I used to love that shit.
the internet sure has been around for a long fucking time…
If you can, I highly recommend acquiring a student ID with no date. And if you have to get an MFA to do it, hey, so much the better. ↩