Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 19

“Every gaucho keeps his mate and his radio within close reach.”

Must-Reads:

“The First Social Network” (Letter from Patagonia) - Jordan Salama saves a horse, rides a radio wave. Ignore the stupidly literal title; this is a gorgeous, touching slice of poetic ethnography. In rural Argentina, a radio program consisting of mundane and crucial status updates provides a conduit for communication amid the most extreme isolation. Technologies create communities; the subaltern structure of this system, which is pervasive but something less than officially sanctioned, creates a space for the social lives of these isolated gauchos. Salama finds a few remarkably moving anecdotes, like the locutora who can’t bear to read the message she writes announcing her own father’s death, but he resists aestheticizing. It would be easy to tell a story like: there is less and less need for the radio transmissions; this is sad because it was beautiful. Instead, Salama’s story is both more specific about the causes (Milei’s decision to allow competition from foreign internet providers has spurred Musk-run satellite communication) and more acute about why we might hold on to ritual (“each broadcast of the Mensajero Rural brought the feeling, however brief, that everyone was gathered together and paying attention”… “there are certain things we do for reasons of need, or want, and how there are other customs that we maintain even after they’ve stopped making sense”). Farewell, transmission.

Window-Shop:

“The Road to Aleppo” (Personal History) - Ben Taub can check out of the Hotel Istanbul any time he likes, but he can never leave. I’ve long been fascinated by Taub’s backstory as I understood it – he used money from an appearance on The Voice to subsidize his freelance trip to the Syrian border. It’s great to have those details sketched in, and the early sections here have a fantastically grim worldliness, with something of the sand-and-heat existentialism of Antonioni’s The Passenger. Taub is mostly interested in telling the story of Ahmed, who goes by Harvester and is something of a scammer-with-a-heart-of-gold figure, running various-degrees-of-ridiculous cons on American journalists and romance-starved older women. Taub never quite conveys why he finds Harvester so compelling – as Taub says, the place is full of “bizarre characters”; he’s not exceptional – and as the piece becomes increasingly dominated by the man and his bad judgement, it starts to lose sight of the landscape surrounding him. The very ending rests on a name in a way that, perhaps accidentally, reads like a bad joke (can you believe it – two Ahmeds?) and Taub hammers his younger self’s lack of faith in his own writing too many times. But in the moments Taub aims for CinemaScope sweep, he achieves it. He may still be a better writer than he gives himself credit for.

“On the Run” (A Critic at Large) - Alex Ross changes tense with Anna Seghers. It is very hard to convey the “excruciating tension” of a piece of writing in a review, and Ross tries a bit but mostly resorts to just telling us about her “iron grip”, “incisive bite”, and “terrible power”. The most compelling material here concerns “her masterpiece”, Transit, “a static thriller that unfurls against a deep historical backdrop, with archetypes recurring across time”. (Ross doesn’t mention this, but it was adapted into an acclaimed Christian Petzold film, thus stretching its story further towards our time.) As an introduction to a major writer, this does its job, tempting us with just-visible depths.

“Robot, Take the Wheel” (Brave New World Dept.) - Molly Fischer makes a way out of no Waymo. Well-written and convincing on a section-by-section level, but structured in such a way that one comes away both shrugging and defeated: Fischer’s catalogue of all the issues with Waymo and their sociopolitical consequences adds up, mostly, to a suggestion of our powerlessness. Yet many of the issues she raises feel very fixable, and despite her doomy tone, one might come away feeling rather reformist – fix this, tweak that, and Waymos really might make things better. Perhaps. And perhaps a more convincingly anti-Waymo text would need to be even more philosophical in ways that are largely beyond the scope of journalism. But I think Fischer had another turn left to make.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Misfit Artist” (Profiles) - E. Tammy Kim practices the art of the Possible Love. A chilly, spare profile, perhaps mirroring Chang-Dong’s reserved approach to his material. Even when discussing his child’s death, the director speaks in spare metaphor, of boarding “‘a boat that was cursed’”. Chang-Dong is not only “suspicious of ideology”; he is more generally suspicious, even paranoid, and Kim does excellent work showing how the Korean political landscape encourages certain types of compartmentalization. But far too much of the second half of this profile consists of a beat-by-beat description of the plot of Chang-Dong’s new film, plus some rather unrevealing on-set observations. It feels as though Kim expected the new film to reflect the political themes of the profile she wanted to write, and when the film was more focused on a different metanarrative, she couldn’t figure out how to pivot. Reading between the lines, I’m not sure she liked the film, which she merely says “runs long”. The quote she includes, from a laid-off factory worker, feels like a kind way of expressing deflation: It’s “‘a nicely gift-wrapped box that contains a white piece of paper, a white handkerchief, and an instruction manual on “how to remember”’”. In other words – an emotional blank and a place to blow your nose.

“Framed” (The Art World) - Hilton Als would like some uplift with his shoplift. I made sure to visit the Lawson show before writing this review, and I left very unsettled; some of it is that miserable narrow Gagosian space on 24th Street, which makes every show feel like a Rolex brand activation; some of it is a shift in the work itself, which feels more voyeuristic and less formally acute. Maybe provoking a feeling is still better than nothing, though. I have to think Lawson would be pretty pissed off by this review, which, after an absurdly long setup, dismisses her early work as “flat” and “a testament not to a vision but to the power of the internalized white gaze”. I totally disagree with that reading, and I don’t think Lawson’s aesthetic is one of “sleaze”. Als also can’t see past the alienated look of the newer subjects to any “interiority”. He’s entitled to his reading, and it’s not entirely divorced from my own (there is an odd lack of “reciprocal emotion” in these new images)… yet it’s hard not to read this review as part of a longer Als project rejecting young contemporary artists because they are young and contemporary. It’s sad that the only time in years the magazine has covered gallery work, it’s to dismiss it as a rotten new version of a better, older thing.

“Giving Them the Finger” (Books) - Ian Buruma broadcasts syndicates. An interesting central idea is quickly stated in a single quoted line: “‘Japanese gangsters have spent the past few centuries fashioning an image based on warrior culture, while pretending to uphold a code of chivalry and honor.’” Buruma’s writing here is so dry it’s ashy, and without some foreknowledge of Japanese history, you’ll have to reread – which may act as a soporific. The Yakuza thrived by promoting a “reactionary spirit” that links chauvinistic, hierarchical values to criminal enterprise and its nihilism; this is also true of most gangs anywhere. Buruma’s picture of the Yakuza is thus practically generic, which holds a lesson in itself: Gangs operate similarly due less to centralization than to carcinisation – there are only so many ways to set up a shell game.

“Boys Don’t Cry” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum sows Discord among brothers. If, ten years ago, critics sometimes gave works of art that were sincere expressions of identity-based trauma a pass for a lack of formal elegance or polish, I think we’re in a similar place now for art that touches identity-based third rails and “is refreshingly unconstrained by rules of positive representation”. That sort of thing can be really, really great (please go to The Nicest Body Ever Seen Around These Parts as soon as possible) and perhaps exists as a response to a school of criticism like Hilton Als’, above, that assumes a measure of judgement in certain depictions. Still, I found Degenerates messy, self-satisfied, and frustrating – if also propulsive, full of passion, and featuring a pair of impeccable lead performances. (I said exactly the same things about Initiative, which probably increased my frustration – the Wents haven’t grown yet.) And I can’t say Nussbaum says much about the many strange choices the show makes; she’s reviewed its best moments and leaves the rest out. Nussbaum is also significantly too satisfied by her knowledge of what all this slang means; her years spent as a Twitter side character are not something she should be proud of. Methinks the lady doth repost too much.

“He Said, She Said” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody just holds Everything, lady.¹ I guess there’s something compelling about Brody’s weird-ass misreadings of a number of moments from this film (Does Fielder “snarkily scoff”?), which is, at its core, about the different ways we understand the things we see and hear from others. That doesn’t exactly make this a good movie review, especially since its analysis is about an inch deep, and the Bresson reference at the end is both random and gratuitously highfalutin. I generally defend Brody from charges of pretentious obscurantism, but in this case I can’t see much of a point.

Letters:

Rachel agrees as to the merits of that incredible Peter Hessler mountain-road piece: “His eye is a marvel.”

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