Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 7

“We subjectivize the world and grasp at pseudo-philosophical pronouncements because they might contain what we now lack.”

Must-Read:

There are plenty of good pieces in this Fall Style & Design issue, but I have big enough gripes with each that I can’t quite elevate any to this top slot. This issue does have the best Letters from Our Readers selection in some time, a sequence of escalatingly petty gripes which suggest that catering to a self-selecting society of periodical-reading pedants is the magazine’s way of finding community in our blearily globalized world.

Window-Shop:

“Unharnessed” (Profiles) - Lauren Collins shows us Hermès-sy buns. Hamstrung by its being labeled a Profile, as the sections on Nadège Vanhée are both less compelling and less convincing than the sections on Hermès as an institution. It’s not that Vanhée doesn’t give an interesting quote or two, but she’s already completed the fashion-designer arc – controversial (in her case, for being too bland – “‘Nabeige’”) to beloved (An odd harness – it reminds me of a training bra – was “‘the must-have accessory of the season’”, apparently) to getting old (Her new collection is “‘narrow and predictable’”, proclaims Cathy Horyn – against the grain, but, as usual, correct). Collins tries to frame Vanhée as unique in her intellectualism, or perhaps in her dry provocation… but she mostly just seems French. The “sexy luxury bitches” she outfits are not characters I’m that invested in.

On the other hand, I had no idea Hermès was such a bizarre cult of authenticity-in-fabrication – a place where even the horse shit in the window displays is authentic; in some sense, the timeless fashion brand every other trend-chasing fashion brand is pretending to be. Collins makes a meal of this, showing how the pursuit of craft above all else has led to unexpected eccentricities – the founder’s son’s room, “lovingly preserved as a private museum”, is then mined for knick-knacks: “the world’s poshest Cracker Barrel”. Those knick-knacks are then sold to customers for whom they function mostly as signifiers of brand loyalty, “‘Birkin bait’” enabling them to eventually buy a “‘quota bag’”. Collins is superb on the awkwardness of the juxtaposition: “rapacious consumerism” clashing with aestheticized “Old World gentility”. When it comes to class conflict, she’s in her bag.

“Just Deserts” (Dept. of Gastronomy) - Ruby Tandoh tries a hollow graham cracker for the King. A premise with potential for greatness: an acid takedown of the cynical Saudi Arabian attempt to cultivate soft power by buying fancy French chefs to come cook in the desert without consideration for culture, ingredients, audience, or any of the things that make great food great. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Tandoh, famously a baker of cakes, struggles to elevate the bitter and spicy notes that would really make this piece sing, arriving somewhere compelling but not indelible. The dismayed description of an Alain Ducasse-branded meal of unseasoned chicken gets close, but the heights of Didionesque nastiness do not arrive, especially after Tandoh leaves AlUla (too early in the narrative) for other Saudi destinations; Tandoh mostly sounds dismayed by the failures of Vision 2030, when disgust – or horror – would be more appropriate. Where’s her gag reflex?

“Jestermaxxing” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum gets pound foolish. No easy task to sum up a fest full of shows, but Nussbaum is up to it, quickly prepping us for a whirlwind of blurbs and then firing them off. I especially appreciate that one of the longest and most appreciative blurbs is for a show that’s actually running here right now, thus cutting my usual criticism of irrelevancy to the city¹ off at the pass. The rest of the blurbs are enticing tidbits, or, in the case of a truly dire Ivo van Hove effort, un-enticing tidbits. It all works! Nussbaum’s thesis, which is basically “clowns are fun”, does not need restatement – and if she thinks we’re lacking “bigger, more ridiculous swings” she clearly didn’t catch some of the year’s best shows, whose small-ish venues and shorter runs are, at least, not un-Fringe-like. Yes, in a stunning turn of events, performers in Europe have more access and more funding; that’s still no reason to act dismayed about all that is over here. Target Margin is even doing a mini-fest on nonsense right now. I hope to see Nussbaum there, with both egg and pie on her face.

“Strange Bedfellows” (Annals of Style) - Jennifer Wilson puts two in the pink and one in the red. Too unpleasant to be a silly trends piece; too ridiculous to be a serious culture-shift piece. Wilson wanders around with a woman who started a right-wing women’s magazine – a sort of Refinery1488 – and they go bra shopping; it’s not uninteresting but it’s sad that a Thiel-associated slop peddler gets to drive the conversation. She’s wearing an astroturf merkin. The history of lingerie politics is witty enough – Wilson is always fun to read – but mostly abandons the initial topic (“‘the bimbofication of MAGA’”) for something narrower and harder to prove, the lingerie industry’s freakout over #MeToo driving a reactionary reclamation of sex-sells imagery. Talk about a poison cup…

“Master Plan” (Books) - Vinson Cunningham is no Flash in the pan. Not especially revealing, but still good fun; if you didn’t know the basic outline of the Grandmaster Flash origin story, you’ll get it here, and if you’re already an expert you can still nod your head to Cunningham’s obvious enthusiasm. I grew a bit impatient with his prose – after elegantly describing Flash as “a confident cosmopolitan, someone who achieves his most important education outside on the streets, after dark”, for example, he spends the rest of the paragraph sketching out a whole imagined scene – “a hot Saturday night, under a blue-black sky, perhaps waiting for a group of friends to show up” – in ways that are pretty but add nothing of substance to the initial line. I also don’t need another print-the-legend treatment of mid-’70s NYC from someone who wasn’t alive for it. Cunningham should learn from Flash: Cut the melodics, stick to the beat.

“Body and Soul” (The Art World) - Hilton Als is swooning for cartooning de Kooning. I am only slightly less annoyed by a long review of a Chicago art show than I would be by an L.A. show – at least you can get to Chicago on a nonstop train. Als uses his carte blanche to include more of de Kooning’s history than there’s usually space for in an art review; there are worse things. The psychosexual analysis of his artwork, on the other hand, does feel excessively autobiographical, and mostly grounded in Als’ fancy. It’s interesting to read a defense of the “primal” female portraits, which have more often been dismissed as misogynistic caricatures of late, even if the element of self-portraiture Als finds is underexplained and not totally convincing. Sketchy, almost.

“Claws and Effects” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang catches a DMZ-movie. A mixed-positive review that’s far more convincing regarding the film’s faults than its merits. I’m down for a “giddily entertaining monster movie” in theory, but between the monster that appears to be “from a decade-old zombie-apocalypse video game” and a late pivot in which “a script that boasts a five-minute soliloquy about diarrhea is suddenly rife with mythical earnestness and impenetrable last-minute world-building”, I’m not enthused. I’m not sure the grievance that Cannes is allowing directors who’ve “succumbed to the blockbuster mentality” onto the main slate is just the “reflexive critical grumbling” Chang dismisses it as; this film isn’t playing with excess and spectacle to achieve artistic ends, it’s indulging in excess and spectacle as an end unto itself. I hope that’s not a trend.

🗣️ “Silencing Simba” (The Pictures) - Daniel Alarcón is working on his roar. A few weeks ago I said the Lion King stage musical was the most culturally freighted text in the world. I’d like to rescind that statement and nominate the unauthorized Quechua dub of The Lion King as the most culturally freighted text in the world.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Faking It” (Books) - Adam Gopnik makes casual conversation. Such an interesting subject that it’s highly unfortunate Gopnik’s approach is comically dated, and that he feels the need to interrupt himself with bad jokes and odd asides, sometimes to the point of incoherence. He’s assembled a parade of mostly-straight white guys who were dead before 9/11; while it may be unfortunate that the average high schooler – who was not alive for 9/11 – would surely not have heard of anyone mentioned as an embodiment of sophistication², it does mean that Gopnik’s claim to be speaking about mainstream American culture in any meaningful sense is obviously far-fetched. He is talking about an America, and a New York City, that no longer exists. That’s a shame, because there’s much to be said about changing notions of sophistication, which is still a value held by the young. Indeed, figures like Rainbolt and Cameron Winter and Jonathon Heyward and this teen who knows flags are potent American male sex symbols for our era. If we had the words to describe the specific thing they have in common, we wouldn’t have to shrug and call them sophisticated.

“Eat Your Heart Out” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield refreshes her feed with Carla Lalli. Wants to be a Books piece, discussing and comparing a few foody divorce books; there’s something to that, but smooshed into Goldfield’s regular column space the execution is shrugging. Goldfield doesn’t have time to articulate a thesis, beyond that Lalli is far from the first to cover this topic. It’s not even really clear whether Goldfield liked the book; the line between “frank and disarmingly raw” and just messy is thin, and I wonder whether the editors that discouraged Lalli were actually worried about selling a book on a downer subject, or if their real concern was that Lalli loudly publicizing her pivot to self-care-coded individualism would seem inauthentic. The proof lies not in her pudding but in herself.

“In His Image” (Letter from Washington) - Antonia Hitchens scrapes at Trump’s gilded conscience. I suppose the image of our unfathomably unpopular leader shrinking his locus of control to the safe space of local construction, then failing even at that, must have a certain schadenfreude to liberal types. But there’s nothing of actual importance here; the psychology of Trump is a topic that holds no interest for me in and of itself, but only insofar as it influences his choices to, say, launch our country into wars. These snafus – the reflecting pool, the ballroom – have been thoroughly recounted as breaking news; Hitchens hasn’t found much to add to that beat-by-beat. The history of Trump construction (racist renting, the Bonwit Teller frieze demolition) is nothing new; the minutiae of N.C.P.C. staffing gets old quick. But I guess we can add another nickname to Trump’s long register: The Power Breaker.

“Ramblin’ Man” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich yells hey, batter, batter, sing. Number of Amanda Petrusich pop music “reviews” in the last two years in which she follows a thirty-something acoustic-guitar-playing Americana-inflected singer-songwriter dude³ around for a day, recording his rambling, pseudo-philosophical thoughts: seven. (One two three four five six seven; a case could be made for eight nine ten eleven.) Total number of Amanda Petrusich pop music reviews in the magazine in that period of time: sixteen.

“Follow Suit” (Showcase) - Rachel Syme sees both sides. Of all the fashion-adjacent art-world people to devote a multi-page photo spread to, we’re really going with the emotionally abusive cult guy? And addressing that “criticism” in one scant paragraph which mostly consists of an aggrieved and dismissive quote from Sachs? The team is literally seen-not-heard; they may be in the pictures, but only Sachs speaks. The work is more of his usual craft-fetish thing. Irresponsible coverage of uninteresting art. I’ve ↄceen enough.

Letters:

Maybe next week; this edition is late enough already.

croquem

bouche