September 19, 2024

Last Week's New Yorker Review: September 23, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 16

"The over-all effect was decapitated leather daddy."

Must-Read:

“Sniff Test” - Rachel Syme huffs bleached lavender and frosty roses with perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. What a delightful, extremely French man. “Kurkdjian wears all black when he’s working for Dior; when working for his own company, all white.” Of course he does! “‘You have to understand that I was not into fashion, like things you could buy. I was into couturiers.’” Of course you were! He was inspired by a film “starring Yves Montand as a swashbuckling perfumer who seduces Catherine Deneuve.” Of course he was! Syme does wonderful work bringing scents to life; synthetic ambergris “has a ferric quality, like blood in the back of the throat”, and Kurkdjian’s scents include “the elevator-clearing Absolue Pour le Soir, which had notes of cumin and wet animal fur”, and a new scent which “smelled of honey and bonfire, cut through with a bright note of snap-pea green.” Syme maintains a loose hold on narrative amid this olfactory medley; mostly we follow Kurkdjian’s career path and small sliver of celebrity, but this doesn’t prevent tangents into scent recreation and “kitschy gourmands”. It doesn’t try to make scent more or less than it is – it’s not a total frivolity, there is an intellectual component, but it’s still as much a commodity as an art form. After reading I spent a few hours browsing Fragrantica and ended up buying myself a cheap Middle Eastern knockoff of YSL Bleu Electrique. Does that give you a scents?

“Other People’s Money” - Laura Miller has a sense of Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s new novel. Just a sturdy book review, focused and precise, with all its elements in balance. Miller manages what so many reviewers don’t – a plot synopsis that weaves in critical analysis instead of shoving it off toward the last few paragraphs. From the start there’s formal analysis of Alam’s ambiguous perspectives – they give “the novel a jangly quality, disorienting at first but also a simulacrum of Brooke’s too permeable mind.” Soon after, there’s a political read: The novel’s Obama-era trappings mirror its adopted Black protagonist’s “belief that the deserving will be rewarded”, “an ambient faith in progress” that inevitably moves toward collapse. It’s not totally clear how much of the novel’s plot Miller does or doesn’t give away – she ends on an ominous cliffhanger, but perhaps the book does too. Not that every positive review needs to spark a consumptive desire in the reader, but it’s amazing how many don’t manage that spark – Miller’s burns bright. Ironic, perhaps, for a book all about the toxicity of money… but if you don’t have a rich benefactor, you can always wait for the paperback.

Window-Shop:

“With the Mostest” - Margaret Talbot finds Pamela Harriman’s power seductive, and her seduction powerful. Talbot’s disinterest in every part of Harriman’s story except the sliver dealing with the War is pretty evident, but by admitting this she turns it into an asset – one gets both a general idea of Harriman as a figure and a more specific idea of her war exploits. That’s preferable to the kind of medium-shot skimming that reviews of biographies often slip into. It means there’s time for delicious details like the massive family estate with no bathrooms because an ancestor found them “‘disgusting’”, the finishing school in Munich which trained girls in “‘polished and disciplined’” culture (Talbot’s parenthetical on that got a laugh) and Harriman’s tea with Hitler, one spouse who, on their wedding night, “read aloud great chunks of Edward Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’” – I guess we know what he was thinking about – and another who, horrifyingly, referred to her as “‘the greatest courtesan in the world!’” To balance things out, there’s also some surprisingly steamy romance – perhaps all the steamier because Harriman’s naked pursuit of “whomever she was drawn to or deemed useful” is wonderfully corporeal compared to the usual tales of men yelling and smoking cigars. Sometimes the room where it happens is the bedroom.

“Mirror Images” - Justin Chang is seeing double here: four body-transformation parables! Chang’s first double movie review is an even split, which is an approach better tailored to his style than Lane’s usual (fat first review and slim second) would be, I think. He clearly adored A Different Man, and he sells it very well, focusing mostly on the script’s “switchblade twists”, but with enough formal analysis (“the camera prowling about like a trapped cat”) and performance study (“the exquisite sad-sack physicality of [Sebastian] Stan”) that I don’t feel shortchanged even at this shorter length. He isn’t quite as able to nail down a take on The Substance – I’d like to know why he thinks its “scattershot dualism” never coalesces. Earlier he’s called it “a movie of process, deliberately paced, exactingly observed” – which sounds the furthest thing from scattershot. Still, Chang’s analysis is obviously scrupulous. Mirror, mirror on the wall – he’s the fairest one of all.

“The Football Bro” - Vinson Cunningham gets with the progrum. I continue to really enjoy Cunningham’s new “random shit on TV” beat, which is self-evidently fun – it’s like watercooler talk with the most perceptive guy in the world. The idea he outlines here about Pat McAfee as a model of “a new kind of guy” bears a lot of similarities to Max Read’s exploration of the “Zynternet”. Because I grew up with this particular model of bro, the earlier kind is what seems alien to me – the idea of a gloomy, straight-laced sports fan yelling at the screen is something I only know from media. Sports zoomers are often pricks, but almost never grumps. Cunningham keeps this piece short, tight, and precise – not everything has to be a touchdown pass.

“Joy Ride” - Anna Wiener flies a plane through the rear triangle of Rivendell’s everyday bikes. The magazine has profiled a few sui generis engineer naturalist nerd types; Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, who’s quoted at length in this piece, got his own excellent profile from Nick Paumgarten a few years ago. If Grant Petersen’s whole deal isn’t wholly unique, he’s still fun to listen to; he writes and speaks in an elevated style that’s mostly Whole Earth Catalog with a dash of Blackbird Spyplane. (“‘...in 2095, a hobo art connoisseur could saunter by, see the frame, pick it up, be drawn to the joints, and say “(Burp) Ha!—an old Rivendell.”’”) I have no interest in or expertise regarding bikes, so my appreciation for Rivendell’s nostalgic craftsmanship is purely theoretical – still, who doesn’t like a well-built object designed in opposition to prevailing trends? This piece gets to the end of the trail three sections before it stops, then ventures offroad into the land of the personal essay; Wiener has a whole midlife crisis moment that’s surprisingly believable but still not hugely engaging. The prose shoots toward the stratosphere, but it’s still just describing some folks riding bikes. (“I pushed off, found the group, and followed them down a steep, exhilarating slide. Dry earth sputtered against my calves. I loosened my hold on the brakes.”) It was too fast a gear shift for me – my chain fell off its, um… Its thingy. Whatever. I’ll leave it to the experts.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Sorry I’m Not Your Clown Today” - Michael Schulman gets plenty of Bowen Yang for his buck.  A fairly glum story about depressive episodes, unsupportive parents, and fights with friends, bizarrely paired with the goofiest fashion photoshoot I’ve seen in my life. It is impossible not to be distracted by these pictures, which envision Yang as some kind of NYC trickster goddess. Taken on its own, the profile is alright – well-crafted and compelling, but, again, notably unfunny: The only laugh lines come from secondary figures Julio Torres, Tina Fey, and Sudi Green (the latter: “‘I said that…[SNL] would be such an incredible comedy education… I knew, as an immigrant kid, that the idea of it being a good school was going to appeal to him.’”) Most of what we get from Yang feels truly borne of crisis. (Nothing here convinced me that he is not still in the middle of a moderate depressive episode.) Unfortunately, that crisis is in many ways unremarkable – it’s about what you’d expect of a newly famous person, enhanced by past trauma as a gay man. Yang is incredibly likable, and I’d love to see him try a juicy dramatic role (I’ll be seated for the Wedding Banquet remake), but I’ve never found his brand of referential humor very funny – perhaps if it were either more (see: Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley)¹ or less (see: Maddy Morphosis) manic. I didn’t really need to know his therapy breakthroughs, and knowing them doesn’t change how I see him even a little bit. But I’ll admit, there is something iconic about posing in stupid little outfits in the middle of a story about your traumatic experience with conversion therapy. “‘Diva!!!!!!!’”

“Eyes Wide Shut” - Jackson Arn gets Monet for nothing, and transfixed for free. One of the worst endings in a long while, spoiling a perfectly decent book review. Whatever point Arn is straining toward – and it’s nearly unintelligible – could also be applied to literally any other artist: Working toward a kind of unity of aesthetic feeling is the gig. Arn’s book review is somewhat dismissive; he doesn’t really have time for an overtly biographical understanding of Monet’s art, and I can’t totally blame him. It’s worth skipping around to the five close reads of Monet artworks; each has a big flaw (respectively: too wedded to its VR-goggles metaphor, lands on the nullity ‘we can’t know’, is attenuated, features a list of apparently “bloodless” words that I do not find bloodless – I genuinely don’t know which are supposed to be the “tender ones in the middle”, doesn’t illuminate much I hadn’t already thought about Monet’s late work) but is still a showcase of Arn’s incredible facility with descriptive language, from “the whizzing perspective of the two trees on the left” to “Camille’s pale face”, arriving “in a fury of blue, white, and violet”. I do also have to register my usual gripe that the magazine’s art critic is reviewing books about art instead of actual art, in museums and galleries, in New York City. Your eyes are needed, Arn!

“Try It On” - Jennifer Wilson chooses stylist over substance. Law Roach is remarkably shallow – this is unignorable. His giant mansion, a kind of plantation-reclamation fantasy (it’s not actually even a plantation, not that that would be better), falls into the usual trap of Black capitalism as salvation, a kind of directionless branding in place of any actual radicalism. (Angelica Jade Bastién’s Beyoncé takedown is maybe the most thorough general-audience unpacking of this phenomenon.) I suppose branding is the whole thing for a stylist, really; even if I strain, I can’t quite see it as an artistic act. It’s a luxury branding exercise – and, yes, one Roach is very good at; Zendaya always looks great, although perhaps part of why Roach has wrangled so much celebrity out of their arrangement is because her fits seem born of some other intelligence – one never gets the sense, as with the truly great red carpet choices, that Zendaya really chose what she’s wearing. Roach is an average woo-woo celebrity type; his early retirement is the most interesting thing about his career, and as Wilson tells it, that was less of the big statement he framed it as on Instagram, and more of a simple case of burnout, compounded by some horrifying family losses. Wilson brooks no criticism of Roach; when an academic calls him “‘part of the radical Black tradition’”, there’s no voice offering an even moderately contrary take. His borderline chintzy literalism (tennis movie? tennis shoes!) is taken by Wilson as “directness”, but it could just as easily be a simple lack of inspiration. Zendaya is Meechie, and stylists are leech-y.

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Letters:

Michael writes that he “could read about moral philosophy all day (and sometimes I do), but Singh's essay kinda reminded me of an enlightened "What I Did During the Summer" essay from eighth grade. But given that his search began with etymology, it did remind me of the great apocryphal quote from biologist JBS Haldene that if a divine being created all living things, then he surely ‘possessed an inordinate fondness for beetles.’

Regarding my pan of Richard Powers, profiled by Hua Hsu, Michael continues, “I like Powers, but I tend to think some of his popularity derives from the innate insecurities of liberal arts majors compared to those studying hard sciences. (I, for one, wish I had become a doctor.) The worst part of The Overstory for me was discovering that one of the book's main themes, the Wood Wide Web (i.e. how nature isn't red in tooth and claw), isn't actually true at all.”

I’d also like to thank my friend Julian for some help with this week’s issue, providing thoughts on many pieces. (The phrase “capitalism as salvation”, above, is his.) You’ll see more of him around these parts.

What did you think of this week’s issue?

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