Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 7

“CRUTCHES, CONCRETE MIXERS, HAT PINS, GROIN CLUTCHER, HINGED EYEBALL, Indication of PAIN or INJURY, ICEBERGS and IGLOOS, HAIRY CHIN, CALIPERS, COLLAPSED GELATO, FEET or HEAD in PAPER BAG, FEMALE NUDE, FOGHORN LEGHORN, EARTH MOVING MACHINE.”

I’ve started my job! And am already way behind schedule here. Such is life. Bear with me as I try to keep the plates all a-spinning.

Must-Read:

“Life Drawing” (Letter from Aukland) - Laura Preston sketches in a silent partner’s silent partner. Reading the magazine with such regularity means that, more often than I’d like, I can eye the table of contents and have a fairly good idea which pieces I’ll favor. So it’s all the more pleasurable when a writer like Preston, whose previous appearances are three scattered Talk of the Towns, drops an effortlessly propulsive and deeply humane artist profile. It’s impossible not to notice that this piece is pegged to a New York gallery opening from three years ago; I have it on good authority that there’s no conspiracy, but it’s too bad that the piece’s time in development hell has sapped some immediacy. (A few lines have been added about a James Fuentes show in L.A. that had a week left to run when the piece dropped, and I hope the superb March Gallery will prep another NYC King show as quickly as possible.) Preston faced a host of difficulties with this subject: Writing about a Disabled artist without writing a piece entirely about disability; accessing the inner life of an artist who doesn’t speak or otherwise “broadcast” one; and maintaining the serious genius of King’s work while avoiding condescension or a thin narrative of inspiration. Preston navigates the profile with such humanity and clarity of purpose that these don’t even read as challenges. Preston has not removed all trace of her effort, but despite ample use of first person, she never describes her emotions during her encounters with King and her sister, Petita Cole, instead maintaining an observational mode that is, perhaps, a way of mirroring her subject. The details are, in any case, enough. In a stunner of a penultimate paragraph, she points out the way this sort of selfless description eventually dissolves all language.

Just as good is Preston’s slow unveiling of Cole’s twin project, a detailed archive of King’s work and its arcane personal referents. This is its own great artwork, a masterpiece of archival social practice. (It’s definitely worth paging through the associated Instagram account, much less-followed than the artist’s main account but amazingly detailed and written in a personable, bloggy voice that has its own “outsider” quality.) My full appreciation of this piece – which would delve into its unafraid treatment of Autism, its heart-rending account of King’s mistreatment by the medical establishment, its abundant humor and poetic verve – would run longer than the piece itself. It doesn’t get much better than this. Preston is apparently writing a book about A.I; it’ll probably be great, but selfishly I wish she would just write more artist profiles. Maybe the next one won’t take three years to drop.

“Dolly Parton” (Postscript) - Kathryn Schulz knows it’s such sweet sorrow. Printing the legend is appropriate for an actual legend. Schulz, it doesn’t need to be said, can write.

Window-Shop:

“Mad Hatter” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine likes that party hat. Alright, it is delicious and strange to spend an entire review talking about how fascinatingly ugly this one particular Matisse is, and although Fine is a little self-satisfied while setting up the conceit (“I still can’t reconcile myself to the shock of its ugliness.” Maybe try propranolol?), his close reading is worthwhile. Matisse came from a family of hatmakers, and Fine sees both “resentment” and “ressentiment” in his rendering and rending of the heady garment; it’s a synecdoche for “bourgeois respectability” and thus the perfect thing to paint in all the wrong colors. Further, Matisse colors in splotches, not planes, and draws a positively pointillist sleeve – thus breaking even the rules of Fauvism itself. I love it; I even believe it.

“Going Up in Smoke” (The Control of Nature) - M.R. O’Connor jumps at a chance. Compared to the average extreme-feats article, this is relatively non-grueling; if these smokejumpers (think firemen with parachutes) come across as fairly bent, they’re communal in ways that complicate the Jack London narrative. O’Connor is mostly interested in derring-do, type 3 fun, and tough-as-nails triumphalism; she’s almost entirely unable to mask her adulation. Your tolerance for glaze will determine your enjoyment. (The historical anecdotes are fun regardless.) The last two sections at last introduce a bit of conflict and complication via consolidation, as the deregulation and enshittification of our nation mounts in acceleration. Who’s gonna fight that conflagration?

“The Scare” (American Chronicles) - Ruby Cramer says vax don’t care about your feelings. An odd treatment, as Cramer keeps her lens very tightly focused on one specific family who got (probably) measles because mommy went MAHA. Michael, the father, is largely admirable – sometimes, your ex-wife really is nuts – but the family-court parts of the plotline, which dominate the second half of the piece, are still predictable and tiring. Have you ever gotten divorced so hard you had to talk to a reporter about it? Clearly, the general idea is that Leah’s spiral stands in for any trip down the “‘radicalization funnel’” toward dangerous delusions; this story is very anecdotal, though, and quackery is nothing new. I’m not sure this needs to be a story that gets written up at such length – but on its merits, as a very dark, news-pegged episode of Normal Gossip, it absolutely works. There are reveals here that I shouldn’t spoil. You may never feel the same about the prayer-hands emoji.

🗣️ “Whale Tale” (Dept. of Groove) - Sarah Larson hears a killer whale lick. What a cool project; what a cool life.

Skip Without Guilt:

“New Wave” (Pop Music) - Kelefa Sanneh bounces a Rubberz check. Went in expecting to hate this – is Sanneh really going to defend slop pop? – and came away mostly shrugging. Sanneh delivers a brief but snappy history of new musical technology and the skepticism that always faces it; he even finds something interesting to say about the A.I. nullity “Rubberz”. (It’s “a pastiche of a form of musical innovation that now sounds quaint, precisely because of its perceptible artificiality; the sharp backbeat and arpeggiated synthesizers remind us of an earlier and perhaps simpler time.”) He’s correct that, whatever happens in the future, music listeners will still want a compelling performance – even vocaloids throw concerts – and some form of “personal connection”. Sanneh seems to think those requirements won’t hamper A.I. music, but he leaves his argument roomy enough that if they do, he can claim to have been right; in other words, he doesn’t say much beyond “we’ll see”. The true moment of horror I had reading this piece, though, was listening to the popular tech-house song that’s a human re-recording of an A.I. composition, then tracking down the original all-robot version. Reader, I liked it far more.

“The Play’s the Thing” (Books) - Katy Waldman bookmarks another trial of the century. Dwight Garner’s choice to cash in all his superlative chips immediately rendered any other positive review of this novel largely irrelevant; if you aren’t going to read it after that, you aren’t changing your mind. If you were hoping for a rave from someone less straight, white, and/or dithyrambic, New York Magazine was lucky enough to have a Jamaican lesbian writer on staff at The Strategist, Tembe Denton-Hurst, and smart enough to recognize her ability to knock a deadpan but glowing assessment out of the park even though her normal beat is finding a powder blush that blends like a cream.¹ So Katy Waldman (straight, white, peppy but not manic), furnishing a perfectly competent review, still places a distinct third. Her hook, highlighting the “plenitude plus lack” that makes up James’ style, is totally astute; it’s also mathematical and thus sort of cold. What are these ravers doing at our rave, anyway? Garner is a coked-up stranger in the corner, Waldman is a hired photographer with a flashbulb. They didn’t come to dance.

“Above the Law” (Books) - Daniel Immerwahr gives a kick in the balls in our court. Can a centrist write a counterargument so weak even he cannot countenance it? Immerwahr would like to make himself believe that now isn’t a good time to weaken the Supreme Court, but Niko Bowie and Daphna Renan have written a “formidable, sharply argued” book in favor of exactly that – specifically, taking away the “horizontal review” powers that allow it to strike down the will of elected officials – and Immerwahr spends most of this piece recounting a very long history of reactionary rulings which “sandbagged democracy”. Then, at the end, he realizes he has to pivot, so he drops a truly bizarre paragraph conflating Trump’s victory with a sweeping people’s mandate to do whatever he wants, then says that while history shows that the court won’t come to our rescue, we can’t reduce its power because, hey, it might come to our rescue. Then he wraps things up with a shrug: It’s “a pickle”. Well, there is a half-sour taste in my mouth.

“Anatomy of a Siege” (A Reporter at Large) - Emily Witt knows where there’s ICE, there’s Hail! Obviously worthy, but frustratingly irrelevant. Witt’s journalism from the midst of Operation Metro Surge was generally very good, but this story is exactly what it appeared to be: a government scheme to terrorize immigrants and Midwesterners. We knew that already, and even a very light consumer of national news will know some of the specific stories Witt retells – the killing of Renée Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the Kristi Noem ad campaigns, the ignored court orders. No deeper truth emerges from time and distance, just verification of the existing story of ICE brutality and local resistance. It’s odd that Witt focuses so little on that resistance; I view it as the central reason why ICE was unsuccessful, but Witt’s story almost makes it seem like ICE’s brutality was self-defeating: that, after Pretti’s killing, Trump just called off the dogs of his own free will. At the very end, Witt finally starts telling the story of local activists and their recent arrest by feds; one wonders why that isn’t where this story begins. What does it mean that the government is painting these activists as political terrorists; how has it changed their lives? Witt ends on a note of the city seeking “catharsis”, immediately after quoting an activist who says “‘the whole nation watched as Minneapolis stood up and showed the country how to resist’” ICE. A city seeking justice feels like a deeper narrative than a city seeking an emotional release.

“Grow Up” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang isn’t an Adults contemporary. I begrudgingly enjoy how much Kang doesn’t ever seem to like television, but writing a piece that’s entirely devoted to meticulously cataloguing which aspects of a show’s premise are or are not derivative is an exceptionally perverse way to write what’s supposed to be a positive review. According to Kang, the “hangout sitcom” is defined by long seasons and “default lightness”, though the show under review has short seasons, and the previous decade’s supposed “prestige” versions aren’t exactly light-by-default – has Kang even seen Girls? Her analysis is obviously cherry-picked (what about Always Sunny?) and probably overstates the cultural impact of the post-Friends hangout shows (nobody was that into New Girl or HIMYM). Any sweeping analysis of TV in the post-network era is easy to nitpick, but that’s all the more reason to not make sweeping analyses and instead just review the shows in front of you for what they are. There is only one paragraph where Kang reviews the second season of the show she’s supposedly reviewing the second season of; everything else is extrapolation. I also definitely don’t think she knows what normcore means.

Letters:

Nothing I’m at liberty to share. 🤫

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