The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Ellises (for fiction), McClellands (for essays), or Whitakers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Ellis, McClelland, or Whitaker indicates a generally positive review.

⏰ Fiction

“This Is How It Happens” by Molly Aitkin. One Ellis. seem, sex, self-conscious. I haven’t seen Wild Wild Country and didn’t know of the particular cult Aitkin very lightly fictionalizes here. Not sure if that changed my response to this brief second-person narrative of inculcation, featuring an extremely Scottish protagonist grieving his mother’s death and stunted by his father’s shaky handle on intimacy. The story is not really a corrective to the usual narrative of transmission, despite the sometimes labored attempts to keep things textually “normal” for the central figure even as they grow strange. The writing is generally excellent, not too affected but not so cold as to duplicate the male reserve it (among other things) lightly critiques. I just found this a bit featherweight; that Aiken had family in the cult speaks, I suppose, to her interest, but she doesn’t have any particular additional information beyond a few family stories, so this isn’t trying to wow you with its historical-fiction detail-density, and because the central figure is deliberately rendered as textually blank, he unfortunately also reads as metatextually blank, as a space waiting for a character, which blunts the already-reserved pathos the last few sections aim for. Still: Travels a lot in a short span, full of strange humor and striking detail.

⏰ Weekend Essay

“One Last Sundance in Park City” by Justin Chang. No McClellands. press, program, prime rib. I wish Chang had had the courage to render this as pure through-the-years travelogue, an account of a place that holds (or has held) a festival; he interrupts it, instead, and turns it into the usual festival-movie summation, always an odd form due to the cramped quarters (four films, one paragraph each) and the desire not to give away too much. The first half is too heavy on tourism-board general trivia, despite Chang’s abundance of experience; it’s only in the very last paragraph that the piece starts to become what it might have been, a tribute to a ritual that will never be the same again.

⏰ Random Pick

“Winslow Homer – Pepsi-Cola Presents” by Robert M. Coates. One Whitaker. development, depth, details. Art critics don’t talk about things like “the supremacy of light over form as a means of portraying evanescent movement” anymore. Maybe for the best that we aren’t praising Light Supremacy, but I do wonder if looking at old art exclusively through a (post?[-post?])modernist lens makes it less exciting. Having seen the superb 2022 Winslow Homer show at the Met a few years ago, I knew the loose eras that Coates lays out – Civil War; rustic ‘genre’; Bahamian water colors; the sea, first occupied by figures and later not so much. But browsing my mind-palace recreation of the show and comparing it to his insights from an earlier era was good fun, if not an experience I can transfer. Coates also mentions one of my favorite paintings from the show: “Weaning the Calf” is “handsomely organized”, exactly. But the ocean pictures he mentions, while of course similar to those in the Met show, are not the same, and so much of Homer is in the in-person view that it’s hard for me to say if “Coast in Winter” really is his “most truly imaginative picture” – in reproduction it doesn’t look as formally imaginative as “Cape Trinity, Saguenay River, Moonlight” or “Northeaster”, but it’s hard to say. These bare sea pictures are not what draws the contemporary critic to Homer; his subtle ethics, visible in the immortal “Gulf Stream” and plenty of earlier heartfelt representations of marginalized people surmounting cruel nature, come to life differently through the politics of identity and environment. Homer may have been looking for movement, but what moves changes.

⏰ Something Extra

Speaking of The Met: The Man Ray show was about as good as I could have hoped. Sorry if you missed it!

By far the best thing I saw this week was the closing act of a Bill T. Jones symposium in a strange small auditorium wedged into the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, in Lincoln Center. At 4pm, with lights raised halfway as if for a talk, Raja Feather Kelly delivered a movement performance about Jones and, roughly, the uses and misuses of modernism. There was lots of what looked like practice but then transformed into the real thing, and the reverse; walls broke down and appeared – and all this with virtually no staging or lights, to a half full crowd, accompanied by a slideshow projection. What the hell?! Kelly surely will make more use of this than a one-afternoon-only study, as it was hugely intricate, deliberate, and intelligent – keep a look out.

Sunday Song:

Congrats to Bad Bunny on a richly deserved Album of the Year Grammy. Plus one for this song: