Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 27

“‘I’m just regular-degular.’ ‘No, you are in the catalogue of dopeness,’”

Must-Read:

🗣️ “Eat the Chowchow” (Collab Dept.) - Zach Helfand knows oxtails marks the spot. Charles Pan-Fried is truly that place. Lana was great on Top Chef and also great on the incredibly fun and unjustly ignored Pressure Cooker, Quié is delightful and the two have great chemistry, chopping it up in and out of the kitchen.

🗣️ “Pope-a-Dope” (Peace on Earth Dept.) - Jane Bua takes a pope, please! Silly enough to work: A catalogue of all the awful popes who’ve committed acts so violent and sinful Trump might have cosigned them. The gradual and expertly modulated amping up of silliness lets Bua get away with more than she might have otherwise: By the end Olivia Pope makes an appearance, and even Epstein gets… if not a nod, an eyebrow wiggle.

Window-Shop:

“Sleeping Beauty” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine’s got the most attitude on the team. Maybe Fine’s sweet spot is pre-industrial, because this is the high water mark of his tenure so far, a complex, spirited read of the Met’s new Raphael show. I was set up to be dismayed when Fine admitted he “could barely form a clear picture of” the artist, but perhaps this was a feint to lower expectations, because Fine makes a fine meal of the scraps he gleans. Raphael’s biography is both so bizarre it’s hard to do much with (he died “from having too much sex”; his biographer made a big deal of his being breastfed) and almost too neat (his dad trained him to be not only an artist but a careerist artist), but once Fine gets into the works themselves, things pick up pace. He suggests one’s time is best spent in a central “octagonal chamber”, and I appreciate his even moderate attentiveness to exhibition design and the actual experience of visiting the show. Once you’ve been told about the perspectival reasoning that caused Raphael to give everyone a massive left trapezius, you’ll never stop noticing it. And the incredibly erotic portrait of a blond whose “coils roll down his neck with absurd levels of silkiness and precision” apparently prompted a “paranormal experience with Bindo’s right eye… it starts to levitate, like a jewel, up and out of the painting.” I love when an inimitable detail of personal experience hijacks a review’s pretense of objectivity and turns it into a trip report. (Having just watched If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, I pictured something like the tub journey through the hole.¹) Can I figure out what Fine finds “moving” about the Ruskin dis he cites in the last paragraph? Unfortunately, not quite, and I don’t know why the last line is phrased to suggest Fine hasn’t just seen a bunch of those “crumbs” of Raphaelian “grace notes”. I’ll give the ending marks for poetic interest, though.

“Tabula Rasa: Volume Six” (Personal History) - John McPhee was a little lad who loved cherries and cream. My guideline for these occasional collections of what is now just scattered anecdote – no pretense anymore of their specifically coming from reportorial assignment – is that there ought to be one or two that spark actual feeling in me, and none I find offputting; most of them, I respond to with a sort of admiring shrug, because McPhee always knows his way around a sentence, but is so intent on finding stories that lend themselves to his specific mode of dry delivery that he usually doesn’t care if he’s telling interesting stories at all. For One Person, here, is surprisingly close to melodrama, but in the context of so much minutiae, I found it totally affecting. The two very brief ones on cherries – Maraschino and Mrs. Pigeoner – are as good as any prose poem. Career Panel is a terrific anecdote, the opener is evocative. The rest I can take or leave narratively, but will happily take on their other merits – except for The City of Brotherly Loot, a too-self-aware gripe about tax payment, which ought to get lost. On the whole, though, a ripe batch. McPhee is now ninety-five – and never snakebit yet!

“Resurrection Hardware” (Annals of Technology) - Julian Lucas blows the cloud away. Worth reading entirely for the brief first and last sections, a beautifully poetic personal history in miniature. It’s almost too moving for the piece it encapsulates. I’ll also give Lucas credit once again for describing tech in a way that assumes basic competency on the part of the reader, as he did in his superb profile of Tim Berners-Lee. Mostly, this is a very straightforward recap of a tour day at DriveSavers, a data loss company that basically gave Lucas their reporters’ special, theme-park style. He had fun, I guess, but who cares? It’s public relations from front to back, and the weirdly chosen driving question of whether this is a sustainable business is so easy to answer – yep! – that all the anecdotes, many of them directly taken from the in-house museum, feel devoid of stakes. If slight, it’s also short. With file sizes like these, who needs friends?

Skip Without Guilt:

“Foul Is Fair” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang takes the obscenic route. The review portion of the review is quite brief, and finds almost no time to remark on the formal qualities of the movie, which, admittedly, sounds too message-sodden to attempt much in the way of cinematic innovation. Chang gets the last word on Davidson at the BAFTAs, and falls in line with the now-established consensus – it’s mostly the BBC’s fault – before remarking that the whole incident “seemed to both destroy and affirm the film in one nightmarish breath — to expose the hollowness of its feel-good machinery while also proving its larger point about the vindictive ignorance of so much of the public.” It’s a compelling enough point, but couldn’t it be made about any public incident of the internet era? We are constantly facing the hollowness of our own good feelings, confronted by the real and imagined victimhood of others.

“The Executor” (Profiles) - Zach Helfand brings Linda McMahon to heel. A whole lot here, yet none of it with much consequence. That McMahon is just following orders in her wholesale dismantling of the Department of Education doesn’t acquit her morally, but it means the narrative of that dismantling doesn’t exactly center around her. Because of that, Helfand spends a very long time in the W.W.E. universe, which is certainly twisted and bizarro… but start disqualifying people on the basis of their corny gonzo sexually twisted autofiction and there will never be a Zoomer in government. The covering up of sex crimes, meanwhile, seems to be a literal prerequisite for a job in this administration, and in this case it’s an old story. The second half of the piece has a lot of Helfand driving home the point of how wasteful and idiotic McMahon’s project to destroy the DoE is; again it’s a case of examining one tree when the whole forest looks pretty much the same. McMahon is loathsome, and perhaps the point is that even those Trump administrators who aren’t immediately grotesque and offputting are loathsome. But that should be obvious. You can’t stay a babyface while you’re hurting babies.

“Start Making Sense” (Books) - Nikhil Krishnan won’t free radicals. I get what Krishnan is trying to say here, and he remains an excellent interpreter of contemporary philosophy. The first three sections are perfectly fine. Then politics enter the fray, and unfortunately Krishnan continuously conflates a politics of tactical moderation and a politics of ideological moderation. One moment he characterizes Rawlsian reasonableness as being about tactical restraint (no “appealing to premises that others cannot reasonably be expected to accept” – a circular definition, but whatever) but the next he makes it clear that the only examples he can cite of tactical restraint are those in which the left wing weakened their terms to appeal to the right wing, and he speaks of “a refusal to allow a minority position within one’s alliance to define the map of value for everyone else”. But if the map of value is simply a matter of seeking the majority opinion, how can justice ever be advanced? Krishnan describes the moderate as one who values “stability over… the triumph of a vision”, as though it’s impossible to figure out the end result of moderate policies; as though the world will simply freeze in place if enough of us will it. The slippage from reasonableness as procedure to reasonableness as centrist outcome is insidious, and also sloppy and tired. In fact, a politician like Zohran Mamdani is a far better example of a tactically reasonable politician than a Tony Blair, who was quite unafraid of the unilateral move; Mamdani works to build coalitions in order to advance one goal without expecting them to advance every goal; and he understands that the politician must unite the communities they serve, not merely speak to each in turn. He is a tactical moderate, and only on the skewed map of American politics can he be seen as an ideological extremist. Like any good paragraph, he’s left-justified.

“Catnip” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum bawls at the Ball and Becky Shaw, digs them, digs them, digs them, says they’re goodies, says jump up to Broadway. If Nussbaum liked Shaw so much, she could have found enough to say about it to fill a review, surely. What she comes up with is so guised it amounts to a must-see stamp and an unspoken recommendation to go in blind. Well, there are worse things. The Cats review is more embarrassing, dropping a lot of first-day-of-school gay media references without any of the requisite humility. “TV shows such as ‘Pose’ and ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ had clearly primed the crowd to read the room, and to hush, with respect…” She’s assuming a lot about those audiences, what their respect is rooted in, and where it comes from! Believe it or not, some of the people at a musical in New York City might have lived experience with ballroom. Nussbaum: Can you see in the dark? Because Jellicles can, and Jellicles do.

“The Way It Happened” (Books) - Hua Hsu said what he fragment and fragment what he said. Unfortunately, Hsu’s prose is bone-dry and the excerpts of Yamashita he gives us are weirdly gloopy and hard to follow. (Possibly the contextualization is poor, possibly the book is just like that.) Japanese American internment is a totally valuable topic on its own, but the lack of any broader historical context for a novel of historical fiction is very odd; the gestures toward a later generation of Asian-American identity formation are confusingly abstract where they could so easily be explicit, and even provide a wider, clearer frame. I’m glad that an experimental work put out by Graywolf is getting magazine coverage, but it’s hard to imagine a reader without preexisting interest in the subject finding this review an enticement.

“Man of Action” (Onward and Upward With the Arts) - Kelefa Sanneh bleaches a reputation. Man, what? Just a bizarrely soft-focus take on this project, as Sanneh somehow decides that the story here is that an action director is taking on a non-action project and not that MICHAEL JACKSON INNOCENT The Movie was abruptly retooled into MICHAEL JACKSON EXISTS The Movie after everyone realized, incredibly late in the process, that the former film was illegal under the terms of settlement signed with one of Michael Jackson’s victims. Sanneh doesn’t exactly make director Fuqua look great in the paragraph where he most directly defends Jackson (“Fuqua is not convinced that Jackson did what he is accused of doing, despite the number of accusers (five) and the fact that Jackson publicly talked about sharing his bed with boys”) but if he’s trying to give Fuqua enough rope to hang himself, it’s bizarre that he spends nearly the whole article lauding the man as “stylish and streetwise”, underappreciated, and on the verge of triumph. This is a fucked-up, evil, malignant movie, and the article written in advance of it would rightfully be focused on our shifting cultural responses to pedophilia post-Epstein. Even if this guy’s new movie weren’t about Jackson, this would still be a really glowing piece for the Olympic is Rising dude; according to most critics, Michael is awful not only as hagiography but on its merits, and this sort of coverage should embarrass everyone involved. It’s really, really bad. Sham on!

Letters:

Re my take on Charli, k asks: “what on EARTH do you mean… not her being our Rousseauian pop star!!!!” If I knew how to clarify, I would. I’m just channeling forces…

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