August 29, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker Review: September 2, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 2

"it’s neither a tale of eccentrics finding each other nor a tale of absurdism appearing sane in a mad world."

Must-Read:

“Faith Healing” - Richard Brody can cantor, can’t he? A microbudget character-driven indie drama about Jewishness: This film, Between the Temples, practically defines Brody’s comfort zone. He delivers, drawing the Roth comparison early enough that it doesn’t overwhelm his reading. He provides a formal analysis of the movie’s cinematography, courtesy of Sean Price Williams,¹ apparently “among the most important artists in modern independent filmmaking”, a judgement that becomes dispiriting when you learn he’s off shooting Sabrina Carpenter music videos. (Well, everybody’s gotta eat.) The film’s director also gets lavished with praise: He “experiences venerable cinematic forms from the inside, with an ingenuous spontaneity and an emotional responsiveness that dispel all irony and foreclose any archness.” I appreciate that Brody is willing to exalt small-scale cinema to high heavens; even when the flick turns out to be just a so-so indie, the aura of Cassavetes or Rossellini hovers around it – Brody makes it so.

Window-Shop:

“The Collector” - Hannah Goldfield rescues recipes with Bonnie Slotnick. Slotnick’s semi-basement cookbook store is a minor NYC icon; I’ve stopped by on my way to the gallery next door. It’s a pleasure to get the inside scoop on Slotnick, whose backstory is predictably distinctive. She “remembers lying under the dining-room table as a child in New Jersey, paging through her mother’s [cookbook], and eating cookies” – the early loss of her mother, Goldfield suggests, has driven Slotnick’s obsession: “…the kitchen was her [mother’s] realm and its objects became talismans.” If there is something self-aware about her status as a local legend – she eats mostly at the sort of quirky restaurants that embody “an evaporating version of New York” and hands all visitors a list of other nearby bookstores to visit – it goes to show that one doesn’t have to be fueled by obliviousness to remain idiosyncratic; a stubborn quality works just as well. All the regulars are irregular.

“The Ripe Time” (Talk of the Town) - Jake Offenhartz sniffs the Gowanus with a professional. Really funny bit, great execution. A stellar first effort from Offenhartz.

“Living Under a Rock” - Kathryn Schulz is a rock, she is… a memoir!² I’m not sure if Sabrina Imbler invented the “science-memoir in which ten representative things provide the context for aspects of the writer’s life” subgenre, but this memoir-in-ten-rocks can’t help but call her book to mind. Schulz calls it “one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory”, but ought to do more to point out its influences. Anything Schulz writes that isn’t actively annoying will be at least a high window-shop, because her prose has an inimitable spark. But making rocks and the people that study them interesting is still a challenge; reading that geology “saw a… dramatic shift with the widespread acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics” just has me shifting in my seat. (Hard to make rock puns –Schulz has used all the good ones.) The grandeur of the exceptional illustration by Emily Hughes isn’t reflected by this small-scale piece. Schulz reaches the conclusion that the book only works when memoir and science are wedded, not just set next to each other; I would’ve guessed that from reading the blurb. But even when the mountain is more of a molehill, Schulz is still a world-class mountaineer.³

Give a Glance:
This is a special section I’m bringing back for the second time because all four of this week’s features are, as I wrote previously, “entertaining to read, but they aren’t that structurally sound, and their stakes are ultimately pretty low. I’d have a very hard time putting one above another.” They’re still vaguely ranked, but they’re all in the same boat.

“Bunker Mentality” - Patricia Marx searches Zillow and lower. Marx staunchly refuses to consider the sociopolitical implications of the stories she finds among bunker maniacs, which is frustrating – an analysis of paranoia and fascism and toxic masculinity and preparation as ego fixation lurks behind a hidden bookcase – but Marx doesn’t go into that room.⁴ Taken for what it is, though, this is good fun; the linguistic absurdity of real-estate listings giving way to the more mundane reality of trying to live in places that are built for a different world. Anna and Jim Cleveland, stuck in a tiny guard shack with a disused missile silo underneath, really put the pit in money pit; their story is the highlight, in part because they seem to have exhausted most of their paranoia. (“‘The sun’s going to come up tomorrow, and my taxes are still due.’”) The end-days nuttiness found elsewhere is more tiresome, especially now that it’s less of a fringe position and more of an operating principle for the right wing. Marx gets her quips in, though. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and she feels fine.

“Life of the Party” - Andrew Marantz rolls up the partisan, please. Despite the two-page-spread photo of Kamala at the convention, this isn’t exactly the opposite number to Anthony Lane’s very iffy fear-and-loathing-at-the-RNC thing. Marantz is more interested in what the Democrats mean as a party after their abrupt pivot to control and competency. I’m not as convinced that the Democrats of late were any weaker than they were in, say, the ‘90s, when the Simpsons captured their general deal: “We hate life and ourselves. We can’t govern!” Who knows how long the latest vibe shift will last. I appreciated the section on what Bernie could possibly have been thinking in becoming Biden’s loudest supporter – that he saw it as a repeat of his own ratfucking by party insiders in 2020 makes a great deal of sense. Otherwise, though, the analysis is lengthy and unsurprising: Pelosi is competent, Schumer much less so; the party is a big, drafty tent without central power or air. It’s still an enjoyable read – there is certainly too much horse race coverage of politics, devoid of policy analysis, these days; however, a lot of it is braindead punditry, like gamblers discussing the odds, whereas Marantz’s historically informed approach is more akin to the inside scoop on track conditions. I wish Marantz didn’t give quite so much air to Dean Phillips’ gloating, which brings a certain Clickhole headline to mind. Peter Welch, on the other hand, makes a charming central figure – the first senator to go against Biden, in part because he’s one of the only senators that’s not a careerist. Interestingly, Harris herself is distinctly absent; surely she gets some of the credit for the seamlessness of the transition. Marantz is more interested in, say it with me, the context of all in which she lives and what came before her.

“Early Scenes” - Al Pacino says don’t be fooled by the Oscars he’s got, he’s still, he’s still Pacchi from the Bronx. A perfectly average memoir excerpt; readable and interesting enough, but without the depth of voice that would make it stand out if it weren’t wedded to a celebrity’s persona. What else is there to say? You know instantly if you’re interested enough in Al Pacino’s upbringing to read him tell stories about it. There are plenty of references to films he’s been in; no egregious reaches, but you never forget what Pacino’s famous for – and that it isn’t writing.

“The Last Day” - Alec MacGillis says school’s out… forever? If MacGillis would stop his petulant sore-winner complaining about how needless and harmful COVID-era school closures were (a narrative I’m somewhat skeptical of) this would have a chance to become a penetrating look at the negative effects of profit-driven school boards on education. They’re so obviously the villain that even as MacGillis tries to point fingers elsewhere, he eventually wraps things up with a very telling interview with a deputy superintendent who was apparently surprised that “‘people don’t care about the money… When you make these decisions, you really have to think about the heart.’” Of course, these words won’t actually provoke different actions without students, parents, and teacher’s unions finding their voices on the subject. MacGillis has no student voices in this piece, an absence I’ll always point out in education reporting. Unions get one whiny paragraph where MacGillis implies that they’re to blame for too-lengthy school closures. It’s clear whose voices MacGillis credits, and how partial his version of this very important story is.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Love’s Labor’s Lost” - Rebecca Mead wipes off genderfluid. It’s probably impossible to cover a 480-page book on the entirety of sexual identity in any kind of satisfying way at this brief length. Mead gestures toward a thesis – something about how Rebecca Davis’ book “reveals” a lot about “our cultural moment”, perhaps unwittingly – more than she really articulates one. Davis’ approach relies on “a series of short biographical accounts”, Mead covers three of these, but chooses seemingly at random – it’s not clear what she thinks they have in common, or what they’re meant to reveal about Davis’ book. They’re still interesting anecdotes, but perhaps Mead would’ve been better off taking a higher view of Davis’ project, surveying its trends without bothering with its stories. That would have been unsatisfying in different ways, surely. Sometimes the assignment is impossible.

“Devil May Care” - Inkoo Kang sees some Evil. Of all the shows to cover twice in the magazine, something that rarely ever happens, this network procedural is a pretty random choice. Kang doesn’t add much to Nussbaum’s analysis, as the show doesn’t seem to have changed much throughout its run. Kang’s writing is adverb-laced and unconvincing – I like The Good Wife and Fight a great deal, but Evil just seemed goofy and a bit self-satisfied – a vibe reinforced by the scene Kang cites, with a punchline about the Devil changing diapers. The devil take it.

“For Love of Country” - Kelefa Sanneh takes a bite of country-vocal-fried Post Malone. It’s unacceptable to write about Malone’s incredibly cynical turn to country music with no reference at all to the racial dynamics that are so obviously at play – complete with a hit single with the N-word guy where they rant together about how the women in their relationships bear part of the blame for their alcoholism!⁵ Surely not all or even most of the fans of Post’s new groove are culture warriors, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t being pandered to, in ways that are incredibly distasteful for an artist who got famous in a Black genre. It’s especially bizarre because Sanneh has written about race so much before. All Malone’s new music is profoundly malignant even when it’s sorta catchy. Sanneh’s getting snowed.

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Letters:

Nada in the mailbag!

What did you think of this week’s issue?

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Excellent Very Good Good Fair

Poor.