Last Week’s New Yorker Review: January 15, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 15
"There are dozens of exercises for the eyes alone."
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Must-Read:
"Broken and Rebuilt" - Jennifer Homans slides between roles with Odissi dancer Bijayini Satpathy. Homans can hardly be called the regular dance critic if she writes this sparingly – nothing from her since March of last year. But never mind that; this is brilliant because it's unafraid to get into the weeds, the nerdy background bits which only an expert could see. The section where Homans tries "to pinpoint the motor or source" of Satpathy's movement – it's the foot, she says – has the same thrill as an episode of Car Talk: Experts dishing about mechanics, with plenty of diversion along the way. Before this, there's a fascinating history that delves into the ways a systematized recovery from colonialism inevitably made "standardized forms" out of Indian dance's "dizzying variety." Homans' appreciation leaves us with plenty of knowledge; this is a fine example of a review of a "closed" show (inevitable in the dance world, since shows run only for a weekend or two) that makes itself useful regardless.
Window-Shop:
"Mind in Flux" - Alex Ross blows trombones up with avant-gardist George Lewis. The AACM, a group which essentially fuses Schoenberg with jazz, then adds dashes of every obscure style under the sun, are late-to-be-hailed giants of new music. Lewis himself insistently returned to the "communal" over the individual, and in a longer piece, Ross might push further toward following suit. This still works, moving from crisp history to fab description: "At the beginning, eruptive full-ensemble gestures give way to a gently purring harp figure and to snappy rhythms on agogô bells. These incipient grooves are almost immediately waylaid by fresh alarms and excursions." It took a reread to understand the piece's structure – the last section departs from the Armory performance to discuss a recently released recording of a Lewis opera; that segment is too light on analysis, though the opera sounds compelling.
"Make It Hurt" - Daniel Immerwahr compares and contrasts "probably the most enduring authors on decolonization" – Frantz Fanon (for) and Ian Fleming (against.) That quote is a good enough thesis; Immerwahr overshoots the mark by insisting the two "had much in common," a point he never proves. Mostly, he just takes the excuse to write two biographical reviews that each frame the other; a surprisingly trenchant structure, since it allows historical context in without requiring a sidebar. The Fleming stuff is excellent down to the final detail (guess who bought his Jamaican estate?) while the Fanon material is somewhat predictably withering, dredging up all the usual damning quotes, many of which are re-dredged from a Pankaj Mishra piece in the magazine two years ago. Immerwahr hones in on the personal more than the philosophical, which can't hurt all-surface Fleming but fairly flattens Fanon.
"Noise on Wheels" (Talk of the Town) - Michael Schulman blasts pedicabs. Service journalism for those of us who've had their Broadway egress impeded by a wall of wheels and pop music. Schulman has his finger on the scale for the great white way; this'd be a totally different piece if the balance of interviews with drivers vs. show people was reversed. But this way's more dishy.
"Fresh Direct" - Hannah Goldfield isn't passing up on her old ways. Very charming and frequently visceral, nailing the description of the fruit itself ("glossy, sunset-colored pulp... sweet, bright, savory, sour, and even a touch sulfuric.") I find it a bit ethically questionable to propose having a personal box of the fruit shipped to you from California "quite affordably" – reader, it's 68 dollars[^1] – but I suppose that (drop)ship has sailed. No idea what's going on with the style guide; apparently it's "passion fruit" in some situations, "passion-fruit" in others, and the more common "passionfruit" never at all. The trek around L.A. is entertaining, but leading with the most bizarro preparation, "reduced passion-fruit pulp over a silky chicken-liver mousse," makes the rest read as anticlimax. These are all nitpicks; I still savor Goldfield's flavor.
"Taste Test" (Talk of the Town) - D.T. Max judges java. Sponcon for Illy? Perhaps. But boy is it a good sip, with "tired and wired cognoscenti" downing cold-brew, and a very funny delayed climax.
"Briefly Noted" - I read these capsule book reviews every week and never find anything to say about them. They're odd – about the only thing in the magazine that's uncredited. But I enjoy them, and this is an especially fine batch, moving from a book that frames Mormonism's history as "both marginalized and marginalizing" to one "richly textured with insights about how money shapes one's conception of safety."
"The Long Way" - Jon Lee Anderson sojourns in Las Palmas. Anderson has a wild story to tell, and merely the ability to remember these long-ago adventures in such meticulous detail is noteworthy. Perhaps because the memories are long-past, the chosen details aren't always exactly what I want to know; the piece feels both rushed (the first two sections quick-hit the background) and lackadaisical. Perhaps in hardening into a story Anderson's trials have lost some of their stakes. He still unspools various incidents with panache, although it's hard to draw any sweeping conclusions from them. [^2] It's just a yarn; Anderson has earned the right to tell it in the magazine, but it'd kill at hour five of a cocktail party. [^3]
"The Life of the Mother" - Stephania Taladrid exposes an unjust death brought on by abortion-ban fears. Visceral and gut-wrenching. I feel almost guilty that it didn't really work for me, and guiltier that I have a hard time articulating why. I think it's that Taladrid isn't sure how much to blame the abortion ban and how much to blame medical misconduct. But it could be that there've been so many great recent stories about our horrifically broken medical system that this one was sadly unsurprising. The straightforward nature of the story, moving beat by beat through Alvarez's story and wrapping up by confirming that "outside experts" found her care lacking, works alright but is very literal; this story lacks the psychological depth of the best stuff in the magazine. Of course, it doesn't need that depth to be important testimony.
Skip Without Guilt:
"Shamelessly Dramatic" - Julian Lucas puts words in the mouth of playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins. Jacobs-Jenkins deserves a profile, and there ought to be a full-circle quality to it, since one of his breakout plays, "Gloria," was modeled after his time working at this magazine. Unfortunately, Lucas doesn't go for any sort of hall-of-mirrors approach, or try anything especially formally exciting. This is a well-written but straightforward profile, one that doesn't really engage with its subject's supposition that profiles like this render "'entire lives flat and uncomplicated and eight thousand words long'". The news hook here concerns Jacobs-Jenkins' upcoming Prince musical; Lucas doesn't make it sound exciting (Jacobs-Jenkins doesn't like the original movie, and seems to have picked the project mainly as a career move.) Jacobs-Jenkins is eloquent, obviously, but Lucas occasionally makes the odd choice to paraphrase his anecdotes, blunting their impact ("...peers fixated on sussing out the race of his narrators" feels like a story gestured toward instead of told.) And unfortunately, Jacobs-Jenkin's penchant for wacky coups de theatre doesn't translate well to the page, where they sound parodically pretentious. ("A girl with cancer was visited by her lost hair," "He nearly drained a goldfish bowl... through a Krazy Straw while delivering a monologue about privilege.") If the piece were weirder, maybe we'd be swept up in the wildness.
"Showing Up" - Alec MacGillis displays hooky. Well-written, but hard to take at face value. The sub-headline ("Has school attendance become optional?") suggests a piece with deep cultural concerns. That isn't the piece MacGillis writes, perhaps because he couldn't find much evidence to back up his personal supposition that COVID overreaction is largely to blame, a drum he's been beating for some time now. He includes a few circumstantial quotes to that effect (and makes sure to put one at the climax,) but mostly he spends the rather brief piece delving into a company, Concentric, that seeks to address absenteeism with face-to-face meetings. It's hard to ignore that most of the wrenching anecdotes MacGillis finds in the field have less to do with COVID and more to do with the dissolved social safety net. ("One mother told Johnson that her son had been missing school because she hadn't been able to buy him a winter jacket.") At best, Concentric is a stopgap solution for the state's failures; at worst, it's private policing with a smile. MacGillis is credulous because it serves the points he's trying to score. You can miss his class.
Letters:
No notes on the end-of-year edition. What did you think of this week's issue?
[^1]: I get that it's a discount over buying them for three bucks a pop, but it's not a massive discount considering you have to use five pounds worth!
[^2]: I'm sure some readers will roll their eyes at Anderson's sometimes blithe privilege to get lost as an adventure, but circumstance is slippery. To paraphrase a certain tweet, you might want to avoid saying "I'm so finished with white men's entitlement lately that I'm really not sad about a 17yo being stranded off the coast of Africa because he ignored signs."
[^3]: Do people still have those? And how do I get invited?