March 7, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker Review: March 11, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 11

"The first day I met him, we drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel's and I was laying on the couch going, 'Uhhh,' and Ru was, like, 'Let's go to Kinko's! Let's make posters of me!'"

We are just ONE paid subscriber away (!!!) from unlocking my reviews of the online-only "Weekend Essay". To make things fun and encourage some speedy subscribing, I'll give a free six month addition to the first new paid subscriber I get after publishing this issue. (If you don't hear from me, sorry, ya weren't first.) ¹

Must-Read:

"Role Play" - Ronan Farrow roller-skates alone with RuPaul. Interesting for what it is not as much as for what it is. If you're expecting any kind of behind-the-scenes look at Drag Race, go elsewhere. Likewise, if you're drawn to this piece by the unrevealing diss RuPaul lobs at her fracking haters, and are expecting raw cattiness and revelation... sorry, girl. Maybe you're just here for the tea, the real, dropped-mask Ru. Farrow seems to be looking for that Ru, too, and depending on how you read the article, he either doesn't quite get there, or he realizes that the performance of RuPaul is RuPaul – that her guardedness doesn't hide a deep inner life, but a more shallow (though still meaningful) sensitivity. The picture Farrow paints of Ru is of a figure that's lonely at the top, isolated from both her racial and queer communities (which she has a sometimes tortured relationship to despite her legendary status), someone with nowhere left to roller-skate. It's less that Ru's guarded because she got hers, and more that she truly struggles with intimacy. Yet even this is contradictory: On Drag Race, Ru often pushes contestants to reveal more and more of themselves, to let down their guard and lift their mask, ² and she exemplifies this with an eagerness to deeply engage (albeit often in a blinkered, Boomerish way) with what's in front of her. RuPaul can be precious about appearances; she also doesn't care how anyone sees her. Being real isn't always being real. Does Ru have no ego, or is she nothing but ego? If her persona is all ego, built as a shield to disguise a lack, does it matter that it's false?

These are the sorts of profound philosophical questions you're surprisingly likely to find yourself asking, not only while reading this piece but, honestly, while watching Drag Race, one of the most oddly psychologically probing shows on television, in which queens are essentially judged on their ability to embody a persona without visible effort – to serve – and to make Ru laugh – all of which are the same thing. To be a celebrity is to be a projection; to be a drag queen is to project the self outward. RuPaul was born to be seen. Nothing she says matters unless that camera is rolling.

Enough philosophy, how's the journalism? Look, if you're a Drag Race viewer, there aren't many deep-cuts here; when Farrow is recounting the history of controversies surrounding Ru and the show, he can sound like the "controversies" section of a Wikipedia page. But it's a short enough piece that there's not too much of that to wade through (and it's probably helpful to general [derogatory] audiences.) By not pushing too hard toward psychological probing, Farrow leaves enough space for the reader to infer, and to develop their own RuPothesis.

Window-Shop:

"The Boy Who Cried Art" - Jackson Arn spray(paints) and prays with Keith Haring. I have to admit, I go into every Arn piece with more unearned petty negativity (Johanna Fateman was right there) than I harbor for any of the magazine's other writing – and despite this he nearly always manages to impress. It's not his fault he got hired, and though his swaggering, proposition-lobbing style might be described as "punchable," it also works. So consider the vicarious chip on my shoulder knocked away for good. This piece wisely chooses a broad framework with which to assess and re-assess Haring – basically, was he a populist Business Artist or was he secretly cerebral? Instead of building to a single conclusion, though, Arn squints at the premise from various angles before eventually declaring it wanting. Arn is fair regarding the biography under review, and evenly balances the book with its subject. He's not funny, exactly, but he's bouncy – "Art for everybody isn't for everybody, I suppose," "His art doesn't need to stick in anyone's craw, so long as it's paired with something that does – it gets people in the room, and an activist takes things from there." His critique of Haring as a white dilettante – an appropriator – is compelling, but really needs more outside confirmation (and in general Arn could use a few more quotes to prop up his constant flurry of self-assured hypotheses.) But this is the sort of piece that will come to mind every time I see a Haring from now on – whether or not you agree with Arn, he makes himself useful.

"The Forty-Three" - Alma Guillermoprieto goes searching for the Mexican students killed by the state. I appreciate Guillermoprieto's willingness to bend reportorial objectivity to remark on things which are deeply awful or unthinkable. The piece's ardent style is mostly to its benefit, and the horrific story it recounts is rendered with appropriate passion. (A few moments are a bit much, like the parenthetical "Why not just shot, one wonders. Why not that small mercy?" We can wonder on our own.) I wish Guillermoprieto had done more to flesh out certain scenes and clarify some details, though. It's somewhat hard to picture the students, who were "rowdy and aggressive," commandeering busses in groups – we are given the excuse that they were politically radicalized, but their daily lives are hazy. At one point, seemingly in the midst of their being kidnapped, they begin "holding an impromptu street-corner press conference" – a detail that feels almost surreal. (There are so many press conferences in this article – at least seven. Are they super common in Mexico?) There's a lot of time devoted to the G.U. gang of narcos, who are implicated in the killing – in establishing their ineptitude, Guillermoprieto spends multiple paragraphs recounting their drug-bussing scheme and their ramshackle text messages, details that are compelling but don't feel central to the case at hand. Still, the piece mostly strikes a good balance between scenes of outraged and grieving parents and a beat-by-beat chronicle of the crime, coverup, and investigations. The human cost of corruption is made manifest, and it's a gruesome thing to see.

"War and Pieces" - Jennifer Homans is plié-sed to meet two new City Ballet dances. I can't understand why dances have runs so short that they receive coverage after they've already stopped performances. Surely the theatrical model, in which good "buzz" drives viewership, would apply to the ballet, too? But apparently not. Anyhow, Homans provides compelling analyses of both new works. A new Alexei Ratmansky dance brings to mind "Agnes Martin and the ways that line can make grief possible by containing feeling so deeply inside form" – an insight extended to include ballet as a whole, its "formal paradox: an art that shows the body at the peak of life also testifies to what is lost when the body is gone." That's both trenchant and stirring. Tiler Peck's accumulative dance has no "sustained themes or development," which should make a review tricky, but Homans smartly hones in on Peck's "effortless" referential ability – I don't know Poulenc from Petipa, but when Homans writes of Peck "transposing the Old Master’s procession of classical arabesques for all-female shades into a line of melancholy men winding their way in a wilting prance", I can picture it perfectly. Dance, especially traditional ballet, often feels born of a formal language I can't grasp; Homans serves as an able translator. She doesn't convince me that I wouldn't find the Ratmansky maudlin and the Peck obscure – but I appreciate her appreciation anyway.

"Harlem is Everywhere" - Hilton Als is a Harlem Renaissance man at the Met. As with a recurring book review of a disappointing sophomore offering that focuses mostly on the sparkling debut, Als spends quite a while praising the curator's earlier show in a smaller space before panning her rangier amassment at the Met. That renders things bumpy, and really, no one wants to read a disappointed art review – but Als finds pockets of lovely observation, like how Winold Reiss "often poses his sitters in white space, the better to see their faces and minds at work... I thought about how far outside of Blackness one needs to stand in order to see how it renders itself." Als could provide more specific evidence of his view that the show "makes the history of Harlem palatable" for the Met's "wide audience" – he references a single word from the wall labels in a way that smacks of cherry-picking. But it's easy to take his point on faith.

Skip Without Guilt:

"Had to Happen" - James Wood says: Let There Be Literary analysis. I quite enjoyed the opening section, which presents an indelible image of a young Wood skeptically analyzing the ominous phrasing of the hymns he's singing in church. No wonder Wood puts so much stock in exegesis – it delivered him from religious anxiety. The rest of the piece critiques Marilynne Robinson's new book on Genesis, mostly by pointing out where its elucidating turns to evangelizing. It verges on repetitive, and those without preëxisting interest in the subject matter won't find new reasons to care. Wood's read on Genesis' god is wildly different from Robinson's, but neither read is especially novel – either he's an unkind grump or he's a tender patriarch; neither case demands much reconsideration. And the final paragraph borders on condescension toward Robinson. But the piece is generally engaging, especially for the theologically minded and those sympathetic to Wood's view: If you're an Atheist who loves Bible study, in other words, the piece is for you.

"High Anxiety" - Rebecca Mead is SSRI-not-SSRI for playwright Lucy Prebble. Mead never finds a solid angle on Prebble, which leaves the piece feeling both scattershot and saggy, though it isn't that long. Prebble comes across quite well, and her quotes are reliably engaging, but she never seems like more than just a someone – it's not that we can't care about a random theater-and-TV writer, but we need to be given a reason to. Instead, there are just a succession of scenes, which don't flow with any discernible logic. (They're not even chronological.) Still, I'm not going to complain about spending time with Prebble: On her ENRON play losing money: "...how extraordinary that I was able to make a play about losing people millions, and then actually do it? Anything I hadn't understood about what I had written, I understood then." On the comfort of videogames: "even if that world is horrific or combat-filled, it's actually preordered and safe." On the lives of sex workers: "...a really high proportion of sex workers suffer from O.C.D... it almost certainly has a relationship to working with strangers a lot, and safety and structure and insecurity around that, and hygiene." I'd happily read a Q&A with Prebble, but this piece never convinced me that it wouldn't have been just as successful if it were that Q&A.

"Spice Odyssey" - Justin Chang doesn't like sand: It's coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Chang excelled last week, but come now, a foreign arthouse drama is basically a four-seam fastball down the middle. ³ The real challenge is in facing an action-packed fantasy blockbuster, and though Dune: Part Two: Whatcha Duuune? is perhaps artier than most, it still proves hard for Chang to stifle his giggles at the silliness of everything, which can't help but feel condescending. It's a tricky problem; go too far in the other direction and you might start soyfacing. But it's best to at least take the general conceit seriously – whereas Chang starts riffing about "cumin bondage" and referencing other big fantasy properties (Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, ever heard of them?) When he regains his composure, the review is perfectly good; he manages to give every central performance a sentence-long summation, a habit familiar from the magazine's theater writing that will hopefully stay here. But it's clear Chang is rejecting the movie's terms, disliking it for being a vast, solemn take on the material, not for how well or poorly it hits that target. That's his right, ⁴ but it limits how much his review can really say. He enters with his eyes rolled, so he can't see much.

"The Last Campaign" - Evan Osnos keeps Biden his time. It's never an easy task to profile a sitting president – their public personality is usually quite well-understood, and beyond that, it's mostly a matter of rehashing the news. It's not as though Osnos really has an insider's view of the administration; he got a couple interviews with the president, and he extrapolates. Unfortunately, Osnos frames everything around Biden's re-election campaign, which means he focuses heavily on Biden's hugely depressing and largely unpersuasive argument that he doesn't need to provide any vision of a future he won't live through – that the disinclination toward Trump is enough. Osnos is critical of this narrative, but he rehashes its one thudding point again and again throughout this needlessly long piece, and when he finally gets to the issues, they're framed basically as points scored for or against Biden's campaign – Gaza alienates Arab American voters, abortion rights galvanizes women voters. It's a flat and fundamentally meaningless way to view the world, as a series of up-and-down arrows. Osnos seems to be borrowing the framework from Biden's campaign team, which is especially enervating when juxtaposed with Biden's personal-to-a-fault view of everything; the kind of view that makes him urge those outraged over Gaza to understand "what would happen if they came into their state or their neighborhood and saw what happened with Hamas" – in other words, excusing genocide because Israel's actually at capacity and can't hold appropriate space. This disconnect, in which quantitative reasoning drives qualitative messaging, hasn't worked well for Biden so far, and may be to blame for the disconnect between Democrats' general success and his poor approval ratings – but he's sticking with the strategy. In a race between two old dogs, we won't see many new tricks.

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Letters:

Michael agrees with me that last week's issue was exceptionally strong; he highlights Kathryn Schulz's piece on solar storms and Ian Urbina's on Chinese labor violations as highlights, while taking issue with my assertion that Urbina's piece frontloads everything notable. He also liked Shane Bauer's piece on the West Bank: "Back in what I consider to be the heyday of Mother Jones, Bauer had a number of really killer investigative pieces. Glad to see he's still delivering the goods."

Caz writes that she wasn't familiar with the Buffy Sainte-Marie Pretendian investigation I spotlighted last week, and found the reporting "overly long and repetitive for a straightforward case of fraud," while giving Sainte-Marie too much air to repeat lies, thereby "perpetuating an ambiguity that doesn't exist in the real world." Regarding Jay Caspian Kang's piece on fake Indian pedagogue Elizabeth Hoover, she says she "enjoyed reading about Hoover stringing beads in meetings. A comical and literal performative Indian."

Heather left a long and fascinating comment – really a short essay – on Mary Gaitskill's piece from a few weeks ago about formative friendship, which explored her reactions to Gaitskill's work in general. You ought to scroll down here and read the whole thing, but to excerpt, she sees Gaitskill's writing as betraying a "sneaky lack of self-awareness... born of a lack of understanding that others might see them as lacking in empathy or kindness. For instance, the fact that it didn’t occur to her to consider how hurt a teen girl might be if her closest friend left suddenly and stole her clothes, even long afterward—it took the ex-friend telling her for her to understand it from her point of view. It’s as though she continued, into adulthood, to believe that someone she envied couldn’t possibly have the same feelings or vulnerability that she did. ...[Gaitskill] seems to see other people as ultimately inscrutable to a point that can serve to flatten them in her estimation. This seems to be especially true of people who are not like her." It's interesting considering this comment in conjunction with some of Gaitskill's short fiction from the magazine and online edition, much of which concerns empathy, inner turmoil, and a certain difficulty understanding the other. What is subject, and what is self?

Heather also highlighted Maggie Doherty's piece on Carson McCullers, saying she "was surprised, while reading, to see little commentary on the gendered aspect of the coddling of erratic genius... I think we should be clear-eyed about the truth of it—that no one’s art is improved by addiction or worth the suffering of others—but seeing mentions, for instance, of Reeves having to cook and keep house as though this were a sign of McCullers’ deficiencies, when so many male writers at the time would have had wives to do this for them, felt a little narrow-minded... We can always learn so much about the past and ourselves when we interrogate how gender shapes our perspective."

What did you think of this week's issue?

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Frankly, click here – I do give a damn!

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