Last Week’s New Yorker, weeks of March 23

“‘Your problem is, you had the artist go out and negotiate’“

Must-Reads:

🗣️ “The Real Deal” (World on a String) - Emma Allen is the trade of the season. Talk of the Town is having a mini-renaissance of late, or at least I’ve been liking it more. It’s largely the same crew of writers as ever – Michael Schulman has had a Talk in the last three consecutive Style & Design issues – and it’s hard to pin down exactly what’s different; it just feels fresher, more lively, better-assigned and more tightly edited. Maybe there’s a behind-the-scenes change – the magazine, famously, doesn’t deign to announce such things publicly – or maybe it’s just chance. This, anyway, is a prime example of a new-feel Talk, a snapshot of major artist Wendy Red Star (don’t get starstruck!) that runs down her latest show – giant beads! – before following her out into the Chinatown knockoff-bag sales, a trip that doesn’t feel contrived (Red Star has an actual aim – a gift for her sister), but still neatly reflects the themes of her work. There’s even a neat little tie-in to local news (“…some Tribeca gallerists came under fire for holding a meeting about how to disperse venders outside their spaces”) and the deadpan Red Star is able to foist some of the spotlight onto her gallerist Allegra LaViola, who accommodates it more; the two have a double-act vibe. I’d see that show.

“Listen to Yourselves” (Books) - Katy Waldman wants for nothing. Glad that Waldman, after a few failed but hilarious attempts, has found a pop-philosophy book that passes her smell test. Not that Adam Phillips is exactly a discovery (“the foremost psychoanalytic writer of our time”, per the publisher); still, this expertly rendered precis of his new book manages the rare trick of rendering a thesis legible without turning it into a commonplace. It’s hard to get to the end of this piece without feeling like you need to pick up Phillips’ book, but thankfully the feeling is one of wanting to ponder an idea more fully, not needing to clarify what the idea is in the first place. His lesson is that our desires are contradictory, messily emerging from the combination of voices that make up our selves. I greatly enjoy the Phillips I’ve read, but even better is Waldman’s insistence on turning his suppositions back on him, like a patient mad at her therapist who asks whether he’s asking that question because of his father. If irreverence is a sign of maturity, his most recent work “is pretty mature… ‘The Life You Want’ sets out to shape Freud into a more amenable ancestor, someone better suited to Phillips’s purposes.” And, as someone with a sense of self that shrinks from interrogation to the point of invisibility, I certainly agree with Phillips over Rorty that knowing what we want also requires us to “surface the sunken richness of our wanting, its destructiveness, its haunting strangeness” – as per Freud. Waldman’s linking of multiple internal voices to “liberal democracy” confused me a little, and generally the very small canvas she’s working on means a few details are lost. But this is one to think on, with, and through.

Window-Shop:

🗣️ ”Nine Lives” (The Boards) - Michael Schulman serves cat. LaBeija is a legend, and Schulman finds a framing device –innocence and experience, basically – that allows LaBeija’s historical reminiscences to feel relevant: the chance “‘to reconstruct, revise, revisit all the things that I experienced’” is contained within the character of Gus. It helps that I’ve seen LaBeija’s performance, and they really do manage to bring their history out through the characterization. Compare to Schulman’s profile of Lisa Kudrow, below, where so much less is said with so many more words. Brevity, at the very least, helps his wit.

“You Up?” (A Critic at Large) - Jennifer Wilson talks show. Best read as a super-sidelong memoir piece, Wilson interrogating her elder-Millennial childhood via The Arsenio Hall Show, which defined “early-nineties cool”, at least for “night folks” like her. This despite containing virtually no biography: Wilson’s eye for the “dialectic between the traditional and the transgressive” embodied by late night, and her interest in a young Arsenio rapt in front of the TV initially had me misremembering the anecdote as concerning Wilson plopped in front of the boundary-bending Hall. Even if Wilson never watched Hall, she grew up in the world he shaped, and she articulates the ways Hall’s show was built not only around Black culture but specifically on white encounters with Black culture: The joke Wilson singles out features Mary-Kate and Ashley shooting dice. Wilson could perhaps take that point further – was Hall an observer, or did he encourage appropriation? And while pointing to Adam Friedland as one of Hall’s successors is hilarious, a more culturally mainstream referent like IShowSpeed would more convincingly show the legacy of Hall’s zany, sexual, risk-taking style – and could allow for a view of Black masculinity that extends past the turn of the millennium. But Wilson knows what she knows, and the kids will get their own columnists and cultural critics, one way or another.

“Rolling Out Our New A.I. Tools” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Lizzie Widdicombe and Paige Ferrari retool. The Shouts trifecta: Funny, Short, Relevant.

“Relativity” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum goes all in for the family. The “piñata play” coinage is instantly memorable and useful, and I appreciate that Nussbaum doesn’t mean it as a burn – she admits that “even lesser variants are fun to watch”, but these two shows, by departing from the formal cliché, find greater depths in their treatment of family. They move in opposite directions, You Got Older tilting “openhearted” and “buoyant”, Moth Days full of “merciless generosity” (what a phrase), “explosive”, “haunting”, “damning”. Nussbaum’s appreciation for both modes deepens these plays, setting them in dialectical contrast without choosing sides. Can love hold both these things at once? You have to see the shows to find out. (If you can afford it – Older has been consistently selling out its small room with the cheapest tickets around $110. For that, one needs family-play money.)

🗣️ “Fixer-Upper” (D.I.Y. Dept.) - Diego Lasarte is superattentive. Funny! Life lessons: Get your fix!

“The Price of Independence” (Books) - Adam Gopnik is Willing to foot the bill. Gradually undermines the thesis of Vague’s book, which is that a certain banker funded the revolution, first by pointing out that a different banker has about as good a claim, and then by showing that the battlefield really did matter more than the bank: “To say that the big question is who could afford to pay for the guns is to be reminded that the guns are where the power lies.” It’s an elegant argument, but it does mean that one gets to the end of the piece wondering why we read it. (Indeed, Gopnik may be reviewing this book solely to make the joke “Vague is clear that Willing was unwilling”, and honestly, it’s worth it.) There’s not much drama – Gopnik spends a whole section needlessly reminding us that bankers are generally dull people – but there’s enough nerdy debate-club interest to keep things moving. Gopnik pays off that opening question – who paid for the boat? – wonderfully, and if you already know the answer you can anticipate where the piece is leading. Anchors away!

“Microbe Aggression” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang thinks what’s good for a Gosling ain’t good for a gander. Chang is a spoilsport about a movie that’s been received rather well; without seeing it, I’m not sure where I’d land – I’m no fan of quips, but Lord and Miller have proven pretty good at them. If the movie is “lumpy”, Chang may just be grumpy, and he admits to enjoying the “whimsical sense of play” that the visuals demonstrate, even if the filmmaking achieves “little sense of flow”. It’s a calculated entertainment, but, I mean, it’s a blockbuster – maybe comparing it to a Claire Denis movie is the wrong standard. She’s losing the blast-off.

“The End of Imperialism” (Annals of War) - Daniel Immerwahr is rocking and a-reeling. A very brief take on Trump’s bloody Iran folly, which basically asserts that nobody – not even Trump – knows what the hell the plan is, and that while a previous generation of imperialists were responsible for their own atrocities, at least the idea that your country is better than everybody else makes you act as though you’re trying to be better than everybody else. Disingenuously? Sure! But the need to operate silently – to put a good face on things – is still a check on power. Trump, on the other hand, feels free to pursue “regime-change nihilism”. It’s a fair enough point, and I appreciate that Immerwahr doesn’t seem to be using it to launder the reputation of either Bush, or whoever else, but solely to point out that Trump’s actions are not really in that lineage – at the very least, Trump doesn’t think of his actions that way. It’s all convincing, just also pretty scant, a recent-past recap that wouldn’t be hard to turn into a tweet thread.

“Oodles of Doodles” (Dispatches) - John Seabrook makes mutt ado. Look, I’m just not going to tell you to skip a piece about how much a guy loves his dog. But this is far too long for how surface-level its consideration of dog breeding is; indeed, if you’ve ever considered what sort of dog to get, you’ll probably know everything Seabrook touches on. I was hoping for a bit more on the ethics of pet ownership; Seabrook spends a while considering how rescue owners get status superiority, but he doesn’t touch on the many ethicists who argue against breeding pets for ownership in the first place.The issues with deregulated doodles and the issues with platypneic Pekingeses are separate but equivalent in their cruelty. The purebreeders and the doodlers hate each other the same way the Catholics hate the Protestants; they can fight it out for all I care. Seabrook’s meditations on Herman are like an even-less-pertinent riff on the baby blog, but it’s still hard not to be charmed by the depth of Seabrook’s love for his “creature”. You’d have to be pretty cold-hearted not to feel some gigil yourself. Don’t squeeze too hard!

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Doctor Is In” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine never knew a guy like-a Egon Schiele. When I told Fine to go to more galleries, I did not mean the Neue Galerie, which is not actually a gallery but a very small private museum of German and Austrian art that irks me with its pricey tickets¹ and its founder’s annex-Greenland ethos. His descriptions of the Schiele portrait at the center of the show are fairly good – I giggled at “the little bandage wedged on his fingertip, like a pat of butter” – though he doesn’t account for what I think is the strangest detail, the turtleneck-ish shirt that separates the doctor’s head cleanly from his body. The body as canvas – a fine metaphor for Fine’s point about Schiele’s surface-first approach. The curators want to make a case that Schiele’s partnership with the doctor provoked the shift in his art, but it seems more likely the causality was reversed. Fine’s take on Schiele doesn’t depart much from convention: He’s “unflinching, aesthetically and emotionally.” Sure, but what’s new?

“Alter Egos” (Profiles) - Michael Schulman gets three in a Kudrow. Kudrow comes across as a level-headed comedy nerd with few distinguishing characteristics; she is not a character, just someone who knows how to play a character. Schulman’s a reliably good writer (“Kudrow is both the scientist looking into the microscope and the wriggling organism on the slide” – that could be the whole piece!), but if you’re a Kudrow fan you’ll know what she’s made, and if you aren’t, there’s simply no reason to read this. The closest Schulman gets to a dark secret is that Kudrow was alienated in high school and holds onto “piles of mementos”. Sorry, but I Kud care less.

“Back to Basics” (The World of Fashion) - Rachel Syme takes a Gap year with Zac Posen. Talented brat sells out, is rewarded. I have no beef at all with Posen, who helped define a fashion moment (“millenial decadence”) and was very fun on Runway, but for the central fashion piece in the style issue, this is pretty depressing! Posen’s newer gowns for GapStudio are frequently gorgeous but when you know they’re basically sponcon it’s hard to forget; his newfound corpo-speak, which even Syme cringes at, doesn’t help. There’s not enough acid here for this to feel anything like a condemnation of Posen, but it’s not a coronation either, and the ‘why now?’ question is not sufficiently answered. Posen still has a chip on his shoulder about having more fame than resources in the past, but he uses this as an excuse too many times, and it wears thin. Posen’s most recent Oscars gown was used as a negative example in a Times piece about breathable dresses; Gap got one brief mention in Lauren Collins’ long piece about Uniqlo a few months ago. These may not be the basics we’re going back to.

Letters:

Nah.

in

for