Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 31
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 31
“a seemingly endless supply of alcohol and cocaine, which he served from a large pepper grinder”
Must-Read:
“Open Secret” (A Reporter at Large) - Ronan Farrow overhears that what’s been overlooked without oversight is overwhelming and overt. Small town cop corruption comes as no surprise, but this is still a jaw-dropping tale, in part because Williams’ crimes are so horrifying and egregious, and in part because the ways he was helped went well beyond the usual blind eye. (Given everything else, it seems very plausible that the cops were involved in facilitating his escape and hideout.) Farrow’s broader point, which he makes pretty lightly, is that while getting away with police corruption is already pretty easy, Trump destroying the regulatory and investigatory environment will make things far worse. What’s really grotesque about this story is the way that the line where regular blithe dismissal of sexual-assault claims ends and outright corruption starts is hazy; indeed, these cops may have plausible deniability because the department handled all rape cases in a manner designed to protect the perpetrators, whether they were paid off or not. This is mostly a standard twisty-turny true crime story, with all the stomach-churning horror/thrill that suggests; Williams has a Boyd Crowder-esque anticharisma, but his story suggests that the Western ethics Elmore Leonard portrayed are dead and buried, and what remains is a country in a manic, druggy delirium state, with no social contract and no paths to justice. It’s downright apocalyptic.
Window-Shop:
“A Matter of Facts” (Personal History) - Yiyun Li makes a way out of no good way to say this. Li’s stark, haunted prose is appropriate for this unimaginable topic; her almost narcotized minimalism reaches toward the unspeakable. The eerily flawless quality of her poetry and the emotional reservedness so core to her being do make one want to scream, a bit; I couldn’t help but think of Brief Encounter, which portrays a similar reserved numbness barely masking suicidality (and also has, you know, trains.) That might be too pop a reference for Li’s younger son, a fan of Wittgenstein whose silence suggests that he rejected the horrifyingly needy striving of language to express the inner world – “one cannot speak” of much, really. Li’s restraint in all things can feel unthinkable, given the circumstances – could a bit less acceptance, a bit more fight, have saved her child’s life? – but of course one must bring their real self to motherhood, and as hard as it is to not render judgement, true empathy demands that we reserve it. This is a stark yawp; but if Didion’s famous books on grief express its irrationality with a similar stillness, Li’s writing shows the pain of a more fixedly rational mind facing the irreconcilable. It’s The Year of Factual Thinking.
“Do You Know Jesus?” (A Critic At Large) - Adam Gopnik nails him down. Not really a piece about Jesus’ personality, more about the different scholarly approaches to the factuality of the Bible – which is a more interesting subject, anyway. Some scholars look for the real-world explanations of the events of the Bible, while a more postmodern batch treat it simply as invented literature, and one figure, who Gopnik seems to know from a corner of skeptics’ youtube that it’s slightly embarrassing he knows so much about (“The True ORIGINS of Genesis Creation Will BLOW Your Mind”, and such), says that Jesus didn’t exist at all. I’m annoyed by the argument Gopnik makes early in the last section, where he returns to Pagels’ more empirical take because it’s a “reasonable middle ground” – a sort of historical centrism that waves off the more fundamental point of the postmodernists just because it feels extreme. But the idea that our view of Christianity was written by the victors, who’ve erased the messaging of potentially pluralist Pagans, is quite compelling. Did it have to be Christianity that prevailed? Probably not – anyone could’ve done it, with a good-enough book.
“Character Studies” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw joins J-J on J. J. That’s Jacobs-Jenkins on Jesse Jackson, whose family Purpose fictionalizes. Comparing the new show, repeatedly, to Jacobs-Jenkins’ revival hit Appropriate is a bit easy, and it’s also pretty obvious to say that an ensemble drama succeeds on the strength of its ensemble. The rave of Vanya is better, finding the “ideal of a Chekhov company” in a one-man production – where “even the tiniest part is being played by the best actor onstage.”
“Home Slice” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield finds inspiration paneer at hand. There’s an Indian Pizza spot – Pizza Twist – in my neighborhood in Jersey City (I’m moving out this weekend – I’ll miss it!) but I figured it was a corporate invention; it’s nice to know how homegrown and unpretentious its origin story actually is. Goldfield spends longer than usual just describing the food; maybe she’s out of practice, because her adjective game is a bit bland. (milky, smoky, spicy, tart, juicy, zesty. “Craggy orbs of turkey kofta” isn’t bad.) Is Indian pizza actually any good? Goldfield suggests it’s usually crust-heavy and just okay, but that a few new spots do it better. Pizza Twist isn’t bad, but it’s really only “takeout-good.” माँ मिया!
Skip Without Guilt:
“Beyond the Curve” (Annals of Inquiry) - Manvir Singh finds that one-size-fits-all medicine doesn’t measure up. A really compelling introductory anecdote, but Singh never actually proposes a solution to the problem of overly narrow medical standards. Creating new standards is not as simple as admitting that the old standards are flawed. “Is it time to move beyond the model of the universal patient?” Singh asks, but he’s mostly content to answer affirmatively without thinking through exactly what this should look like. I didn’t need much convincing that the current standards are flawed, a point Singh spends the entire piece reiterating. What should we do about it, though? I’m not sure, and Singh doesn’t say.
“Landscape Mode” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Anna Wiener moves with the stillness of Dave Longstreth. Wiener is a very good writer, and obviously highly intelligent… so I’m confused by how performatively baffled she is by Longstreth’s nobrow lateral thinking. Conveying a song’s energy with photos of Butoh performance is “inscrutable”, a line he drops connecting wilderness and the human psyche is “offered, bafflingly.” But all Longstreth really has to offer are a series of dull straight-boy commonplaces: “‘The desert is very alien… The nothingness is very existential’”, “‘Los Angeles is always a dreamscape and an apocalypse,’” he loves “‘epic, multipart works that were worlds unto themselves,’ like Philip Glass’s Qatsi trilogy or Lil Wayne’s ‘Tha Carter’ series.” It would be self-parody if it were more interesting. I’m fascinated by the self-titled Dirty Projectors album, one of the strangest artistic fiascos of the entire hipster era, and Wiener does get into it, but she only names half the problem – the astonishing mean-spiritedness of the enterprise – while never conveying just how awkward it is (one infamous but entirely representative couplet: “Now I’m listening to Kanye on the Taconic Parkway, driving fast / and you’re out in Echo Park, blasting 2Pac, drinking a fifth for my ass”) so that when she says it was “an experiment in Warholian integration” and “a bid for universality”, an uninformed reader might take these statements at face value. Astonishingly, Longstreth says he “‘didn’t realize music could hurt people’”, which does sum up the mortifying blitheness of that project, I suppose. It ought to be noted, though, that Longstreth has done nothing of artistic value since; the deliberately band-forward effort Lamp Lit Prose is entirely uninspired; the five-EP project half-finished, or less. Is the new work interesting? I’ll believe it when I hear it, and maybe not even then.
“Choral History” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang is seeing double here: Four De Niros! I’m generally happy with the decision, under Chang, to cease the double-movie reviews and grant each film a full column. Sometimes, though, a film feels designed to be blurbed, and The Alto Knights, a drearily pro forma gangster flick, is certainly such a one. Does anyone really care about the plot of this movie? Chang simply has to answer two questions: Does Levinson still have it? (No!) And: Does De Niro still have it? (Yeah, but it’s not really enough!) The real story here is that this film exists because David Zaslav wanted to see it. Kiss the ring!
Brody on Kael (Takes) - The first mixed review to appear in Takes, as Brody sees Kael’s perspective as partially blinkered. But such brevity doesn’t give him enough time to really articulate that argument; this just feels half-formed.
“Community Property” (Books) - Molly Fischer knows the fault is not in our divorces but in ourselves. Confusing: Fischer never makes it clear what Mlotek’s book consists of, exactly; apparently, she wants to maintain her privacy around her divorce, even while writing a book about it. And Fischer never bothers to delve into what, exactly, the second-wave argument about marriage was (she gives it two words, the euphemistic “domestic asymmetries”) – but of course she gives plenty of time to the odious manosphere, since their points are easier to argue against. Fischer slyly presents a horseshoe-theory view of marriage, in which “revolutionary” and “reactionary” opposition to marriage “offer narrative satisfactions”, but “the liberal view” of live-and-let-live privacy is ultimately more meaningful. I think it’s a totally false equivalency; surely anti-marriage revolutionaries also have a vested interest in ensuring divorce is, like certain other things, free, on demand, without apology. And the liberal view of “live and let live, privately” can veer awfully close to “...just as long as you don’t do it in front of me.” Sure, we don’t need a divorce pride parade (although I would like to see it) but hiding the political parts of your life for what are basically aesthetic (“romantic”) reasons feels an awful lot like obedience in advance.
Letters:
Michael B. writes in to say that the timeline Hannah Goldfield gives in her piece, reviewed above, might need adjusting. “I first encountered Indian Pizza at a Seattle place called Can Am Pizza which got me thinking, ‘what in the world does Canada have to do with Indian Pizza?’ …Wikipedia at least feels that Vancouver has at least as strong a claim on Indian Pizza as the Sandia Francisco place called out by Goldfield. A notable omission in this era of increasing Can-Am tensions.” Indeed, this article says one Vancouver Punjabi-owned pizza place opened in ‘85, a year before Zante – and although Zante expanded into Indian flavors in “the late ‘90s,” Can Am cites 1999 on its site… so who knows? Was this simultaneous invention, idea sharing, I.P. theft, or something else entirely?
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