May 9, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker Review: May 13, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 13

"the pensive gaze of a protester whose face is obscured by a kaffiyeh"

Must-Gaze:

“A Campus in Crisis” - Jelani Cobb assesses Nina Berman’s photographs of the Columbia encampment. Ignore the annoying title (a crisis for whom?) and focus on Berman’s stellar photographs, which highlight her expertise in photographing protests and rallies, now turned toward her home campus. Cobb’s brief essay leads into the images without too much fuss, and each gets its own gorgeous color spread. Some are technically striking – the image of Cornel West has astonishing focal depth, which conveys scope and the feeling of being surrounded by old brick architecture so well; the image of the Intifada banner brings a cool nighttime atmosphere with its eerie depth of tone. Others are just plainly powerful; the image of cops hauling away a yelling protester could become iconographic; the final image of swarming police isn’t too subtle about its loyalties – with their fiery, blur-melted faces, the cops look positively demonic. The small touch of adding dates to the photos furthers the sense of scale. It’s a phenomenal portfolio. (Note also that there are a number of extra photos online – the strongest cuts are in the magazine, and the flow is better there as well, but it’s still worth scrolling through afterward.)

Window-Shop:

“Origin Story” - Maya Jasanoff returns to a state of nature. A deeply compelling and remarkably concise analysis of the history of prehistory – namely, that our ways of thinking about the politics of the past have really been an attempt to define the politics of the future – though still one that could go further. From William Jones’ linguistic insight “propelling fantasies of a fresh wave of Aryan conquest” to Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory of social evolution prompting Marx and Engels to conclude “that a primitive communism had been wrecked by the emergence of marriage and monogamy”, every anecdote both hammers Jasanoff’s point home and proves individually fascinating. Jasanoff points out that the book under review is really only concerned with “European intellectuals”, but she hardly attempts to widen the scope; her contemporary discussion is very U.S.-centric. And her conclusion doesn’t quite arrive at its own logical endpoint: Namely, if our present-day projections of the future are apocalyptic, perhaps part of the solution is revising the lessons we’ve drawn from our own distant past. (She shrugs off Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which is concerned with this same point.) As Doc Brown might say, to get the future we want, we have to go back!

“New Tricks” - Nick Paumgarten sees dogs at work. Work, dogs, work! A really entertaining low-stakes story with exactly two levels. Level one: How animal trainer Bill Berloni prepares Bing the Great Dane for a role in a major motion picture. Level two: How the absurd meticulousness of motion-picture making extends to its smallest detail. The first level is a clever angle in theory; unfortunately for Paumgarten (and fortunately for everyone else involved) Bing proves such a consummate professional that there are hardly any issues to surmount – leaving this piece with no real conflict at its center. There’s a difficult dachshund, who we hear about only second-hand, and a slight issue with hot-dog-eating speed… and that’s about it. Everyone is happy, everything works out great. Berloni seems generally scattered – he gets his texts mixed up and seems to be continually transporting a menagerie – but there’s no sense this is different from his usual state. So the story has to rely on the second level to sustain our interest, which it intermittently does; the story about sourcing “paprika-seasoned hot dogs” to keep the Humane representative happy is great. But Paumgarten can’t let this theme be subtext; he spends a paragraph early on drawing our attention to it (“Why not rewrite the scene, to make it more practical to shoot?”) which ends up spoiling the fun we’d have getting there on our own. As Bev says to Bing: “Leave it.”

“Stones of Contention” - Rebecca Mead loses her marbles and finds her cameos at the British Museum. Mead doesn’t try too hard to link the story of the stolen marbles (which I knew all about) and the story of the stolen cameos (which was news to me). They’re both thefts at the British Museum: we can handle a little cross-cutting. Neither half could quite sustain a piece on its own; the marbles story lacks any conclusion, and Mead declines to speculate in True Crime podcast style on the motives of the cameo-napper. The cameo segments are still more fun; Gradel is a character (“‘I don’t like having a reputation as someone who goes around bandying frivolous accusations against all and sundry’”) and the literal and figurative smallness of the matter (at least compared to cultural imperialism) keeps things light. The story of the marbles is an important one, and fairly well-told, but it doesn’t feel like Mead got much access – it’s somewhat removed and newsy. This only proves a real issue in the thudding and lengthy final wrap-up section, which reiterates points about the difficulty of the situation in language that sounds like it’s coming from the board of trustees whether or not they’re speaking. That’s followed by a description of the stolen gems which is mostly unnecessary after the fine choice to add some photographic inserts pages earlier, and then a quote that’s clearly meant to speak to both stories – but really has nothing at all to do with the story of the marbles. (All the evidence there is clear! It’s not about fragmentation, it’s about theft.) The previous section’s ending is more telling, anyway – you can stop there.

“Paradise Lost” - Jennifer Wilson is conflict-avoidant with Claire Messud’s new historical novel. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, this magazine’s gotta publish defenses of art which grants interiority to politically troublesome subjects without directly condemning them – bonus points if it’s literally written by James Wood’s wife – till it dies. Myopia is a fascinating subject, and I’m sure that Messud’s treatment is striking (though the quotes, and there are plenty, didn’t do much for me) …and still, I’d love to see this book covered by a Viet Thanh Nguyen, say; someone whose stated views are plainly in opposition to Messud’s project. That’d spark a more lively discussion (even – especially – if he liked the book); Wilson is all too ready to take Messud’s position entirely at face value. Taken for what it is, this review succeeds – but it doesn’t draw blood.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Death in Venice” - Jackson Arn is your little Venice bitch. There’s something really annoying about flying halfway across the world just to see art and starting your review complaining about how tired you are of looking at art. A true flâneur is a masochist, not a griper. (Jerry Saltz gets some things wrong, but he gets that right.) Arn’s too overwhelmed by scale to find a strong connecting thread to the Biennale; unfortunately, that doesn’t stop him from trying – apparently there is a lot of literal rumbling, which means… something. And his anecdote about someone angry behind him in line would be boring if he told it to me at a party – never mind in the middle of what’s supposed to be an art review. When he gets out of his own way, Arn’s a great describer, though, which is key here since most readers won’t see this show. One artist’s batik pieces “stick to the same spiky patterns and subdued hues but never retrace their steps,” another painting of a shoe is “one of the most calmly odd things… pulling you in with the friendly yank of a pop song.” Venice seems to have rendered Arn wobbly – when you’re starting your last section “Good? Bad?” you might need to step away from your keyboard – but there’s nowhere like Manhattan to walk off those sea legs.

“Mothers of Us All” - Helen Shaw is mother. (You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to say that.) Pointing out that all three of these shows involve “richly human mothers” and “a long moment during which we are invited to simply sit and study a woman’s face” is interesting enough, but it’s more of a coincidence than a connection – Shaw doesn’t make clear what these shows are saying about motherhood, just that they’re addressing the theme. Shaw never finds any point of view on Suffs, and hardly discusses the production at all. The Mary Jane review is so short that its “exquisite” qualities are indicated more than articulated. Mother Play fares a bit better – it’s clever to summarize the performances by describing the actors’ dancing styles – though Shaw’s skepticism about the use of dementia as a theatrical device is a bit weird, since it’s presumably based on Vogel’s life. If Shaw wanted to address motherhood onstage, she could’ve roved far wider – Appropriate, Days of Wine and Roses, Oh, Mary! and (reportedly) Hell’s Kitchen all address the theme of troubled motherhood in their own respects. Hemmed in by the need to review and trend-watch, Shaw can’t quite manage either.

“Pure Pleasure” - Amanda Petrusich looks but doesn’t touch Dua Lipa. In pop music, the concept is generally less important than the small details. Petrusich has a clever idea here, but everything comes undone in the specifics. Petrusich is so obviously talking about Taylor when she describes the pop trend Dua’s pushing against – “a more postmodern, self-referential approach” – that she ought to say her name. Framing Lipa as the leader of that counter-trend feels right, though – and does a good job framing a pop star who doesn’t lead with personality. (Lipa is the Zoomer Katy Perry, really.) Things first go wrong when Petrusich scoffs at poptimism while misrepresenting it – sure, it’s a problematic ideology, but one that a music critic should take seriously after all this time. She highlights Kevin Parker (the Tame Impala guy) as key to the album’s “vaguely blitzed” sound – but she lists three songwriters before him with their own culturally pertinent styles (Danny Harle = P.C. Music; Tobias Jesso = singer-songwriter pop; Caroline Ailin = ‘80s-meets-EDM), each of which swirl together on the new record – she could at least mention the influences they bring. Petrusich’s evocation of Bhad Bhabie is a serious reach, and writing her catchphrase out in eye dialect is majorly misguided. The second section is well-meaning, but Petrusich strains to connect the argument that pop music is “mantra-like by design” and thus offers “something like transcendence” (true enough) to Lipa’s generational trauma. It’s all too messy – keep the chorus and start over.

“Stunted” - Richard Brody can’t help falling. A bit of a crash-landing. The triple-frame setup is laborious, the plot synopsis is never Brody’s strong suit, and where things really go south is in his grumpiness about an action movie’s “thinness of personal backstory.” Surely Brody can understand that this is part of the genre’s point? The film has “…the chilly efficiency of an equation being solved,” and the happy ending is “anticlimactic” after the “virtuosic action sequences” – which is all exactly what I want and expect from a good action movie. Brody has an admirable willingness to treat each film with a beginner’s mind, but sometimes this gets him into trouble – like when a film is relying on our expectations to do its work.

“Read the Label” - Manvir Singh has a runny diagnose. I was excited, reading the first section, to get Singh’s takedown of the psychiatric establishment, whose overreliance on the DSM and other often misleading tools leads them to fail so many neurodiverse patients. Instead Singh quickly pivots to reviewing three books by neurodiverse writers, and critiquing them for, basically, participating in the system. Paige Layle, an Autistic writer, wants the condition to be diagnosed by neurologists – “Yet,” Singh interjects, “the same research threatens to destabilize the spectrum and her place on it.” Later, reviewing Alexander Kriss’ book on being Borderline, he writes that “despite his exceptional resistance to the DSM, Kriss, like his patients, finds himself inhabiting its categories.” He’s basically popping out of the well and saying “Yet you participate in medicine. Curious!” Trust me, neurodiverse patients are aware – often more aware than medical professionals – that their conditions are tenuous and arbitrary partial representations of a complex interior reality. They seek treatment because they are struggling; they seek self-identity and community through these labels not because they are attached to some specific list of traits, but because their very condition isolates them from society, and finding commonality can be a way of surmounting alienation. It’s baffling that Singh can’t seem to see this – and it’s incredibly offensive that he even vaguely compares Autistic people unmasking more after a diagnosis, a well-documented phenomena, with mass psychogenic illness – and specifically, a nun biting hysteria.

Perhaps the real question isn’t why patients embody the models of illness they’ve been given; perhaps the question is why doctors see patients only as the cluster of symptoms they can isolate. The HiTOP system, theoretically compelling, is still exclusively concerned with outlining harm – focusing on easily diagnosed symptoms which challenge a patient’s ability to efficiently labor. But the internal experience of these conditions often has little to do with these outward symptoms – and true self-understanding is often hurt when every list of symptoms reads like a bad performance review. I’m not going to point out every troublesome perception Singh unwittingly reinforces; I’d need a novel. The central issue is that Singh’s thesis fundamentally misunderstands the reason patients cling to their diagnoses. They already know themselves – they’re looking for other people.

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Letters:

Zoë Beery enjoyed Parul Sehgal’s profile of Judith Butler: “I really liked the light but inquisitive structure of the piece, which parallels the humor that Sehgal emphasizes to balance the headiness of Butler's work. And I am always on the side of NYer pieces that open sections with lyrical writing instead of the standard description of a person/thing, place and time, or a question that the section is intended to answer. The magazine's writing has become too standardized in recent decades and I love when writers push against that.” I agree completely.

Kevin and John both wrote in to express excitement for the Nuggets in their playoff series against the Timberwolves. Since then, the Nuggets have faceplanted horribly and embarrassed themselves. Ah, sports.

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It’s obviously “that’s that me espresso” and not “that’s that me, espresso”, right? “me” is serving as an adjective modifying espresso – essentially saying it’s me-flavored espresso. Otherwise it would just be “That’s me, espresso.” Still a terribly written song: That lyric is fine, but “move it up-down-left-right, oh / switch it up like Nintendo” is egregious, as are basically all of the verses. The subscribe button: Your source for my takes on pop music.

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