Last Week's New Yorker Review: September 22
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 22
“There are stone renderings of a turtle and a tortoise, to connote the stability of the cosmos, and a donkey—Gaudí ordered that a living animal be hoisted in a sling up the façade, so that he could capture the beast’s form more accurately.”
Fall Style & Design issue this week. Everything basically fits the assignment!
Must-Read:
“The Behemoth” (Letter from Barcelona) - D.T. Max says for God’s sake get me the church on time. Delightful from beginning to end, as Max considers what others have made of Gaudí’s unfinished opus. Pairs well with Rebecca Mead’s piece on the touristification of Barcelona, as I can’t think of another architect so closely associated with one city.1 Thus his crowning achievement is both a bizarre outlier – an expression of an utopic religious ideology that was already out of favor and is now (sadly) completely marginalized – and the crown and center of a major city. It’s as though the Baha’i Temple were right in the middle of Chicago, and as mobbed as Cloud Gate. Thus it’s no wonder that politics and aesthetic arguments have thoroughly muddled the work, which is now being completed in a fashion both meticulously faithful to the extent possible and, at the same time, so literal it is in some sense hard to see as an expression of Gaudí, a king of whimsy. The reason to read is less for this overarching narrative, though, and more because Max finds a constant stream of strange anecdote (“After the looting of 1936, Gaudí’s disciples had risked their lives to sweep up the master’s workshop, saving whatever they could”) and telling juxtaposition (“A nearby crane was, eerily, lifting a portable office cubicle” – as though acting out the reverse of the beginning of La Dolce Vita). In other words, it’s a classic example of what this magazine does so well. Let Max take you to church.
Window-Shop:
“What I Wanted, What I Got” (Personal History) - Rachel Kushner tries this on for size. A lovely slice of personal history from Kushner, not nearly as probing or revelatory as her piece on teenagehood from a few years ago, but also a bit sparer and perhaps clearer-eyed. The image of seventies hippie college town child poverty differs from the stereotype of neglect, allowing for a slightly oblique perspective. Unlike the usual childhood history, Kushner basically ignores her parents, instead immersing us in a child’s-eye view of fashion and, more broadly, identity. Kushner, aware so early of taste, keeps striving for an authentic aesthetic identity, one spoken in the language of the world, but not exactly of the world. (To adopt an identity would be an admission of unoriginality and thus insignificance.) At first this looks like an adaptive riff on the outré: an innocently chosen Farrah Fawcett tee, the very funny attempt to “be ‘fifties’” – and eventually there is the enlightened return to childlike life: “lately, a vintage yellow T-shirt that says ‘Women miners can dig it too.’” The piece doesn’t wear out its welcome – it just wears it. Can you dig it?
“The Unicode” (Annals of Fashion) - Lauren Collins sees the utility in Uniqlo. Collins really wants us to see Uniqlo as culty, but I wonder if some of this isn’t just a difference between Western and Eastern cultures – more comfort with philosophies and sweeping statements (“a distribution system for utopian values”), less need for the false ingratiation and human face that American corps emphasize. Obviously a privately owned piece of “‘infrastructure’” supplying well-made clothing basics is a fundamentally techno-authoritarian idea. The thin patina of radicalism or democracy that the company tries to present is disingenuous, but no more disingenuous than the “Happy Meal” or buying the world a Coke. Collins is friendlier toward Clare Waight Keller, a luxury insider now designing for “the masses with their body masses and social, cultural, generational, geographical, and meteorological needs.” (Collins’ prose is snappy as ever.) The best material here, though, emphasizes the history of Japanese fashion, going all the way back to the Tokugawa shogunate and the subsequent Meiji Haircut Edict. (oh fuck.) The textile transliteration back and forth between cultures has amusing results – preppy clothes as signifiers of radicalism – but its end result, eventually, is a globalized ‘normal’ that Uniqlo represents and even advocates for. (As with IKEA’s discount nordic minimalism, this style as a trend has passed, but the brand that helped bring it to the masses lives on.) Is this democratic? I don’t buy that. But I will continue to buy the socks. They are very good socks.
“Saving Face” (Books) - Anahid Nersessian is in her bag. Nersessian is a poetry critic and a Keats expert so it makes sense that her assessment of Birkin, an It Girl with a troubled life, would focus on her “lyrical” writing and her world of pains and troubles more than her hobnobbing with the glitterati. There is quite a bit on her sequence of abusive relationships, so much that it crowds out any potential source of her “youthful insouciance” and “je ne sais quoi”. Eventually, finally, she finds “gravity” and “self-possession”. From where? Nersessian doesn’t guess. Maybe it was hidden at the bottom of her handbag all along.
“Runaway Bunny” (Pop Music) - Kelefa Sanneh knows Bad Bunny will always be true light blue. This succeeds just as a letter of recommendation: It got me to listen to the new Bad Bunny record all the way through, and man is it a breakthrough. That a song as strange and singular as DtMF can be the year’s first to a billion streams proves to me that our world still aches for vision and soul. I did not previously “get” the artist, whose work felt like slight variations on a theme. The new project cracks that theme wide open, revealing the lineage of feeling that it carried within all the time. Does Sanneh have much to say other than that this shit slaps? He highlights Bunny’s political activism, which is welcome, and a few of his successors (all men, none as interesting – but whatever). Mostly, he just parties. Por la tarde, ron!
“Full Circle” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw is a prisoner of the white lines on the stage. An early work of “poetic drama”, “polished to a deep lustre”, now “feels more like an assured masterpiece”, and a high-concept slideshow show (a couple of those recently) is “discursive, often hilarious”. I’m glad fall theater is back, and glad Shaw is here to write about it. Maybe she’s still getting warmed up, because this mostly lacks her usual flair.
Wilson on Orlean (Takes) - Too much time spent recapping the plot of Adaptation. But the sliver of personal history is evocative enough.
Skip Without Guilt:
“I Made You” (A Critic at Large) - Rebecca Mead surveys the battle of all mothers. A reasonably compelling but totally shapeless survey of monstrous-mother books, which literally contains the transition sentence “Other daughters, other mothers”, and moves at that clip. These books are lessened because Mead reads them only as variations on a theme; different ways of liberating the self, slowly, partially, from variously difficult mothers. The first two sections are quite good, as Roy’s book sounds compelling, and Mead cleverly names how it furthers the author’s fundamental theme: “how politics and social order shape, and often warp, our capacities for love and empathy”. After that, things move faster, mostly progressing as a series of very lightly annotated quotes from a variety of books. Not pointless, just slack. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions, but I suppose that’s part of growing up.
“Making a Move” (The Art World) - Adam Gopnik will Calder meeting to order. Despite circling, Gopnik doesn’t quite find a new perspective on Calder, whose magic is easy enough to grasp: they’re mobiles, traditionally the first thing that a baby finds wondrous. Calder’s grandkid is quoted so extensively one wonders who’s leading this tour. Then, suddenly, Gopnik resurrects Clement Greenberg to claim that “art’s primary role” is “not to issue statements but to make things”. I understand and am generally sympathetic to what Gopnik is getting at, but the implicit critique of, I guess, the 1993 Whitney Biennial is more than a little dusty.2 Gopnik may claim that Calder’s work makes no “ideological assertions”, but Adorno reminds us that the claim of art is always ideology.
“Mommy Issues” (Profiles) - Clare Malone follows Jessica Reed Kraus, who wants to make child molestation aesthetic again. Malone just doesn’t go nearly hard enough on this woman, whose red pill moment was seeing Brett Kavanaugh be very credibly accused of sexual assault – think of my boys! she cries; what if they grow up to be very credibly accused of something I don’t want them to have done? – and whose current fixation is on the supposed innocence of convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. (Almost as if…) To write a profile of someone this rancid that they can read and proclaim “surprisingly fair”3 is, in almost all circumstances, to pull punches. I do think Malone intends this piece to be read as critical of Kraus; there’s a quote that labels the “‘food issue’” as “‘cover’” for the anti-vaccine stuff, and she’s certainly painted as obsessed with celebrity. But the tone is still essentially bemused, almost whimsical. I don’t need Malone to project outrage, I just need her to call a spade a spade.
“Covers, Live!” (Portfolio) - Michael Schulman and six photographers remake way. Minter and Schorr take the assignment very loosely and don’t push their comfort zones a millimeter, while Falquez is so slavish the exercise seems pointless. McGinley’s photo is stilted and ungainly; Erizku and Prager indulge in nominally knowing kitsch. Zero for six, but they were all set up to fail; the assignment is trite celebrity worship, not befitting this magazine.
Letters:
Eli requests I mention another recent take on New Yorker fact checking, “superior” in their estimation to Zach Helfand’s recent effort: Ismail Ibrahim’s essay House Arab.
I have mixed feelings about this essay, which succeeds as a personal narrative but I think ends up discounting Ibrahim’s work for the magazine, which did, after all, publish the story he discusses fact checking, a fantastic piece by Shane Bauer. I have to think the publication of this story contributed in some way to the (obviously horrifyingly slow) gradual awakening to injustice among the general readership (centrists, liberals, Sanders socialists). Remnick’s pieces have gotten steadily more and more critical of Israel, which has also pushed the centrist consensus view away from the Israelis. Ibrahim’s question is whether it’s worth the pain to change the minds of liberals. I suppose whether you think that project can ever be worthwhile or successful comes down to your ideology, but if you’re a leftist working at the magazine, that’s going to be your project, like it or not. I think it’s sad that Ibrahim, who was very successful at that project, doesn’t seem to see it as having been at all useful. He helped set the terms of the conversation based on rigorously sourced facts.
I’ve been repeatedly critical of the magazine’s Gaza coverage; I’m not defending the institution, exactly. I just don’t think “the editors condensed the historical background to one paragraph” is a cardinal sin.
Now, it definitely speaks poorly of the magazine that they let their employee spiral to this degree without offering him some more mental wellness support. That’s a separate matter, and one I can’t speak to. But my feeling is that this essay is not fair to a number of actors, perhaps primarily not fair to Ibrahim himself. He ends the piece with a drawing of Sisyphus letting the stone roll down, finally happy. But as Camus says, true revolt demands one keep pushing that stone.
Also I keep forgetting to mention this but each of the last three issues has had a noticeable typo. In the double issue was “connecwts” in Tables for Two, last week the Amanda Petrusich article had no period at the very end, and this week the Uniqlo article says “ten at time” – which at time of writing has not been corrected online. Hmm…
shuffling deck chairs
Niemeyer and Brasília is a good counter, but a different matter, I think. ↩
Read the linked piece if you want to remember what early 2016 felt like again. ↩
(I can’t link to an Instagram story) ↩
Ellie