Last Week's New Yorker Review: February 6, 2023

desperate longing, false triumph, vertiginous collapse, desolate meandering, damaged nostalgia, rancid rage, full-throated lament

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 6

Must-Reads:

“Farewell Symphony” - Alex Ross pays tribute to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. Itself an “arresting performance,” Ross clearly kicked into high gear by his admiration for Tilson Thomas and his awareness that, since the conductor has aggressive brain cancer, this may be one of the last occasions to frame his technique with words. And Ross’ reading of Tilson Thomas’ characteristically Californian “exterior landscape” take on Mahler as a rejection of death is a rhetorical coup. Tilson Thomas teaches “one more lesson through the music that he loves,” and Ross’ translation of his pedagogy — his interpretation of the interpretation — is itself virtuosic, “veer[ing] toward delirium.”

“Ballad of the Oscar Streaker” - Michael Schulman looks into the history of the 1970s’ naked Oscar crasher, and stumbles into San Francisco’s gay counterculture. Perfect choice of detail at every turn, with a kaleidoscopic quality but still focused since it ultimately hews close to Opel’s life. Fits a whole biography into a couple pages, and gets Opel’s personality across in a way that requires finesse when there’s this much history to sort through. And leaves enough mystery that we don’t feel everything has been stripped bare. Mass culture usually catches the counterculture at its silliest and most mockable, and this piece is a reminder that it takes all types to make an artistic scene, from Robert Mapplethorpes to Robert Opels.

Window-Shop:

“The First Composer” - Alex Ross (again!) encapsulates the very early music and proto-outsider-art of Hildegard of Bingen. Last week in “the Medieval period sorta rocked,” we had time-managing monks; this week, female scholars who channel nature-spirits while working mostly inside the system of the Catholic church. Only later does the “putative liberation of the Renaissance” lead to a “social regression” in which male-lead universities replaced monasteries “as centers of learning.” I wasn’t previously familiar with Hildegard, and appreciated the density and brevity of this piece, which gives just a taste of each of her pursuits (music, science-writing, letter-writing, art) but gets their “singular voice” across. And do take the ten minutes to listen to the specific recording of “O Vos Angeli” Ross cites, which is buried on Spotify but was worth the dig.

“The Collaborators” - Joshua Yaffa unwinds the stories of Ukrainians who helped Russian occupiers under various degrees of coercion. If grueling personal accounts and knotty ethical quandaries are your thing, this is the piece for you. Certainly, as a feat of journalism, it’s impressive on its face, but what really makes it succeed are the dual reminders that this is an issue in every war, not just this one; and that society in war is not any more monolithic than society in peace; every individual has a different narrative and has faced different choices. If you aren’t inherently compelled by war reporting, though, there’s no news here, just closely rendered recounting.

“Stopping the Violence” - Alec MacGillis chronicles the competition of two anti-violence programs, on the eve of a surge in federal funding. As an ex-resident of Baltimore, I follow a lot of area lefties online, and they aren’t the biggest MacGillis fans. (His sometimes egregious beating of the in-person-school drum at the height of the pandemic didn’t help.) But I thought this was fairly far from copaganda, if sometimes subtler than it needs to be in pointing out the issues with the cop-tolerating bureaucracy. Ultimately, fifty million dollars toward anti-violence initiatives covers “a few years” until “the federal money runs out,” an embarrassingly paltry sum compared to police spending (ten times that amount annually,) something MacGillis does gesture towards, with anecdotes like Corey Winfield only making $13 an hour working for one program and having to sell drugs on the side. Passive-voiced euphemisms like “an erosion of police-community trust,” repeated three times, are not great, and a few figures, like Shantay Jackson, take unearned and personal-seeming blows, but ultimately the piece is a relatively balanced and frequently compelling look at a nuanced situation, one where outcomes are “fundamentally difficult to assess” and the scales are always tilting back toward violence, injustice, and more money for cops. I do get why some would prefer an abolitionist’s take on the issue, though.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Solitary Creatures” - Helen Shaw reviews three self-regarding one-person shows. Shaw beautifully frames the three shows in contrast to one another; unfortunately, there’s not too much to be said about any of them, and the most compelling review of the three is for a closed show. So beyond nice moments like “Quinn’s beloved stage persona, tailored and then washed soft by a million tour dates,” there’s little reason to read.

"Thrills and Red Pills" - Inkoo Kang buys a subscription to Peacock and watches its two new shows. Interesting to see the Chapo Trap House coinage "failson" show up unexplained here, along with some other online slang. In general, it seems like Kang is attempting something like restaurant reviews of TV shows — heavy on flouncy description of the overall vibe (Poker Face is "largely sun-soaked" in "gleaming black comedy," "a warmth suffuses the story lines," "a sense of generosity pervades the production," while Paul T Goldman is "an experimental plate of astringent saccharin") but very light on analysis — you won't know much about the sausage beyond how it tastes. Not my thing, but perhaps I'll warm to it.

“Making the News” - Louis Menand reads some books and gestures in a few directions about the public’s belief in the press and its proper role. Unaccountably messy and scattershot for “this magazine,” and genuinely confusing as a result. I suppose Menand is talking about an extremely specific subsection of the press, the part that covers American electoral politics, although he never states this. He first covers CIA control of the press, then the ‘68 Democratic convention, which may have been the first shot fired in the public’s polarization against the press, although Menand himself says Vietnam was mostly to blame (he still doesn’t truly answer the question of ‘why,’ though.) The bookends, for, I guess, relevance, are the Washington Post’s corny new-ish slogan, and the Clinton emails scandal. Both feel ancient already. Circles around the idea of “truth” and objectivity as possibly unstable and unreliable, before ultimately recommitting to the idea (“the power of the press … rests on faith” that journalists pursue “the truth without fear or favor”) without addressing its instability. To be honest, with a thesis like this, Menand should really spend more time focusing on the forces that kill sites like Gawker for actually doing free speech, and less worrying about Bezos’ blog’s tagline.

Letters

Michael quotes a great joke from the Batuman piece: “Standing in the busy square, gazing from the City Assembly building, constructed in the nineteenth-century Moorish Revival style, to a Courtyard by Marriott Hotel, renovated in the early-two-thousands Courtyard by Marriott style, I felt the words ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ slowly losing their meaning.”

Maybe I should make these prompts a bit simpler, to encourage people to write in. (For real, write in! You can use the comments section or just reply to this email!) How about this, after the streaker piece: What’s something surprising you’ve seen on TV? I was pretty surprised by the winner of the most recent season of Survivor. Actually, the new season is premiering soon and I’m not sure I’m done processing!