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CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Schulman (The Talk of the Jillian Tamaki (“Junban,” p. 52) won,
Town, p. 20; “Extraordinary Alien,” with Mariko Tamaki, a Caldecott Honor
p. 22) is a staff writer and the author for the young-adult graphic novel “This
of “Her Again.” One Summer.” Her latest picture book
is “Our Little Kitchen.”
Ali Fitzgerald (“The Museum of Purga-
tory,” p. 36), an artist and a writer, first Nick Drnaso (Fiction, p. 58) is the au-
contributed to the magazine in 2016. thor of the graphic novels “Beverly”
She published “Drawn to Berlin” in 2018. and “Sabrina.” He is at work on “Act-
ing Class,” which is due out in 2022.
Harry Bliss (Cover) has contributed
cartoons and covers to the magazine Calvin Trillin (“Some Notes on Funniness,”
since 1998. He is the author, with Steve p. 30), a contributor to The New Yorker
Martin, of “A Wealth of Pigeons.” since 1963, has written thirty-one books,
including “Jackson, 1964” and “About
Liana Finck (“Stay-at-Home Fun,” Alice.”
p. 76) is a New Yorker cartoonist. Her
latest book is “Excuse Me.” Sarah Akinterinwa (Shouts & Murmurs,
p. 28), an illustrator, created the comic
Ronald Wimberly (“Pandemic Paper “Oyin and Kojo.” She began contrib-
Doll,” p. 42), the founding editor of uting cartoons to the magazine in 2020.
LAAB magazine, is the creator of the
graphic novels “Prince of Cats” and Ian Frazier (Poem, p. 34) is the author
“Black History in Its Own Words.” of, most recently, “Hogs Wild.” He is
working on a book about the Bronx.
Roz Chast (“A Cartoonist’s Life,” p. 33),
a New Yorker cartoonist, published, with Jeremy Nguyen (“Sketchpad,” p. 21) began
Patricia Marx, “You Can Only Yell at publishing cartoons in The New Yorker
Me for One Thing at a Time.” in 2017.
hear this.
Narrated stories,
along with podcasts,
LEFT: MIN HEO; RIGHT: KATE WARREN FOR THE NEW YORKER
Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
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4 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020
THE MAIL
ON BECOMING A HERETIC ever, when individuals choose to stay and
demand acceptance, Orthodox commu-
Larissa MacFarquhar’s article is a sen- nities slowly change over time. As the
sitive examination of the complexities executive director of Eshel, a nonprofit
of the child-custody cases that play out that creates community for L.G.B.T.Q.
in civil courts when ultra-Orthodox Orthodox Jews, I have seen the begin-
Jewish parents make the wrenching de- nings of evolution. My organization
cision to leave their community, and it runs a retreat that was mentioned in the
adds an important dimension to the article; its existence is proof that there
growing body of films, memoirs, and are queer Orthodox Jews who would
scholarship on the subject of those who like to find ways to stay in their com-
abandon religion (“Solomon’s Dilemma,” munities. The work we do with Ortho-
December 7th). But in one description dox parents of L.G.B.T.Q. people and
MacFarquhar’s casual tone could give a with Orthodox rabbis shows that these
wrong impression. Voicing one source’s communities can become more accept-
account of friends who have experienced ing of a diverse membership.
a crisis of faith but haven’t left Hasi- Miryam Kabakov
dism, MacFarquhar writes that they “vi- Northampton, Mass.
olated Shabbos all the time, watching
sports, and just lied to their families I left the Hasidic world at the age of
about it.” In my book about religious forty-five, and I have seven children.
Jews who lead double lives, “Hidden Hasidic kids are born into a system that
Heretics,” I find that people who have withholds the education they need to
lost their faith but have decided to stay function in the secular world. The sta-
don’t “just” lie to their spouses and chil- tus quo is upheld by politicians who turn
dren. The emotional and moral reason- a blind eye to yeshivas that do not ad-
ing behind their lies is complex, and it here to state educational standards, even
is based, above all, on a desire to avoid though the schools are ostensibly ac-
causing hurt to their loved ones. Some credited and supported by public funds.
are afraid of the outside world, and oth- Many Hasidic adults can barely read or NEW ALBUM OUT NOW
ers, especially women with few resources, write in English. What’s important to
are afraid of losing their children in the remember is that Hasidim are not in a
kinds of divorce scenarios that MacFar- quaint world apart from ours; they are
quhar describes. Indeed, many hidden Americans. Young adults are leaving
heretics have told me that, despite their ultra-Orthodox communities without
doubts about the truth of the Torah, the skills they need to survive. They face
they believed that staying in their com- homelessness, depression, addiction, and
munity was the most ethical thing to suicide. MacFarquhar’s article depicts
do. Ironically, by choosing to stay, these the lives of these apostates and their “McCARTNEY RETURNS TO THE
people expose their children to their communities in a lyrical way, but avoids SOUND OF HIS EARLY SOLO WORK
FOR A LAID-BACK GEM”
changing understanding of choice, in- hard numbers and the sordid political
dividuality, tolerance, and critical think- collusion. At the end, the piece becomes “A CHANCE FOR THE MASTER TO
KICK BACK AND SMILE AWAY.”
ing—thereby changing ultra-Ortho- a love story, as if in love there is resolu-
doxy itself. tion. I am a lesbian. I left my commu-
Ayala Fader nity in order to survive.
“…ONE OF HIS MOST COMPELLING
Professor of Anthropology Leah Lax ALBUMS IN DECADES…”
Fordham University Houston, Texas
New York City
• “...EVOKES THE DELICACY OF
Belonging to a Hasidic community offers Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, ‘YESTERDAY’ OR ‘BLACKBIRD’”
a life style of unparalleled social cohe- address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
sion, but, as MacFarquhar shows, the [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
community’s tight embrace all too often any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
strangles those who don’t fit in. How- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
PaulMcCartney.com
In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed.
Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming.
When the Rink at Rockefeller Center (above) opened, on Christmas Day in 1936, it was meant to be a
temporary attraction. But the “skating pond,” as it was then known, has long since become a winter fixture
of New York City. Holden Caulfield went on a date there in “The Catcher in the Rye,” and Truman
Capote took to the ice for a Life magazine photo op. The rink is open to the public, for fifty-minute
skating sessions, until Jan. 17; masks and advance tickets (via rockefellercenter.com) are required.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER LIEPKE
1
ART
mist, seem obliquely related to the spectral
sculptures, as if connected by the same bleak,
underrepresented voices to speak on issues that
move them, is to offer a purposeful corrective to
ancient narrative. An accompanying essay, the predominantly white, predominantly male
by the curator and critic Bob Nickas, sheds podcasting sphere. In each episode, the speaker
“100 Drawings from Now” light on TARWUK’s haunting, fragmented (guests have included the writer Bernardine Eva-
This invitational show, at the Drawing Center, world, citing the Croatian War of Indepen- risto, the body activist Jada Sezer, the editor Tobi
in SoHo, speaks to our lockdown epoch with dence, in the nineteen-nineties, as a formative Oredein, and the journalist Poorna Bell) takes
startling poignancy. All but one of the works trauma for the artists and noting the pop and on a single word, such as “failure,” “strength,” or
were created since the pandemic’s onset. Few art-historical references in their dense visual “empire,” and then delivers a manifesto exploring
are thematic. There are scant visual refer- lexicon—which is cryptic but well worth de- her own definition of the term. What results is a
ences to the spiky virus, though there are some coding.—J.F. (martosgallery.com) heady combination of TED talk, literary reading,
good jokes on homebound malaise. Among rousing impromptu lecture delivered in a smoky
the better-known artists, Raymond Pettibon 1 bar, and raw confessional.—Rachel Syme
pictures himself bingeing on episodes of “The
Twilight Zone” and Katherine Bernhardt re- PODCASTS
ports a homeopathic regimen of cigarettes Lolita Podcast
and Xanax. Stylistic commonalities are scarce, Very few books have vexed and divided more
aside from a frequent tilt toward wonky figu- Anthems people than Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 master-
ration. The show confirms a deltalike trend— The British podcast producer Hana Walker- piece, “Lolita,” the tale of a pedophile named
or anti-trend—of eclectic eccentricities with- Brown launched her new show, “Anthems,” in Humbert Humbert, who is hideously obsessed
out any discernible mainstream. What unites March, to mark International Women’s Day. The with a twelve-year-old girl. Jamie Loftus, a
Rashid Johnson’s grease-stick abstraction, goal of the program, which provides an outlet for writer and the host of the podcast “My Year
conjuring a state of alarm in a pigment that he
has invented and dubbed Anxious Red; Cecily
Brown’s pencilled carnage of game animals
after a seventeenth-century still-life by Frans AT THE GALLERIES
Snyders; and a meticulous, strikingly sombre
self-portrait by R. Crumb? Isolation. Intended
or not in individual cases, the melancholy
gestalt is strong, as is its silver-lining irony of
satisfying all artists’ ruling wish: to be alone
in the studio. Alone with themselves. Alone
with drawing. I found myself experiencing
the works less as calculated images than as
prayers.—Peter Schjeldahl (drawingcenter.org)
Sally Saul
This veteran ceramicist’s small, brightly glazed
animals, figures, and flowers (all made during
the pandemic) become something like an indoor
sculpture garden at the Rachel Uffner gallery,
where they’re placed on pedestals of varying
heights. Saul, who lives in the Hudson Valley,
titled her show “In the Woods,” playing on an
undercurrent of anxiety lurking in the bucolic.
Working in a forthright style, informed by folk
traditions and the Bay Area art scene of the
nineteen-seventies, Saul is attuned to the nat-
ural world and depicts birds—white-throated
sparrows, a red-winged blackbird—with par-
ticular charm. Some of the pieces evoke tur-
moil, both inner and outer. In “Transformed,” a
woman whose features recall emojis appears on
COURTESY THE BENNY ANDREWS ESTATE AND MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY
1
THE THEATRE
A Christmas Carol
Why limit yourself to one role in a show? In
2004, Jefferson Mays won a Tony Award for “I
Am My Own Wife,” in which he channelled a
transgender woman and the people in her life.
A decade later, he barrelled through madcap
costume changes as he portrayed every mem-
ber of the D’Ysquith family in the zany musi-
cal “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”
Now Mays is taking on all the characters in
Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” in an
adaptation that he wrote with his wife, Susan
Lyons, and the inventive director Michael
Arden (“Once on This Island”). The show,
which débuted two years ago at the Geffen
Playhouse, in Los Angeles, has been restaged
The episode that got me hooked on “Ologies,” a weekly talk show hosted for a streaming version filmed at the United
by the boisterous, flame-haired comedian Alie Ward, was “Scorpiology.” Palace, in New York City—a rococo geyser of
red velvet and gold detailing that is the perfect
Ward interviews an intrepid entomologist named Lauren Esposito, who setting for a Victorian tale.—Elisabeth Vincen-
has spent her career studying scorpions. As a person with an extreme telli (Through Jan. 3; achristmascarollive.com.)
aversion to creepy-crawlies, I tuned in with trepidation, but an hour
later I was walking in loops around a block so I could keep listening and This Is Who I Am
felt a newfound tenderness for and excitement about the wild world of For the Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar
venomous stingers. This was in no small part thanks to Ward’s gregarious Zuabi, cooking does not just anchor individ-
uals and families; it also serves as a storytell-
interview style, which is at once casual, curious, and concrete. The show— ing device. In his one-woman play “Oh My
each episode of which features a long chat with a scientist, a professor, Sweet Land,” from 2013, a small audience
or some other eccentric expert—is about digging into not only quirky gathered to watch an actor prepare a dish of
kibbe in real time. Now comes “This Is Who
subject matter but the humans who choose to devote their lives to study- I Am,” a live-streamed production directed by
ing fringe fields. You’ll meet a nephologist (clouds), a nassologist (taxi- Evren Odcikin and produced by PlayCo and
dermy), a cucurbitologist (pumpkins), and many others. Ward is generous the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, in
which a father (Ramsey Faragallah) and his
and inquisitive, warm and never judgmental; when it comes to pulling son (Yousof Sultani) cook the savory pies
touching stories out of scientists, she has it down to an art.—Rachel Syme known as fteer. In a sign of the times, they
are chatting over Zoom: the older man is
in Ramallah, the younger in New York (the
actors are in their respective kitchens), and
in Mensa,” first read “Lolita” when she was in staple and a reliable crowd-pleaser since its their relationship is physically and emotion-
middle school and has been haunted by it ever début, twenty years ago. On Dec. 23, Ballet ally distant. The virtual format works well in
since. She decided to unpack her complicated Hispánico streams a 2019 performance of the this context, but Zuabi’s ripe dialogue can’t
feelings about the material in the new “Lolita piece on its YouTube channel and Facebook avoid the clichés that so often burden recon-
Podcast” (produced by iHeartRadio), which, page. The screening also includes a conver- ciliation narratives.—E.V. (Through Jan. 3;
despite its simplistic name, is a remarkably sation with the company’s artistic director, woollymammoth.net/event/who-i-am.)
researched and complex dive into the rab- Eduardo Vilaro; the work’s Cuban-born cho-
bit hole of Nabokov’s work and the cultural reographer, Pedro Ruiz, a former company 1
twisting of his reputation. Loftus believes member; current dancers; and alumni.—Brian
that Nabokov intended the story to damn its Seibert (ballethispanico.org) MUSIC
protagonist rather than exalt him, but she is
more interested in exploring the long fallout
of the novel than in taking sides. She probes The Nutcracker at Wethersfield The Hamrahlíð Choir:
many aspects of the “Lolita” industrial com- The ritual of attending one of many versions
plex, from the film adaptations to the fashion of “The Nutcracker” during the holidays
“Come and Be Joyful”
ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA RUPPRECHT
shows, attempting to get to the heart of why looks different this year. With few excep- CLASSICAL There may be no advocates for ad-
the book maddens and endures.—R.S. tions, companies have reverted to some form olescent vocalizing more compelling than
of online presentation. Troy Schumacher, Iceland’s Hamrahlíð Choir, whose alumni in-
1 a soloist at New York City Ballet with a clude the operatic bass Kristinn Sigmundsson,
burgeoning choreographic career, is trying the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, and, according
DANCE something different: an experiential version to Björk, “every single Icelandic musician
at Wethersfield, a stately home with formal you have ever heard of.” Having sung in the
gardens, in Amenia, New York. The story is choir when she was sixteen, Björk engaged the
Ballet Hispánico told through a series of danced scenes, each youthful group and its venerated conductor,
“Club Havana,” a fun evocation of nineteen- in a different room of the house—and on the Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir, for her album “Uto-
fifties Cuban floor shows, has been a company terrace, in the gardens, and, finally, in a large pia” (2017) and for “Cornucopia,” an elab-
MAVENCLAD is a prescription medicine used to treat relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS), to include relapsing-remitting disease
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Talk to your healthcare provider to find out if MAVENCLAD is right for you,
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struggles to express themselves freely in at the café, she encounters Ryan (Bo Burn- (Angela Bassett), but, in his excitement, he
white-run media, the overlapping quests ham), a doctor and former classmate, but has a fatal accident, and his soul ascends to
for economic and political power, and the struggles to confide in him about the past. As a grandiose yet rigidly bureaucratic place in
government persecution endured by Black Cassie’s schemes become more complex and the sky where character traits and personal
activists. The foursome’s mounting conflicts violent, the tale grows diabolically clever yet identities are assigned. Joe’s soul wants to get
lay bare crucial historical fault lines; the cartoonishly exaggerated—her machinations, home for the gig, and, aided by a rebellious
fervent performances, which King passion- implying the skills of both a secret agent and soul (Tina Fey), he escapes; back in the city
ately and probingly spotlights, match the a crime boss, just happen. The film’s writer through some posthumous trickery, he learns
momentousness of the high-stakes dialectical and director, Emerald Fennell, suggests that valuable lessons about his wonderful life.
wrangling.—R.B. (In limited theatrical release.) extreme measures are needed to achieve even The movie’s depiction of an afterlife that’s
minimal justice; Cassie’s history and ongo- run like a corporation is as chilling as its
ing confrontations with predators inspire message about not quitting one’s day job.
Promising Young Woman righteous outrage and aching empathy, but Far from teaching children to follow their
The thirtysomething Cassie (Carey Mul- her passionately solitary devotion remains dreams, the movie—directed by Pete Docter
ligan), a medical-school dropout, works as abstract and impersonal.—R.B. (In limited and co-directed by Kemp Powers—advo-
a barista and goes out every night to bars theatrical release.) cates leaving the dreaming to the pros.—R.B.
and clubs, where she feigns drunkenness and (Streaming on Disney+.)
teaches the men who pick her up a lesson
about consent. The backstory eventually Soul
emerges: in medical school, a female stu- Pixar’s latest creation, bouncy and earnest, is Sylvie’s Love
dent—Cassie’s best friend—was raped while (like “Inside Out,” from 2015) an experiment This teeming and sprawling romantic drama,
drunk and reported the crime, but the school in psychology—and, as the title suggests, written and directed by Eugene Ashe, takes
took no action, and, soon thereafter, she died it’s a metaphysical one. Joe (voiced by Jamie on a mighty symbolic burden—one that
by suicide. Ever since, Cassie has been im- Foxx) is a middle-school music teacher who nearly overwhelms its narrative. The ac-
proving the world, one man at a time, and has long aspired to a career as a jazz pianist. tion begins in 1957, sparked by the meeting
awaiting her chance for revenge; meanwhile, He gets a gig with a famous saxophonist of two young Harlem residents—Sylvie
(Tessa Thompson), who works in her fa-
ther’s record store and dreams of becoming
a television producer, and Robert (Nnamdi
WHAT TO STREAM Asomugha), a rising jazz saxophonist who
takes a job in the store. Sylvie, who’s en-
gaged to a promising businessman (Alano
Miller), has a brief affair with Robert but
loses touch with him until a chance encoun-
ter, in 1962, by which time she’s married
and has a child—and a successful TV ca-
reer, which causes conflict at home. Ashe
meticulously and lovingly re-creates the
conventions and styles of glossy Hollywood
dramas of that era—and re-centers them on
Black characters. Embracing a large span of
time and a wide scope of action, the movie
rushes through its plot and keeps charac-
ter development spare, but its imaginative
flair packs great emotional power.—R.B.
(Streaming on Amazon Prime.)
action highlights conflicts of class and culture; the most passionate and from David Byrne, whose song of the same
contentious reminiscence, involving a young salesclerk (Linda Darnell) name supplies the movie’s title. Released in
2012.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue
and her boss, a middle-aged department-store owner (Paul Douglas), of 11/5/12.) (Streaming on Amazon, Tubi, and
pivots on a New Year’s Eve celebration in which love and lust, pride other services.)
and rage are compressed into a single mercurial encounter. A year later, 1
Mankiewicz won the same pair of Oscars for “All About Eve”; “A Letter For more reviews, visit
to Three Wives” is the deeper film.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town
débuted last month near Madison Square bagels, as he calls them (available only on whose name (German for “snails”)
Park. His hands have been covered in weekends), are both denser and smaller doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. “I was
olive oil for most of his sixty-odd years. than most of their latter-day equiva- a little nervous that people wouldn’t get
In the early nineties, the Queens native lents. The increased puffiness of bagels it and they couldn’t pronounce it,” Heller
opened a series of Italian restaurants, in- is not, Strausman explained, a result of told me the other day. But, she said, “we
cluding Campagna and the original Coco the broader supersize phenomenon but, want to tell stories with our food.”
Pazzo. In 1996, he created Freds at Bar- rather, of technological advancement; Edith’s schnecken encase sour cher-
neys, turning it into an institution with to make bagels automatically, you need ries and Turkish pistachios, or honey
satellites in Beverly Hills and Chicago. a wetter dough or else the machine will seasoned with the paprika-forward
Last year, Barneys went bankrupt, jam. More water means more fuel for Middle Eastern spice mix baharat. But
and Strausman was let go. Never mind: yeast, which means more rising and ex- perhaps the best represented of the plan-
he was already hard at work on Mark’s panding. Strausman is preserving the et’s scattered populations of Jews is the
Off Madison, which he abbreviates dying art of hand-rolling. one right here in New York, in the form
as M.O.M., to emphasize the Jew- So, too, is a young woman named of a bagel sandwich called the BEC&L.
ish-mother theme. Devotees of Freds Elyssa Heller, across the river, at her That’s “B” for bacon (with apologies to
will be delighted to find many of its sig- indefinitely running pop-up, Edith’s the rebbes), paired with egg, Cheddar
nature dishes resurrected here, including (60 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, in cheese, and a gloriously crispy, thick
the chopped chicken salad (with avo- the pizzeria Paulie Gee’s), which offers golden latke. (Mark’s Off Madison bagel
cado, string beans, and pears), Estelle’s what you might call your great-great- platters $22-$38. Edith’s bagel sandwiches
chicken soup, and bolognese lasagna. But grandmother’s bagels—hand-rolled but $10.50-$12.50.)
hand-painted letters on a glass wall in also twisted, as in Old World Poland. —Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 15
In case you’re
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The (actual) best restaurants,
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Get $10 off your first order of $35+ with code NEWYORKER.
Good through 1/28. Terms apply.
asked, “You met Doug, right? Every- “Student Retention at the Community
body met Doug?” College: Meeting Students’ Needs”—
They had met Doug Emhoff, the was piddling. If anything, that topic is
husband of Vice-President-elect Ka- more urgent than ever. Last month, a
mala Harris, and many more Ameri- study by the National Student Clear-
cans will get to know him in the weeks inghouse found that community-college
leading up to her swearing in, along- enrollment had fallen, in the course of
side Joe Biden’s, on January 20th. When the pandemic, by almost ten per cent;
Biden announced his selection of Har- among underrepresented minorities,
ris as his running mate, he said that that number is close to thirty per cent.
Emhoff would be a “barrier-breaker” Community colleges provide a route to
as the first Second Gentleman of the the middle class for people who are low
United States. He will also be the first income, the first in their family to at-
Jewish person to be a Second (or First) tend college, immigrants, single parents,
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 17
or all of the above. When Joe Biden was (Tipper Gore, Laura Bush, Karen supporting can be an act of strength,
Vice-President, Jill Biden taught at Pence), a J.D. (Hillary Clinton, Mi- for a man as well as for a woman.
Northern Virginia Community Col- chelle Obama), or a Ph.D. (Lynne Emhoff has won praise and ardent
lege, becoming the first known sitting Cheney). Emhoff was involved in liti- fans for doing something that should
Second Lady to hold a full-time paid gation surrounding the Taco Bell Chi- not be extraordinary: expressing pride
job. She has written that it was easy for huahua; Michelle Obama once pro- in his wife’s achievements. O, The Oprah
her Secret Service agents to blend in at tected the intellectual property of Magazine, after reviewing Emhoff ’s
the college, because the average age of Barney the Dinosaur. The “traditional” social-media posts—photographs of
the students was twenty-eight. Her plan picture has long been outdated; per- Harris next to an airport shop display
is to teach as First Lady, too. haps an advantage of being a gentle- that includes a book she wrote, of a TV
Emhoff will also be teaching, in his man, rather than a lady, is not being screen on which an interview of her is
case a course on entertainment law at told to pretend otherwise. playing, and of himself wearing a Har-
Georgetown University. (“Just call him Harris and Emhoff found each other ris campaign hoodie—declared him to
professor Doug Emhoff,” a story in relatively late in life, when both were be “the ultimate hype-man we all de-
People began, though he will techni- in their forties. She had not been mar- serve in a partner.” That is as good a
cally be a lecturer—a reminder that ti- ried before; he was divorced, and his summation as any of the aspiration for
tles come more easily in some cases two children call Harris “Momala.” ordinary decency—something that has
than in others.) He is leaving behind (Stepparents are not new in First and often seemed out of reach in Trump’s
a partnership at the international law Second Families; the list includes not Washington. Perhaps Emhoff ’s radical
firm DLA Piper. Still, in terms of qual- only Jill Biden but Melania Trump, task is to remind people that respect
ifications, he is not an outlier. Since Nancy Reagan—and George Wash- for a woman’s career and credentials can
1993, every First and Second Spouse, ington.) Emhoff has said that his role be something quite normal. He can al-
with the exception of Melania Trump, is not to be Harris’s adviser but to “sup- ways ask Dr. Jill Biden for advice.
has had an advanced degree: a master’s port her.” His useful message is that —Amy Davidson Sorkin
BERKSHIRE COUNTY POSTCARD idemiologists, physicians, and statisti- is 100% against herd immunity! Our
NAME GAME cians, as well as a stray philosopher, town’s name has been hijacked!” a local
published a report called the “Great posted on the town’s Facebook page.
Barrington Declaration.” “The Declaration has absolutely noth-
Sponsored by the American Insti- ing to do with GB. I wonder if it’s even
tute for Economic Research, a libertar- legal to use GB’s name in a case like
ian think tank based in the town, the this,” another wrote, adding, “Why not
declaration argues against lockdowns issue something called the Great Bar-
teve Bannon wasn’t angry, but he and in favor of a strategy of herd im- rington Nazi Party Declaration and put
S was very disappointed. “You know,
I’m pretty low-key,” he said one recent
munity as a way to contain the corona-
virus. Its chief signatories are professors
swastikas on it.” Mostly, residents were
worried that tourists would stay away—
evening. “And I think my instinctive re- at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, the or, worse, turn up without masks. Leigh
action was ‘I really wish they had not last of whom asserted in May that covid Davis, a select-board member, drafted
done this to our town.’ Because I love was “on its way out” in the United King- an angry letter to the A.I.E.R., protest-
our town, and we didn’t deserve it.” He dom. The document immediately at- ing its “despoiling of our town’s good
was sipping hot chocolate outside a busy tracted international attention. Chris name.”The select board decided against
café in Great Barrington. “And I must Whitty, England’s chief medical adviser, publishing it, on the ground that it was
tell you, with my name,” he added, “it told a parliamentary committee that it too harsh.
seemed like a double whammy.” was “scientifically weak, probably dan- Instead, town leaders fell back on a
Bannon, who frequently receives “very gerously flawed, operationally imprac- tried-and-true strategy: painting things.
nasty” e-mails meant for the right-wing tical, and, I think personally, ethically a In May, they had tried to send a hope-
political operative, is a pharmacist and little difficult.” Tedros Adhanom Ghe- ful message by adding rainbow stripes
the chair of the select board in Great breyesus, the World Health Organiza- to a number of Main Street crosswalks.
Barrington, a town of around seven thou- tion’s director-general, said that it was In July, a local youth group painted a
sand souls in the corner of the Berkshires “scientifically and ethically problematic.” colorful Black Lives Matter mural in a
where Massachusetts meets Connecti- Anthony Fauci dismissed it as “ridicu- prominent alleyway. After the declara-
cut and New York. A popular second- lous.” The White House embraced it. tion was published, the town stencilled
home spot for New York City residents, For the people of Great Barrington, sidewalks with reminders to social-dis-
the town was until recently best known it was the declaration’s title that caused tance and wear masks. “We have been
to city dwellers as the nearest place with anguish. They saw it as a slur, in the way very proactive,” Bannon said.
a full-service pot dispensary. But that that Mike Pompeo’s insistence on calling The select board also tried to disso-
distinction was overshadowed in Oc- SARS-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus” vilified ciate itself from the declaration. “We’re
tober, when more than three dozen ep- China. “The town of Great Barrington not a town that does a lot of national
18 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020
press releases,” Bannon said. But, for
this, “we put out two international press
releases.” The first, published in Octo-
ber, made the point that “the town it-
self had no role in, or forewarning
of, the declaration bearing the town’s
name.” A second was addressed to the
A.I.E.R.: “Your co-opting of our town’s
name . . . is exploitative and unwel-
come.” Mark Pruhenski, the town man-
ager, wrote a letter to the Guardian,
lamenting that the A.I.E.R. “has caused
immeasurable distress to many in our
community and confused many others
about our town’s safety.”
The last time the town made the
national news was in 2012, when Bill
O’Reilly, then still at Fox News, called
it “the town that hates Christmas,”
claiming that it had banned festive lights
on Main Street. O’Reilly had first picked
on the town in 2007, when the select
board imposed an ordinance mandat-
ing that Christmas lights be turned off
at 10 p.m., to save energy. Great Bar-
rington weathered those unwelcome “Hon, it’s not daytime yet. Those are just
moments in the limelight. Residents our neighbor’s Christmas lights.”
are hoping that this one, too, shall pass.
Ed Abrahams, another select-board
member, gave an interview to the Berk-
• •
shire Edge, an online newspaper, in
which he pointed out that “the Paris N.Y.U. One night, he and some fel- play anything. “I have a very spongy
Accords were signed in Paris and I don’t low-students were recruited to work as brain,” he said the other day. “If I’ve
think the people of Paris formally ap- runners at the reopening of the night heard it, I can play it. Until recently, my
proved that document.” He added that club Limelight. The naked-but-for- fans didn’t know I had these skills.”
Ralph Lauren had once marketed a line body-paint dance troupe being late, the These fans, who include Bruce Spring-
of bedding named for Great Barrington. students, attired in black turtlenecks steen, Elton John, and Barack Obama,
“Though it’s possible,” the Edge noted, and slacks, were asked to improvise some will now guess, correctly, that this Pan-
“those pillow shams and dust ruffles are moves. Our honoree, dutifully Dieter- demic Person of the Year is Adam Weiner,
named after the village of Great Bar- ing, looked down from the stage and the songwriter, singer, piano player, and
rington in Gloucestershire, England, saw Donald Trump: “He was staring chief showman behind the band—and
from which the southern Berkshire directly at me, with a look on his face occasional solo act—Low Cut Connie.
County town derives its name.” that said, ‘What is this garbage?’” His sixth album, “Private Lives,” came
—Leo Mirani This was his second encounter with out this fall. One track, “Look What
1 the future President. When he was nine They Did,” laments the mess that Trump
YEAR’S BEST or so, his parents took him, as they often and others left behind in Atlantic City.
TOUGH COOKIE did, to Atlantic City. “We’re in the Taj The album has had some chart success
Mahal, and Trump shows up, with Marla and has made (and even topped) some
Maples. And so I—and I don’t remem- year-end best lists. And yet, for what-
ber doing this, my parents tell this sto- ever reason, Weiner, who is forty, has
ry—I stood on my chair and yelled out, never had a record deal. (Several albums
‘Hey, asshole! Fuck you!’” ago, he started his own label.)
In New York, our awardee worked What has enabled him to show off
ACTING CLASS
BY NICK DRNASO
Match the hair style with its famous owner. A spoonerism is a familiar phrase whose initial sounds have
been swapped to make a wacky phrase: for example, “bear hug”
and “hair bug.” Can you decipher these illustrated spoonerisms?
1. a.
2. b.
3. c.
4. d.
5. e.
PUZZLES BY LIZ MAYNES-AMINZADE AND ANDY KRAVIS
6. f.
7. g.
8. h.
9. i.
answer key spot the differences: Pretty much everything.
splitting hairs: 1 (d); 2 (f ); 3 (g); 4 (e); 5 (b); 6 (i); 7 (a); 8 (c); 9 (h).
animal spoonerisms: crushing blow (blushing crow); funny bone (bunny phone);
box fan (fox ban); dense fog (fence dog); crime lab (lime crab).
Can you improve these classic poems?
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
HOT-ICE-CREAM DREAMS
The marvellously mixed-up masters of early animated cartoons.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
A
nyone who came of age in the or that the relatively unsuccessful “Bull- this way is new, and significant. The pe-
latter part of the twentieth cen- winkle” series, which concluded in 1964, culiar excellence of “The Right Stuff ”
tury will recall the constant flow could inspire four feature films three and was not that it showed astronauts to the
of animated cartoons that made up most four and even five decades later. world but that it showed the astronauts
of children’s programming on TV. In a In “Wild Minds: The Artists and Ri- as worldly. Wolfe explained that they
culture of supposedly short memories, valries That Inspired the Golden Age of were far from dim-witted test pilots:
they were an art form that reached right Animation” (Atlantic Monthly Press), they knew what they were doing and
back across time. On the radio, “oldies” Reid Mitenbuler recalls that flood— what was being done to them. Miten-
were a separate genre within pop music, and points out that the vintage cartoons buler’s larger aim is similar: to show us
but on the kids’ shows there was a steady within it were often censored by later that the best cartoonists were not hap-
stream of cartoons from half a century’s distributors in ways that robbed them of hazard artisans but self-aware artists,
creation, reality intruding mostly with their original spice and sex appeal. Of working against the constraints of com-
commercials for pre-sweetened break- the kinds of popular books that have merce toward a knowing end of high
fast cereals. Everything ran together: proliferated in the past few decades— comic, and sometimes serious, art. The
bending, bug-eyed dogs and cats play- the little thing that changed everything book’s governing idea lies in its heroes’
ing bad swing jazz on living clarinets (cod, longitude, porcelain), the crime or collective intuition that animated films
from the thirties, spinach cans popping scandal that time forgot (Erik Larson’s could be a vehicle for grownup expres-
open and tattooed muscles popping up specialty)—none are more potent than sion—erotic, political, and even scien-
from the nineteen-forties, and Japanese the tale of the happy band of brothers tific—rather than the trailing diminu-
animation of the sixties so limited that who came together to redirect the world. tive form they mostly became. A cartoon
it hardly moved. The genre runs from Tom Wolfe’s “The tradition that could seem child-bound,
There appeared to be a boundless Right Stuff ” through Jenny Uglow’s “The sexless, and stereotyped was once vital,
reservoir of historical cartoon styles— Lunar Men,” and Mitenbuler’s “Wild satiric, and experimental.
with some, the Bugs Bunny cartoons, Minds” is an attempt to do the same for Mitenbuler explains that the famil-
clearly made on a theatrical scale and the history of American animation. iar form of the cartoon arose, in the nine-
with big budgets and full orchestras, and teenth and early twentieth centuries, be-
others, like the Bullwinkle cartoons,
cheaply made but slyly imagined, rich
“ W ild Minds” assembles its his-
tory with love and a sense of
cause the same persistence of vision that
enables a rapid sequence of photographic
in satiric push. It all came at the viewer occasion. The chronicle that results, as stills to give the illusion of movement
in an indiscriminate collage. R. Crumb, Mitenbuler explains in a prefatory note, works if you draw the images, with a
the great underground cartoonist, had also appears at a moment when, for the pen. The joy of this discovery, made by
the imagery so stored up inside that, first time in the history of the form, a close succession of animators, was that
amid LSD trips in the sixties, everything everything is available. Obscurities that it set you free from the constraints of
came spilling out—what he called “a in the past one would have waited years realism: you could make anything you
grotesque kaleidoscope, a tawdry carni- to find in a stray MOMA screening are imagined exist on film, from waltzing
val”—and gave him a cast of characters now online. Even the lewd (though gov- dinosaurs to talking mice. Along with
for the rest of his career. The flow of ernment-sponsored) “Private Snafu” car- this discovery came a subsequent, pain-
cartooning past so imprinted itself on toons, made for G.I.s during the Sec- ful one—that drawing the frames, one
us that nobody found it odd that the ond World War and written by Theodor by one, was insanely laborious and ex-
1996 movie “Space Jam” paired peak Mi- Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, can pensive. (The commercial history of an-
chael Jordan with characters who had be found at a touch of the YouTube tab. imation from then on was basically a
first appeared long before he was born, The act of pulling everyone together in contest between the pleasure taken in
78 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020
SOURCE: ALAMY; OPPOSITE: TAMARA SHOPSIN
Betty Boop, remembered now mainly for her “Boop-oop-a-doop” cry, was in her day a full-fledged mini-Mae West.
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX MERTO THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 79
seeing the extravagant imagination come early thirties the Fleischers seemed as A Disney princess Betty Boop was
alive and the shortcuts that had to be likely as their great competitor, Walt Dis- not. In the mid-thirties, her skirt got
devised in order to draw the pictures ney, to become the masters of animated lengthened and her manners curbed
ever more cheaply.) cartoons. Proudly Jewish (their cartoons when Catholic groups pressed the Pro-
Very early animation has a single occasionally exploded with Hebrew let- duction Code on Hollywood, and the
theme, the fluidity of form: what’s some- tering) and extremely louche (Mitenbuler Fleischers turned their attention to Pop-
times called the first fully animated film, speculates that they started the studio eye, from E. C. Segar’s lovely strip. They
the French “Fantasmagorie” (1908), is a with money from the race track), they simplified the action; Popeye’s deus ex
two-minute-long study in visual metamor- threw their careers away in a series of canica of spinach first became iconic in
phosis, stick figures caught in a constantly misadventures worthy of a Michael Cha- their cartoons. In one of the great mis-
changing two-dimensional world. The bon novel, choosing Florida over Cali- placed bets in American show business,
first hero of Mitenbuler’s American story fornia as the place to make cartoons and however, the Fleischers moved their stu-
is therefore Winsor McCay, the author then overindulging in the pleasures of dio to the nascent town of Miami, where
of the “Little Nemo in Slumberland” se- the flesh once there. The Fleischers, we their largely Jewish and very New York
ries, the amazing accounts of dream ex- learn, began by inventing a once famous employees sometimes had a hard time
perience that anticipate Surrealist fan- clown, Ko-Ko, who was a fellow-travel- with swamp insects and other swamp
tasy. We learn that McCay, though best ler of the first famous cartoon figure, Felix creatures. “On the mornings after Ku
remembered now as a visionary fantasist, the Cat, both drawn under the orbit of Klux Klan rallies, the air sometimes
was also an editorial cartoonist in the Chaplin, whose influence on early ani- smelled like the turpentine used to burn
Hearst stable. Nor did McCay see his in- mation can be found everywhere. the crosses,” Mitenbuler records. Many
ventions primarily as a means of enter- The Fleischers didn’t see why anima- of them fled back home. (Others had
tainment. In 1916, after projecting his tion needed to remain a diminutive form. already been poached by the Disney stu-
“Gertie the Dinosaur” cartoon as part of Having made stake money with Ko-Ko, dio, all the way out in California.)
a vaudeville act, he invested his talents they took up what they thought was as Even before this difficult time, the
and money in a twelve-minute—long for obvious a subject for animation as, say, Fleischers—Max, especially—clearly
the time—animated version of the sink- the adventures of Pocahontas or the work- had in mind the hot-ice-cream dream
ing of the ocean liner Lusitania, which ing life of any number of dwarves: Ein- of a feature-length cartoon, made fear-
had been torpedoed by a German U-boat stein’s special and general theories of rel- somely difficult by the number of art-
the previous year, with a huge loss of life. ativity. Earning Einstein’s approval, the ists and the amount of time needed to
Though drawn in McCay’s distinc- silent film, released in 1923, is still an as- produce so many frames. Time-saving
tive Art Nouveau-ish style—two ele- tonishingly early and sophisticated pop- tricks were sought. Max had developed
gant fish under the ocean watch an om- ularization of his theory. But lacking, the technique of rotoscoping, which is
inous torpedo approaching with dismay, perhaps, a mascot—Li’l Al the Light still in use and which enables live-action
and turn away in synchrony—it is still Beam or the like—it was a flop, accord- film to be overlaid with animation. It
piercing to watch. The sequence in which ing to Mitenbuler. Two years later, un- created the quivering, noir-El Greco
the ship tips over into the water, as human deterred, the Fleischers used the occa- effect of their heroic figures, including
figures leap from it in dignified silhou- sion of the Scopes trial to goose up a the Superman series of the early forties.
ette, is more memorable and affecting history of life on earth as imagined by After Disney came out with a feature,
than anything in “Titanic,” exactly for Darwinian evolution. (It caused a riot at the saccharine but successful “Snow
its stylized equanimity. We register the the American Museum of Natural His- White,” in 1937, Paramount finally gave
tiny figures coming down ropes, the tory when it débuted, but seems to have the Fleischers the money to work on a
neatly outlined eruptions billowing made little money.) feature of their own, a full-length ver-
smoke, the inkblot clouds of fire, the The Fleischers—having secured back- sion of “Gulliver’s Travels,” which was
ship sinking beneath the hand-drawn ing from Paramount—had another go released in 1939. It lacks Swift’s satiric
waves—it’s like an early newsreel re- at presenting the drama of sexual repro- fire, but the juxtaposition of the roto-
imagined by Hiroshige. duction: they invented Betty Boop, the scoped and vividly human Gulliver with
But McCay was limited by William first frankly sexy cartoon character. Later the smooth-edged cartoon Lilliputians
Randolph Hearst, who owned him as bowdlerized, and remembered now has an almost creepy intensity that suits
a kind of property and valued his mainly for her “Boop-oop-a-doop” cry, the subject. (In films with both human
political-editorial work, while seeing Betty was in her day a full-fledged mini- movement and cartoon movement, like
little profit in animation. In “Wild Mae West. A zaftig Broadway showgirl, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” it’s always
Minds,” McCay then retreats, while she went topless, routinely seduced the real-world footage that looks coarse,
Mitenbuler’s Chuck Yeager figure—the Bimbo the dog, and was just as routinely otherworldly, and disturbing.)
too often overlooked and audacious seduced, and occasionally spanked, by The contrast between the practices
hero who inspires the later, better-known her animal cartoon lover. (“Wanna be a of the Disney studios in Los Angeles
adventurers—is double: the Fleischer member, wanna be a member?” she sings, and those of the Fleischers in Miami—
brothers, Max and David. after rubbing her hands up and down long in debt to Paramount—is the ma-
Though now mostly forgotten by her body, in one bizarre fantasy about terial for an American comedy. At Dis-
non-experts, in the nineteen-twenties and the initiation rites of a mystical order.) ney, classes in drawing and composition
80 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020
were compulsory. Mitenbuler tells us that
“Jean Charlot, a Mexican artist who had
painted murals alongside Diego Rivera, BRIEFLY NOTED
a revolver strapped to his hip, provided
lessons on composition and geometry,” The Walker, by Matthew Beaumont (Verso). Contending that
while Rico Lebrun, an expert on animal our “increasingly authoritarian” cities, with their omnipres-
anatomy, “dragged a deer carcass into the ent surveillance and commodified spaces, make the arche-
studio and, over the course of several ses- type of the flâneur—a privileged stroller who observes with-
sions, peeled back layers of pink tissue out being threatened—“unsustainable,” this heady blend of
until he finally struck bone.” Bambi was history and theory seeks more fitting literary models. The
born. Boris Morkovin, a professor at convalescent in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” is a figure
U.S.C., taught the theory of humor, an- whose illness allows him, finally, to experience the city out-
nouncing, “Ve vill now explain vott iss a side the daily grind. H. G. Wells’s “The Invisible Man” por-
gak.” (In the manner of the Russian for- trays a walker who is hounded and hunted. Beaumont de-
malists, he had analyzed “over two hun- picts the city as unremittingly hostile, but his ambulatory
dred gags into thirty-one basic types,” antiheroes hint at ways in which we might reclaim the
Mitenbuler reports.) streets, declaring our freedom, as he puts it, “to wander and
While the Disney animators were wonder at the same time.”
dutifully studying life drawing, the
Fleischers were living the life. Miten- Waste, by Catherine Coleman Flowers (New Press). Making
buler writes that the red light above the case for investment in America’s rural population, this
Dave’s door sometimes meant that he memoir moves from the author’s youthful civil-rights ac-
was having sex with his secretary, and tivism to her continuing fight against wastewater-infra-
that when Max complained about this, structure injustice. In Lowndes County, Alabama, where
right in front of visiting suits from Para- Flowers grew up, some ninety per cent of septic systems are
mount, David told them that Max was failing or inadequate. She documents conditions—raw sew-
having an affair with his own secretary. age backing up into homes and yards—that led, in 2017, to
“The tryst soured Max’s already stormy the country’s first outbreak of hookworm in decades. Indis-
relationship with his wife, Essie,” Miten- putable connections emerge between our nation’s history of
buler adds, who “was occupied with her slavery and sharecropping and the current inaccessibility,
gambling habit. In order to reach her for some, of “the right to flush and forget.”
bookie at any hour, she had wired the
palm trees of their estate with telephones.” The Orchard, by David Hopen (Ecco). The adolescent nar-
Soon the Paramount executives, no rator of this début novel, Aryeh (Ari) Eden, grew up in an
surprise, more or less foreclosed on the Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn. When his family
Fleischers and took ownership of all their moves to the fictional town of Zion Hills, Florida, Ari is
intellectual property. Max Fleischer never confronted with the privilege of his new yeshiva classmates.
recovered his studio or his momentum, (“Everyone has a Chagall,” someone tells him.) His reli-
or, for that matter, his relationship with gious piety is soon challenged by secular distractions—Aston
his brother. It was easier to blame his Martins, Olympic-sized swimming pools, house parties. Ari
mishandling of his career on a business seeks out the “tragic grandeur” conferred by experience, even
rival than on a character flaw. Through- as he realizes that it disrupts his ideals and his sense of self.
out his long and mostly unhappy after- “I’d been filled, finally, with experience,” he says, after a
life, this usually good-natured man would, blurry night out in Key West. “And yet along the way I’d
at the mere mention of Disney’s name, been emptied out.”
mutter, “That son of a bitch.”
Stillicide, by Cynan Jones (Catapult). One meaning of “stil-
espite wearing the red rose of the licide” is a continual dripping of water, and the chapters of
D intrepid Fleischers, Mitenbuler is
kind to Disney—kinder than a cultural
this novel collect like rainwater to tell the story of a dysto-
pian Britain stricken by drought. Entrepreneurs propose
historian of an earlier vintage might have razing homes to bring a giant iceberg into a London “Ice
been. It wasn’t so long ago that “the Dis- Dock,” a plan that sparks protests. Jones mostly focusses on
ney version” was the standard term for the disempowered—a dying nurse who writes her husband
the worst kind of vulgarization of the a letter she’ll never send, a scientist who hopes his discov-
classics. Disney is in better odor now, in ery will stop the Ice Dock, an elderly couple who refuse to
part because of the proto-Spielbergian leave their home despite rising sea levels. A laborer whose
spell he seems to cast in his best work, work on the Ice Dock will mean the destruction of his lov-
like “Pinocchio,” and in part because er’s house muses, “How often the process of construction
the lurid legends circulated after his starts with destruction.”
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 81
death—that he was an anti-Semite who later Sgt. Bilko. Bugs isn’t mean, but he’s went on to produce a genuine full-length
had himself frozen after death—turn out always ready to protect himself from the animated classic, “Mister Magoo’s Christ-
not to be true. Mitenbuler, while regis- Elmer Fudds of the world with his own mas Carol” (1962). It included a first-class
tering the relentless creep of formula into cleverness. In the Second World War, song score by two Broadway A-listers,
the work, gives Disney credit for genu- Bugs became every put-upon G.I.’s totem Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, which, once
ine artistic innovation: “Fantasia,” with and hero. Indeed, what’s demonstrated by heard, is hard to forget.
its high-art hungerings and a score fea- the recirculation of those lewd training
turing Paul Dukas and Igor Stravinsky, films—directed by, among others, Chuck o we live at the end of the era
wasn’t the effort of a cynic. And, by elim-
inating sex, Disney landed, in an almost
Jones and voiced by Mel Blanc—is that
the voice of the Everyman, Private Snafu,
D of two-dimensional animation?
Though the fans of the form persuasively
classic bit of Freudian-style sublima- is indistinguishable from Bugs’s. reassure us of the beauties of new classi-
tion, on evil, the forbidden energy that’s The embodiment of the mythic cally animated works—including those
essential to any fable. Disney’s villain- “trickster” figure in a rabbit or hare is, by Studio Ghibli, in Tokyo, and Cartoon
ous characters—like the queen turned for reasons buried deep in the human Saloon, in Kilkenny—they will strike the
witch—tend to be more memorable than psyche (or perhaps only in the bunny’s average parent searching for cartoons to
the doe-eyed good ones. fertile nature), oddly ancient and uni- share like warmly glowing Edison bulbs
If the Fleischers are the doomed Hec- versal, running from Japan to Africa in a sharp-lit L.E.D. era. The aesthetic-
tors of Mitenbuler’s tale, his favorites are and into American indigenous culture. minded new animators still float on Mc-
the hyper-energetic, demonic band of There’s a South African rabbit-trick- Cay’s waves, but most of the old-guard
cartoonists who helped establish the War- ster story in which the rabbit, having Hollywood animation units now seem to
ner Bros. animation studio in the thir- been instructed by the moon to share be listing like his Lusitania.
ties and forties, inventing Daffy Duck, the certainty of resurrection with all The larger story of the intersection of
Porky Pig, Pepé Le Pew, and, eventually, creation, says, instead, “Like as I die and commerce and the popular arts, within
Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. do not rise again, so you shall also die which this history sits, is not a wholly
It was during one of those irresistible and not rise again.” The moon, enraged, negative one, but it does have a specific
creative moments that, for a brief time, hits him right in the kisser and splits shape. High moments in popular art begin
everything fell right: Mel Blanc, the his lip. It’s a pure Bugs moment. You when no one has cracked the commer-
voice artist, was integral to the inven- can hear him saying the offending line, cial code sufficiently to know what will
tion of the characters. (At least one is a carrot like a cigar in hand. (If Bugs is work—will an Einstein cartoon take
caricature of a studio executive.) Happy the ideal trickster, Wile E. represents off ?—and a proliferation of possibilities
accidents happened: Porky Pig was voiced the necessary folk-tale adjunct, the trick- becomes available, including, above all,
by an actor with an actual, frustrating ster tricked, excessive predatory inge- the possibility of open-ended, unkempt
stammer, who turned it to creative use. nuity denied by his prey’s naïve energy.) emotion. This proliferation of possibili-
The wild-man directors of the “Looney The Warner Bros. comedy is not gen- ties happened with pop music in the late
Tunes” cartoons, Tex Avery and Chuck tle but hard-edged and, to an unusual sixties, with American film in the early
Jones and Frank Tashlin, were hardly degree, bundled around the soundtrack. seventies, with long-form television in
loony about their art. Tashlin articulated Not only did Mel Blanc’s voice charac- the first decade of this century. A recep-
their purpose bluntly. “We showed those terization often drive the cartoons; the tive audience, a plurality of artists, and
Disney guys that animated cartoons don’t scores, usually supervised by the Disney the basic commercial uncertainty about
have to look like a fucking kids’ book,” refugee Carl Stalling—and played by the what works or what can be made to work,
he said. Chuck Jones’s list of rules for his in-house fifty-piece orchestra—were and, presto, you get “Sgt. Pepper” and
art are acute and broadly applicable: “You dense with musical puns and jests. Every “The Godfather”; then someone cracks
must learn to respect that golden atom, moment had its music, and many of those the code of commerce, and you get
that single-frame of action. . . . The differ- moments were as much allusive as illus- “Frampton Comes Alive!” and “Smokey
ence between lightning and the light- trative, with old pop songs momentar- and the Bandit.”
ning bug may hinge on that single frame.” ily summoned to accent the action. The good stuff never disappears, but
What is true of frames is true of words, As a codicil to the Warner Bros. tale it does subside. We are living through
and notes. of independence rewarded, Mitenbuler a moment of subsidence now. Flexibil-
The Warner Bros. cartoons remain relates the slightly later story of U.P.A., ity of form meets the certainties of com-
the high point of what might be called the left-leaning animation studio that merce. Dammed up, the flow of cre-
American Wise Guy comedy. Where brought a short-lived stylistic renais- ative energy retreats, re-forms, finds a
Felix and Ko-Ko (and Chaplin) repre- sance to cartooning in the fifties, with new opening, and starts to flow again.
sented a beleaguered immigrant-naïf an unapologetically anti-naturalistic, The Fleischers were not wrong about
comedy, Daffy and Sylvester the Cat and, clean and lean style, and cool jazz back- this. All art aspires to the condition of
above all, Bugs Bunny are celebrations ground music. Some of the U.P.A. team, music, a wise man said once, and per-
of unashamed American ingenuity. It’s a including the director John Hubley, who haps all cultural history aspires to the
kind of second-generation-immigrant helped create Mr. Magoo, were black- condition of a cartoon: a seeming fluid-
comedy, where wheedling and scheming listed by the House Committee on ity of movement, made up of countless
are admired, very much like Phil Silvers’s Un-American Activities, but the studio small stops and starts.
82 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020
comedy more finely tuned to our grow
BOOKS ing consciousness of the nonhuman world
and the forces that inhabit it.
In Carrington’s creation story, the butt
EXTRAVAGANT CREATURES of the joke is her true origins, an incur
ably repressive AngloIrish upbringing,
Leonora Carrington’s matriarchal Surrealism. which she fled in 1937. She settled first
in France, and then, when the Nazis de
BY MERVE EMRE scended, Madrid, New York, and Mex
ico City, where she spent the rest of her
life. She never again saw her father, a
Lancashire mill owner who, in her twen
ties, had her committed to a mental in
stitution. “Of the two, I was far more
afraid of my father than I was of Hit
ler,” she claimed. She seldom visited her
mother, an able, sympathetic woman,
more mesmerized by the whirligig of the
London scene than by art or literature.
“The Debutante,” a story Carrington
wrote just after leaving home, shows the
savagery she wrought from her family’s
money and good English manners. A
girl befriends a hyena at the zoo, teaches
it to speak, and persuades it to take her
place at a ball. The hyena attends wear
ing the face of the girl’s maid, killed and
eaten as part of its evening toilette.
“Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a
hungry hyena, and you’re a bone,” Lewis
Carroll’s Alice shouts, in “Through the
Looking Glass.” Alice is too young to
imagine her game of makebelieve lit
eralized as gruesome social satire, but
Carrington, a devoted reader of Carroll
and Jonathan Swift, certainly could. The
Cheshire Cat and the Houyhnhnms
Carrington and Max Ernst. She rejected male Surrealists’ views of women. must have taught her that comedy and
critique both work by casting the famil
hen asked to describe the cir The success of a creation story hangs iar aspects of life in new, doubtful guises.
W cumstances of her birth, the Sur
realist painter and writer Leonora Car
on how richly it seeds the life to come.
Carrington’s encompasses all the elements
Which is more artificial, she asks: dress
ing a hyena as a human or a human as
rington liked to tell people that she had of her life and her art. There is her dec a woman? What is the difference be
not been born; she had been made. One adence and indelicate sense of fancy; her tween a hyena and a human? Shouldn’t
© LEE MILLER ARCHIVES, ENGLAND 2020. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
melancholy day, her mother, bloated by fascination with animals and with bo the two be allies in a planetary war
chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold dies, both otherworldly and profane. against débutante balls, against kings
pheasant, feeling fat and listless and un Above all, there is her highspirited, ba and queens and empires, against the
desirable, had lain on top of a machine. roque sense of humor, mating the artifi cannibalizing machinery of capital,
The machine was a marvellous contrap cial to the natural, and recalling Henri which takes the domination of women
tion, designed to extract hundreds of Bergson’s claim that the essence of com and nature as its origin point?
gallons of semen from animals—pigs, edy is the image of “something mechan Surrealist art, with its convulsive, out
cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks— ical encrusted upon the living.” Her landish juxtapositions, showed Car
and, one can imagine, bring its user to humor and its offspring—two novels, a rington how to discern the folly of the
the most spectacular orgasm, turning memoir, a delightfully macabre collec humans she knew. It also invited her to
her whole sad, sick being inside out and tion of stories, along with hundreds of cavort with nonhuman creatures, draw
upside down. From this communion of paintings, sculptures, and objets—have ing on their beauty and suffering to make
human, animal, and machine, Leonora been unearthed on several occasions since tame ideas about character and plot more
was conceived. When she emerged, on her death, in 2011. Each time her work porous, elastic, and gloriously unhinged.
April 6, 1917, England shook. is reborn, it seems more prescient, her The distinctions between human and
PHOTOGRAPH BY LEE MILLER THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 83
animal, animal and machine, flicker in he immediately believes it to be real and tor who weaves the story of her life; the
and out of focus in her early stories, but alive and as long as he believes this he reader who lets herself be ensnared by it.
the fiction she wrote in the nineteen- is trapped inside the dead image, which “Down Below” imagines its narra-
fifties and sixties dissolves them lavishly. moves in ever-increasing circles away tor and its readers journeying toward
Here we find several barnyards’ worth of from Great Nature.” For Carrington, hu- Knowledge as a collective entity, yet the
chimeras, extravagant beings who com- manity was a seductive costume donned circumstances leading up to its writing
mune with all manner of “mechanical by dummies. To step out of the costume were singular and bizarre. They began
artifacts.” They are bearers of utopian risked deranging the self that one un- with Carrington’s adolescent rebellions.
hopes and victims of threats from ordi- thinkingly inhabited, courting madness, Her father sent her to a convent school
nary humans. Consider her story “As the dissolution of the belief in the human in 1930; the nuns sent her back. In 1936,
They Rode Along the Edge,” a romance world as the arbiter of reality. But it was her mother sent her to study art in
featuring Virginia Fur, not quite woman, also to draw closer to Great Nature, in London, where she fell in with the Sur-
not quite cat, with “bats and moths im- the quest for a new, liberating art. realists. They worshipped her as a muse,
prisoned” in her hair and a blind night- a witch—not the old and ugly kind,
ingale lodged in her throat. Her lover, he story of Carrington’s liberation André Breton explained, but an en-
Igname the Boar, woos her in “a wig
made of squirrels’ tails.” Their children
T from the human world is the sub-
ject of her memoir, “Down Below”
chantress with “a smooth, mocking gaze.”
This reputation still clings to her, un-
are seven little boars conceived under “a (1944). The book opens by summon- like the bedsheets she is said to have
mountain of cats.” Virginia boils and eats ing its reader: worn to parties.Even her well-intentioned
all but one of the children, after men biographer Joanna Moorhead writes
Exactly three years ago, I was interned in
hunt and kill their father. Dr. Morales’s sanatorium in Santander, Spain,
with bewitched reverie of the teen-age
In Carrington’s writing, the critic Janet Dr. Pardo, of Madrid, and the British Consul Leonora, “the beautiful, sparky young
Lyon has observed, the appearance of an having pronounced me incurably insane. Since woman with her dark eyes, crimson lips,
ordinary human always feels like an ab- I fortuitously met you, whom I consider the and cascade of raven curls” destined to
erration, a harbinger of death. Ordinary most clear-sighted of all, I began gathering a meet the German Surrealist Max Ernst,
week ago the threads which might have led me
humans, when confronted with Car- across the initial border of Knowledge. I must
twenty-six years older than her, and
rington’s creatures, brandish their supe- live through that experience all over again, be- soon to anoint her his femme-enfant.
rior rationality and industry. Sometimes cause, by doing so, I believe that I may be of Her family had wrongheadedly nick-
they press the point with guns, other use to you, just as I believe that you will be of named her Prim. He renamed her the
times with atomic bombs, as in her novel help in my journey beyond that frontier by Bride of the Wind.
keeping me lucid and by enabling me to put on
“The Hearing Trumpet,” to be reissued and to take off at will the mask which will be
How far would the wind carry its
next month by New York Review Books. my shield against the hostility of Conformism. young bride? Across the Channel, to a
Yet they remain ignorant of how piti- small stone farmhouse in Saint-Martin-
able it is to be merely human in the first Who could turn down this flattering d’Ardèche, in the Rhône Valley, which
place. “To be one human creature is to invitation? You will serve as her accom- the couple bought in 1938. They painted
be a legion of mannequins,” a goddess plice, as well as her pupil—the débutante its interior with fish and lizard-like crea-
in one of her stories proclaims. “When to her masked hyena. Together, you form tures, women turning into horses, and
the creature steps into the mannequin one of her conjoined beings: the narra- a blood-red unicorn. They sculpted a
mermaid for the terrace, bought two
peacocks to roam the yard, and mounted
a bas-relief on the house’s façade. Its
two figures still stand. A man in robes,
with a bird cawing between his legs—
this was Loplop, Ernst’s alter ego. Next
to him, a faceless woman holds a
lopped-off head in her hand. Her most
notable features are her stony, round,
vigorously protruding breasts.
Here Carrington completed her first
major painting, “Self-Portrait (Inn of the
Dawn Horse),” in which a hyena with
engorged teats and a woman with fero-
cious hair and a pale, unalarmed face
stare out at the viewer. But amid the
painting, the drinking, the talk and the
sex, the wind blew foul and fair. For one
thing, the Nazis were drawing near. For
“I wanted this to work, too, James, but it’s time we accepted it—I am another, Ernst was married, more estab-
entirely grass, and you are clearly some part of the cat’s face.” lished, selfish, clingy, and demanding.
One wonders if she started to see their me, because I, too, was jammed between chiatric institutionalization was mir-
relationship the way that his patron Peggy Saint-Martin and Spain.” In Andorra, rored by Surrealism’s institutionalization
Guggenheim did: “Like Nell and her she could only scuttle like a crab: “an at- in New York’s art market—a complicity
grandfather in ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’” tempt at climbing stairs would again with wealth depressingly symbolized by
One also wonders if Carrington, eying bring about a ‘jam.’” The modernist ar- Ernst’s marriage to Peggy Guggenheim,
the bas-relief, felt paralyzed by the way thropod—Kafka’s bug, or Eliot’s Pru- in 1942. “Surrealism is no longer consid-
male Surrealists had treated women as frock, longing to be “a pair of ragged ered modern today,” a character in “The
artificial beings—their bodies manipu- claws”—is a well-worn trope of alien- Hearing Trumpet” laments. “Even Buck-
lable, their spirits elusive. Salvador Dali, ation and stasis, but for Carrington it ingham Palace has a large reproduction
in his essay “The New Colors of Spec- sparked a breakthrough. Part car, part of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with
tral Sex Appeal” (1934), had prophesied crab, part Carrington, she hit on the same an eye peering out. It hangs, I believe, in
that the sexual attractiveness of modern revelation that all her fiction would offer: the throne room.”
woman would derive from “the disartic- her body had only ever been a poorly
ulation and distortion of her anatomy.” crafted artifice, caging her spirit and bar-
“New and uncomfortable anatomical ring the entry of others.
“ T he Hearing Trumpet,” one of the
great comic novels of the twenti-
parts—artificial ones—will be used to And so a more profound journey beck- eth century, reprises the quest narrative
accentuate the atmospheric feeling of a oned, not the expulsion of a single man— of “Down Below,” but with some key
breast, buttock, or heel,” he wrote, only Ernst is forgotten by the narrator—but changes to insure it succeeds. Its narra-
half-joking. She would appear a lumi- her reincarnation as a multiple and quix- tor, Marian Leatherby, is ninety-two years
nous paradox, animate and inanimate, otic being: “an androgyne, the Moon, the old, gummy, rheumatic, gray-bearded,
carnal and ghostly; perfect for being de- Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora and deaf. Her lifelong dream is to tour
sired and for being painted but not for Carrington, and a woman,” she wrote. Lapland in a sleigh drawn by woolly
creating an art of her own. And a more terrible obstacle loomed. dogs. Barring that, she would like to col-
Against this background, “Down Be- For her revelation, she was institution- lect enough cat hair for her friend Car-
low” opens with Ernst’s internment by alized, made “a prisoner in a sanatorium mella to knit her a sweater. But Mari-
the French as an undesirable foreigner, full of nuns,” and later injected with an’s son, Galahad, less noble than his
after the outbreak of war, in 1939. His im- Cardiazol, stripped, and strapped to a Arthurian namesake, installs her in a re-
prisonment, we learn, jump-started a rit- bed. She had a series of visions in which tirement home for women run by the
ual of purgation. Carrington spent twenty- all the nuns and doctors, all of history, Well of Light Brotherhood and “financed
four hours drinking orange-blossom water religion, and nature were contained in by a prominent American cereal com-
to induce vomiting. Then she took a nap her, and she was the world. Freeing her- pany (Bouncing Breakfast Cereals Co.).”
and reconciled herself to his absence. For self would free the cosmos, “stop the Before Marian is taken away, Carmella
three weeks, she ate sparingly, sunbathed, war and liberate the world, which was gives her a hearing trumpet, pictured in
tended potatoes in the garden, and ig- ‘jammed’ like me,” she had reasoned. The Carrington’s illustrations as a ridiculously
nored the German troops thronging the place where will permeated all matter, oversized, scallop-edged object, “en-
village. She wondered if her attitude “be- where the boundaries between bodies crusted with silver and mother o’pearl
trayed an unconscious desire to get rid and beings dissolved, was not Spain but motifs and grandly curved like a buffa-
for the second time of my father: Max, what she called “Down Below.” “I would lo’s horn.” Marian—part human, part
whom I had to eliminate if I wanted to go Down Below, as the third person of animal, part machine—delights in the
live,” she wrote, planning to sell up and the Trinity,” she announced. The title of artifice of her body’s enhancement. She
drive to Spain. The reader who counts the book named her true destination, can hear now, and how prettily!
the threads of the story—a purified her- her utopia. What can we hear through “The
oine, her calling to vanquish an undesir- This, at least, is what we are led to be- Hearing Trumpet”? First, a thorough-
able man, a journey through a mysteri- lieve. The reader, like any dutiful side- going commitment to absurdity; the plot
ous land—knows that this is no lurid kick, awaits further instructions to go is gleeful nonsense. Then the driest strain
memoir of psychosis and political chaos. Down Below. Instead, Carrington’s mad- of humor. Finally, the echoes of a rag-
It is a quest narrative, designed to give ness lifts, and upon her release she jour- tag history of English literature, mined
brisk expression to Carrington’s desire neys from Madrid to Lisbon to New not for its contact with human reality
for a freer world. York. The quest is aborted, utopia aban- but for its capacity to conjure a world
Like all quests, this one had its ob- doned, the threads of the story snapped beyond the one humans can see, smell,
stacles. The first turned out to be her before they can be knotted together. Why, touch, and taste. The hearing trumpet,
body, prized and painted by the Surre- the disappointed reader wonders, has the or otacousticon, is a seventeenth-century
alists. Previously dismantled into its erotic heroine failed to complete her quest? The invention, and the scrapes it gets Mar-
components—a torso in a photograph, epilogue to “Down Below” suggests that, ian into seem plucked from the earliest
a breast on a wall—it began to integrate in life, no one was there to help convert picaresques. The retirement home is
with everything around it. “Jammed!” Carrington’s madness into a fully real- headed by a lewd doctor who preaches
Carrington proclaimed when the car tak- ized world. The artistic community of a doctrine of “Will over Matter.” The
ing her to Spain broke down. “I was the European Surrealism was now scattered, women live in cottages, each more pre-
car. The car had jammed on account of confined. Her surreal experience of psy- posterously shaped than its neighbor: a
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 85
lighthouse, a circus tent, a toadstool, a into a cauldron of meat broth and, in ible Painting,” is a testament to a kind
cuckoo clock. The discovery of a docu- an act of Eucharistic voodoo, drinks of Fabian workshop in exile, whose tech-
ment detailing the occult activities of an herself, lightly seasoned with salt and niques seemed enchanted by care. His
old abbess suddenly launches us on a peppercorns. Dissolving like a bouillon mother’s “inner demons would dissolve”
grail quest. It summons to Marian’s side cube, she finds her brothy spirit perme- when she did embroidery and appliqué;
not Galahad but the winged animals ating the other women, who keep her woodworking yielded “a she-wolf inlaid
and white goddesses of the Celtic and from spilling all over the place. Together, with abalone shells” and a roulette wheel
Old English traditions. they forage mushrooms, raise goats, con- she painted with horses. She made dolls
Carrington’s heroine succeeds be- jure bees whose honey they lick from stuffed with cat hair for the children and
cause she is matched by a narrative form their bodies, and make spinning wheels. cooked for everyone—a procession of
as chimerical as she is—not the short They hope to people the frozen earth outrageous meals over which they would
story or the memoir but the novel. “The with “cats, werewolves, bees, and goats”— gather to speak a hybrid of Spanish, En-
Hearing Trumpet” reads like a spectac- an “improvement on humanity,” Mar- glish, and French.
ular reassemblage of old and new genres, ian declares. Underneath all this shimmering play
the campy, illegitimate offspring of Mar- For all the outlandishness of the nov- runs a deep vein of vulnerability. “I am
garet Cavendish’s romances and Rob- el’s action, there is something supremely an old lady who has lived through a lot
ert Graves’s histories, with Thomas Pyn- practical about its tone, as if it were well and I have changed,” Carrington wrote to
chon’s riotous paranoia spliced in to keep within our power to step into its look- a friend in 1945. She was only twenty-
it limber and receptive to the political ing-glass world—a world where Car- eight. She did not have to be elderly to
anxieties of its moment. The search for rington’s recombinant art and utopian feel old—isolated, estranged from her
the grail is undertaken after the “dread- imagination are not extraordinary at all body, her consciousness dispersed. She
ful atom bomb” has inaugurated another but simple facts of life. Perhaps what was soon to be a new mother in a for-
Ice Age, killing nearly all humans and made the novel’s surreal ending conceiv- eign country, never to live in her home-
destroying their modern infrastructure. able was the environment in which it was land again. She had entered early retire-
The Cold War has turned the world, produced, the artistic community that ment, settling into her self-fashioned
well, cold. Carrington’s comedy of lit- formed around Carrington in Mexico assisted-living facility. After her younger
eralization asks us how a metaphor has City. She arrived there in 1942, and found son, Pablo, was born, in 1947, Carrington
become a terrible reality. A conversa- a city full of socialists and communists wrote to the art dealer Pierre Matisse ex-
tion between Marian and Carmella pro- in exile, its arts scene presided over by plaining why she would not attend her
vides an answer: the suspicious luminaries of Mexican solo show at his gallery in New York: “I
Muralism. (Frida Kahlo apparently called haven’t been out of these four walls for
“It is impossible to understand how mil-
lions and millions of people all obey a sickly Carrington and her circle “those Euro- about 2 years & have become so intimi-
collection of gentlemen that call themselves pean bitches.”) She married the Hun- dated by the outside world that I might
‘Government’! The word, I expect, frightens garian photographer Chiki Weisz, had have grown a hare-lip, a long grey beard
people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and two children, and created a new “Surreal & three cauliflower ears, bow legs, a hump,
very unhealthy.” Family,” anchored by two friends, the gall stones & cross eyes.”
“It has been going on for years,” I said.
“And it only occurred to relatively few to dis- photographer Kati Horna and the painter Some might see this self-imposed
obey and make what they call revolutions. If Remedios Varo. The family was a matri- lockdown as a constraint born from her
they won their revolutions, which they occa- archy, committed to dissolving the bound- insecurity, but it contained the condi-
sionally did, they made more governments, aries between the daily work of art and tions of her liberation. The gray beard
sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last.” the daily work of care—a feminist proj- would reappear on her heroine Marian,
“Men are very difficult to understand,” said
Carmella. “Let’s hope they all freeze to death.” ect more enduring and surreal than any as would her mistrust of institutional
single romance or school of painting. consecration. Both are marks of wisdom,
The women have no use for frozen in- proof of Carrington’s faith that the spirit
stitutions. What they seek are living or the next several decades, the fam- of a community, where art is truly lived
communities for all creatures, forged
not through domination and cruelty but
F ily experimented with traditional
craftsmanship. Carrington’s studio was
and made, can walk through walls.
Whether she was young or old, locked
through care and mutual assistance. “a combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, up or locked down, Carrington sum-
The community that the novel cre- kennel, and junk-store,” her patron Ed- moned unseen forces to come and make
ates is what distinguishes “The Hear- ward James observed, impressed by the a lonely world feel bigger. “The Hear-
ing Trumpet” as a delicious triumph magic she could wring out of domestic- ing Trumpet” prophesied the rest of her
of world-making. Unlike Leonora in ity. Atop a table one might spy a cot for life, and she was content with it. She
“Down Below,” Marian is not alone in Horna’s daughter, with a parade of long- made her art, loved her friends and chil-
her fight against Conformism. Her side- necked animals that Carrington had dren deeply, had no interest in public-
kicks are not her spectral readers but a painted around the base; in later years, a ity, rarely offered explanations of her
gathering of elderly women, animals, folding screen, a gift for Carrington’s son work, and never wrote another novel.
and spirits, growing ever more crowded Gabriel, with whom she would smoke And why would she? “The Hearing
and boisterous as the novel shuffles them the marijuana she grew on the roof. His Trumpet” contained the utopia she imag-
to their end. In its climax, Marian leaps forthcoming memoir of her, “The Invis- ined, and the world she knew.
86 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020
a few industry connections, and a new-
POP MUSIC found awareness that he had what many
Californians considered a thick South-
ern accent. “They’d be, like, Where are
DRINK IT IN you from?” he recalls. He began think-
ing about that question, too.
How Morgan Wallen became the most wanted man in country music. These days, Wallen is a country-music
star. His signature hit, “Whiskey Glasses,”
BY KELEFA SANNEH is a perfectly constructed ode to a woman
and a drink, lost and found, respectively:
“I’m a need some whiskey glasses / ’Cause
I don’t wanna see the truth.” According
to Billboard, it was the top country-radio
song of 2019. The music video depicts a
fictionalized version of the makeover
that Wallen underwent after “The Voice.”
He rips off the sleeves of a plaid flan-
nel shirt and shaves the sides of his long
hair, transforming himself into an Ev-
eryman rock star: Bruce Springsteen
meets Larry the Cable Guy, crowned
with a glorious mullet. Through this
process, Wallen became not just a singer
but a character—and, in a development
that seems to have surprised many Nash-
ville professionals, a sex symbol, beloved
by an army of fans who appear to be dis-
proportionately female and thirsty. An
innocuous photograph of him leaning
against a truck recently drew nearly half
a million likes on Instagram, and almost
ten thousand comments, including a
prayerful declaration from a young
mother in South Carolina: “Lord have
mercy im bout to bust.”
Wallen was alarmed when the live-
music industry shut down in March, but
2020 has turned out to be the best year
of his career. A new single helped him
maintain his radio ubiquity, and his
early seven years ago, a shaggy school, by a debilitating injury to his homebound fans made him a TikTok
N singer with a shy smile introduced
himself to America. “My name is Mor-
ulnar collateral ligament. “I’m just a nor-
mal small-town kid, and I really don’t
favorite, reacting to snippets of songs
and recording their own versions. Some
gan Wallen, I’m twenty years old, I’m have a clue how to get into music— non-country listeners first heard about
from Knoxville, Tennessee, and I’m cur- other than this,” he said. Wallen in the beginning of October,
rently a landscaper,” he said. He was Wallen had never been on an airplane when “Saturday Night Live” announced
standing on a stage in Los Angeles, until he flew to L.A. for the taping, and that he would be the musical guest on
competing for a spot on “The Voice,” he was unsure what kind of singer he an upcoming episode. Many more of
one of those reality shows in which es- wanted to be. He auditioned with a husky them heard about him a few days later,
tablished stars offer aspiring ones a version of “Collide,” an earnest ballad when the show announced that Wal-
chance to discover, first hand, just how from the two-thousands, which impressed len’s appearance had been cancelled be-
heartbreaking the music industry can Shakira, one of the celebrity judges. “Your cause of video footage that was circu-
be. He was wearing a tie and a cardi- voice is unique—it has this raspy tone, lating, on TikTok (naturally), showing
gan, with shoulder-length hair and most gritty sound to it,” she said. “It’s as manly him at an Alabama bar the previous
of a beard, and he explained that his as it gets.” Even so, Wallen was elimi- weekend, sharing kisses—and, for all
promising baseball career had been nated a month later, and he returned to anyone knew, virions—with at least two
ended, during his senior year in high Tennessee with a slightly higher profile, different women. Wallen acknowledged
his mistake in a downbeat but charm-
Wallen’s music is sometimes wistful, sometimes rowdy, and almost always boozy. ing two-minute video, apologizing for
PHOTOGRAPH BY KRISTINE POTTER THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 87
what he called “short-sighted” behavior guess I’ll sing country music, because Mac and the bittersweet memory of an
and signalling a temporary withdrawal this is the life I know.” old flame. “We thought we were cutting
from the spotlight. “It may be a second After “The Voice,” Wallen moved to this deep cut,” Moi says. But Wallen’s fans
before you hear from me, for a while,” Nashville, where he found a like-minded grew obsessed, posting and reposting the
he said. producer: Joey Moi, known for his work snippet and begging him to release the
He wasn’t gone long. In early De- with Nickelback, who had reinvented final version. When he eventually did, a
cember, Wallen made it to “S.N.L.,” per- himself as a country hitmaker. Wallen few months later, they pushed it to No. 6
forming a couple of songs and starring was streamlining his singing style, ex- on the Billboard Hot 100, thereby mak-
in a sketch in which he reënacted his cising bluesy flourishes to arrive at a mel- ing reality-television history. “The Voice”
fateful trip to that Alabama bar and low but muscular country-rock hybrid. recently concluded its nineteenth season,
begged forgiveness, singing, “I thank “He had no idea how good he was,” Moi and Wallen is the only contestant ever
you in advance / For giving this poor recalls. Wallen’s first album, “If I Know to score a Top 10 hit.
Southern boy a second Yankee chance.” Me,” from 2018, started with a likable On the second half of “Dangerous,”
On Twitter, viewers debated his hair, his lead single, “The Way I Talk,” which Wallen reminds listeners who he is and
hygiene, and his general persona. “Go stalled at No. 30 on the country-radio where he’s from. This is something that
to any Circle K in Indiana and you’ll chart—an ominous sign for a new singer. mainstream country singers are obliged
find yourself a Morgan Wallen,” one But then came a trio of No. 1 country to do, especially the men, who are ex-
user wrote. But it is not clear that Wal- hits, helped by a collaboration with an- pected to inject new life into familiar
len would consider this an insult. On other Moi client, the country duo Flor- lines about pickup trucks and women in
January 8th, he will release “Dangerous: ida Georgia Line, and by that haircut, cutoff jeans. Not all of Wallen’s efforts
The Double Album” (Big Loud), which a staple of nineties country fashion that in this regard are up to his usual stan-
takes pains to reassure listeners that he had come to seem stylishly retro. (One dards, especially during a four-song
is still a small-town guy, albeit one with of the most famous mullets belonged to stretch that includes “Somethin’ Coun-
a marvellously grainy voice and a knack Billy Ray Cyrus, whose daughter Miley try” and “Country A$$ Shit” and “What-
for singing clever songs that are some- has lately contributed to their revival.) cha Think of Country Now.” (It would
times wistful, sometimes rowdy, and al- “If I Know Me” reached No. 1 on the not be a surprise to learn that one or
most always boozy—in this way, at least, Billboard country-album chart in Au- more of these compositions began with
he is a country traditionalist. One of the gust, more than two years after it was a songwriter losing a bet.) But more often
advantages of his sleeveless-shirt image released. By then, Wallen had a new he establishes his bona fides with a wink,
is that it provides him occasional op- song heading up the country charts, as in “Blame It on Me,” a mock apology
portunities to upend listeners’ expec- “More Than My Hometown,” an an- to a woman who “goes country” for him,
tations. “Ain’t it strange the things you them of civic pride that is also, inevita- and has a hard time going back. Perhaps
keep tucked in your heart,” he murmurs, bly, a love story. He underenunciates, it is no coincidence that “Blame It on
near the end of one song. And this un- using his drawl to make the wordy verses Me,” with its evocation of cultural au-
expectedly philosophical flourish helps sound casual: “I ain’t the runaway kind, thenticity, is actually a musical hybrid: a
draw out the double meaning in the I can’t change that / My heart’s stuck in tidy pop song, partly propelled by a drum
next line, which suggests personal growth these streets, like the train tracks / City machine. Since the twenty-tens, coun-
while also recapitulating the excuse that sky ain’t the same black.” And in the cho- try singers have grown increasingly adept
he must have offered to “Saturday Night rus he makes his choice, declaring, over at borrowing from contemporary hip-
Live” executives, not long ago: “I found classic-rock guitar, “I guess I’ll see you hop and R. & B., and Wallen sometimes
myself in this bar.” around / ’Cause I can’t love you more sings with a rapper’s sense of rhythm,
than my hometown.” even as he defines himself against urban
allen grew up in Sneedville, Ten- Wallen made his first album in a rush, sounds and urban life. “Beer don’t taste
W nessee, an isolated town in a val-
ley near the Virginia border, where his
squeezing recording sessions into a ten-
day window between gigs. This year, like
half as good in the city,” he sings. “Beer
don’t buzz with that hip-hop, cuz / But
father was for a time the pastor of the many people, he found himself with more it damn sure does with a little Nitty
local Southern Baptist church. Wallen free time, and that explains why “Dan- Gritty.” Although he is wrong about beer,
took classical-violin lessons as a boy, but gerous” contains thirty songs. For tradi- he is surely right that many of his listen-
by the time his family settled in Knox- tion’s sake, the album is split into two ers like to think of him as one of their
ville, when he was in high school, he was “sides,” the first of which is gentler and own—loyal to a country community that
listening to unpretentious radio-friendly better, starting with a lovesick Tennessee harbors, even now, mixed feelings about
rock bands like Breaking Benjamin and boy in a “sunburnt Silverado,” reminisc- the cultural dominance of hip-hop.
Nickelback. In Wallen’s account, his em- ing about a beachside fling. Near the end When Wallen found out that “Sat-
brace of country music was less a stylis- comes “More Than My Hometown,” as urday Night Live” had rescinded its ini-
tic choice than a cultural imperative. “It well as “7 Summers,” which fans first tial invitation, in October, he was sitting
may not have been the biggest influence heard in April, when Wallen uploaded in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan,
in my life, as far as musically,” he says. part of a demo to Instagram. “7 Sum- getting ready for rehearsal. As he pro-
“But once I started writing songs, it just mers” uses a pair of major-seventh chords cessed the news, a member of his man-
sounded country. And I was, like, well, I to evoke the breezy sound of Fleetwood agement team ordered him a steak din-
88 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020
ner from a nearby restaurant, which he
ate in his room before flying back to Ten-
nessee. This month, when he returned
to New York for his second chance,
he sounded excited to be on the show,
though he didn’t pretend to be a regular
viewer. “I think this is a huge opportu-
nity for me to hopefully give ’em a good
first impression,” he said, from a differ-
ent room in the same Manhattan hotel.
This time, he promised not to do anything
to violate quarantine protocol. (TMZ
cameras spotted him on his way to the
set—dressed, counterproductively, in a
camouflage sweatshirt.) Although his
appearance went smoothly, it also illus-
trated how wide a gap remains between
the media mainstream and the country
mainstream. During Wallen’s sketch, he
bantered cheerfully with Jason Bateman,
the host, and Bowen Yang, a cast mem-
ber, who played versions of Wallen from
the future, sent back in time to stop him
from partying away his big chance at
stardom; both actors did notably inex-
act impressions of his accent. But during
his final performance Wallen seemed “Really, Mom? You wrapped up the clothes I left on the floor?”
defiant, as if he weren’t sure that he liked
being the butt of all these New York
jokes. “Call it cliché, but hey, just take it
• •
from me / It’s still goin’ down out in the
country,” he sneered, using hip-hop slang of playful songs, “P.M.S.” and “Thick Nashville bar owned by a local celebrity
to convey a sentiment as old as country Thighs,” and then, this summer, “Just who turned out to be sympathetic: Kid
music itself. About Over You,” a well-crafted lament Rock.) Wallen has said that he wants to
that propelled her out of the TikTok change his habits for the sake of his son,
n March, not long after the lockdown underground and into the country main- who was born in July. And tucked near
I began, a woman named Priscilla Block
appeared on TikTok, brandishing a glass
stream. She signed a major-label deal
in September.
the end of the album’s first half is his
version of “Cover Me Up,” by the cele-
of wine and singing an updated version During this year’s lockdown, TikTok brated singer-songwriter Jason Isbell.
of “Whiskey Glasses.” Instead of “I just has emerged as a new way for country The lyrics tell the story of a man recu-
wanna sip ’til the pain wears off,” Block singers to get noticed, much the way perating from a bender, or a lifetime of
sang, “I just wanna sip until the quar- TV singing competitions did a couple benders, surrendering to love and, maybe,
antine’s done.” Both her voice and her of decades before. FM radio, not tele- sobriety; Isbell’s original is quavering
timing were impressive, and her cover vision or social media, still defines the and uncertain, as if he were still learn-
was played millions of times. Block was country mainstream, but sometimes it ing to believe what he sings. Wallen’s
twenty-four, and had been living in scrambles to keep pace. “7 Summers” interpretation, which has been streamed
Nashville, performing in local bars for was, fittingly, a summer hit on the Hot nearly a hundred million times on Spot-
tip money. With the bars closed, she 100, which includes data from stream- ify, is brawnier and perhaps more sug-
dedicated herself to TikTok, often post- ing services. But it is only now starting gestive. “Girl, leave your boots by the
ing multiple videos in a day: she wielded to ascend the country airplay chart. bed, we ain’t leavin’ this room,” he sings,
a makeup brush like a microphone, re- “Dangerous,” with its thirty songs, seems in a voice that justifies the enthusiasm
corded sing-alongs from her car, and designed to keep radio stations busy of both Shakira and a certain mother in
posted pleas for Wallen to release more well into the post-pandemic era. South Carolina. Wallen’s record com-
music. (She wants it known that she The album includes plenty of party pany hasn’t decided whether to make it
was a fan even before his makeover, not songs—so many, in fact, that some of a single and try to persuade radio sta-
that she objected to it. “The mullet just Wallen’s fans may worry about him. (In tions to play it. Isbell’s songs are not typ-
made it better, honey,” she says. “I love May, Wallen was arrested, but not pros- ically heard on country radio—but these
the mullet.”) Soon Block began sharing ecuted, for public intoxication and dis- days just about anything Wallen sings
snippets of her own work: first a couple orderly conduct after an incident at a sounds like a potential country hit.
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 89
transformations that puberty wreaks on
ON TELEVISION the young. The characters, who, back
then, were seventh graders, encountered
new growths and protrusions (hard-ons,
THE YOUNG ONES pubic hair, boobs), distressing secretions
(sweat, semen, blood), and the nutso psy-
Season 4 of “Big Mouth,” on Netflix. chological effects these bodily changes
incur. One of the show’s strong suits is
BY NAOMI FRY its portrayal of the capricious ways in
which youthful sexuality can express it-
self: Jay ( Jason Mantzoukas), a greasy
but sympathetic classmate of Andrew
and Nick’s, discovers that he is bisexual
by humping a “boy” pillow as well as a
“girl” pillow; Andrew ( John Mulaney),
a bespectacled, mustachioed ball of neu-
roses, develops a crush on his cousin and,
although he is ashamed, proceeds to send
her a dick pic; the lovable, bucktoothed
nerd Missy ( Jenny Slate) masturbates
with her childhood Glo Worm and re-
fers to the act as her “worm dance.”
The show’s anarchic spirit is reflected
in its graphic, borderline grotesque style
of animation, which enables it to depict
aspects of pubescent sexuality that might
otherwise offend or disturb. (Goldberg
was a longtime writer on “Family Guy,”
an adult cartoon that is like “Big Mouth”’s
coarse, alcoholic uncle.) The kids’ urges
and fears are represented by a slew of
fantastical creatures: there are shaggy,
wisecracking “hormone monsters”; a
finger-wagging “shame wizard”; a silk-
en-voiced “depression kitty”; and, as of
this season, a jumpy “anxiety mosquito”
named Tito (Maria Bamford). Unsur-
prisingly, Tito is a real bummer. “Their
penises are thick hairy hogs and yours is
a bald little piglet,” he tells Nick, a late
n early episode of the fourth season drew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jenni- bloomer, as the boy is getting ready to
A of “Big Mouth,” now streaming on
Netflix, opens with the show’s protago-
fer Flackett. By allowing its characters to
age—and by focussing in on them, to an
take a shower at summer camp.
The first three episodes of the fourth
nists, Andrew Glouberman and Nick almost painful degree, as they do so— season, which take place at the camp,
Birch, embarking on their first day of “Big Mouth” can feel more akin to live- are some of the funniest TV I’ve watched
eighth grade. “Look at us, growing up,” action TV than it does to cartoons such in a while.There’s a new character named
Nick (voiced by Nick Kroll) says. “Not as “South Park” and “Bob’s Burgers,” which Milk (Emily Altman), a mouth-breath-
like Bart Simpson. That yellow schmuck have used animation to keep their pro- ing whiner who can’t stop bringing up
has been in fourth grade for, like, thirty tagonists static over the course of many obscure factoids, seemingly apropos of
years.” A clever but heartfelt cartoon that seasons, as if preserved in amber. nothing (“My dad’s friend Bob Reedy
is bursting with pop-cultural references “I’m going through changes,” Charles says there’s no such thing as choice, only
and is popular with adult viewers, “Big Bradley sings in the show’s opening destiny”). He is a familiar prototype:
Mouth” owes more than a little to “The theme. (The tune was originated by Black the uppity dork who is so annoying that
Simpsons.” (Even the use of “schmuck” Sabbath, that band of hormonal lads even the softer-hearted kids don’t feel
is evocative of Krusty the Clown.) Still, from Birmingham.) Since 2017, when sorry for him. “Milk, your dick is so
Nick’s comment identifies the unique- the first season aired, “Big Mouth” has weird. I can see the veins in your balls,”
ness of this series, created by Kroll, An- depicted the riotous, often alarming a bunkmate tells him. “During the Re-
naissance, scrota such as mine were con-
The show’s teen-age protagonists are followed around by “hormone monsters.” sidered a delicacy,” Milk responds air-
90 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY SIOBHÁN GALLAGHER
sullivan + associates
A R C H I T E C T S
ily. Perhaps nothing embodies the “Big lieved to see “Big Mouth” double down
Mouth” formula better than this ex- on that idea. One of my favorite gags
change: gross, hilarious, weird, precise. was Andrew’s obsession with Jessi’s new
boyfriend, Michaelangelo. Andrew, who
martha’s vineyard
TV show can have growing pains, is straight, swoons over the dreamy Brit,
A too. Andrew and Nick are the alter
egos of Goldberg and Kroll, who’ve been
but this is treated as unremarkable; it is
just one more facet of Andrew’s horni-
real-life best friends since childhood, ness. A more serious arc deals with Na-
and, early on, the series hewed closely talie, a trans camper. Jessi is upset when
to their adolescent milieu: upper-mid- Natalie starts bunking with the girls—
dle-class, white, straight Jews from West- not because Jessi is transphobic but be-
chester. (In Season 1, the “Great Women”- cause last summer Natalie, who had not
themed bat mitzvah of Nick and An- yet transitioned and was still known as
drew’s sardonic friend Jessi—voiced by Gabe, from the boys’ cabin, teased Jessi
Jessi Klein—has an Anne Frank table.) mercilessly, calling her “fire crotch.” European Beret $20
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In Season 2, a gay classmate, Mat- turning them into plot points. This sea-
thew (Andrew Rannells), and a Latina son, Missy, who has grown up in a “post-
one, Gina (Gina Rodriguez), got more racial household,” grapples with both her
airtime; in Season 3, a new student named burgeoning womanhood and her evolv-
Ali (Ali Wong) introduced herself as ing racial identity. “N-word alert!” she
pansexual. “If you’re bisexual, you like blurts out nervously, when visiting her
tacos and burritos,” she said. “But I’m older, cooler cousins, Quinta and Lena
saying I like tacos and burritos, and I (Quinta Brunson and Lena Waithe).
could be into a taco that was born a bur- The cousins, who tell Missy that her par-
rito, or a burrito that is transitioning ents haven’t let her be Black, take her Premier Senior Living
into a taco.” This flippant distinction, to get her hair braided (“What shampoo In Beautiful Bucks County, PA
which seemingly suggested that bisex- do you use?” “Well, Tom’s of Maine, of Life at Pennswood Village is all about
uals could not be attracted to transgen- course!”) and encourage her to buy new Living, Your Way- independently, with
der and nonbinary people, led to an out- clothes, which she does—but only after health care peace of mind. Guided
cry online. (Goldberg apologized on bidding a weepy farewell to the overalls by Quaker values of dignity, equality
and respect, Pennswood Village is a
Twitter.) This summer, in the midst of she has worn for the past three seasons. welcoming and active 65+ community
the Black Lives Matter protests, Jenny “Talking to your clothes? That’s some with opportunities for intellectual,
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should be played by Black people.” Slate When Missy’s mother expresses
had already recorded Missy’s dialogue doubts about whether her daughter’s
for Season 4, but she would be replaced cornrows are “manageable,” Missy blows
by the Black comedian Ayo Edebiri, be- up. “Stop stealing our men!” she yells, in
ginning with the penultimate episode. a hilarious, shocking moment that turns
Part of the charm as well as the signifi- heartrending when she gasps, through
cance of “Big Mouth,” I had always felt, tears, “I just really wanted to show you
©2020 KENDAL
was its commitment to the confusion of my new hair.” Later, in a Halloween- Never stop
categories, born of a sense that identity, themed episode, Missy reaches a détente learning.
sexual and otherwise, can be a messy with her fragmented self and kisses her
thing that does not necessarily adhere to refracted reflections in a haunted house’s Retirement living in proximity to
a clear orthodoxy. (In this regard, the broken mirror—a sweet reimagining of Oberlin College, Conservatory of
show is similar to others I loved this year: a sequence from Jordan Peele’s horror Music and the Allen Art Museum.
crude, funny, yet searching comedies like movie “Us.” In this moment, her voice
FXX’s “Dave” and Hulu’s “PEN15,” which changes from Slate’s to Edebiri’s. “There
explore race and sexuality in unexpected I am,” she says, triumphantly. “I’m all of 1.800.548.9469 EQUAL HOUSING
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look, loosely termed Constructivist: off clopedic, surveying a time of ideologi- platonic socialist worker, sporting a
kilter geometric shapes, vectoring diag cal advertisement, when individuals uniform of his own design and stand
onals, strident typography (chiefly blocky sacrificed their artistic independence to ing amid his own abstract sculptures.
THE MERRILL C. BERMAN COLLECTION /
sans serif ), grabby colors (tending to programs of mass appeal. The celebrity gesture ran riskily afoul
black and orangeish red), and collaged “The title ‘artist’ is an insult,” the Ger- of Soviet impersonality and was not re
or montaged photography, all in thrall man Communists George Grosz and peated. When, in 1932, he was accused
to advanced technology and socialist John Heartfield declared in 1920. Grosz of “bourgeois formalism,” he retreated
exhortation, in mediums including ar subsided into satirical painting and draw- to sports photography, finding a safe
chitecture, performance, and film. But ing, but Heartfield became a dedicated harbor that was denied his movement
you won’t have seen most of the works propagandist who cast Hitler as a pup- colleague Gustav Klutsis, a master of
photomontage whose worshipful imag
Liubov Popova’s “Production Clothing for Actor No. 7,” from 1922. ery of Josef Stalin didn’t forestall his ex
92 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020
ecution, on unclear grounds, in 1938. may prove to be ephemeral. No living omnibus ego to work for emancipatory
Rodchenko’s diminution illustrates the artist I know of, however fervently ac personal and social consciousness. Pas
Soviet tragedy of formal and visionary tivist, is renouncing art as a distraction sionately embracing Bolshevism, he
genius that was ground underfoot even from moral commitment, as the more wrote successful plays, delivered stir
before the inception, in 1928, of Stalin’s extreme Constructivists did. But a good ring speeches, supervised important
ruinous first Five Year Plan, and of the deal of recent polemical art suggests a magazines, and became wildly popular.
coerced visual banalities of socialist re useby date that is not far in the fu During the New Economic Policy,
alism. Not that the MOMA show in ture. Aesthetic judgment, based in ex instituted by Lenin in 1921, he collab
dulges in historical drama. Its focus is perience, confirms differences between orated with Rodchenko, contributing
scholarly, separately documenting cre what is of its time and what, besides snappy slogans to advertisements for
ators who, as one redemptive credit to being of its time, may prove timeless. light bulbs, cocoa, and cigarettes: high
Soviet social reform of the time, include I feel that our present moment, marked lights of the show. Even in love poems,
a great many women. It builds knowl by imbroglios of art and politics, forces his freeverse style—a sort of machine
edge. Meaning is up to us. the issue, even in face of tendencies a tooled lyricism—stuns and arouses.
century old. (The American poet James Schuyler
rt happens when someone wants As the exhibition unfolds, artists deemed the effect an “intimate yell.”)
A to do it. Advertising and propa
ganda start from given ends and work
penitent, shrinking from the perils of
originality, dominate in Russia. Ca
Politically, Mayakovsky can seem a
fabulously specialized instrument of
backward to means. There’s just enough reerist designers teem in the West, with worldly transformation. In 1926, he called
genuine art in the exhibition to hone such fecund exceptions as László Mo his mouth “the working class’s / mega
this point. The small Malevich, of cock holyNagy and Kurt Schwitters. I know phone.” He wrote a threethousand
eyed red and black squares on white, that I’m casting a wet blanket on work line panegyric in praise of Lenin. But
elates. Then there’s my favorite work, that might be—and surely will be— by 1930, increasingly subject to hard
which I’d like to steal: a version of the enjoyed without prejudice for its for line, and official, attacks for “petit bour
sublimely sophisticated Liubov Popo mal ingenuity and rhetorical punch. geois” subjectivity and other supposed
va’s “Production Clothing for Actor The architectonic and typographical apostasies, he was meekly policing his
No. 7” (1922). A blackcaped, robotic razzmatazz of the Austrianborn Amer unauthorized feelings: “stepping / on
figure extends a square red sleeve like a ican Herbert Bayer, the Dutch Piet the throat / of my own song.” A tortu
smuggled Suprematist banner. Personal Zwart, the Polish Władysław Strze ous love life may have helped drive
flair and practical use merge. (What miński, and the Italian Fortunato De him—on April 14, 1930, at the age of
would Popova’s fate have been if she pero afford upbeat pleasures, and a strik thirtysix—to shoot himself. But it’s
hadn’t died of scarlet fever in 1924, at ingly sensitive Dada collage by the impossible not to think of him as mar
the age of thirtyfive? The Moscow art German Hannah Höch feels almost tyred by his own high church: a trashed
world adored her.) Among a few other overqualified for its company. Strictly prototype of the Soviet new man. His
serious gems included for passing ref as a phenomenon in design, Construc funeral was one of the largest in the re
erence, the curators Jodi Hauptman, tivism and its offshoots merit celebra gime’s history.
Adrian Sudhalter, and Jane Cavalier tion. It’s just that the historical out In the catalogue, the poets Katie
hazard a Piet Mondrian from 1921, comes of the period get my goat, as Farris and Ilya Kaminsky offer their
“Composition with Red, Blue, Black, does the show’s sidelining of firstrate fine translation of a poem that was
Yellow, and Gray.” I wonder if the paint artists. Don’t look for anything by Vlad found with Mayakovsky’s body. It shows
ing will give you, as it does me, a shock imir Tatlin, Malevich’s innovational what was lost to the world with his
of recognition of true artistry: decisions peer in sculpture: not thematic enough, suicide. The poem, with its comic and
made not for but with a purpose, as cap plainly. The show’s freest and most grand interiority, helps me imagine the
tivating in the context of happy work prolific stylist is also, for me, the most unexpressed states of mind and soul of
ers working, a heroic soldier standing annoying: El Lissitzky. A star mentee so many artists who were inspired and
at the ready, and Stalin strolling among of Malevich’s who immigrated to Ber then blighted by a common cause:
his subjects as is Wallace Stevens’s jar lin in 1921, Lissitzky popularized the Already Two
in Tennessee. Constructivist look as an international It’s already two a.m. You’re likely asleep.
Art unaffected by personality is ster style that wasn’t about anything: jazzy The Milky Way’s a silver river through the
ile. That needn’t constitute a failure. It formal clichés that hugely influenced night.
may be a cleareyed choice made on commercial culture. At MOMA, ap I’m in no hurry; I’ll not storm your dreams
with the lightning bolts of telegrams.
principle. Many things are more im proaches to abstraction—logolike ci “It’s not you,” as they say. “It’s we.”
portant than art. Today, imperatives of phers by the Hungarian László Peri, Love’s boat has crashed on our lives.
racial and social justice preoccupy nu and stark geometries by the Polish But we’ve already closed out our tab,
merous artists. Hard light is wanted in Henryk Berlewi—deliver bright prom so there’s no need to list each
a crisis; away with moonbeams. What ise, then evanesce. pain, pinprick, pang.
You watch: silence settles on the earth.
needs saying conditions how it’s said, The show has a posthumous heart. The night taxes the sky of its stars.
which means accepting the chance that, It is lodged in the remains of the great In such an hour one stands up and speaks
should conditions change, the work poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who put an to the ages, to history, and all creation.
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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Each week, you, the readers, submit captions to a contest that runs on this page of the magazine.
But you’re weary, and your face muscles ache from trying to grin and bear your way through 2020.
So we called in the professionals—professional comedians, that is—to caption this cartoon
by E. S. Glenn. Follow @newyorkermag on Instagram for a chance to pick your favorite.
“I’m sorry. I’m having trouble focussing. “He sees you when you’re sleeping? “My insurance covers the first
Why the fuck are you dressed like Santa?” He knows when you’re awake? It’s time session, but your assistant said there’s
ana fabrega we defund the North Pole.” a co-pay of four cookies?”
ziwe fumudoh demi adejuyigbe
“Wait. Can you explain it to
me again? Do you know Jesus at all?” “What does that even mean, ‘nice’?” “I think the problem is less that I ‘need to
mike birbiglia nick offerman believe again’ and more that my wife
continues to sleep with my best friend.”
“I really love oat milk. I can’t believe I used “Now bring us the figgy Prozac.” kyle mooney
to drink whole milk! Ha ha, that’s so nasty.” pete holmes
melissa villaseñor “In 2020, is the entire
“Do you accept Zelle?” world on your naughty list?”
“Hallucinations? I wouldn’t say so. Just kate berlant marie faustin
these visions of sugar plums dancing
in my head. Had ,em since I was a kid. “If I had been there that day, I know “Sorry, I just assumed I’d sit
That’s normal, right?” Grandma would’ve been O.K….” on your lap during the session.”
john hodgman rachel pegram karen chee
“I don’t have an Oedipus complex. “I mean, I don’t want “PS5s have sold out everywhere and I’m all
I just didn’t like seeing you kiss my mom.” coal, but I deserve coal.” out of options. How good was I this year?”
sarah cooper tim heidecker ify nwadiwe
“I know I ask you this every time, “Thanks for making time— “I was six years old and got coal for
but you’re not making a list, are you?” I know this is your big day.” Christmas! Of course I have problems.”
aparna nancherla alyssa limperis gary richardson
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