cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
TRUMP
Donald Trump, it is worth stating, is married to an immigrant [Melania Trump, nee Melanija Knauss]…Trump’s mother was an immigrant, too, from Scotland; his first wife was born Ivana Zelníčková, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. If he’s as concerned as he says he is by all the “people that are from all over and they’re killers and rapists and they’re coming into this country,” he might consider building a wall around his pants.
–Lauren Collins, “The Model American,” The New Yorker
There’s a bunch of good stuff in this week’s Food and Travel Issue of The New Yorker. Lauren Collins’ piece on the Salon International de l’Agriculture made me wants to check out that legendary annual Parisian food fair. Dana Goodyear’s “Mezcal Sunrise” reminded me that I’ve always meant to investigate that smoky intense agave spirit, which my friend David Lida raved about to me years before it became trendy. Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” gave me a peek into Bolivian food culture and almost made me want to check it out. I’m still looking forward to reading the dispatch about a Himalayan glacier by the great reporter Dexter Filkins. And I’m inspired to following Roz Chast’s disappearance down the rabbit-hole of looking at Japanese product labels printed between the two World Wars.
But nothing interested me more in this issue than “Soul Survivor,” editor-in-chief David Remnick’s article about Aretha Franklin (above, photographed by Richard Avedon), which is stuffed with fascinating tidbits. To name just a few: Miss Franklin will not go onstage to sing until she is paid in cash (“small stacks of hundred-dollar bills”), which she puts in her purse and takes onstage with her, keeping it in her sight at all times. When she goes to the theater, she buys two seats, one for her mink coat. A film exists of the gospel concert Franklin gave in Los Angeles in 1972 that she released as a live album, Amazing Grace — originally filmed by Sydney Pollack, it’s been tied up in technical and rights issues that are on the brink of being resolved and is reportedly unbelievably great. And the Queen of Soul, who sensational performance of “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors last December brought tears to President Obama’s eyes, is seventy-four years old.
A few long pieces held my interest:
* Lauren Collins on the new vogue for Scandinavian TV shows (with my favorite passage in the entire issue);
* Adam Green’s profile of Apollo Robbins, whose professional is pickpocket-as-entertainer; and
* Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Personal History” account of the correspondence between a tortured young homosexual (himself, growing up in Long Island) and Mary Renault, renowned lesbian author of a string of novels set in ancient Greece loaded with homosexual romances.
Andy also pointed out the poignant contrast between Chris Ware’s “Back to School” cover from last September…
and this week’s, titled “Threshold,” in which the parents are not nearly so casual as they drop the kids off to school:
In other media notes, I was struck by a couple of juxtapositions in the Sunday New York Times recently that left misleading impressions. Last weekend, the annual “The Lives They Led” issue opened with this spread, which at first I took for a remarkably tony two-page ad for Portlandia:
Then in today’s Arts and Leisure section, at first glance it looks like Reed Birney is making his Broadway comeback in drag impersonating a highly recognizable Hollywood actress:
DANISH
When asked by the Guardian to account for the popularity of Danish television overseas, the actress Sidse Babett Knudsen – who plays Birgitte Nyborg, Denmark’s first female statsminister, on “Borgen” – replied, “I’ve no idea, because our language is one of the most ugly and limited around. You can’t seduce anyone in Danish; it sounds like you are throwing up.”
— Lauren Collins in the New Yorker
The annual Food Issue isn’t one I look forward to with particular relish, but I gorged myself on this year’s, starting with a uniformly excellent Talk of the Town section, especially the pieces on dragonflies and Aimee Mann. Calvin Trillin’s piece on Mexican food includes this hilarious description of mole as “a thick sauce made from as many as thirty ingredients, in a process so laborious that it puts most complicated Continental dishes into the category of Pop-Tart preparation by comparison.” Among the food pieces, I found myself engrossed by Mimi Sheraton’s piece on sausages and Lauren Collins’s profile of Apollonia Poilane, who took charge of her family’s famous bakery in Paris after her parents died in a helicopter crash when she was 18 years old. And I kept being strangely moved to tears by Jane Kramer’s loooooong, intimate profile of Yotam Ottolenghi (below) and Sami Tamimi, two gay Israelis (ex-lovers now with other partners) who have apparently revolutionized the way food-conscious Londoners eat. At the very end of the article, she describes an enviable evening she spent cooking, eating, and drinking wine with the two of them, their partners, and Ottolenghi’s ex Noam Bar and his partner.
Also delicious: Peter Schjeldahl’s review of Deidre Bair’s biography of Saul Steinberg, whose love life was remarkable, to say the least. I haven’t read Antonya Nelson’s short story “Literally,” but I’m about to chill out and listen to her read it aloud on the magazine’s iPad app.
another eye opens 