newyorker--2020-03-02--The Cold, Imperious Beauty of Donald Judd

I would tell you my emotional responses to the gorgeous works in the Donald Judd retrospective that has opened at the Museum of Modern Art if I had any .
I was benumbed , as usual , by this last great revolutionary of modern art .
The boxy objects ( he refused to call them sculptures ) that Judd constructed between the early nineteen-sixties and his death , from cancer , in 1994 , irreversibly altered the character of Western aesthetic experience .
They displaced traditional contemplation with newfangled confrontation .
That ’ s the key trope of Minimalism , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that will tag him until the end of time .
In truth , allowing himself certain complexities of structure and color , he was never as radically minimalist as his younger peers Dan Flavin ( fluorescent tubes ) and Carl Andre ( units of raw materials ) .
But Judd , a tremendous art critic and theorist , had foreseen the change ( imagine , in theatre , breaking the fourth wall permanently ) well before his first show of mature work , in 1963 , when he was thirty-five .
Slowly , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seventies , the idea that an exhibition space is integral to the art works that it contains took hold .
It is second nature for us now—so familiar that encountering Judd ’ s works at moma may induce déjà vu .
We are talking about , for example , an untitled piece from 1964 : a wall-mounted , square-sectioned , polished brass tube , seven feet long , from which descend five vertical tubes in iron , lacquered blue .
Of the same vintage , there ’ s a rectangular box , almost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and sides of translucent orange Plexiglas and ends of hot-rolled steel .
The works register as material propositions of certain principles—chiefly , openness and clarity .
They aren ’ t about anything .
They afford no traction for analysis while making you more or less conscious of your physical relation to them , and to the space that you and they share .
As installed by the curator Ann Temkin , with perfectly paced samples of Judd ’ s major motifs—among them , floor-to-ceiling “ stacks ” of shelflike units , mostly of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and flavor the space they occupy—the second of the show ’ s four big rooms amounts to a Monument Valley of the minimalist sublime .
Don ’ t miss it .
Less enchanting , though expertly appointed , are a room of tentative early work and two that feature such later developments as boothlike , angled constructions , at joins of wall and floor , in raw plywood ; large aluminum boxes containing differently oriented , lushly colored sheets of Plexiglas ; and a huge congeries , nearly six feet high by more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , bolted , and multicolored horizontal aluminum open boxes .
Not represented are Judd ’ s curatorial adventures , which included an exquisitely revamped building at 101 Spring Street , where he lived for a time and experimented with ways of installing art .
It has been preserved as a museum .
Then came the artist ’ s Bayreuth , his Mecca , in the remote ( from anywhere ! )
desert town of Marfa , West Texas .
There , starting in 1971 , he converted old military , civic , commercial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and temporary installations of his work , that of artists he favored , and his collections of Navajo blankets and other choice craft objects .
He also created studios , guest quarters , and his own living space , tucked into one end of a former gymnasium .
Works by Judd are almost routinely beautiful , but coldly and even imperiously so , as if their quality were none of your business .
If you have any feeling , it might be chagrin at being underqualified to cope with so rigorous a visual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; you ’ re not .
He came on as a Savonarola of art in early writings and interviews , preaching a chastened aesthetic that should be “ non-naturalistic , non-imagistic , non-expressionist , ” in addition to “ unrelational , ” “ nonillusionistic , ” and “ neither painting nor sculpture.
” That dispenses with an awful lot of what normally appeals to people about art , leaving , in my case , a state of chilled awe .
The one solid pleasure still provided is that of decoration : art that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but to be seen in relation to the environments that it enhances—keeping in mind that Judd ’ s ideal environments are voids .
( Come to that , we owe to Minimalism the stubborn fashion in architecture and design of hygienically spare , white-walled interiors and sleekly simplified commodities . )
Success did not mellow him .
Nor was he much given to humor .
His statement of purpose , in 1986 , for the Chinati Foundation , which he instituted for Marfa , admits no doubt about the grandeur , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Somewhere , just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure , a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.
” Visiting those places , you ’ re not an art lover .
You ’ re a pilgrim .
Judd was born in 1928 in Excelsior Springs , Missouri , the son of a Western Union executive .
In 1948 , after Army service , he began studies that led to a degree in philosophy and—but for a thesis—one in art history , from Columbia University .
His @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to such tentative three-dimensional experiments as the relief of a yellow , concave , plastic letter from a sign embedded in a Masonite panel painted cadmium red light ( a favorite Judd hue ) .
Manually , he was a klutz .
Nothing quite fits in his initial constructions , and his drawing style is rudimentary .
His first really strong works—woodblocks , from 1961 , of tine-like vertical stripes contained by a diagonal shape—were executed by his father , Roy ( who co-signed the backs ) .
Starting in 1964 , almost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He was a thinker and a designer of far-seeing intellect and , if you will , profound taste .
Indeed , his main holdover from modernism was a high seriousness in matters of discrimination , asserting preferences as gauges of integrity that expand beyond the aesthetic to the moral .
You can ’ t know now from looking only at his work that his politics were left-libertarian , but he seemed sure that sophisticated viewers would implicitly understand his stance .
The populism of Andy Warhol repelled him , but he found Roy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ satisfying.
” Judd ’ s extraordinary connoisseurship shines in the reviews he wrote—some six hundred of them—between 1959 and 1965 , most for Arts Magazine .
Gathered in a cherishable book , “ Donald Judd : Complete Writings 1959-1975 , ” they combine lucid description and fearless judgment in a bracingly forthright , no-nonsense style that makes other critics of the time , and most of us since then , seem flabby by comparison .
Almost always , when an artist is familiar to me Judd ’ s assessment is penetrating and dead-on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Imagine being Charles Cajori , a fair-to-middling second-generation Abstract Expressionist , and reading a review of your work that begins “ The color is gray , varied some , and a little grayed blue and orange .
It could not be less considered.
” ) Judd ’ s later writing , from the seventies to the nineties , runs to jeremiads against the thick-headedness and what he deemed the incompetence of art-world institutions .
He regularly had good reason to complain of damage to his works returned from museum shows .
Minimalist art @ @ @ @ @ @ @ viewers who barely saw it as art , and to children who mistook it for playground equipment .
Absolute physical perfection , destructible by a nick or a fingerprint , is as essential to Judd ’ s aesthetic as it was , before him , to Brancusi ’ s , and , more recently , to that of Jeff Koons .
A wonderment of the MOMA show is that it is installed with no physical , or even indicated , barriers .
Temkin , fingers crossed , acknowledged to me that the presence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s worth pausing to note that probably only MOMA commands the clout , the cash , and the expertise to gather , from many collections , the number and quality of so many fragile treasures .
The chance surely won ’ t recur to take the measure—platinum-iridium grade or not—of an artist whose influence on our art and , sub rosa , our lives in common , remains beyond large , engulfing .
♦

I would tell you my emotional responses to the gorgeous works in the Donald Judd retrospective that has opened at the Museum of Modern Art if I had any. I was benumbed, as usual, by this last great revolutionary of modern art. The boxy objects (he refused to call them sculptures) that Judd constructed between the early nineteen-sixties and his death, from cancer, in 1994, irreversibly altered the character of Western aesthetic experience. They displaced traditional contemplation with newfangled confrontation. That’s the key trope of Minimalism, a term that Judd despised but one that will tag him until the end of time. In truth, allowing himself certain complexities of structure and color, he was never as radically minimalist as his younger peers Dan Flavin (fluorescent tubes) and Carl Andre (units of raw materials). But Judd, a tremendous art critic and theorist, had foreseen the change (imagine, in theatre, breaking the fourth wall permanently) well before his first show of mature work, in 1963, when he was thirty-five. Slowly, by erosive drip through the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the idea that an exhibition space is integral to the art works that it contains took hold. It is second nature for us now—so familiar that encountering Judd’s works at moma may induce déjà vu.
“Untitled,” from 1989. Photograph courtesy Glenstone Museum © 2020 Judd Foundation / ARS, New York
We are talking about, for example, an untitled piece from 1964: a wall-mounted, square-sectioned, polished brass tube, seven feet long, from which descend five vertical tubes in iron, lacquered blue. Of the same vintage, there’s a rectangular box, almost four feet long, with a top and sides of translucent orange Plexiglas and ends of hot-rolled steel. The works register as material propositions of certain principles—chiefly, openness and clarity. They aren’t about anything. They afford no traction for analysis while making you more or less conscious of your physical relation to them, and to the space that you and they share. As installed by the curator Ann Temkin, with perfectly paced samples of Judd’s major motifs—among them, floor-to-ceiling “stacks” of shelflike units, mostly of metal-framed, tinted Plexiglas, which expose and flavor the space they occupy—the second of the show’s four big rooms amounts to a Monument Valley of the minimalist sublime. Don’t miss it. Less enchanting, though expertly appointed, are a room of tentative early work and two that feature such later developments as boothlike, angled constructions, at joins of wall and floor, in raw plywood; large aluminum boxes containing differently oriented, lushly colored sheets of Plexiglas; and a huge congeries, nearly six feet high by more than twenty-four feet long, of stacked, bolted, and multicolored horizontal aluminum open boxes.
Not represented are Judd’s curatorial adventures, which included an exquisitely revamped building at 101 Spring Street, where he lived for a time and experimented with ways of installing art. It has been preserved as a museum. Then came the artist’s Bayreuth, his Mecca, in the remote (from anywhere!) desert town of Marfa, West Texas. There, starting in 1971, he converted old military, civic, commercial, and domestic buildings to house permanent and temporary installations of his work, that of artists he favored, and his collections of Navajo blankets and other choice craft objects. He also created studios, guest quarters, and his own living space, tucked into one end of a former gymnasium.
“Untitled,” from 1969. Photograph courtesy Saint Louis Art Museum © 2020 Judd Foundation / ARS, New York
Works by Judd are almost routinely beautiful, but coldly and even imperiously so, as if their quality were none of your business. If you have any feeling, it might be chagrin at being underqualified to cope with so rigorous a visual intelligence. He’s Donald Judd; you’re not. He came on as a Savonarola of art in early writings and interviews, preaching a chastened aesthetic that should be “non-naturalistic, non-imagistic, non-expressionist,” in addition to “unrelational,” “nonillusionistic,” and “neither painting nor sculpture.” That dispenses with an awful lot of what normally appeals to people about art, leaving, in my case, a state of chilled awe. The one solid pleasure still provided is that of decoration: art that is meant not to be looked at but to be seen in relation to the environments that it enhances—keeping in mind that Judd’s ideal environments are voids. (Come to that, we owe to Minimalism the stubborn fashion in architecture and design of hygienically spare, white-walled interiors and sleekly simplified commodities.) Success did not mellow him. Nor was he much given to humor. His statement of purpose, in 1986, for the Chinati Foundation, which he instituted for Marfa, admits no doubt about the grandeur, and the grandiosity, of his enterprise: “Somewhere, just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.” Visiting those places, you’re not an art lover. You’re a pilgrim.
Judd was born in 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, the son of a Western Union executive. In 1948, after Army service, he began studies that led to a degree in philosophy and—but for a thesis—one in art history, from Columbia University. His early work evolved from so-so abstract painting to such tentative three-dimensional experiments as the relief of a yellow, concave, plastic letter from a sign embedded in a Masonite panel painted cadmium red light (a favorite Judd hue). Manually, he was a klutz. Nothing quite fits in his initial constructions, and his drawing style is rudimentary. His first really strong works—woodblocks, from 1961, of tine-like vertical stripes contained by a diagonal shape—were executed by his father, Roy (who co-signed the backs). Starting in 1964, almost everything Judd made was commercially fabricated. He was a thinker and a designer of far-seeing intellect and, if you will, profound taste. Indeed, his main holdover from modernism was a high seriousness in matters of discrimination, asserting preferences as gauges of integrity that expand beyond the aesthetic to the moral. You can’t know now from looking only at his work that his politics were left-libertarian, but he seemed sure that sophisticated viewers would implicitly understand his stance. The populism of Andy Warhol repelled him, but he found Roy Lichtenstein’s formal prowess “hugely satisfying.”
“Untitled,” from 1976-77. Photograph courtesy Des Moines Art Center © 2020 Judd Foundation / ARS, New York
Judd’s extraordinary connoisseurship shines in the reviews he wrote—some six hundred of them—between 1959 and 1965, most for Arts Magazine. Gathered in a cherishable book, “Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975,” they combine lucid description and fearless judgment in a bracingly forthright, no-nonsense style that makes other critics of the time, and most of us since then, seem flabby by comparison. Almost always, when an artist is familiar to me Judd’s assessment is penetrating and dead-on correct, while never gentle. (Imagine being Charles Cajori, a fair-to-middling second-generation Abstract Expressionist, and reading a review of your work that begins “The color is gray, varied some, and a little grayed blue and orange. It could not be less considered.”) Judd’s later writing, from the seventies to the nineties, runs to jeremiads against the thick-headedness and what he deemed the incompetence of art-world institutions. He regularly had good reason to complain of damage to his works returned from museum shows. Minimalist art was long vulnerable to art handlers and viewers who barely saw it as art, and to children who mistook it for playground equipment. Absolute physical perfection, destructible by a nick or a fingerprint, is as essential to Judd’s aesthetic as it was, before him, to Brancusi’s, and, more recently, to that of Jeff Koons.
A wonderment of the MOMA show is that it is installed with no physical, or even indicated, barriers. Temkin, fingers crossed, acknowledged to me that the presence of the works would be compromised otherwise. It’s worth pausing to note that probably only MOMA commands the clout, the cash, and the expertise to gather, from many collections, the number and quality of so many fragile treasures. The chance surely won’t recur to take the measure—platinum-iridium grade or not—of an artist whose influence on our art and, sub rosa, our lives in common, remains beyond large, engulfing. ♦


newyorker--2020-03-02--BET Worries About the Vote

BET Worries About the Vote

Not long before Super Tuesday , a couple of hundred media , technology , and civic-engagement types gathered at a West Hollywood hotel to discuss how to get more youths and people of color to vote .
“ It ’ s nonpartisan , ” Scott Mills , the president of Black Entertainment Television , which had organized the day of panels , said .
He stood on a blue carpet in front of a blue-lit conference room strewn with blue pillows .
Agitated , he called an aide over and asked , “ How did we get all the blue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” the aide said , sheepish .
“ I hadn ’ t thought about that.
” The event , called META 2020 , was timed to coincide with the N.A.A.C.P .
Image Awards , but the primaries were on everyone ’ s mind .
“ There ’ s so much activity designed to inhibit—I won ’ t use the word ‘ suppress ’ —African-American participation in this election , ” Mills said .
“ We think it ’ s important , now that we have no candidates of color , to say , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all participate in this process.
’ ” It ’ s a sentiment that goes down like a shot of vinegar .
“ I am borderline apathetic , ” Angela Rye , the C.E.O .
of Impact Strategies , a political-advocacy firm , told Janai S. Nelson , of the N.A.A.C.P.
’ s legal-defense fund .
“ Mmm , ” Nelson said .
“ We have to work on that.
” “ I ’ ve heard people say , ‘ I can ’ t vote for the lesser of evils , ’ ” an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I say , ‘ Yes , you can .
Yes , you better.
’ ” He added , “ We ’ re in the midst of this cancel culture : ‘ This person is gay , this person didn ’ t fight in the military , this person called a black person an epithet in 1986 .
Anything I find that gives me a reason to cancel—done.
’ That ’ s how we got here.
” Onstage , Kamala Harris offered advice on combatting misinformation from Russian bots and “ the Liar-in-Chief.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about trusted sources of information , like BET , ” she said .
“ Point out , ‘ That ’ s a lie.
’ ” There were texts to action .
“ Pull out your phone , ” Tiffany Dena Loftin , the director of the N.A.A.C.P.
’ s youth-and-college division , said .
“ Think of a person in your contact list ” who is unlikely to vote “ and send them a text.
” First text : “ Hey.
” Second : “ Do you know who you ’ re voting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I actually just checked to make sure I was registered , at vote.org .
You should , too.
” “ It ’ s an opening , it ’ s a question , and then it ’ s an action , ” Loftin went on .
“ Sometimes we get stuck in thinking our posts on social media will do enough .
But that ’ s not what ’ s going to help us win in November.
” Tiyale Hayes , BET ’ s senior vice-president of consumer insights , showed pie charts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of black men surveyed in February said that they were excited about a candidate ; forty per cent said that they were satisfied but not excited .
“ If I were another country with a bunch of bots , I ’ d be trying to attack these people right here , ” he said .
Another panel addressed how to get more black men to the polls .
“ You can ’ t just expect us to show up on your behalf , ” the rapper Clifford Harris , Jr. , who goes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve already , in unison , said Bloomberg ain ’ t it .
I don ’ t care how much money you throw around.
” “ We don ’ t need all the money in the world , but it does take resources , ” Andrew Gillum , the former mayor of Tallahassee , who narrowly lost Florida ’ s 2018 gubernatorial race , said .
“ Do you know how much money we spent trying to get old white people to vote for us ?
And I don ’ t say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pejorative—older white people are , in my state , consistent voters.
” He continued , “ They get mail pieces several times a week.
” Over drinks , attendees weighed their options .
“ I think it ’ s Elizabeth ” —Warren—Zip Gould , the founder of Gaia Green Earth , an energy-tech firm , said .
“ Everything ’ s been so patriarchal on this planet for the past six thousand years.
” “ I ’ ve been a Bernie Sanders hater for about four years , but I ’ m really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Quentin James , the founder of the Collective PAC , which supports African-American candidates , said .
He wore a beige porkpie hat .
“ But , ultimately , the person who I think could help us win elections most is Michael Bloomberg .
None of this shit is possible without winning the Senate , and , to win the Senate , you got ta win fucking states like North Carolina , Alabama , Mississippi , Texas .
You need a ton of fucking money to do it .
It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s a conundrum for our community .
Yeah , I hear the stop-and-frisk shit , I get it .
This is about power.
” Which candidate was T.I.
, who had on a large diamond pendant , rooting for ?
“ Bernie , ” he said .
“ He ’ s not as snazzy and cool .
He don ’ t have , like , quick one-liner punch lines , but if you look at his history , where he started in politics , from marching for civil rights , I think if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and being represented by a fair and decent human being , then I think Bernie ’ s the best candidate .
Now , if you don ’ t give a fuck about that and you just want to get to the money .
.
.
” He shrugged.
“ O.K.
, cool.
” ♦

Not long before Super Tuesday, a couple of hundred media, technology, and civic-engagement types gathered at a West Hollywood hotel to discuss how to get more youths and people of color to vote. “It’s nonpartisan,” Scott Mills, the president of Black Entertainment Television, which had organized the day of panels, said. He stood on a blue carpet in front of a blue-lit conference room strewn with blue pillows. Agitated, he called an aide over and asked, “How did we get all the blue?”
“The two parties,” the aide said, sheepish. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
The event, called META 2020, was timed to coincide with the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards, but the primaries were on everyone’s mind. “There’s so much activity designed to inhibit—I won’t use the word ‘suppress’—African-American participation in this election,” Mills said. “We think it’s important, now that we have no candidates of color, to say, ‘It’s critical that we all participate in this process.’ ”
It’s a sentiment that goes down like a shot of vinegar. “I am borderline apathetic,” Angela Rye, the C.E.O. of Impact Strategies, a political-advocacy firm, told Janai S. Nelson, of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
“Mmm,” Nelson said. “We have to work on that.”
“I’ve heard people say, ‘I can’t vote for the lesser of evils,’ ” an actor named Dondré Whitfield said. “I say, ‘Yes, you can. Yes, you better.’ ” He added, “We’re in the midst of this cancel culture: ‘This person is gay, this person didn’t fight in the military, this person called a black person an epithet in 1986. Anything I find that gives me a reason to cancel—done.’ That’s how we got here.”
Onstage, Kamala Harris offered advice on combatting misinformation from Russian bots and “the Liar-in-Chief.” “Use your voices to remind people about trusted sources of information, like BET,” she said. “Point out, ‘That’s a lie.’ ”
There were texts to action. “Pull out your phone,” Tiffany Dena Loftin, the director of the N.A.A.C.P.’s youth-and-college division, said. “Think of a person in your contact list” who is unlikely to vote “and send them a text.” First text: “Hey.” Second: “Do you know who you’re voting for in November?” Third: “I actually just checked to make sure I was registered, at vote.org. You should, too.”
“It’s an opening, it’s a question, and then it’s an action,” Loftin went on. “Sometimes we get stuck in thinking our posts on social media will do enough. But that’s not what’s going to help us win in November.”
Tiyale Hayes, BET’s senior vice-president of consumer insights, showed pie charts with sobering statistics: twenty-one per cent of black men surveyed in February said that they were excited about a candidate; forty per cent said that they were satisfied but not excited. “If I were another country with a bunch of bots, I’d be trying to attack these people right here,” he said.
Another panel addressed how to get more black men to the polls. “You can’t just expect us to show up on your behalf,” the rapper Clifford Harris, Jr., who goes by T.I., said. “We’ve already, in unison, said Bloomberg ain’t it. I don’t care how much money you throw around.”
“We don’t need all the money in the world, but it does take resources,” Andrew Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee, who narrowly lost Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial race, said. “Do you know how much money we spent trying to get old white people to vote for us? And I don’t say ‘old white people’ as a pejorative—older white people are, in my state, consistent voters.” He continued, “They get mail pieces several times a week.”
T.I. screwed up his face. “What’s a mail piece?”
Over drinks, attendees weighed their options. “I think it’s Elizabeth”—Warren—Zip Gould, the founder of Gaia Green Earth, an energy-tech firm, said. “Everything’s been so patriarchal on this planet for the past six thousand years.”
“I’ve been a Bernie Sanders hater for about four years, but I’m really warming up to him right now,” Quentin James, the founder of the Collective PAC, which supports African-American candidates, said. He wore a beige porkpie hat. “But, ultimately, the person who I think could help us win elections most is Michael Bloomberg. None of this shit is possible without winning the Senate, and, to win the Senate, you gotta win fucking states like North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas. You need a ton of fucking money to do it. It’s Bloomberg who has it. That’s a conundrum for our community. Yeah, I hear the stop-and-frisk shit, I get it. This is about power.”
Which candidate was T.I., who had on a large diamond pendant, rooting for? “Bernie,” he said. “He’s not as snazzy and cool. He don’t have, like, quick one-liner punch lines, but if you look at his history, where he started in politics, from marching for civil rights, I think if you care about being fair and decent, and being represented by a fair and decent human being, then I think Bernie’s the best candidate. Now, if you don’t give a fuck about that and you just want to get to the money . . .” He shrugged.“O.K., cool.” ♦
An earlier version of this piece misidentified the legal-defense fund that employs Janai S. Nelson.


newyorker--2020-03-02--Aharon Appelfeld’s Legends of Home

Aharon Appelfeld’s Legends of Home

In 2018 , Israel lost its two greatest novelists , Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld .
Both were older than the country itself and had witnessed its entire dramatic history , but the ways they dealt with that history could not have been more different .
Oz , born in Jerusalem in 1939 , threw himself into the development of the young Jewish state : he wrote about the kibbutz where he lived and the psychology of the first Israeli Sabra generation , and assumed an active role in politics as a founder of the Peace Now movement .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its first half century , Oz ’ s novels would be the natural place to start .
Reading Appelfeld , by contrast , tells you basically nothing about the country in which he lived—at least , not directly .
Though he wrote in Hebrew , taught at an Israeli university , and received Israel ’ s highest literary honors , his imagination remained fixed in the land of his early childhood , which was Eastern Europe .
Appelfeld wrote more than forty books—including “ To the Edge of Sorrow , ” which appeared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out in a posthumous English translation by Stuart Schoffman ( Schocken ) —and almost all of them are set in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire .
They are often about people like his parents : assimilated , German-speaking , middle-class Jews who live in provincial cities , vacation at country resorts or in spa towns , and worship literature and music instead of the God of their ancestors .
And so they are all , inevitably , about the Holocaust , which annihilated those Jews and their civilization when Appelfeld was a young boy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a village near Czernowitz—a city that was then in Romania and now belongs to Ukraine—and his childhood came to a terrifying end in 1941 , when the fascist Romanian government deported the region ’ s Jews to labor camps .
The soldiers who came to Appelfeld ’ s house shot his mother in the yard as he listened , then sent him and his father to a camp , where they were separated .
Appelfeld escaped , hid in the forest , and spent the next few years roaming the countryside , either @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , until he managed to take refuge with the approaching Red Army .
By the time he arrived in Palestine , in 1946 , two years before the founding of Israel , Appelfeld had been utterly stripped of his identity .
He had lost family , home , and country , as well as years of education and experience .
“ World War II went on for six straight years , but sometimes it seems to me that it lasted only one long night , from which I awoke a completely different person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ memoir , “ The Story of a Life.
” The uniquely strange atmosphere of Appelfeld ’ s fiction comes from the fact that , because he could not remember his own past , he was forced to imagine it .
“ The Story of a Life , ” in which Appelfeld tries to write about his experiences in a nonfictional register , is a valuable but meagre and fragmentary book .
In his novels , conversely , Appelfeld writes with entranced certainty about experiences that could never have been his and worlds that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one .
In this way , Appelfeld resembles Kafka , whose influence he discussed in a 1988 interview with Philip Roth : “ He spoke to me not only in my mother tongue but also in another language which I knew intimately , the language of the absurd.
” Absurd , in the philosophical sense of inescapable yet pointless , perfectly describes the journey that the narrator undertakes in Appelfeld ’ s book “ The Iron Tracks ” ( 1991 ) .
Set in the years after the Second World War , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Holocaust survivor who spends his entire life on railroad trips , making an identical circuit of Austria ’ s train stations every year .
“ The trains make me free .
Without them , what would I be in this world ?
An insect , a mindless clerk , ” Siegelbaum muses , evoking Gregor Samsa , who turned into an insect in Kafka ’ s “ The Metamorphosis.
” His perpetual journey allows Erwin—which was Appelfeld ’ s first name , before he changed it to the Hebrew Aharon—to remain homeless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home .
It is a parable of the Jews ’ relationship to Europe after the Holocaust , able neither to live in the Old Country nor to leave it behind .
“ I have no stake here , ” another Jewish traveller , whom Erwin encounters on a train , says .
“ I have nothing .
Still , it ’ s hard for me to leave that nothing.
” For an Israeli novelist like Appelfeld , an imaginative obsession with Europe and the past was a kind of defiance .
From the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Zionism was “ negation of the Diaspora ” : in their homeland , Jews were supposed to turn their backs on centuries of oppression .
This idea was all the more urgent for the refugees who arrived in Israel after the Holocaust , and were seen as terrible reminders of the price of Jewish powerlessness .
In “ The Story of a Life , ” Appelfeld recalls that , as a new arrival in Palestine , he was indoctrinated with the need to be totally reborn : his future was to require @ @ @ @ @ @ @ complete personal transformation and a total identification with this narrow strip of land.
” In “ Badenheim 1939 , ” published in 1975 , and perhaps his best-known book , Appelfeld wrote as lethal an indictment of the self-delusions of prewar European Jewry as any Zionist could want .
A hideous idyll , the story takes place in an Austrian spa town , whose Jewish residents spend the last summer before the war listening to chamber music , eating pastries , and engaging in intrigues , while the government ’ s Sanitation Department @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impending deportation “ to Poland.
” On the book ’ s last page , the town ’ s inhabitants gather at the train station , and one of them remarks , “ If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go.
” The line is devastating because of the gap between what the Jews of 1939 knew and what the reader after 1945 knows—a gap that can never be closed , no matter how many times Appelfeld writes about it .
In Hebrew , the term @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which literally means “ ascent , ” while leaving the country is yerida , “ descent ” —concepts that carry an unmistakable moral valence .
( In Amos Oz ’ s first novel , “ Elsewhere , Perhaps , ” from 1966 , the Dostoyevskian villain tries to seduce a kibbutz girl into leaving Israel and going back to Europe—the ultimate betrayal . )
Those directional terms are central to the parable that Appelfeld constructs in “ To the Edge of Sorrow ” —the story of a group of Jews who go up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new kind of society , only to have to come back down in the end , partly victorious and partly defeated .
Many of Appelfeld ’ s novels are concerned with such miniature societies .
“ Badenheim 1939 ” has its spa town , and “ The Iron Tracks ” its cast of itinerants ; “ The Retreat , ” from 1982 , is about an old-age home of sorts in twentieth-century Austria where a group of Jews go to unlearn their bad ( i.e.
, identifiably Jewish ) habits .
Such settings @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where certain human potentialities can be developed to an extreme , while excusing the novelist from the sometimes dreary obligations of social realism .

In 2018, Israel lost its two greatest novelists, Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld. Both were older than the country itself and had witnessed its entire dramatic history, but the ways they dealt with that history could not have been more different. Oz, born in Jerusalem in 1939, threw himself into the development of the young Jewish state: he wrote about the kibbutz where he lived and the psychology of the first Israeli Sabra generation, and assumed an active role in politics as a founder of the Peace Now movement. If you wanted to understand Israeli society in its first half century, Oz’s novels would be the natural place to start.
Reading Appelfeld, by contrast, tells you basically nothing about the country in which he lived—at least, not directly. Though he wrote in Hebrew, taught at an Israeli university, and received Israel’s highest literary honors, his imagination remained fixed in the land of his early childhood, which was Eastern Europe. Appelfeld wrote more than forty books—including “To the Edge of Sorrow,” which appeared in Hebrew in 2012 and is now out in a posthumous English translation by Stuart Schoffman (Schocken)—and almost all of them are set in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. They are often about people like his parents: assimilated, German-speaking, middle-class Jews who live in provincial cities, vacation at country resorts or in spa towns, and worship literature and music instead of the God of their ancestors.
And so they are all, inevitably, about the Holocaust, which annihilated those Jews and their civilization when Appelfeld was a young boy. He was born in 1932 in a village near Czernowitz—a city that was then in Romania and now belongs to Ukraine—and his childhood came to a terrifying end in 1941, when the fascist Romanian government deported the region’s Jews to labor camps. The soldiers who came to Appelfeld’s house shot his mother in the yard as he listened, then sent him and his father to a camp, where they were separated. Appelfeld escaped, hid in the forest, and spent the next few years roaming the countryside, either sleeping outdoors or lodging in Ukrainian homes, until he managed to take refuge with the approaching Red Army.
By the time he arrived in Palestine, in 1946, two years before the founding of Israel, Appelfeld had been utterly stripped of his identity. He had lost family, home, and country, as well as years of education and experience. “World War II went on for six straight years, but sometimes it seems to me that it lasted only one long night, from which I awoke a completely different person,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir, “The Story of a Life.”
The uniquely strange atmosphere of Appelfeld’s fiction comes from the fact that, because he could not remember his own past, he was forced to imagine it. “The Story of a Life,” in which Appelfeld tries to write about his experiences in a nonfictional register, is a valuable but meagre and fragmentary book. In his novels, conversely, Appelfeld writes with entranced certainty about experiences that could never have been his and worlds that don’t quite resemble the real one.
In this way, Appelfeld resembles Kafka, whose influence he discussed in a 1988 interview with Philip Roth: “He spoke to me not only in my mother tongue but also in another language which I knew intimately, the language of the absurd.” Absurd, in the philosophical sense of inescapable yet pointless, perfectly describes the journey that the narrator undertakes in Appelfeld’s book “The Iron Tracks” (1991). Set in the years after the Second World War, it is the story of Erwin Siegelbaum, a Holocaust survivor who spends his entire life on railroad trips, making an identical circuit of Austria’s train stations every year.
“The trains make me free. Without them, what would I be in this world? An insect, a mindless clerk,” Siegelbaum muses, evoking Gregor Samsa, who turned into an insect in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” His perpetual journey allows Erwin—which was Appelfeld’s first name, before he changed it to the Hebrew Aharon—to remain homeless in the country that is his only home. It is a parable of the Jews’ relationship to Europe after the Holocaust, able neither to live in the Old Country nor to leave it behind. “I have no stake here,” another Jewish traveller, whom Erwin encounters on a train, says. “I have nothing. Still, it’s hard for me to leave that nothing.”
For an Israeli novelist like Appelfeld, an imaginative obsession with Europe and the past was a kind of defiance. From the beginning, one of the key principles of Zionism was “negation of the Diaspora”: in their homeland, Jews were supposed to turn their backs on centuries of oppression. This idea was all the more urgent for the refugees who arrived in Israel after the Holocaust, and were seen as terrible reminders of the price of Jewish powerlessness. In “The Story of a Life,” Appelfeld recalls that, as a new arrival in Palestine, he was indoctrinated with the need to be totally reborn: his future was to require “the extinction of memory, a complete personal transformation and a total identification with this narrow strip of land.”
In “Badenheim 1939,” published in 1975, and perhaps his best-known book, Appelfeld wrote as lethal an indictment of the self-delusions of prewar European Jewry as any Zionist could want. A hideous idyll, the story takes place in an Austrian spa town, whose Jewish residents spend the last summer before the war listening to chamber music, eating pastries, and engaging in intrigues, while the government’s Sanitation Department issues ever more ominous proclamations about their impending deportation “to Poland.” On the book’s last page, the town’s inhabitants gather at the train station, and one of them remarks, “If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go.” The line is devastating because of the gap between what the Jews of 1939 knew and what the reader after 1945 knows—a gap that can never be closed, no matter how many times Appelfeld writes about it.
In Hebrew, the term for moving to Israel is aliya, which literally means “ascent,” while leaving the country is yerida, “descent”—concepts that carry an unmistakable moral valence. (In Amos Oz’s first novel, “Elsewhere, Perhaps,” from 1966, the Dostoyevskian villain tries to seduce a kibbutz girl into leaving Israel and going back to Europe—the ultimate betrayal.) Those directional terms are central to the parable that Appelfeld constructs in “To the Edge of Sorrow”—the story of a group of Jews who go up a mountain in order to found a new kind of society, only to have to come back down in the end, partly victorious and partly defeated.
Many of Appelfeld’s novels are concerned with such miniature societies. “Badenheim 1939” has its spa town, and “The Iron Tracks” its cast of itinerants; “The Retreat,” from 1982, is about an old-age home of sorts in twentieth-century Austria where a group of Jews go to unlearn their bad (i.e., identifiably Jewish) habits. Such settings serve Appelfeld as a fictional petri dish where certain human potentialities can be developed to an extreme, while excusing the novelist from the sometimes dreary obligations of social realism.
In “To the Edge of Sorrow,” the society in question is a band of Jewish partisans during the Second World War. Numbering fewer than fifty, they hide in the Ukrainian countryside, raiding farms for supplies and hoping to hold out until the arrival of the Red Army. This sounds like the premise of a wartime adventure story, but, although we do hear about shoot-outs and sabotage missions, Appelfeld’s narrative style is inherently unsuspenseful. His novels are not about waiting for what will happen next but about immersion in a timeless present, a bubble world that is all the more enthralling because you know it is about to pop. This attitude toward time is surely a reflection of Appelfeld’s own experience of the abrupt end of childhood, and maybe also of his period in the forests, which was so different from the life he had known that it hardly seemed to be happening in the real world.
The same is true of the collective life of the partisan band, whose experiences are narrated by one of its members, the seventeen-year-old Edmund. The leader is Kamil, a tough fighter who trains the young recruits and leads them on missions to blow up the Germans’ railroad tracks. But we soon learn that Kamil is also a spiritual seeker, whose goal is not just the preservation of Jewish lives but the renewal of Jewish life: “Our war is not merely to stay alive. If we do not come out of these forests as complete Jews, we will not have learned a thing.”
When Kamil leads the partisans to the summit of the mountain, he is not just securing a safe hideout for the coming winter. He is also Moses on Sinai, hoping to receive a new law that will make a broken people whole. He insists on setting aside time for studying religious books that the partisans have rescued from abandoned Jewish houses, even though his own acquaintance with Jewish texts is poignantly limited to the works of Martin Buber, a modern popularizer.
But most of the partisans, like most Jews in Appelfeld’s fiction, are secular people with no real connection to Judaism, and they see Kamil’s preaching as embarrassingly retrograde. Karl, the symbolically named communist, even relates how he used to go around bullying rabbis and making them promise to stop teaching Judaism. Only Grandma Tsirl, a very old woman, still possesses some of the simple faith of their ancestors. “Sometimes Grandma Tsirl seems like a priestess whose tribe has been lost and who tries to pass on to the remaining few, to the embers who have been plucked from the fire, beliefs that are beyond their understanding,” Appelfeld writes.
In this way, the partisans’ mountaintop, which was already a kind of Sinai, also becomes a version of the Alpine sanatorium where Hans Castorp undergoes his spiritual education, in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” Like Mann, Appelfeld surveys all the great quandaries of the twentieth century, only in their Jewish versions. Can modern people genuinely return to a pre-modern way of belief? (“How does one pray without believing the words of the prayer?” Appelfeld writes.) Is communism the heir of Judaism’s faith in a messianic future, or a perversion of that faith? Why did the Nazis, even after Germany began to lose the war, continue to prioritize killing Jews above urgent military aims? And how can Jews continue to raise children in a world where such hatred is possible?
By the end of the novel, none of these questions have been answered, because they can’t be. After further trials, the surviving partisans make their descent from the mountain back into real life, where they must face the continuing hostility of their neighbors and the challenge of starting their lives over. For Appelfeld and many other survivors after 1945, the only possible next step was to go to Israel, where they would be asked to forget the past in order to build the future.
“To the Edge of Sorrow” ends on a more ambiguous note. On the novel’s last page, a camp survivor asks one of the partisans where they should all go:
“Home,” he answers right away.
“Which home?” asks the survivor.
“There’s only one home we grew up in and loved, and we’re returning to it.”
But what is that home, which Appelfeld deliberately refuses to name? Is it Eastern Europe, whose Jews were almost all murdered? Is it Israel, which Zionism sees as the Jews’ historic home and to which it calls them to return? Or perhaps, for Appelfeld, the only possible home was like that mountaintop—a half-remembered, half-imagined place that could exist only in the pages of a book. ♦


newyorker--2020-03-02--How Socialist Is Bernie Sanders?

How Socialist Is Bernie Sanders?

Bernie Sanders , who for decades has described himself as a democratic socialist , is now the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination—a position he could solidify by winning a majority of the fifteen primary contests being held on Super Tuesday .
Sanders is running on a more ambitious platform than most American voters have seen in their lifetimes , promising to create a single-payer , national health-insurance program ; to offer free tuition at public colleges and trade schools and to cancel student debt ; and to launch a Green New Deal , which would fully transition electricity and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Many Democrats have objected to the sweeping ambition of Sanders ’ s proposals , questioning whether they can actually be passed and implemented and voicing concerns about whether Sanders ’ s vision of an expansive welfare state is in keeping with the Democratic Party ’ s agenda .
To talk about the Vermont senator ’ s campaign and its place in the annals of American progressivism , I recently spoke by phone with Michael Kazin , a professor of history at Georgetown University and a co-editor of Dissent ; he is currently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
During our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we discussed the ideological similarities and differences between Sanders and Franklin Delano Roosevelt , the distinctions between socialism and left-wing populism , and whether Sanders ’ s rise in a time of political upheaval is less shocking than people think .
Bernie Sanders likes to say that his proposals aren ’ t very radical if you take a long view of American history .
Do you agree with that ?
I agree and disagree .
On the one hand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rather than Eugene Debs .
He ’ s saying he ’ s going to complete the New Deal , and he talks about the Four Freedoms , which F.D.R .
talked about in his State of the Union Address in 1941 .
So , in a sense , he ’ s going along with the social democratic tinge of the New Deal and arguing Roosevelt would be supporting Medicare for All , free college , the Green New Deal , that F.D.R .
would be wanting to strengthen labor unions and tax the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the mainstream of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party .
On the other hand , he calls himself a socialist , which F.D.R .
never did , because he wasn ’ t .
The fact is also that Sanders is running in some ways against the so-called Democratic establishment and has never really become a Democrat , and he wants to transform the economy as utterly as he can .
That would make him the most left-wing candidate for President that any major party has ever nominated .
He ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more mainstream rhetoric within the mainstream Democratic Party—with ambitions which will clearly go beyond what any Democratic nominee has ever stood for .
He seems very shrewd about that , because on the one hand , clearly , a lot of his policies are popular .
On the other hand , as we know from polls , most Americans don ’ t like the idea of socialism .
Why did F.D.R .
decline to call himself a socialist ?
Was that for largely political reasons , or was there something about his policies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policies , or the policies of other socialists ?
First of all , there was a Socialist Party in the nineteen-thirties , led by Norman Thomas , a Presbyterian minister .
And they thought that F.D.R.
’ s policies were far too timid , because they really wanted to bring about a socialist society , not just a reformed capitalist one .
And F.D.R .
was very much in the tradition of the Democrats , from William Jennings Bryan to Woodrow Wilson to Al Smith in the nineteen-twenties , who wanted to give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But they were really trying to make sure that capitalism would be able to serve the needs of most people .
They wanted what you might call a moral capitalism , which they thought would be able to promote growth and more equity in the society but at the same time stay away from any kind of state ownership .
The public-works jobs created in the New Deal , for example , through the Works Progress Administration ( W.P.A . )
, the Civilian Conservative Corps ( C.C.C . )
, and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never intended to be permanent .
The government was only supposed to be an employer of last resort during the Depression .
Socialists at the time wanted to go much further than that .
After World War Two , most socialist parties in Europe gave up the idea of the total transformation of society and became what we now call social democrats , putting into place robust welfare programs , public housing , free or cheap transportation , and later on environmental regulations .
They gave up the dream of a worker-controlled society @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done that , too .
But by calling himself a socialist , I think he leaves the way open for some of his supporters who really do want to go to a purely democratic-socialist society .
And also , Bernie ’ s background is pretty different from Roosevelt ’ s .
Roosevelt was a rich guy , had some rich family , and didn ’ t want to do away with all rich people , whereas Bernie pretty much does .
I mean , peacefully do away with them .
Populism is another @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about .
How well do you think the label “ populist ” applies to Sanders ?
I think Sanders uses populist rhetoric of a certain kind , as Trump uses populist rhetoric of a certain kind .
Populist rhetoric is available to many different so-called outsiders in American politics .
Bernie ’ s populism , of course , is left-wing populism , which speaks to or for a large majority—the “ ninety-nine per cent , ” undifferentiated by race or ethnicity or national origin or religion—against the economic élite .
A more right-wing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speaks to the white middle of the population against certain élites at the top , especially cultural élites and the media and former liberal governing élites .
It is also very suspicious of the alleged unspoken alliance between the liberal élites at the top and people of color , especially immigrants , at the bottom .
And that ’ s a traditional kind of populism going back to the Ku Klux Klan in the nineteen-twenties , which had a very similar kind of rhetoric as Trump , although , of course , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How much do the history of American left-wing populism and the history of American socialism intersect or overlap ?
How would you differentiate between those two things ?
Socialism is a much more explicit , well-defined doctrine , which includes specific , well-defined policies : the ownership of major means of production , a larger welfare state , more powerful unions , civil liberties for all , especially those who dissent from conventional economic doctrines .
Whereas my definition of populism—and some people disagree with it—is as a way of talking about politics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the people ” as a moral group , a hardworking group beset by immoral élites .
And the definition of the élite changes depending on who ’ s talking about it , and the definition of the people changes depending on who ’ s talking about it as well .
So socialism is a doctrine , it ’ s an ideology , it has a history—an organizational history , a movement history—whereas , from my point of view , though populism began with a movement and a party in the eighteen-nineties in this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boundaries of that particular historical reference .
And it ’ s now all over the place .
You can find people talking about populists on the right , on the left , in the center .
It ’ s really a way of opposing the people to the élites , and what matters are the definitions of the élites and the people .
There are no populist policies in the way there are socialist policies .

Bernie Sanders, who for decades has described himself as a democratic socialist, is now the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination—a position he could solidify by winning a majority of the fifteen primary contests being held on Super Tuesday. Sanders is running on a more ambitious platform than most American voters have seen in their lifetimes, promising to create a single-payer, national health-insurance program; to offer free tuition at public colleges and trade schools and to cancel student debt; and to launch a Green New Deal, which would fully transition electricity and transportation to renewable energy within ten years.
Many Democrats have objected to the sweeping ambition of Sanders’s proposals, questioning whether they can actually be passed and implemented and voicing concerns about whether Sanders’s vision of an expansive welfare state is in keeping with the Democratic Party’s agenda. To talk about the Vermont senator’s campaign and its place in the annals of American progressivism, I recently spoke by phone with Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University and a co-editor of Dissent; he is currently writing a history of the Democratic Party. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the ideological similarities and differences between Sanders and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the distinctions between socialism and left-wing populism, and whether Sanders’s rise in a time of political upheaval is less shocking than people think.
Bernie Sanders likes to say that his proposals aren’t very radical if you take a long view of American history. Do you agree with that?
I agree and disagree. On the one hand, he’s channelling F.D.R. rather than Eugene Debs. He’s saying he’s going to complete the New Deal, and he talks about the Four Freedoms, which F.D.R. talked about in his State of the Union Address in 1941. So, in a sense, he’s going along with the social democratic tinge of the New Deal and arguing Roosevelt would be supporting Medicare for All, free college, the Green New Deal, that F.D.R. would be wanting to strengthen labor unions and tax the rich, and that he—Sanders—is not out of the mainstream of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
On the other hand, he calls himself a socialist, which F.D.R. never did, because he wasn’t. The fact is also that Sanders is running in some ways against the so-called Democratic establishment and has never really become a Democrat, and he wants to transform the economy as utterly as he can. That would make him the most left-wing candidate for President that any major party has ever nominated. He’s sort of straddling a more legitimized politics—with more mainstream rhetoric within the mainstream Democratic Party—with ambitions which will clearly go beyond what any Democratic nominee has ever stood for. He seems very shrewd about that, because on the one hand, clearly, a lot of his policies are popular. On the other hand, as we know from polls, most Americans don’t like the idea of socialism.
Why did F.D.R. decline to call himself a socialist? Was that for largely political reasons, or was there something about his policies that separate them from Sanders’s policies, or the policies of other socialists?
First of all, there was a Socialist Party in the nineteen-thirties, led by Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister. And they thought that F.D.R.’s policies were far too timid, because they really wanted to bring about a socialist society, not just a reformed capitalist one. And F.D.R. was very much in the tradition of the Democrats, from William Jennings Bryan to Woodrow Wilson to Al Smith in the nineteen-twenties, who wanted to give working people more power in the society. But they were really trying to make sure that capitalism would be able to serve the needs of most people. They wanted what you might call a moral capitalism, which they thought would be able to promote growth and more equity in the society but at the same time stay away from any kind of state ownership. The public-works jobs created in the New Deal, for example, through the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.), the Civilian Conservative Corps (C.C.C.), and some of the other alphabet agencies were never intended to be permanent. The government was only supposed to be an employer of last resort during the Depression. Socialists at the time wanted to go much further than that.
After World War Two, most socialist parties in Europe gave up the idea of the total transformation of society and became what we now call social democrats, putting into place robust welfare programs, public housing, free or cheap transportation, and later on environmental regulations. They gave up the dream of a worker-controlled society, and I think Bernie Sanders has done that, too. But by calling himself a socialist, I think he leaves the way open for some of his supporters who really do want to go to a purely democratic-socialist society.
And also, Bernie’s background is pretty different from Roosevelt’s. Roosevelt was a rich guy, had some rich family, and didn’t want to do away with all rich people, whereas Bernie pretty much does. I mean, peacefully do away with them.
Populism is another subject you’ve written a lot about. How well do you think the label “populist” applies to Sanders?
I think Sanders uses populist rhetoric of a certain kind, as Trump uses populist rhetoric of a certain kind. Populist rhetoric is available to many different so-called outsiders in American politics. Bernie’s populism, of course, is left-wing populism, which speaks to or for a large majority—the “ninety-nine per cent,” undifferentiated by race or ethnicity or national origin or religion—against the economic élite. A more right-wing populism, like Trump’s, speaks to the white middle of the population against certain élites at the top, especially cultural élites and the media and former liberal governing élites. It is also very suspicious of the alleged unspoken alliance between the liberal élites at the top and people of color, especially immigrants, at the bottom. And that’s a traditional kind of populism going back to the Ku Klux Klan in the nineteen-twenties, which had a very similar kind of rhetoric as Trump, although, of course, a lot of the references are different.
How much do the history of American left-wing populism and the history of American socialism intersect or overlap? How would you differentiate between those two things?
Socialism is a much more explicit, well-defined doctrine, which includes specific, well-defined policies: the ownership of major means of production, a larger welfare state, more powerful unions, civil liberties for all, especially those who dissent from conventional economic doctrines. Whereas my definition of populism—and some people disagree with it—is as a way of talking about politics or a way of talking about “the people” as a moral group, a hardworking group beset by immoral élites. And the definition of the élite changes depending on who’s talking about it, and the definition of the people changes depending on who’s talking about it as well.
So socialism is a doctrine, it’s an ideology, it has a history—an organizational history, a movement history—whereas, from my point of view, though populism began with a movement and a party in the eighteen-nineties in this country, it sort of slipped the boundaries of that particular historical reference. And it’s now all over the place. You can find people talking about populists on the right, on the left, in the center. It’s really a way of opposing the people to the élites, and what matters are the definitions of the élites and the people. There are no populist policies in the way there are socialist policies.


newyorker--2020-03-02--“House,” by Stanley Plumly

“House,” by Stanley Plumly

Door frames off the square , the inside sweating tile-brick walls uncovered , the checkerboard linoleum floors tilted toward infinity or at least in the direction of my northern bedroom window , which in winter is half-frozen with ice thick enough some mornings to draw on with a fingernail , while in the dust of summer the heat though everywhere fills up the sunburned space with what my sister calls the angels , who live also in the attic , no less famous for its stars and star-like rain that sometimes slips on through the ceiling into the shy air @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with nothing in his hands , the angst coming down like air the weight of gravity through the whole length of his body , a lifetime of falling and slow settling like night fog or soft rain , as if there were a lake inside him and above that the cloud-float of a mind , until a day , like now , the water rises to the limits of its form : and it does no good to say that fathers are the fathers of their own misery , it does no good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when all he is doing is standing there , alone , in silence , disappearing into himself .

Audio: Read by David Baker.
Door frames off the square, the inside
sweating tile-brick walls uncovered,
the checkerboard linoleum floors tilted
toward infinity or at least in the direction
of my northern bedroom window, which
in winter is half-frozen with ice thick
enough some mornings to draw on
with a fingernail, while in the dust of
summer the heat though everywhere
fills up the sunburned space with what
my sister calls the angels, who live also
in the attic, no less famous for its stars
and star-like rain that sometimes slips
on through the ceiling into the shy air.
A man standing before his children with
nothing in his hands, the angst coming
down like air the weight of gravity through
the whole length of his body, a lifetime
of falling and slow settling like night fog
or soft rain, as if there were a lake inside
him and above that the cloud-float of
a mind, until a day, like now, the water
rises to the limits of its form: and
it does no good to say that fathers are
the fathers of their own misery, it does
no good to take it all to heart, when
all he is doing is standing there, alone,
in silence, disappearing into himself.


newyorker--2020-03-02--Moses Sumney’s World of Possibilities

Moses Sumney’s World of Possibilities

When we ’ re young , a love song can seem like a beacon .
It translates the mystery of feeling—the erratic moods and palpitations associated with growing up—into the stability of language .
Pop music is built on these pithy excavations of fantasy and desire , even as this actual thing called love remains ephemeral .
But the love song can just as easily become a kind of provocation , an unworkable template , a list of ways we can ’ t fit ourselves within a supposedly universal norm .
In 2017 , the singer Moses Sumney released his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a meditation on his inability to engage in romantic attachment .
It ’ s not that he is incapable of feeling .
It takes listening to only a few seconds of Sumney ’ s singing to become aware of how much and how deeply he feels , and of his skill for cramming as much of himself as possible into every second of his music .
A single line delivers a continuum of these feelings , expressed by a strident falsetto , a coy growl , a fey , broken whisper .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and loneliness—not quite mopey despair so much as a quest for what to do with a surplus of energy .
“ I fell in love with the in-between / Coloring in the margins , ” Sumney recalls on “ Neither/Nor , ” a brisk , rising song on his new album , “ græ.
” He ’ s reminiscing about his youth , singing softly about being a boy , breathing out “ smoke with no fire.
” Since he began playing small clubs in Los Angeles , in the early part of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fashion-forward Sumney has fit the profile of someone destined for stardom .
But there is a mismatch between the fluid , slippery music he makes and the narrow range of identities and poses allowed to black artists .
He has spent much of his career exploring his own emotional language rather than writing sing-along anthems , expanding his own world rather than settling comfortably into the one he found himself in .
At times , “ Aromanticism ” feels sparse and withdrawn ; “ græ ” is more expansive and , consequently , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Virile ” opens with a string of carefree “ ahs ” and a shimmering harp , before giving way to a series of cathartic arena-rock drumrolls .
Sumney goes high and low in search of a different version of manhood .
“ You wan na slip right in / Amp up the masculine / You ’ ve got the wrong idea , son / Dear son , ” he sings , stretching that last word out with a teasing , almost nagging falsetto .
The song is quickly followed by “ Conveyor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in assembly line .
It ’ s as if Sumney were trying to lull a chorus of malfunctioning machines into submission .
His voice manages to cut through the chaos and the clatter , bringing with it a soothing synth refrain , offering a model of resilience sometimes more captivating than the words themselves .
Philosophers , scientists , and pop fans alike have wondered what in a song triggers emotion .
Is it the lyrics ?
Is a happy song merely any song that makes us happy ?
Or is there something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a certain way ?
Nowadays , our biggest pop stars are often our moodiest .
What makes Sumney so enigmatic is the way his work calls to mind an observation by the psychologist Carroll Pratt : that “ music sounds the way emotions feel.
” A song conveys the storm and the stress of how it feels to feel , the manic turns of joy and ecstasy , the sudden onset of all emotions at once .
Lyrics may anchor us in a scene or a situation of being up or down .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ about what it means to feel , even if you have no idea how to name the force that is overtaking you .
Sumney , who is in his late twenties , was born in San Bernardino , about sixty miles east of Los Angeles .
Both of his parents were Christian pastors from Ghana .
Earlier this year , he published an essay in “ Fight of the Century : Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases , ” in which he discussed his parents ’ status , during his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t fully aware of at the time .
When Sumney was ten , the family briefly returned to Ghana .
He ended up back in Southern California for high school , and began singing in the school choir .
He attended U.C.L.A.
, where he pursued creative writing .
He befriended the Los Angeles R. & B. trio King , who invited him to open some shows .
Sumney ’ s performances mainly consisted of him singing over ethereal guitar loops .
Audiences quickly recognized that there was something special about his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out how to use it .
Dave Sitek , best known for his work with the post-punk group TV on the Radio , lent him a four-track recorder .
Sumney ’ s first few singles were folky and stripped down .
He collaborated with artists like Beck and Solange , and opened for Sufjan Stevens and James Blake , while deciding what to do for himself .
Sumney ’ s early recordings had a withdrawn , almost shy quality , as he tried to make his singing blend in with pretty strums and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as his songs grew more sophisticated , he began exploring the full range of his voice .
Sometimes this meant holding back , calling to mind the quiet , frisky moments of Amy Winehouse .
Other times , his voice was bold and restless , almost overpowering the track .
Sumney can be reminiscent of Björk : you hear a song and imagine that a less interesting singer might have turned it into an easy hit , rather than a performance that is uniquely the artist ’ s own .
“ græ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost literal : although its first half was released online in February , the rest of it , as well as the physical version , isn ’ t coming out until May .
Among the forty-odd contributors to “ græ , ” the most prominent is the experimental electronic musician Daniel Lopatin .
Lopatin , who also records as Oneohtrix Point Never , is a master at evoking the feeling of the present : a seamless seesaw between anxious dread and ecstatic bliss .
He and Sumney are like sparring partners , testing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quavering falsetto with machine growls , playful rudeness with New Age synths .
Sumney seems less forlorn this time , as he invites others to help navigate these swirls of sound .
The seriousness and the self-possession that define Sumney ’ s work make it easy to miss out on moments of humor .
His singing sounds epic and timeless , and then you listen closely and hear a reference to the fantasy series “ Animorphs , ” or a question about whether he ’ s merely someone ’ s “ Friday dick.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a willowy track that will be released in May , he describes a dog that ’ s “ whiter than a health-food store.
” That these songs are often about loneliness lends the quiet invitation to cross lines a kind of awkward mischievousness .
“ Sometimes I want to kiss my friends , ” he sings on the lush , tiptoeing “ In Bloom.
” “ You don ’ t want that , do ya ?
/ You just want someone to listen to ya / Who ain ’ t tryna screw ya.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ video for “ Polly , ” a gorgeous , lilting guitar ballad about a relationship at an impasse .
Sumney looks directly at the camera for the song ’ s duration .
As the lyrics appear onscreen , he cries and cries .
It ’ s both hard to watch and impossible not to .
It ’ s also impossible to understand what he is feeling in that moment—which is why all I could do was laugh .
His singing is absorbing and sensual , drawing you past the words , which will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ græ ” begins with a meditation on the relationship between the words “ isolation ” and “ island.
” Throughout , there are spoken segments in praise of multiplicity and knowing oneself , and riffs railing against society ’ s penchant for classification .
Perhaps this is the fate of knowing yourself too well—you may always be misunderstood .
On “ Me in 20 Years , ” Sumney addresses a fortysomething version of himself , wondering what the future holds and whether the “ imprint in my bed ” remains .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ like a muffled lounge singer , wishing to “ dedicate my life / My life to something bigger / Something bigger than me.
” For now , Sumney ’ s songs feel like a billowy shelter , “ a space inside which you can exist.
” Sometimes he sounds like a man , other times like a woman , and then you realize that it ’ s not so much the distinction that matters as how one makes a home of one ’ s choosing in that space .
Resisting binaries or expectations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gray isn ’ t just a halfway point between black and white .
It is its own shade , its own color , its own world of possibilities .
♦

When we’re young, a love song can seem like a beacon. It translates the mystery of feeling—the erratic moods and palpitations associated with growing up—into the stability of language. Pop music is built on these pithy excavations of fantasy and desire, even as this actual thing called love remains ephemeral. But the love song can just as easily become a kind of provocation, an unworkable template, a list of ways we can’t fit ourselves within a supposedly universal norm.
In 2017, the singer Moses Sumney released his début album, “Aromanticism,” a meditation on his inability to engage in romantic attachment. It’s not that he is incapable of feeling. It takes listening to only a few seconds of Sumney’s singing to become aware of how much and how deeply he feels, and of his skill for cramming as much of himself as possible into every second of his music. A single line delivers a continuum of these feelings, expressed by a strident falsetto, a coy growl, a fey, broken whisper. “Aromanticism” lingers on themes of ambivalence and loneliness—not quite mopey despair so much as a quest for what to do with a surplus of energy.
“I fell in love with the in-between / Coloring in the margins,” Sumney recalls on “Neither/Nor,” a brisk, rising song on his new album, “græ.” He’s reminiscing about his youth, singing softly about being a boy, breathing out “smoke with no fire.” Since he began playing small clubs in Los Angeles, in the early part of the last decade, the charismatic, fashion-forward Sumney has fit the profile of someone destined for stardom. But there is a mismatch between the fluid, slippery music he makes and the narrow range of identities and poses allowed to black artists. He has spent much of his career exploring his own emotional language rather than writing sing-along anthems, expanding his own world rather than settling comfortably into the one he found himself in.
At times, “Aromanticism” feels sparse and withdrawn; “græ” is more expansive and, consequently, more open to vulnerability. The song “Virile” opens with a string of carefree “ahs” and a shimmering harp, before giving way to a series of cathartic arena-rock drumrolls. Sumney goes high and low in search of a different version of manhood. “You wanna slip right in / Amp up the masculine / You’ve got the wrong idea, son / Dear son,” he sings, stretching that last word out with a teasing, almost nagging falsetto. The song is quickly followed by “Conveyor,” as in belt, as in assembly line. It’s as if Sumney were trying to lull a chorus of malfunctioning machines into submission. His voice manages to cut through the chaos and the clatter, bringing with it a soothing synth refrain, offering a model of resilience sometimes more captivating than the words themselves.
Philosophers, scientists, and pop fans alike have wondered what in a song triggers emotion. Is it the lyrics? Is a happy song merely any song that makes us happy? Or is there something about its structure that makes us feel a certain way? Nowadays, our biggest pop stars are often our moodiest. What makes Sumney so enigmatic is the way his work calls to mind an observation by the psychologist Carroll Pratt: that “music sounds the way emotions feel.” A song conveys the storm and the stress of how it feels to feel, the manic turns of joy and ecstasy, the sudden onset of all emotions at once. Lyrics may anchor us in a scene or a situation of being up or down. But Sumney’s music is more about what it means to feel, even if you have no idea how to name the force that is overtaking you.
Sumney, who is in his late twenties, was born in San Bernardino, about sixty miles east of Los Angeles. Both of his parents were Christian pastors from Ghana. Earlier this year, he published an essay in “Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases,” in which he discussed his parents’ status, during his childhood, as undocumented immigrants—something he wasn’t fully aware of at the time. When Sumney was ten, the family briefly returned to Ghana. He ended up back in Southern California for high school, and began singing in the school choir. He attended U.C.L.A., where he pursued creative writing.
He befriended the Los Angeles R. & B. trio King, who invited him to open some shows. Sumney’s performances mainly consisted of him singing over ethereal guitar loops. Audiences quickly recognized that there was something special about his voice; he just needed to figure out how to use it. Dave Sitek, best known for his work with the post-punk group TV on the Radio, lent him a four-track recorder. Sumney’s first few singles were folky and stripped down. He collaborated with artists like Beck and Solange, and opened for Sufjan Stevens and James Blake, while deciding what to do for himself.
Sumney’s early recordings had a withdrawn, almost shy quality, as he tried to make his singing blend in with pretty strums and delicate, lo-fi sound collages. But, as his songs grew more sophisticated, he began exploring the full range of his voice. Sometimes this meant holding back, calling to mind the quiet, frisky moments of Amy Winehouse. Other times, his voice was bold and restless, almost overpowering the track. Sumney can be reminiscent of Björk: you hear a song and imagine that a less interesting singer might have turned it into an easy hit, rather than a performance that is uniquely the artist’s own.
“græ” ’s resistance to closure is almost literal: although its first half was released online in February, the rest of it, as well as the physical version, isn’t coming out until May. Among the forty-odd contributors to “græ,” the most prominent is the experimental electronic musician Daniel Lopatin. Lopatin, who also records as Oneohtrix Point Never, is a master at evoking the feeling of the present: a seamless seesaw between anxious dread and ecstatic bliss. He and Sumney are like sparring partners, testing each other’s capacity to match quavering falsetto with machine growls, playful rudeness with New Age synths. Sumney seems less forlorn this time, as he invites others to help navigate these swirls of sound.
The seriousness and the self-possession that define Sumney’s work make it easy to miss out on moments of humor. His singing sounds epic and timeless, and then you listen closely and hear a reference to the fantasy series “Animorphs,” or a question about whether he’s merely someone’s “Friday dick.” On “Two Dogs,” a willowy track that will be released in May, he describes a dog that’s “whiter than a health-food store.” That these songs are often about loneliness lends the quiet invitation to cross lines a kind of awkward mischievousness. “Sometimes I want to kiss my friends,” he sings on the lush, tiptoeing “In Bloom.” “You don’t want that, do ya? / You just want someone to listen to ya / Who ain’t tryna screw ya.”
In December, Sumney released a video for “Polly,” a gorgeous, lilting guitar ballad about a relationship at an impasse. Sumney looks directly at the camera for the song’s duration. As the lyrics appear onscreen, he cries and cries. It’s both hard to watch and impossible not to. It’s also impossible to understand what he is feeling in that moment—which is why all I could do was laugh. His singing is absorbing and sensual, drawing you past the words, which will never suffice anyway, toward something deeper.
“græ” begins with a meditation on the relationship between the words “isolation” and “island.” Throughout, there are spoken segments in praise of multiplicity and knowing oneself, and riffs railing against society’s penchant for classification. Perhaps this is the fate of knowing yourself too well—you may always be misunderstood. On “Me in 20 Years,” Sumney addresses a fortysomething version of himself, wondering what the future holds and whether the “imprint in my bed” remains. On “Gagarin,” he sounds like a muffled lounge singer, wishing to “dedicate my life / My life to something bigger / Something bigger than me.” For now, Sumney’s songs feel like a billowy shelter, “a space inside which you can exist.” Sometimes he sounds like a man, other times like a woman, and then you realize that it’s not so much the distinction that matters as how one makes a home of one’s choosing in that space. Resisting binaries or expectations isn’t just about negation. Gray isn’t just a halfway point between black and white. It is its own shade, its own color, its own world of possibilities. ♦


newyorker--2020-03-02--Cathy Yan’s Accidental Movie Career

Cathy Yan’s Accidental Movie Career

Cathy Yan , the director of “ Birds of Prey , ” the new DC Comics movie , starring Margot Robbie as the anarchic antiheroine Harley Quinn , became a big-studio filmmaker the same way that Hemingway describes going bankrupt : gradually , then suddenly .
In 2018 , shortly after going to Sundance with her first feature , “ Dead Pigs , ” a satirical look at a rapidly modernizing Shanghai , she landed a meeting with Warner Bros. “ I put together a sizzle reel , ” Yan recalled the other day , sipping a matcha oat-milk latte @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in SoHo .
“ But it was not your typical sizzle reel.
” To a homemade remix of “ Diamonds Are a Girl ’ s Best Friend , ” Yan set a collage of clips that embodied the worst of modern womanhood : “ Like , scenes from ‘ Bachelor ’ proposals , the De Beers diamond commercial , Kim Kardashian ’ s vampire facial , Fox anchors talking about women , Trump saying ‘ Grab ’ em by the pussy ’ ” —stuff that might make a girl want to smash @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the video , there was just silence.
” At thirty-three , Yan is the second woman to solo-direct a modern superhero film , after “ Wonder Woman ” ’ s Patty Jenkins .
The theme of “ Birds ” is female revenge , its style an explosion of glam and grunge .
Harley , who has been dumped by her boyfriend , the Joker , goes on a rampage around Gotham in short shorts , a rainbow tinsel jacket , and Gwen Stefani pigtails ; her weapon of choice is a paintball gun @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glitter bomb .
Yan ’ s look is more professional .
With her honey-blond bob , tortoiseshell earrings , and navy coat , she could pass for a consultant , a job that she briefly considered when she was an undergrad at Princeton .
“ Everyone was doing it , ” she explained .
( Remember , kids : friends don ’ t let friends apply to McKinsey . )
“ I remember my case interview .
I was , like , ‘ I don ’ t care how many Ping-Pong balls are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , she went to work at the Wall Street Journal and eventually landed a position reporting in Hong Kong .
Improbably , the Journal may be responsible for her film career .
“ Digital was just starting , and they literally shoved a video camera in my hand and said , ‘ You ’ re young , shoot something , ’ ” Yan said .
Stepping out into a cold rain , she strolled toward Chrystie Street .
“ I ’ m a global wanderer , ” she said—she was born in China @ @ @ @ @ @ @ went to high school in Hong Kong— “ but New York is my home.
” She based her Gotham on the city of the eighties , a burg with grit and heart : “ I ’ m sick of seeing post-apocalyptic visions of Gotham , where everyone ’ s homeless and being all sad.
” On Grand Street , she stopped to join a crowd gathered on a handball court .
An amplified voice addressed the group in Mandarin .
“ Oh yeah , I forgot , happy Chinese New Year , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so bad , because it ’ s hard to celebrate it in America , and there are so many freaking days of it.
” She approached a stand selling Chinese-style beef jerky , produced in Queens .
One of the venders , dressed in an embroidered red jacket and a crown , with a phony Confucian beard—Caishen , the Chinese god of wealth—announced , “ Trump said , ‘ American-made.
’ We back him up !
” She exchanged holiday salutations with the man .
“ What I just said there literally means @ @ @ @ @ @ @ money.
’ The Chinese love money , it ’ s just a matter of fact.
” Yan spent her early childhood with her grandparents in Shanghai .
Her father had been granted a visa to study sociology in the United States , a rarity in pre-Tiananmen China , and left before Yan was born .
Her mother followed two years later .
Yan didn ’ t make the move until she was four .
“ I met my parents at the airport , ” she said .
Her next project , for A24 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Heart , ” Jenny Zhang ’ s 2017 book of stories about Chinese immigrants growing up in New York .
Yan has a lot of family in China , and she visits often .
“ I spent a fair amount of time in Beijing , ” she said .
“ It was the big , happening place .
I was there for the Olympics .
There were these really cheesy bars we would go to .
I had a favorite night club called Chocolate that felt like it was run by the Russian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if that makes any sense.
” Outside Wu ’ s Wonton King , Yan struggled to light some sparklers she had just bought .
An elderly passerby stopped to cup his hands around Yan ’ s , shielding the flame from the elements .
“ He says it ’ s raining and it ’ s windy , ” Yan said , when he ’ d left .
“ There ’ s a metaphor in here somewhere.
” She produced a party popper from a bag and began to twist .
Tiny hundred-dollar bills @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and took a photo .
Then she headed off , shedding miniature Benjamins as she walked .
Maybe there was a metaphor in there , too .
♦

Cathy Yan Illustration by João Fazenda
Cathy Yan, the director of “Birds of Prey,” the new DC Comics movie, starring Margot Robbie as the anarchic antiheroine Harley Quinn, became a big-studio filmmaker the same way that Hemingway describes going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. In 2018, shortly after going to Sundance with her first feature, “Dead Pigs,” a satirical look at a rapidly modernizing Shanghai, she landed a meeting with Warner Bros. “I put together a sizzle reel,” Yan recalled the other day, sipping a matcha oat-milk latte in a coffee shop near her apartment, in SoHo. “But it was not your typical sizzle reel.” To a homemade remix of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Yan set a collage of clips that embodied the worst of modern womanhood: “Like, scenes from ‘Bachelor’ proposals, the De Beers diamond commercial, Kim Kardashian’s vampire facial, Fox anchors talking about women, Trump saying ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’ ”—stuff that might make a girl want to smash the patriarchy. “After I showed the video, there was just silence.”
At thirty-three, Yan is the second woman to solo-direct a modern superhero film, after “Wonder Woman” ’s Patty Jenkins. The theme of “Birds” is female revenge, its style an explosion of glam and grunge. Harley, who has been dumped by her boyfriend, the Joker, goes on a rampage around Gotham in short shorts, a rainbow tinsel jacket, and Gwen Stefani pigtails; her weapon of choice is a paintball gun with the force of an AK-47—annihilation by glitter bomb.
Yan’s look is more professional. With her honey-blond bob, tortoiseshell earrings, and navy coat, she could pass for a consultant, a job that she briefly considered when she was an undergrad at Princeton. “Everyone was doing it,” she explained. (Remember, kids: friends don’t let friends apply to McKinsey.) “I remember my case interview. I was, like, ‘I don’t care how many Ping-Pong balls are in the vending machine.’ ” Instead, she went to work at the Wall Street Journal and eventually landed a position reporting in Hong Kong. Improbably, the Journal may be responsible for her film career. “Digital was just starting, and they literally shoved a video camera in my hand and said, ‘You’re young, shoot something,’ ” Yan said.
Stepping out into a cold rain, she strolled toward Chrystie Street. “I’m a global wanderer,” she said—she was born in China, grew up in Virginia, and went to high school in Hong Kong—“but New York is my home.” She based her Gotham on the city of the eighties, a burg with grit and heart: “I’m sick of seeing post-apocalyptic visions of Gotham, where everyone’s homeless and being all sad.” On Grand Street, she stopped to join a crowd gathered on a handball court. An amplified voice addressed the group in Mandarin. “Oh yeah, I forgot, happy Chinese New Year,” Yan said. “I always feel so bad, because it’s hard to celebrate it in America, and there are so many freaking days of it.”
She approached a stand selling Chinese-style beef jerky, produced in Queens. One of the venders, dressed in an embroidered red jacket and a crown, with a phony Confucian beard—Caishen, the Chinese god of wealth—announced, “Trump said, ‘American-made.’ We back him up!”
She exchanged holiday salutations with the man. “What I just said there literally means ‘Hope that you can make more money.’ The Chinese love money, it’s just a matter of fact.”
Yan spent her early childhood with her grandparents in Shanghai. Her father had been granted a visa to study sociology in the United States, a rarity in pre-Tiananmen China, and left before Yan was born. Her mother followed two years later. Yan didn’t make the move until she was four. “I met my parents at the airport,” she said. Her next project, for A24, is an adaptation of “Sour Heart,” Jenny Zhang’s 2017 book of stories about Chinese immigrants growing up in New York.
Yan has a lot of family in China, and she visits often. “I spent a fair amount of time in Beijing,” she said. “It was the big, happening place. I was there for the Olympics. There were these really cheesy bars we would go to. I had a favorite night club called Chocolate that felt like it was run by the Russian mob. It was very free, if that makes any sense.”
Outside Wu’s Wonton King, Yan struggled to light some sparklers she had just bought. An elderly passerby stopped to cup his hands around Yan’s, shielding the flame from the elements. “He says it’s raining and it’s windy,” Yan said, when he’d left. “There’s a metaphor in here somewhere.” She produced a party popper from a bag and began to twist. Tiny hundred-dollar bills shot into the air. Yan squealed and took a photo. Then she headed off, shedding miniature Benjamins as she walked. Maybe there was a metaphor in there, too. ♦


newyorker--2020-03-02--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons March 9, 2020

“ Myra , if you really mean it about restructuring , let ’ s lose the shepherd and keep the @ @ @

“Myra, if you really mean it about restructuring, let’s lose the shepherd and keep the sheepdogs.”
Cartoon by Victoria Roberts