Paper Chase
I write this, as I write almost everything, on a computer. The words you’re reading will remain "in" assorted computers until--or unless--I (or you) hit Control-P and turn them into ink on paper. Only then will they become part of the physical world.
Does that make a difference? Words are words, readers are readers, whether they are scrolling down a webpage or thumbing through a magazine. But there is a difference to a writer. I still remember the thrill forty-some years ago when my first column appeared in the Notre Dame Observer. It was called "A Message from Ann," a loving tribute to my sister, who had Down Syndrome. Ann is gone now--she died a year ago--but there's still a yellowing copy of "A Message from Ann" in my filing cabinet.
Twenty-five years ago, when paper was still king, there was much more in my so-called "filing cabinet,” the piles of newspapers and magazines in various corners of my office. Here was a three-foot high stack of Village Voices, there an equally high pile of New York Times Arts sections. Then the shelves: New Yorkers to the left, Downbeat Magazines to the right, Art in America, American Theatre, Opera News—whatever monthly I thought should be at hand just in case I want to look up an artist or recent event.
Those were the (dusty, cluttered) days.
But I miss my stacks of yellowing papers. The permanence of the printed word gave it heft, authority. Its creation assumed a process—author, editor, copy-editor, proofreader, typesetter—that surrounded it with an aura that instilled trust. One’s choice of reading material was usually informed by a long-term relationship with an author or institution. Not due to the whim (or insidious calculation) of an algorithm.
The digital revolution is not without its delights. The permanence of print is comforting but daunting, particularly for someone whose copy editing skills are fair at best. But here, a friend alerts me to a “parellal” or a “wierd” and it’s fixed with just a few keystrokes. No apologies. No "we regret the errors.” It's as if the writing/editing process never stops. As the old author saw goes, “You don’t finish a book, you abandon it.” But online, the tweaking can go on and on and on.
Big Shoulders (and Sharp Knives)
Jeremy Allen White in The Bear.
Like a king-size Chicago Italian beef sandwich with extra giardiniera, The Bear, at first, was a bit much. Christopher Storer’s love letter to the Chicago food scene is a feast for fans of the Second City—ripe with lots of local color and gorgeous aerial shots. But in the first frenzied season, Storer rubbed our noses in the kitchen chaos and kept the emotions turned up to eleven. Perhaps that was "Chicago" to him--a very loud and anarchic mix of David Mamet and John Belushi. But I was craving an occasional quiet palate cleanser.
There are plenty of reasons for the chaos. Carmen Barzatto (Jeremy Allen White) returns home to Chicago after his brother’s suicide to take over his family’s Italian Beef restaurant. Since he’s an accomplished chef who has sautéed and chiffonaded his way through gigs at Noma and The French Laundry, he naturally wants to dump the over-salted au jus and start over—with an eye toward a Michelin star or two of his own. To get there, he has to navigate $300K in debt, coke-peddling co-workers, blown fuses, and the aftermath of a kid’s birthday party where the Kool-Aid was accidentally laced with Xanax.
Ayo Edebiri in The Bear
The second season settled down and found an easier groove, mostly by distilling the chaos into a single, harrowing flashback that explained the Berzatto family dynamics (featuring an Emmy-worthy performance by Jamie Lee Curtis as the troubled family matriarch).
In the present, Storer keeps the countdown to the restaurant opening front and center, but gives his supporting characters some attention. Carmen sends his less-than-Michelin-worthy staff out to culinary school or to extended internships at A-List restaurants. We get a sweet taste of their struggles and successes, often in quiet, almost meditative, scenes—featuring lovely cameo performances from Will Porter and Olivia Colman—which dig in to the nature of excellence in food and life.
Ultimately, The Bear is structured like a classic heist movie. Instead of a Vegas casino robbery, we’re counting down to the restaurant’s opening night. We meet the quirky “crew,” watch them navigate the SNAFU’s along the way, then look over their shoulder for a nail-biting night of nerve-wracking glitches and small triumphs. With these soulful characters, we’re rooting for them all the way.
Parker Rolls
If James Parker was around in my magazine hoarding days, a stack of Atlantic Monthly’s would be front-and-center on my shelves. When a new issue arrives—in a metal box just outside my front door (remember those?)—I immediately open it to the back page to see what he is Ode-ing to this month. He explains the genesis of his short monthly column thus:
James Parker
So the Odes were born. Short exercises in gratitude. Or in attention, which may in the end be the same thing. Encounters with the ineffable, encounters with the highly frigging effable. The grace of God, the piece of toast. Seeking always what my friend Carlo calls the odeness: the essence, the thing of the thing, the quality worth exploring and if possible exalting. Songs of praise, but with (I hoped) a decent amount of complaining in there: a human ratio of moans.
His writing tackles the big stuff, too. Wet your whistle on these brief, back-page apertifs, and gird yourself for some of Parker’s entrees. He drives a sky-blue Toyota Camry across the country, and lives to write the tale. He muses on T.S. Eliot’s apocalyptic poem, “The Waste Land,” on its 100th anniversary, where he finds contemporary equivalents in Rick & Morty and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The pleasures of his insights, his verbal zigs and zags, remind me of some of my favorite critic/writers from my past: James Wolcott, Fran Lebowitz, John Leonard. And here he is, just the kind of apocalyptic irreverence our times need.
Harlem Nocturnes
Colson Whitehead
Yes, Colson Whitehead is back. And Ray Carney is back, too. Carney is the furniture salesman—and sometime criminal “fence”—at the center of Whitehead’s 2021 novel, Harlem Shuffle, the author’s glorious reconnaissance of Harlem life in the 1960s. Crook Manifesto brings Carney into the 1970s, where his furniture business is booming and his criminal dabbling is pretty much in the rear-view mirror. But he promised his daughter tickets to the Madison Square Garden Jackson Five concert, which puts him “back in the game.” It’s a vivid snapshot of Harlem that is, in Walter Moseley’s words, “stirring with the unease of change and oppression.”
But if the vision and history is unsettling, the prose is as vivid and vibrant as a Soul Train dance floor. Here’s the way Whitehead introduces one of Carney’s employees at his furniture store, who calls everyone, “baby.”
“He belonged to that tribe of black player so nimble in his skin that all others were baby—old man, young mother, red-faced beat cop. Your average square would use the world slick to describe him, on account of that jaunty smile and stream of hectic patter, which Larry would take as a compliment. Slick was an asset in the sales game. he was only twenty-one but had lived many ives, even if Carney suspected he had emerged full grown from a vat of Harlem Cool five minutes before he first laid eyes on him.”
Geome-tree
A walk in the woods: asymptotes, hyperbolas, perpendiculars, fractals.
Have a good week.