The New Yorker, 2005-05-09

[fiefoe]

"A Little Learning" / Jeffrey Goldberg

    '(Doug Feith) was indefatigable in his own defense'.
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"Bitter Bamboo" / John Updike

• (On Su Tong's "My life as Emperor"): a shrugging, dandyish tone... (his) morbid fantasia wears an opaque lacquer of willful elegance
• Like Voltaire's "Candide", this parade of misfortunes ends with a garden.
• Their wanton weakness and self-absorption, and the natural poetry both are capable of, rebuke the societies that have made life on earth hellish. Bad societies offer no incentive to grow up.
  

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"Parked Cars" / Peter Schjeldahl (c.f.)

• (On Robert Bechtle's photo-realist "'61 Pointiac"): I sense the droning, sheer duration of days in suburban neighborhoods in mild climates, an immensity laced with a familiar terror: boredom, our foretaste of being dead. .. Bechtle is a fascinated diver in the ocean of interminable American afternoons.
• Bechtle’s paintings do not yield first impressions. I immediately feel that I know them thoroughly, as if from a prior life. This may be an effect of their congruence with the sorts of things that the brain, in self-defense, refuses to remember. .. Bechtle zeroes in on the always seen and never noticed—without giving it importance.
• “Alameda Gran Torino” (1974), a masterpiece, is a nova of banality. The station wagon can’t help but be only and exactly what Detroit fashioned... A closeness between the green of the car and that of a background shadow is unusual, but so perfectly meaningless that your mind may panic at the waste of its energy in beholding the fact. Then something peculiar can happen: your reflexive sense of the picture as a photograph breaks down, and the object’s identity as a painting, done entirely on purpose, gains ground... The whole work is a feat of resourceful painterly artifice. At last, it’s as if the original photograph were a ghost that died and came back as a body.
• Life is incredibly complicated, and the proof is that when you confront any simple, stopped part of it you are stupefied.
  

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"Personal Battles" / Anthony Lane:

    'There's something ungrounded about the (uberkids), a reluctance to verse themselves in the ways of the world.'