So This Is The New Year
Some Rosh Hashanah thoughts, a few announcements, and a visit to a brilliant gallery show
To those of you of the Jewish persuasion reading this, Shana Tova! To those who are not, this week marks Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Days of Awe. As my people must overcomplicate everything, we actually have four New Years. Passover marks another one of these new years— it is actually when the months of the calendar turn over again— and thus, while the calendar year changes with Rosh Hashanah, it is actually the seventh month of the year. (The other two New Years mark, among other things, when the period begins taxing animals and plants respectively).
Anyway, this is a time for the reviewing of one’s life, for seeking to become a better person, and atoning for one’s past mistakes. I am doing this, but this is territory too private for a newsletter. Or at least, for this newsletter right now. I will say that there is a grim extra resonance in Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur this year; they fall quite late and in between the two comes the anniversary of October 7th.
Longtime readers of mine know my politics. I am not a Zionist, in the sense of believing that the Jewish people need to control a nation state to be safe and free. I am opposed to ethno-states of all kinds, and that includes ones built for me and supported in my name. Even if I supported such a goal, I think there is little sign that the state of Israel actually accomplishes— or could accomplish—safety and freedom. Even if I believed that Israel could accomplish those goals, I think the cost to our souls of maintaining that state— a cost that included, even prior to Israel’s decimation of Gaza over the last year, ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid—is too high.
I hope that in this time of reflection and of atonement, a time really of becoming, that we can mourn all the lives lost, and work together for peace, freedom, safety, and equality for all.
—-
A few announcements:
I am teaching a class! It’s a remote course with Great Place Books, which means no matter where you live, you can participate. The class is focused on dramatic action for prose writers. It’s about how you can use the fundamental tools of storytelling, ones we’ve been writing and thinking about for literally thousands of years to make your essays, short stories, novels, and so on more alive, vibrant, and compelling. We’ll study texts ranging from classic novellas to celebrity profiles to figure out the mechanics lurking underneath them, and then bring those lessons to our own writing.
For those of you who are fans of The Method, this class grew out of my deep study of Stanislavski, and the ways he and his heirs Richard Boleslavsky and Stella Adler broke down text, and thought about how action could be used to reveal everything from the world of the play to its themes and politics. In theater, we’re taught to think about dramatic action all the time, it is the fundamental molecule of the complex animal of theater, but I found that often in my conversations with prose writers, it feels like a very obscure set of craft skills and guidelines, often reduced into super reductive paint by numbers formats like Save the Cat. I want to avoid that, thinking less about prescriptive rules and more about teaching you the possibilities so you can make them your own and harness them to work for writing.
You can read more about the class and register here.
Second, I’ve returned to something I love doing— writing assessments of actors. These are long form pieces that aren’t exactly profiles, and aren’t exactly reviews, more like a deep dive into a specific performer, their career, and what their body of work might mean. I’ve written three recently, and I think you’ll like them:
For the Criterion’s website, I explored what made Philip Seymour Hoffman so special by digging in to his work on The Savages, a brilliant film from Tamara Jenkins about two adult siblings caring for the father, who alternated between abusing and neglecting them throughout their childhood. It’s a surprisingly funny film, with career-highlight work from many people involved, including Laura Linney and Peter Friedman. I also got to interview Hoffman’s acting teacher/coach to find out how he actually worked. You can read that here.
For Slate, I’ve written two assessments. The first is of Dennis Quaid, an actor whose work I’ve always admired, even as he has almost never actually been in a good movie. I try to puzzle through that contradiction, through what it means to be a good actor with a truly regrettable body of work, while watching his new film Reagan, an awful, relentlessly dishonest hagiography of one of our worst Presidents.
The other assessment is of Colin Farrell, a wonderful and very subtle actor giving a bizarre and extremely unsubtle performance in Max’s The Penguin. When I was a young adult going to the movies, Farrell was basically joke, a pretty boy with a drinking problem who was the leading man in several flops, some of which (like Oliver Stone’s Alexander) felt like fodder for future seasons of MST3K. But Farrell has proven himself a subtle, sensitive, extremely funny and charming actor, a guy who could’ve been the next Cary Grant, if they still made the kind of movies that star Cary Grant. Which is why it’s so surprising to see him done a fat suit and a metric ton of prosthetics to give a completely unrecognizable performance in The Penguin. It shouldn’t work… but it does! You can read my thoughts on why here.
—-
Yesterday, I had the good fortune to visit Onishi Gallery on the Upper East Side to spend some time with their new show The Spirit of Noto: Urushi Aritsts of Wajima. The exhibit features perhaps two dozen pieces of Japanese lacquer work by nineteen different living artists. Every piece in it is extraordinary, revealing new details and depths the longer you stare at them.
This box, titled Young Maples is by Yamagishi Kazuo, a Living National Treasure of Japan. The Living National Treasures are masters of traditional arts and crafts given official recognition by the government. THere are only ever fifty five of them at a time; in order to become one, a previous one has to die. I asked if anyone ever murdered a National Treasure to free up a space on the list, and was told that the median age of the cohort is somewhere in the 80s, so new spaces open up fairly regularly.
Anyway, the box. The prevalence of fake lacquer work made out of shiny plastic belies how powerful seeing one of these hand-made object sin person is. Each little etch, each bit of pigment, each line, is made by hand. Layers upon layers of lacquer made from the sap of the Urushi tree is applied. No detail is too small to go unnoticed. That green and gold stripe across the box was made by carving tiny troughs in a lattice work pattern, applying light green paint so that it would flow into those cuts, and then repeating the process of cutting and flooding with dark green and then again with gold. Here is a zoomed-in picture so you can see the level of work this detailing took:
Young Maples took two years to make, roughly as long as my last book.
Every object in the collection was like this, a work of hand-made brilliance, forged from intense dedication to an ancient art form, a level of pure focus and attention to detail I am not sure I am capable of ever achieving, even in my chosen art form of the sentence.
As I stared at the objects and talked with the gallerists about them, I found myself intensely moved, almost to tears. To spend time with these objects is to leave the mechanized present behind for a while, to enter into the deeper time of historical craft. Every time I turned around, I would notice some new little detail, and I would turn to the friend I went with and say, “Did we already look at that piece?” Most of the time, the answer was yes; it had been made new by the force of my own noticing. The level of detail both encourages and rewards longer contemplation, heightens the perceptions, causes the viewer to notice more and think more deeply about their sensory experience of the world, if only for a few minutes. To take such care with the objects of this world, to invest so deeply in one’s mastery of a form, and then to work that mastery on the world to make it more beautiful, is an incredible gift to us all.
During the show, I began to understand the power of idolatry, and why the Abrahamic faiths might be so opposed to it. With tree sap, and wood, and metal dust, the artists of Wajima created objects capable of providing their viewers with an actual spiritual experience, one that brings us both inside and outside of ourselves simultaneously. Even without investing the objects with divinity, they had the kind of power any new religion might well be scared of.
The objects in the exhibit come from Wajima in the Noto Peninsula. Wajima has been in the news this year. On New Year’s Day (The January 1 kind, not the Rosh Hashanah kind), a 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit the Noto Peninsula. Hundreds of people lost their lives and destruction of infrastructure was widespread. Many of the artists in the show lost their studios. Less than two weeks ago, Wajima was again hit, this time by floods. “It was like what is happening in North Carolina,” Nana Onishi, who owns the gallery, told me. The exhibit doubles as a benefit for the artists. If you happen to be in New York over the next month, I highly recommend you check it out.