vicarious experience for the insensitive
some things I’ve seen or read or heard recently
The Nutcracker
Choreography by George Balanchine, music by Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, performed by the dancers of New York City Ballet
I’d only seen this version once before, a couple of years ago, and that time it reignited my desire to dance, something I did quite seriously for fifteen years. The studio I attended in my teens didn’t do a full-length Nut, just excerpts; I danced “Snow” and “Flowers,” and those corps-led numbers— “Snow” doesn’t even have one featured principal role—are still my favorites to watch. They’re small marvels of synchronicity and syncopation, the individuals fusing into a single entity, for moments disaggregating, and then cohering once again. In them, the music takes physical shape. I saw it last Friday and have been listening to the score ever since.
Charade
1963, dir. Stanley Donen, 105 min.
After watching it, I played with the question of who would be the perfect cast for a present-day remake. George Clooney in Cary Grant’s role is obvious: an aging ham, a salt-and-pepper cut-up, manly without trying to be, charming while trying only a little. He’s only missing Grant’s rather large physical presence—a Google search tells me Grant was only one inch taller than Clooney, and while that may be technically true I do not believe it to be so spiritually—its imposing effect amplified by Audrey Hepburn’s diminutiveness. My little mental game quickly made apparent the disappearance of the gamine type from the Hollywood roster. Funny and sweet yet capable of reserve, feminine but not womanly, rather wily, and, of course, endlessly charming—she’s a character rather more complex than most of the women we see in Hollywood movies of this tenor today. Her existence as a social creation is obvious; she is a woman born of her circumstances, a set of reactions to limits and expectations. Meg Ryan would have been the right choice had a remake been made in the 1990s; in the 2000s Jonathan Demme actually did direct a remake, with Thandiwe Newton and Mark Wahlberg, who has all the charm of a reheated steak. Emma Stone is too brash, Jennifer Lawrence too tall, Aubrey Plaza too sardonic. My choice ended up being Alison Brie, though even in my imagination I hope this remake never gets made.
An Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles
on view at the American Folk Art Museum through March 1, 2026
I find the idea that textiles are part of an ecological system that starts with plants in soil and ends with, for example, a quilt on a bed, to be equal parts obvious and overwhelming. If I really take time to ponder it I start to wish to never purchase another garment ever again. I tend to chafe at the idea that we can fix anything—the environment, the economy—by changing our consumption habits, but doing so can certainly alter our relationship to the world around us as well as to ourselves. I rarely buy anything new anymore, but even sifting through racks at the thrift store and combing through carefully selected pieces at a vintage shop have lately become exercises in remembering just how many things already exist and then picturing masses of these items growing until they consume the world. I wonder what mental images arose for the unidentified artist who made the floral appliqué quilt on view at the American Folk Art Museum during the exercise of passing a piece of thread down through a swath of fabric for one millimeter, then up for one, then down, and so on, in one line after another set maybe four millimeters apart, until that swath of fabric was adequately tacked down to the one below it and then, one by one, stitching down hundreds of pieces of cloth representing flowers and greenery. I imagine the motion would alter one’s body, beckon it to stillness, and that the slow march of progress across the field of fabric over months would install a sense that time can contain so much and, at the same time, so very little. Not every quilt at this show was as intricate as all that, or as exacting, but even the ones put together in uneven pieces and mismatching elements convey resolution and intention and, above all, care. A refusal to take the material for granted.
“Avant-Garde and Kitsch”
1939, Clement Greenberg
Without a doubt popular culture has changed since Greenberg wrote this piece—for one, TV hadn’t even reached mass popularity—but his use of material and class analysis makes most if not all of the ideas feel current and alive despite their age and despite the fact that they’ve served as the basis for so much of the critical theory written between its publication and today. Some examples:
“True, the first settlers of Bohemia—which was then identical with the avant-garde—turned out soon to be demonstratively uninterested in politics. Nevertheless, without the circulation of revolutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never have been able to isolate their concept of the “bourgeois” in order to define what they were not. … Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in “detaching” itself from society, it proceeded to turn around and repudiate revolutionary politics as well as bourgeois.” (I don’t think the exact same is true of the short-lived scene of Dimes Square, but the general outlines certainly correspond.)
“It is a platitude that art becomes caviar to the general when the reality it imitates no longer corresponds even roughly to the reality recognized by the general. Even then, however, the resentment the common man may feel is silenced by the awe in which he stands of the patron of this art. Only when he becomes dissatisfied with the social order they administer does he begin to criticize their culture. Then the plebeian finds courage for the first time to voice his opinions openly. Every man, from Tammany aldermen to Austrian house-painters, finds that he is entitled to his opinion. Most often this resentment towards culture is to be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism, and latest of all, fascism.” (Some things this brought to mind: tradwives, OnlyFans, MAGA hats.)
“The same point can be made with respect to kitsch literature: it provides vicarious experience for the insensitive with far greater immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do.” (All I could think about here was Taylor Swift.)