The Hairball Review

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  • The Biennale of Falling Things: A Walk Through

    The tenth Biennale, installed in the long gallery of the Tabbycroft Institute, presents some two hundred objects, each of them pushed from a high surface by a paw. The pieces include a pen (Gallery 1), an unfinished mug of tea (Gallery 4) and a glass of water, whose fall is rendered in a continuous loop for thirty one minutes. It is rigorous work.

    Curator Wilhelmina Argyle has declined to explain the curation. “Gravity is the explanation,” she told me, before nudging my notebook toward the edge. I admired the nerve. The catalogue, at $38, is itself a hardback that has been dropped, repeatedly, and the dent is part of the price. Standouts: the cactus, the remote, and a single vitamin. Not to be missed, unlike the vitamin.

  • The Laptop: An Appreciation of Accidental Heating

    Few inventions of the last century have so improved the posture of a cat. The modern laptop, I submit, is a heated mat that also, on occasion, contains a human’s work. Its warm patch, near the left hinge, reaches a gentle 41 degrees Celsius after twenty minutes of what the owner calls a spreadsheet. I have never seen a spreadsheet. I have only seen the heat.

    Critics grumble that sitting on the keyboard deletes things. This is not a flaw but the work’s central gesture. In one celebrated incident, I produced forty lines of the letter “j” into an email intended for a client of the company. The client replied warmly. Few poets have achieved as much in their first draft.

  • Milk: A Eulogy

    I was told, many years ago, that milk would make me ill. I choose to see this as a challenge, and in the intervening decades I have treated every saucer as a seminar in consequences. Milk is the great unreliable narrator of the pantry: thick with promise, thin on follow through, and followed in my case by a long evening in the bathroom.

    The new oat milk at the Grain and Whisker deli, $6.40 a carton, is a different proposition entirely. It tastes like a glass of porridge that has forgiven you. I drank it in one sitting and looked into the middle distance. Is it milk? It is not. Is it better than milk? I will say only that I have written my will, and that it contains a clause about oats.

  • The Opera of Three in the Morning

    It begins, as the finest operas do, with an unexplained grievance. At 3:07 a.m. the soprano, a grey tabby of rare lung capacity, takes her position at the foot of the stairs and delivers an aria in a language she appears to have invented for the occasion. There is no libretto. There is only the corridor, the dark, and the mounting sense that someone is meant to be doing something.

    Act two, a gallop, was somewhat overlong. The ensemble knocked over a lamp, which I thought a bold directorial choice, though the lamp did not. I rise to applaud, in spirit, from under the duvet. Four paws, and a note for the management: the human in the bed was not consulted, and did not enjoy it, and that is the point.

  • Corrections and Clarifications

    In our August issue we described the sofa at Pennyfeather House as “tasteful.” It is not. It is a sofa, and it is blue. We regret the error. We also stated that Mr. Alaric Tuttle’s meow was “distinctive,” when it is simply loud, and that the cheese platter at the Brindle Society dinner contained “at least six cheeses.” There were four, and one was a candle.

    Readers have asked us to apologise for the phrase “a dog, but in spirit only.” We decline. We will, however, note that the dog in question, a Mr. Barnaby, wrote to say he found the description fair. Finally, the Review wishes to clarify that its editor did not “fall” from the pantry shelf on the 14th. He descended, with intent.

  • Farm to Floor: The Ethics of the Garden Mouse

    There is a movement afoot, and it has a hashtag, to eat only what has wandered across one’s own lawn. Proponents, such as the formidable Madame Ysolde of Brackwater Lane, speak of provenance, seasonality and a short supply chain, by which they mean twelve feet. I attended a supper at her potting shed and was served a vole, fresh, unadorned, offered with what I can only call pride.

    I declined. I explained that I was fond of the chef’s work in principle and my digestion in practice. She nodded with tremendous contempt. The meal, by the account of the other guests, was exceptional. I can only say that I have never sat so near to a thing so near to being a rival.

  • Why I Have Stopped Reviewing Water

    For eleven years I reviewed the water of this city with the diligence of a sommelier and the patience of a cat on a counter. The still bowl, the dripping tap, the toilet, the puddle by the bins: I assessed them all. But last Thursday, I tasted the new ceramic fountain in the Hallworth conservatory and realised I had nothing left to say. It was wet. It was cold. It moved.

    Water, I have come to believe, is beyond criticism, much as breathing is, or the postal service. I will go on drinking it from the glass beside the bed at 3 a.m. while you sleep, but I shall do so as a private citizen. This column will now cover the tap. The tap is a more serious matter.

  • Five Scratching Posts and the Men Who Bought Them

    The sisal column at $29 is honest, if a little proud. The carpeted tower at $119, with its three platforms and its little hammock, is the sort of object an architect buys for a cat he has never met. The pole wrapped in rope that smells faintly of a boat is, I regret to say, the best of them, and the one I now use daily and in secret.

    The fifth post, a modernist concrete slab priced at $410, cannot be scratched at all, and is thus the only one that is truly art. Its maker, the sculptor Ottoline Brandt, told me it was “about resistance.” I told her it was about her cat, who sat on it. We have not spoken since, which is also about resistance.

  • The Laser Dot: Derivative, Yet Impossible to Look Away From

    The red dot has been called the defining visual motif of our age, usually by those who have been chasing it. I find it a deeply unoriginal work. It goes left. It goes right. It stops, which is the closest the piece comes to a thesis, and then it goes left again. There is no character arc and no catharsis, since the dot cannot be caught, and I note that this is also true of most careers.

    Still, I watched it for forty minutes in the hallway of a Mr. Desmond Pratchley, and I chased it for thirty nine of them. Criticism requires distance, I told myself, tumbling over an ottoman. Two paws. Four, if you add the ottoman.

  • Le Tuna Rouge: Eleven Courses, One Fish

    Chef Aurelio Finch has built a career on the radical proposition that tuna, when approached with sufficient seriousness, can be served eleven ways. The first course is tuna. The second is tuna with a smaller piece of tuna. By the fifth, a foam arrives, which I took to be an apology. The seventh, “Tuna, Remembering Itself,” was cold, flaked and utterly unrepentant, and I admit I wept slightly into my napkin.

    The service is attentive to the point of surveillance, the wine list is a single bowl, and at $240 per cat the evening is steep. Yet I left satisfied, a state I distrust. Three and a half paws. Reservations are taken by blinking only, and I recommend arriving hungry and leaving humbled.