Innholdsfortegnelse for September 14-27, 2020 i New York Magazine

SIX MONTHS INTO THE PANDEMIC, I’ve developed a new gymless fitness routine that is, under the circumstances, reasonably robust. My husband and I bought a Peloton bike. I do at-home strength-training workouts with dumbbells, and I’ve tried to get used to jogging with a mask on. I’ve been doing yoga, which has allowed me to tell myself that—while I may have put on a few pounds—I’ve never been more flexible. I’ve grown especially used to exercising with an onscreen instructor who can’t see me, which means I can shout as many obscenities as I like without bothering anyone (a habit that has made it hard for me to adjust to the occasional outdoor group workouts that friends have invited me to). I’m not alone in all this change. The pandemic…

HIP-HOP STARTED OUT in the parks and traveled around the globe, picking up accents and flavors in every time zone, rubbing elbows with other genres and cultures, and adapting to new climates and temperaments. But the spark that inspired the early bombers, breakers, DJs, and rappers to revolutionize art, dance, fashion, music, and language endures in New York. When kids in the Bronx needed party music to distract from the tumult of the ’70s, DJ Kool Herc figured out how to extend the climaxes of funk records, making long and euphoric vamps out of sweet seconds of ecstasy. Drum-machine fanatics took after auteurs like Prince and Miles Davis, assembling clattering percussion parts that would lead to early-’80s gems like Run-D.M.C.’s “Sucker M.C.’s (Krush-Groove 1).” A happy studio accident in the…

ANTEBELLUM is out September 18. THE MOVIE Antebellum opens with an intricate tracking shot that winds through a southern slave plantation. It’s late afternoon, and the light slanting through the trees is as golden as the dress worn by a young girl picking flowers by the white-pillared main house. It’s an aggressively bucolic tableau meant to recall Gone With the Wind, complete with enslaved people bustling around the grounds alongside Confederate soldiers. Then the camera finds its way into a clearing, where an escape attempt is being viciously thwarted. A woman’s desperate sprint toward the tree line is presented in extravagant slow motion, capturing every panicked contortion of her face as she’s dragged to the ground and murdered. The violence is filmed with the same uncanny lushness as everything that…

COASTAL ELITES HBO. STREAMING NOW. ONE OF THE HUNDRED REASONs this short, horrifying coronavirus moment has felt so long culturally is that its artistic questions don’t seem to change or advance. What makes something “filmed theater” as opposed to “digital performance”? Should we call any performance on a screen “television”? We go around and around, wondering if definitions even matter. I spend hours thinking about categorization, but I know fussing about genre is how critics have always entertained themselves. We have to argue about something. At least HBO’s foray into quarantine creation, Coastal Elites, offers the swift gift of clarity. This show is obviously theater, regardless of the delivery system. Originally conceived by the playwright Paul Rudnick as a group of comic political monologues, it was on track to appear…

WHAT CAN BE DONE? On the eve of Labor Day weekend, three of the four largest fires in state history were still burning, a Bay Area ring of fire, with none of them close to “contained.” That Friday night, the Creek Fire broke out in Fresno County and quickly grew past 100,000 acres in two days. The state’s offshore winds, long understood as the driver of the most devastating and out-of-control fire disasters, had not yet even arrived. When they did, they ignited something like a whole new fire season compressed into just a few days. The Bear Fire, in Northern California, burned through 250,000 acres in a single day—roughly as much as burned in the entire state throughout all of 2019. In Oroville and the surrounding foothills, 20,000 people…

WITH THE CORONAVIRUS vaccine hurtling toward its public debut as early as late fall, the United States is about to enter a new and precarious phase of the pandemic response. Regardless of when a vaccine becomes available, the rollout is almost destined to be messy for logistical reasons, as public-health officials must ready a massive campaign to convince 330 million citizens to take it. But after months of misinformation and disingenuous optimism from the White House—underlined by revelations that President Trump knew all along that the coronavirus is deadly—will anyone trust the administration’s assurances about the new vaccine’s safety? There are already clear signs that the public is suspicious about the rigor with which a vaccine will have been assessed before its release, and experts are increasingly concerned that conflicting…

The defendant looked uncomfortable as he stood to testify in the shabby courtroom. Dressed in a dark suit and somber tie, he seemed aged, dimmed, his posture noticeably stooped. The past year had been a massive comedown for the 76-year-old former world leader. For decades, the bombastic onetime showman had danced his way past scores of lawsuits and blustered through a sprawl of scandals. Then he left office and was indicted for tax fraud. As a packed courtroom looked on, he read from a curled sheaf of papers. It seemed as though the once inconceivable was on the verge of coming to pass: The country’s former leader would be convicted and sent to a concrete cell. The date was October 19, 2012. The man was Silvio Berlusconi, the longtime prime…

MULAN DIRECTED BY NIKI CARO. DISNEY+. PG-13. MULAN DOESN’T SING “Reflection” anymore. In fact, no one sings in the new live-action remake of Mulan, which trades the 1998 film’s musical numbers for wuxia-inflected action scenes and only deploys its most famous ballad to underscore select pivotal moments for its heroine. The 2020 Mulan, played by Liu Yifei, is made of sterner stuff than her animated predecessor, a character from the tail end of the Disney Renaissance era who was adapted from a Chinese folktale about a young woman who disguises herself as a man to take her infirm father’s place when he is conscripted to serve in the emperor’s army. Mulan has become a princess without an “I wish” song, which feels, in some way, fitting—she was never a royal…

MOVIES 1. See Tenet Wear a mask. In theaters. Movie theaters are back across the U.S. (though closed in New York indefinitely). If possibly exposing yourself to COVID-19 as you sit with (hopefully masked) strangers in the dark seems worth the risk, then Christopher Nolan’s latest is as decent a spectacle as any for a reintroduction to big-screen viewing. A big, brawny action movie with a nearly incomprehensible time-warping conceit, it has bullets that travel backward, John David Washington and Robert Pattinson in tailored suits, and globe-hopping. ALISON WILLMORE TV 2. Watch Jeopardy! With a new daily double. ABC. What is the beloved quiz show that returns for its 37th season with Alex Trebek as host and Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings as a consulting producer, which implies that whenever Trebek…

MY MOTHER’S EX-HUSBAND, Jim (who, until I turned 8, I’d thought was my uncle), had Google alerts set for me. Every time my name appeared in the news—if you can call gossip websites “news”—he was notified immediately via email. Jim was well meaning but an alarmist; he wished to maintain a relationship with me, and these alerts provided him with perfect opportunities to reach out. ¶ I was walking through Tompkins Square Park with a friend and her dog and sipping a coffee when Jim’s name lit up my phone. “See you’re getting sued. My advice …” he began. Jim was a lawyer, familiar with people calling him up to ask for legal advice and therefore used to doling out his opinion even when it wasn’t solicited. “I guess this…

TEVE BARNES WAS FURIOUS. Over the past 25 years, he had helped turn a small-time Buffalo personal-injury law firm into a New York institution, one with eye-popping profits and an empire of advertisements so widespread you wondered if everyone who got into an accident in the state would end up as its client. But now everything he’d built was at risk of falling apart. How could anyone, especially his own partner, Ross Cellino, want to turn off the rivers of green that flowed into their coffers? It was April 2017, and Barnes’s emails boiled with frustration, each one a verbal roundhouse to the partner yoked to him by an ampersand and thousands of TV, radio, and billboard spots. “We have made 10+ each for the last few years, with nothing…

SO JUST RECENTLY, my brother and I started playing together again,” says Eleanor Friedberger, who, along with her brother, Matthew, formed the band the Fiery Furnaces, which had been on hiatus since 2011 while they each engaged in various solo projects. They recorded their new single, “Down at the So and So on Somewhere,” in February in a studio upstate (they are working on their next album now) not too far from this house (pictured), where she lives with the artist Michael Berryhill. The Fiery Furnaces were formed in Brooklyn in 2000, when that was still a vibrant scene. Friedberger moved to Ulster County in 2013, when she couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore as a full-time musician. She bought a place with a friend in Kerhonkson, a…

ONLYFANS—A SUBSCRIPTION APP that allows people to charge fans for access to photos, videos, and other content—has been around since 2016. But in the past year, it has gained mainstream attention for one very specific genre: sex work. Despite the common assumption that getting rich on OnlyFans is as simple as posting a tit pic and waiting for the cash to roll in, running a big account is a lot of work. Lena the Plug (pictured), one of the app’s most popular content creators, walks us through how she does it. STEP NO. 1 Keep multiple accounts. Lena has one free account (that helps her attract more fans) and one premium account (that fans can pay a monthly membership fee to unlock); additional videos are available on a pay-per-view basis.…

THE BOYS AMAZON PRIME. MANY HEADS EXPLODE in season two of The Boys, Amazon’s wry, messy, gruesome, sharp superhero drama. Some of the head explosions are figurative, as when a character’s surprising backstory is revealed or a particularly surprising twist arrives. This is The Boys, though—a show that loves its gore almost as much as it loves sardonic music cues and skewering capitalism—so most of the minds that get blown in season two are gleefully literal. Heads pop open at unexpected moments, splattering gray matter hither and yon. Mid-conversation, a head may simply cease to be, replaced by a bright spray of red and a sound like dropping an open carton of orange juice on the floor. “Heads will roll” is such an old-fashioned way of thinking about violence. “Heads…