Innholdsfortegnelse for March 1-14, 2021 i New York Magazine

ONCE, AS A CHILD RIDING in the back seat of the family station wagon, I told my mom that someone was following us. I’d seen spy movies on TV; I thought it would be fun to evade some imaginary bad guys. But she reacted with real fear, urging me to lie horizontal so I couldn’t be seen. It wasn’t until the garage door closed behind us that she allowed me to sit up. My cheeks were hot from where I’d pressed them against the car’s upholstery, and I was sweaty from the guilt of making her feel so afraid. Like so many Asian American immigrants, my parents left everyone and everything they knew in Taiwan to build a better life for my brother and me. One of their biggest dreams…

1. Samuel Omare Manager at Playground Coffee Shop Wearing a Playground Coffee Shop sweatshirt and matching tote bag. 2. Jane Shuai Co-owner of New Top Jewelry Wearing own coat and blouse. 3. Miyako Bellizzi Costume designer Wearing an Elara hat (the Safdie brothers’ production company) and her mother’s vintage New York Knicks T-shirt from the ’70s. 4. Kulwinder “Jani” Singh Owner of Punjabi Deli Wearing a Punjabi Deli crewneck and Timberlands. 5. Rajni Jacques Fashion director at ’Allure,’ co-founder of Building Black Bed-Stuy Wearing an authentic Starter Mets bomber jacket, Building Black Bed-Stuy shirt, and Mets scarf. “When my parents moved to America from Haiti via Mexico, they settled in Queens. Shea Stadium was so close to home, and we would go to games often.…

IN APRIL 2013, Prue McCallum, a recent Fashion Institute of Technology grad, ended up at the first of what would become one of New York’s most combustible Berlin-inspired raves. “Shade” was thrown by the nightlife impresarios Ladyfag and Seva Granik, whose parties brought together glittery club kids, serious techno heads, shirtless Chelsea twunks, and black-clad fashion-industry strivers. The 23-year-old had RSVP’d to a Facebook invitation with the location “TBA Day of Show” that led hundreds of people to a giant warehouse in East Williamsburg with red and blue lasers, neon lights, and glow-in-the-dark drinks. McCallum, who at the time identified as a cisgender gay man but now identifies as nonbinary, showed up ready to lose themselves in a set. They didn’t expect to brush shoulders with Alexander Wang. Their meeting…

1977/2017 ‘Cutting Out CONYT’ O’Grady’s first act as an artist was a series of collages called “Cutting Out the New York Times,” which she made by cutting up the paper’s Sunday editions. Forty years later, she reprinted and reshuffled her earlier work, creating a new series of tense, poetic diptychs. Above: Cutting Out CONYT 12. 1980/1994 ‘Miscegenated Family Album’ A series of diptychs pairing depictions of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti with photos of O’Grady’s late sister, Devonia, and Devonia’s family. Above: Miscegenated Family Album (Cross Generational), L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia’s youngest daughter, Kimberley. 1980–83/2009 Mlle Bourgeoise Noire O’Grady’s first performance persona, whom she imagined as a 1950s Caribbean Bostonian beauty queen. She crashed exhibitions at Just Above Midtown gallery and the New Museum, with her brother-in-law playing…

IF YOU WANT TO… BUY A NEW PIANO FIRST: AN UPRIGHT OR A GRAND? Grands produce a deeper sound and a wider range of tones but are more expensive (at least $10,000, generally, whereas uprights start around $5,000) and have larger soundboards (the wooden piece that transmits the vibration of the strings). It’s always best to try out a piano in person. “Even two pianos that came off the assembly line the same day from the same factory will feel and sound different,” says Sarah Binder Mehta, president of rental shop PianoPiano. Even if they’re out of your budget, it’s worth visiting Steinway Hall in midtown to test out the company’s made-in-Astoria pianos. For a wider variety of high-end brands (like Bechstein, Bösendorfer, and Fazioli), most everyone we spoke with…

THE ENDORSEMENT Sip sublime Irish coffee. WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS—the Dead Rabbit being No. 1—you don’t go to an Irish bar for Irish coffee. Old Folgers from the Bunn warmer, an out-of-whack coffee-to-whiskey ratio, and freshly spewed Reddi-wip about sums it up. But when done right, Irish coffee is a mood lifter nonpareil, a little miracle of perfection, little being the operative word. According to Dale DeGroff, who consulted on the Dead Rabbit’s recipe, you want no more than four ounces of freshly brewed coffee, one and a half ounces of Irish whiskey, an ounce of demerara syrup, and an inch of cream on top. Balance is key, and so is whipping the cream à la minute, and only to the point where it barely reaches soft, not stiff, peaks. The…

MOVIES / ALISON WILLMORE Speak, Memory A disorienting close-up on a mind that’s beginning to fray. ANTHONY (ANTHONY HOPKINS) has come unstuck in time. He can never seem to find his watch, and he suspects that someone has taken it—maybe one of the women hired to be his caregivers or the man he encounters in the living room who claims to be married to his daughter. Inevitably, it turns out to be in the bathroom, where he has always hidden his valuables, a habit that’s not nearly as secret as he seems to think it is. Anthony’s desire to enforce order on the day is countered by the way that the hours keep slipping by him; he’ll still be in his pajamas when he finds himself being asked to sit…

FOR WEEKS, Andrew Cuomo believed that all the chatter about the nursing-home scandal, and the creeping doubts about his management of the pandemic, was mere noise. He would get past it, and a glorious spring of vaccinations and school reopenings would give way to a summer of carnivals and crowded beaches and bars. Attention would then turn to his reelection bid, and he would be The Man Who Brought New York Back from its year of COVID-induced death and misery. Forgotten by then would be the directive his administration issued that forced nursing homes to accept COVID patients from hospitals, causing, his critics claim, the disease to rip through them like a match in dry grass. Forgotten, too, would be the allegation that the administration covered up the death toll…

WIGHT BELL, 64, first heard Mozart’s Sonata in A-major, K. 331, 30 years ago in an episode of The Twilight Zone in which the dolls in a dollhouse come to life. He eventually wanted to play it—a desire that only intensified after he heard Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha’s version on the radio. “It sounded easy to play. Little did I know,” he says. When the pandemic began, Bell found himself with more time on his hands and began looking for a teacher who could give him lessons over Zoom. Since June, he has been meeting virtually with Arielle Levioff, an instructor at the 92nd Street Y School of Music. And with work—he practices two and a half hours a day—he has gotten surprisingly good: He now sails through the…

THE ARTIST EMILY MASON died at age 87 in December 2019, but you can still feel the joyful presence of her work in her bright studio in the Flatiron District. She painted here for 40 years (in the winter months, anyway; from May to October, she worked at her country place in Vermont). Her paint-flecked smocks are still hanging on a hook, and the small footstools she perched on to study her work are in place. Her rocking chair, another vantage for studying her paintings, is nearby, as are a pair of her favorite velvet gondolier slippers, which she would buy on every trip to Venice. Mason was weaned on art. Her mother, the well-known abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason, was a descendant of John Trumbull, whose Declaration of Independence…

1. Coco Pazzeria 307 Spring St.; cocopazzeria.com SOME 30 YEARS AGO, Coco Pazzo’s Pino Luongo hired Ciro Verde to work the pizza oven at his pioneering Chelsea trattoria, Le Madri. Post Le Madri, they went their separate ways and fell out of touch. After Verde closed his Brooklyn restaurant last year because of the pandemic, he reunited with Luongo to open this Coco Pazzo spinoff, and the result is impressive. Verde’s thin-crust pies fall somewhere on the pizza-style spectrum between the Roman and the Neapolitan. And great new topping combos abound, like the ’ndujaspiked Comma Pica (“How spicy!” in Neapolitan dialect), and the Burrata pie (pictured). 2. Washington Squares 21 W. 8th St.; washingtonsquarespizza.com THE GRANDMA PIZZA Dan Kluger introduced at Loring Place three years ago was so good you…

NOT EVERY GREAT movie has a great ending. The reverse is also true: A ho-hum flick can become instantly unforgettable thanks to an awesome conclusion. The end is arguably the most important part of any film; the way a filmmaker wants you to feel in those final minutes is often the key to what that picture was really about. In compiling a list of the greatest endings in movie history, we found ourselves drawn to dark and ambiguous endings, endings that purport to explain something but actually do not, endings that deny us (and the characters) closure, and endings that feature people dancing—but not always in joyous fashion. Maybe that was a reflection of the times we’ve been living in (grim, uncertain, and marked by a significant amount of human…

THE NEW MUSEUM’S show “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” finds terrible beauty in the pain, rage, mania, and sorrow that form the continuing psychosis of this country’s obsession with race. Featuring 37 Black artists working in the United States from 1964 to today, it plumbs the long American night of racism with an eye on the poetics of abstraction, the possibilities of monochrome, and the documentation of bare facts. Together, these 97 pieces suggest Black artists have made the most important art of our time. It’s notable that this exhibition, with its themes of mourning and loss, was the last organized by the great Nigerian-born, Germany-based curator Okwui Enwezor, a visionary pioneer of international multiculturalism, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 55. Part…

POP MUSIC 1. Listen to Revelación Latin pop. Interscope Records, March 12. A year after her comeback album Rare topped the Billboard charts, thanks in part to the buzz around “Lose You to Love Me,” a thundering ballad many fans thought to be a reflection on the end of the singer’s relationship with Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez readies Revelación, her first Spanish-language EP. Early singles like “Baila Conmigo” and “De Una Vez” connect the singer with Latin music producers Tainy, Jota Rosa, and Albert Hype, architects of hits by international superstars like Bad Bunny and J. Balvin, giving Gomez’s lilting, effortless vocals all the more bounce. CRAIG JENKINS TV 2. Watch Waffles + Mochi Puppets named after food are the best puppets. Netflix, March 16. Imagine a children’s show about…

ANDREA ROBERTSON HAS swabbed thousands of noses since she was first assigned to oversee the COVID-19 testing tent outside Elmhurst Hospital one year ago. The head nurse of ambulatory care began testing patients last March, and she hasn’t stopped since—8 a.m. to 4 p.m., often seven days a week. In those early days, Robertson was afraid of passing the strange new virus to her family, including her elderly parents. “Iremember a patient said to me, ‘I can’t go back home because I’m positive and I have nowhere to go.’ And that hit me really hard because I know what it is like,” she says. But with lines of patients snaking around the block, there was no time for self-doubt. “I had to roll up my sleeves, get my anxiety levels…

AFEW MONTHS ago, I met up with a friend who works in fashion for a socially distanced walk through Prospect Park. I noticed she was wearing a Yankees cap. Three years ago, she would have been dripping in Dries. “These days, it’s all I want to wear,” she said. I’m pretty sure she can’t name anybody on the team. On a Zoom recently, a friend who definitely doesn’t follow fashion mentioned that he had been out buying pita bread and found himself momentarily paralyzed while looking at something pinned to the wall of the market, unable to answer a question in his head: Why do I covet this not particularly attractive T-shirt from Sahadi’s? A woman I work with texted me a dating-profile pic in which a handsome bachelor named…

TRENT SIMONIAN and Jack Byrne show up at 12:30 p.m. on the dot, just as they said they would. The Saturday in January is crystalline and frigid, but the two NYU students arrive with open puffer jackets, no gloves, and a “Let’s get right down to business” competence that makes it possible to forget they’re only 19. It’s not what you might expect if you’ve ever seen an episode of their raucous one-minute Instagram show, Sidetalk. Each post begins with the familiar bing-bong sound of the subway’s “Stand clear of the closing doors” recording, but after that, you might find the sloe-eyed Simonian deadpanning into the camera as a disturbed woman screams about Jezebel’s children. You might meet a man named Jesus humping a tree in Central Park or a…

Focusing on a single goal will get you further than trying to tackle Chopin’s nocturnes and Bill Evans’s “Autumn Leaves” all at once. For any of the following objectives—or to learn a single song, for that matteryou’ll have to first grasp the basics: where to put your fingers, how to read notes on a music staff, and the names of the individual piano keys. 1 I want to re-create Marie’s Crisis in my living room. ➽ THIS WILL ENTAIL becoming acquainted with “fake books,” which contain the melodies and chords of hundreds of pop, jazz, and Broadway songs. The melodies are usually written out as musical notes you’ll play with your right hand; you’ll use your left to play chords that go along with them. In the “real books” (an…

BETWEEN ESTABLISHMENTS that have formally announced their closing and those still plodding valiantly along lies a vast restaurant limbo of darkened windows and no visible activity but, thankfully, no FORRENTsigns either. One local landmark that falls into this category is Knickerbocker Bar & Grill (the Knick, for short), a Greenwich Village mainstay that opened in 1977 on the corner of University Place and 9th Street and has preserved much of its vintage charm as well as its seasoned clientele. The Knickerbocker is known for its live jazz, its horseshoe booths, its solid American-chophouse menu, and a categorically unpretentious vibe that somehow appeals to everyone from multigenerational families to local celebrities (Isaac Mizrahi, Simon Doonan, Chris Noth, and F. Murray Abraham have all sung its praises). Its musical talent has included…

THE MEMBERS OF the 46-year-old Wooster Group are the monks of New York theater. They’re our holy fools, who—even when no one is watching—keep the art’s sacred fires burning. Rehearsal isn’t so much a preparation-to-show as it is a kind of religious practice—as endless, deliberative, and open to inspiration as a Shaker meeting. Could COVID stop them? Certainly every other theater in New York was shut down. But ensconced in its longtime home, the Performing Garage, the group has continued doing what it always does. Even without quarantine, Wooster productions can take years to develop, since they’re the product of collaborative composition, meticulous study, and skill acquisition. For Poor Theater (2004), the ensemble trained as modern dancers; for LaDidone (2009), the Woosters learned to sing opera. For their latest work,…

BLACK CHARACTERS AND others of color should have the right to die tragically in sweet, poignant stories about nightmarish moments in history. That’s a slightly off-center place to begin a review of Russell T. Davies’s often beautifully moving limited series It’s a Sin, about the AIDS epidemic in London. But one of the foundational ideas of the show, which follows several young people through the 1980s and early ’90s as they experience the horrific toll of HIV and AIDS on the gay community, is that marginalization is key to what made the AIDS epidemic so devastating. The series’s five episodes, which aired in the U.K. before hitting HBO Max in February, build toward a big closing thesis-statement-type monologue from Jill (Lydia West), the best friend of the show’s protagonist, Ritchie…