Innholdsfortegnelse for November 8-21, 2021 i New York Magazine

DRESSED HEAD TO TOE in black Armani, Peter Gelb is white-knuckling the railing on the sixth floor of the Metropolitan Opera House. “I haven’t been up here in 16 months,” he says dazedly. It’s opening night at the Met, one of the most sacred evenings in the cultural and civic life of the city. This hasn’t happened since 2019. He’s looking down on something thrilling, if slightly terrifying. During the months of the pandemic inside the darkened opera house, pieces of the dormant machinery that powers the mammoth sets began to rust, break, and fall apart. The Met furloughed 1,000 people; the orchestra and chorus went unpaid. Gelb waived his own salary for nine months. That time in which the hall sat empty, its innards decaying, cost the Met $150…

AS COVID TAKES its time ebbing away from the life of the city, all sorts of welcome signs of recovery are springing up around town. Broadway is open again, of course, and the last time I wandered down Restaurant Row on 46th Street, herds of goggle-eyed tourists were jostling for space along the sidewalks just like in the old days. The lean-to sheds up and down the avenues are made of sturdier materials for the coming cold weather, and many are set with proper four-tops and strings of decorative lights. A few vanished establishments are even coming back to life (hello, Gotham), and here and there the kind of theatrical, big-money, high-concept restaurants that used to open weekly, like Broadway plays, during the boom years seem to be slowly returning…

The Marred Stupa Tenants say the Buddhist shrine crowning the top of the structure was originally made of copper and that, during World War II, it was covered in black tar and asphalt to better conceal the building from potential air attacks. The Semi-Legal Office of Dissent Magazine After the death of its business manager Simone Plastrik in 1999, Dissent magazine was suddenly officeless. Soon after, a sublet was found for it in a studio on the 20th floor of the Master. “The co-op board looked the other way, even though businesses were not allowed, because, as the managing agent said, ‘Dissent has a certain cachet on the Upper West Side,’” Maxine Phillips, the magazine’s former executive editor, wrote in an essay for n+1. “The apartment’s…

1. SEXPLOSION Issa gives Daniel a blowjob and is upset when she gets come in her eye. A conversation ensues about how white women are more comfortable giving blowjobs than Black women. “I stand by what we did, but I would handle the sexplosion episode differently given the time,” Rae says. 2. CONDOMGATE During the early seasons, fans complained that the characters never used condoms. “People were being taken out of the story,” Rae recalls. “The highest compliment paid to the show is people see themselves in these characters. If you’re like, I would use a condom, and I identify with Molly, then it feels like we should address that.” 3. THE GREAT JARED DEBATE Molly breaks up with her boyfriend Jared after he admits to receiving a blowjob from…

ROSALIND FOX SOLOMON has rarely worked on assignment. When she first started taking photographs with an idea of making art, few would have expected her to turn that pursuit into a career; she was heading into her 40s with two children, a woman trying to figure out how to communicate as she hadn’t been able to before. She began by making work close to her home in Tennessee, but even after she gained some recognition and traveled farther afield, she didn’t exactly have a long-term plan: She would, she says, just decide to go somewhere—India, Guatemala, Missouri. She’d move around and look at people, engaging them but not saying much, and come back with pictures. That’s it. Did she think about what collectors or publishers or editors might want? “First…

EDGAR WRIGHT IS one of our great musical directors even though he hasn’t technically made a musical. Whether they’re fighting the undead, laying waste to quiet Cotswold towns, or driving getaway cars for assorted goons, his characters move to melodies and rhythms both real and imagined, their gestures and glances timed to the beats of the director’s carefully chosen soundtracks. This isn’t just a stylistic feature. In Shaun of the Dead, the protagonists try to behead zombies with vinyl LPs. In Baby Driver, the wheelman hero always has to wear a pair of earphones while driving; his music is his superpower, and without it, he is helpless. In Wright’s worlds, pop can transform your reality. And so in the opening scenes of Last Night in Soho, we see soon-to-be fashion…

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, 24 hours later than expected, news organizations announced that Phil Murphy had been reelected governor of New Jersey. The narrow victory the day after Election Day was a dumbfounding rebuke of the state’s Democrats, who went into the election with the drink-clinking serenity of the ensemble in the first act of The Poseidon Adventure. With the exception of one or two outliers, the polls showed Murphy winning by eight or more points. Instead, his party got smacked by a Republican wave. Murphy managed to win by a whisker, thanks to late-arriving results from machine-run North Jersey counties. But there were shocking outcomes down the ballot. In South Jersey, the president of the state senate, an ally of the state’s most powerful political boss, lost to a truck…

WHEN GOLDMAN SACHS analysts were sent home early in the pandemic, they figured their jobs would stay largely the same. The same 80-hour weeks, the same urgent but menial tasks, and, to get through it all, the same sustenance Goldman had always provided: Seamless. In the in-office era, they had been able to expense around $60 on late nights. For analysts—the bank’s youngest employees, enrolled in essentially a two-year boot camp—the meal allowance was sacrosanct, less a privilege than an entitlement. And so when Goldman eliminated the Seamless stipend in the spring of 2020, the reactions came in shades of outrage. “When we went work-from-home, they gave us nothing—literally nothing,” a Goldman analyst who quit last year told me. The bank had a reason: Meals at home, where workers had…

WHEN AUTOMOBILES first appeared on the streets of New York, quickly and decisively transforming the city into an early center of car culture, those streets bent to their needs. Sidewalks were narrowed to add lanes of traffic. Crossing the street, once an improvised sport of dodge-the-wagon played anywhere, was confined to corners and governed by lights. In the 1950s, the city converted miles of curbside into free overnight storage space for private vehicles. The result was that virtually every street and avenue became a river of moving steel, flanked by banks of immobile steel. We need to adapt again, this time to the long-obvious reality that cars are too plentiful, too big, too polluting, and too murderous to stampede a crowded city. Streets are not givens but tools that we…

IN THE BEST OF TIMES, it isn’t easy to relocate an iconic restaurant. Toss a pandemic into the equation and things get really tricky. Take the case of Jonathan Waxman’s Barbuto. After the restaurant’s Washington Street building was sold, Waxman vowed the much-loved auto garage turned Italian brasserie would return. Leading up to the last supper in 2019, farewell dinners were held, teary tweets tweeted. And then nine months later, in February 2020, Barbuto 2.0 emerged near the West Side Highway, three blocks away from the original and twice as big. All was right in the West Village Cal-Ital world. For three weeks, anyway, until the pandemic brought indoor dining and Barbuto’s relaunch to a halt. (Waxman dabbled in takeout for an additional week. “The day after Floyd Cardoz died,…

“Issa in the bathroom mirror has been her true feelings. In season one, she spent so much time denying who she was to others, trying to figure herself out, but in that bathroom, in that mirror, she couldn’t deny it. She had to be honest with herself through rapping in the mirror and getting her true feelings and frustrations out. Over time, when she moved into a new apartment, it became a reflection of her subconscious and someone to have a conversation with. In season four, as she started to divest from Molly and that friendship started to regress, she began to have crazy conversations with Mirror Issa. It’s been an extension of her, it’s been a crutch for her, a source of comfort and denial, but it’s been her…

WHEN DEXTER MORGAN reappears on TV for the first time in more than eight years, he is ankle-deep in snow and running with a rifle in his hands. Soon he visually locks in on a target—a beautiful buck as white as the surroundings—and places his index finger on the trigger. But he can’t pull it. This is the Dexter: New Blood version of Dexter Morgan, a man far from the Miami he once inhabited and the many murders he committed over eight seasons of the original show, Dexter. Technically, he’s not even Dexter Morgan anymore. In Iron Lake, New York, the small town where he now resides, he is known as Jim Lindsay, and good ol’ Jim hasn’t killed a soul. Yet. Is it possible for a serial killer—one who…

IN EARLY NOVEMBER, after 46 days of picketing and 15 days of hunger strike, members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance won what they deserved all along: a measure of relief from the vast debts incurred when the inflated value of their city-issued medallions crashed in recent years. Under a three-way agreement among the NYTWA, the de Blasio administration, and the city’s largest medallion lender, drivers—who owe, on average, $550,000 each—will see their debt written down to $170,000 and amortized so that monthly payments don’t exceed $1,122. Most important, the city will guarantee each of these rescue loans in the event of default. It was only fair that the city agree to back the loans. The Taxi and Limousine Commission had, in recent decades, driven the value of a…

Taming Traffic JOB ONE IS TO cut the number of private vehicles without letting the remaining drivers treat emptier streets like the open road, as they did during lockdown. Congestion pricing will help—eventually—as would robust enforcement. But diversifying streets is mostly a design project whose principles are well known. New York already has a few models for blocks in which pedestrians enjoy primacy and streets are true public space. East 25th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue, lined by Baruch College buildings, is a cross street that could be replicated all over town. The challenge is in the negotiation of needs: Keeping bikers, buses, pedestrians, and cars out of one another’s way, for example, can make it harder to hail a cab. THE SOLUTION: We envision drastically scaling back free…

IN THE REALM of pandemic origin stories, the Sunken Harbor Club has a doozy. Those who remember the joint as a weekly tiki night operating for nearly seven years in the original location of St. John Frizell’s Red Hook bar, Fort Defiance, only know the half of it. When the onetime pop-up resurfaces November 13 in a former hair salon above the resuscitated Gage & Tollner, it will have gained a brand-new centuries-old and completely fabricated identity: the headquarters of a Victorian-era explorers club, revealed during renovations of the landmark restaurant. As Frizell—a writer before he became a bartender, which helps explain this elaborate yarn—tells the tale, the club’s members traveled the world, searching for the most mouthwatering, life-changing libations and bringing the recipes home. These formulas were recorded in…

AFTER FIVE SEASONS and two presidential administrations, Insecure is getting out while the getting is still good. A classic of the new Black television renaissance, the HBO sitcom chronicles the triumphs and mishaps of awkward 30-something Issa Dee and her friends and romantic partners. The series sparked intense discussion over its characters’ open marriages, messy breakups, and, most recently, “authentic” sorority representation. Not since the halcyon days of Shonda Rhimes’s TGIT lineup has Twitter been ablaze so routinely. For the final season, creator and star Issa Rae, showrunner Prentice Penny, and the team of writers gathered to reflect on Insecure’s journey and took a final poll on the Team Lawrence–versus–Team Daniel debate. What was it like to work in a Zoom writers’ room this season? ISSA RAE: The fuckin’ worst.…

KEV’YN THE SPOOF: TV reboots THE ORIGIN: “All these reboots were happening. We were like, Why aren’t they rebooting Black shows? What about making our own Martin?” —P.P. LOOKING FOR LATOYA THE SPOOF: True crime THE ORIGIN: “There was a podcast about a white actress who was murdered in the ’40s. At the time it aired, there was a gratuitous number of Black women who had gone missing in the D.C. area, and we were like, This is insane.” —A.A. CONJUGAL VISITS THE SPOOF: Late-night prison shows THE ORIGIN: “We were trying to figure out what a Crackle show is. It was a bit, but people liked it. We shot it on the last day of production.” —P.P. DUE NORTH THE SPOOF: Scandal THE ORIGIN: “Two of our writers, a…

BEFORE I GET TO the overwhelming power of the revival of Caroline, or Change, candidate for the century’s greatest piece of musical theater … before I get to the performance by Sharon D. Clarke, who peels the gilt from the Studio 54 ceiling with her voice … before I get to the perfection, even prescience, of this particular show’s appearance here in the cooling fall of 2021, I want to ask something important: Why the heck is there a comma in the middle of that title? Even without it, the title of Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori’s 2003 musical that is secretly an opera is already playing games with words. In the plot, 8-year-old Noah Gellman teeters between affection for his family’s maid, Caroline Thibodeaux, and his actual pocket…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. POP MUSIC 1. Listen to Red (Taylor’s Version) Not just for Swifties. Republic Records, November 12. Taylor Swift’s campaign to rerecord her first six albums, since rights to the original masters were acquired by music exec Scooter Braun, continues. Come for fresh takes on country-pop bangers and pure pop joys and stay for guest spots from Chris Stapleton and Phoebe Bridgers and a ten-minute take on “All Too Well.” CRAIG JENKINS TV 2. Watch Cowboy Bebop In the flesh. Netflix, November 19. The stylish anime series Cowboy Bebop has become a new live-action series with John Cho as Spike Spiegel, the bounty hunter who chases down criminals in space. JEN CHANEY MOVIES 3. See The Power of the Dog Canonical Campion.…