Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-05-15 i The New Yorker

WILLIAM FINNEGAN (“THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T SIT DOWN,” P. 40), a staff writer, is the author of “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life,” which was published in July. RANIA ABOUZEID (“OUT OF SIGHT,” P. 34) is an independent journalist based in Beirut and a fellow at New America. She is writing a book about the Syrian uprising. ALEC WILKINSON (“SOMETHING BORROWED,” P. 26) has been contributing to the magazine since 1980. “The Protest Singer” is one of his many books. SCAACHI KOUL (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 33) is a senior writer at BuzzFeed Canada. She is working on her first collection of essays, entitled “The Pursuit of Misery.” JOHN UPDIKE (POEM, P. 38), who died in 2009, was a contributor to the magazine for more than fifty years. This poem,…

BEFORE THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, there were two basic models for classical-music venues in New York: the concert hall (read Carnegie’s Stern Auditorium, or its little brother, Weill Recital Hall) and the alternative space (such as the Kitchen, the kind of place that offered opportunities to musicians that venues like Carnegie had little use for). Then Carnegie, in 2003, opened up Zankel Hall, a flexible midsized venue with a relatively relaxed ambience, and the traditional duopoly suddenly seemed outdated. Enter the kids. (Le) Poisson Rouge, which opened in 2008, found success presenting all sorts of music in a club-style space on a for-profit basis. Then in 2013 came SubCulture, also run as a business, which has struggled financially despite besting its older competitor in its warm acoustics and living-room-style…

For observers of religious royalty, last week in New York was a bonanza. In town, for various reasons, were His Holiness, Pope Francis; Her Holiness, Beyoncé, to perform in Central Park; and a group of people who like to “feel that they’re the sun around which everyone orbits,” as a representative of the Waldorf Astoria recently said, describing the heads of state who were visiting for the Seventieth General Assembly of the United Nations. The logistical challenges were numerous: clearing the streets for the Pope’s Fiat, conducting Secret Service “sweeps,” and figuring out where everyone was going to stay. Beyoncé had her apartment, in Tribeca, and the Pope had a Vatican town house near Central Park, but housing the hundred and ninety-three U.N. delegations was another headache. There are only…

It can be tough, in these days of promoted tweets and pop-up notifications, to capture someone’s attention. Kaluk, a troupe of branding consultants-cum-street performers, mostly from Red Hook and all under the age of twenty-five, offers, according to the group’s Web site, “a playful touch of theatricality to get your brand noticed in a crowd.” As dusk fell at Louis Valentino Jr. Park, overlooking the Red Hook Channel, several members arrived early for a public movie night, a screening of “The Incredibles,” sponsored by local businesses. The marketers leaned against a wall, wearing black-and-orange T-shirts that read “Spread the Word.” The Kaluk team, weary of digital ploys, promotes products the old-fashioned way: with spectacle. “People on Facebook, they don’t look at stuff,” one of the group’s founders, a twenty-yearold named…

On a Saturday night in late May, I sat in the back seat of a taxi as it drove through a shantytown in Baghdad. We were not far from Firdos Square, where, in April of 2003, invading American troops famously toppled a large statue of Saddam Hussein. A highway passed overhead, its traffic thudding, and Baghdad’s tallest building, the Cristal Grand Ishtar Hotel— still widely known as the Sheraton, although the hotel chain withdrew from Iraq in 1990—rose in the distance. A forty-year-old woman whom I’ll call Layla sat in the front passenger seat; she wore a black abaya, and strands of dyed-black hair fell out from under her head scarf. Her husband, Mohammad, drove. We were headed toward a dimly lit cinder-block shack. Children darted in and out of…

The English band New Order is thirty-five years old. Such is its influence on the large, hybrid musical territory we might call “synth pop” or “dance rock” that entire careers are impossible to imagine without it. There might have been no LCD Soundsystem, or the Rapture, or the flurry of similar acts that arose in New York in the early aughts; there would be no Radiohead, either. “It’s very difficult to genuinely impress my bandmates,” Phil Selway, the Radiohead drummer, said during a recent BBC Radio broadcast, introducing his guest, the New Order drummer Stephen Morris. His mere name, Selway explained, had reduced the other members of Radiohead to a state of hushed awe. “I made Radiohead go all quiet!” Morris replied, in his thick northern accent. “Blimey!” The music…

CAPITAL CASES Judy Clarke, the loyal opponent of the death penalty who was profiled by Patrick Radden Keefe, is a great attorney, colleague, and friend (“The Worst of the Worst,” September 14th). Although she participated in the successful effort to win a life sentence for Zacarias Moussaoui, she did not significantly help in constructing the mitigation case. We served as co-lead counsel for Moussaoui; Clarke was part of the defense team for a six-month period three and a half years before the case went to trial. Her role was limited to early work on competency litigation, which came to bear in the mentalhealth portion of the larger mitigation case presented at trial. The extraordinary efforts of the lawyers, investigators, and paralegals on the team, along with the courageous testimony…

DAN BEJAR, AN ENIGMATIC and prolific singer-songwriter from Canada who has, since the mid-nineties, performed as Destroyer, has a reputation as a killjoy, and a curmudgeon. “That comes from me shooting off my mouth in interviews,” he told me last month, sitting up in bed by a window overlooking the Strathcona section of Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lives with his wife and their young daughter. This spring, he made an offhandedly dismissive remark about Taylor Swift—God forbid!—and was blasted by a disproportionately vocal faction of the online critical establishment that was quick to defend pop music’s very own one per cent. “I should never open my mouth,” he said quietly, and sighed with resignation. “I guess I didn’t realize how much had changed in North America, or that pop…

FOOD & DRINK 730 Classon Ave., Brooklyn (718-483-9950) “I love a good beer story,” a man gushed at Covenhoven a few nights ago. Young, the bartender to whom this love was professed, has a multitude of stories on tap: one for each of the bar’s sixteen draft beers and countless more for the hundred-and-fifty-odd bottles and cans they sell. One group passed around a draft Oxbow Loretta (eight dollars)—a grisette, which, Young explained, is an old Belgian beer style, originally enjoyed by coal miners. “I could drink this all day,” someone said, despite never having worked in a mine. The bar takes its name from a yellowed Dutch farm map of the area (the section in which it’s located is labelled “Covenhoven”) which hangs on the wall. Cavernous fridges illuminate…

If chefs are “the new rock stars” (the Times) and rap is “the new rock and roll” (Kanye West), then the Roger Daltrey of the current moment is a cannonball-shaped thirty-one-year-old rapper from Flushing named Action Bronson. A culinary-school dropout who has been nominated for two BET awards, Bronson raps about hibiscus syrup and feta au four the way other m.c.s name-check Bentleys and Basquiats. On a recent afternoon, he sat at the rooftop bar of Eataly, in the Flatiron district, cleansing his palate with an I.P.A. “These days, I’m more of a water guy, to be honest,” he said. “But when Chef hands you a beer you play along.” He gestured toward his tablemate, Mario Batali, Eataly’s owner. “He’s got me out here eating pork, beef— shit I haven’t…

To appreciate the beleaguered position that Kenneth Goldsmith finds himself in, you have to know that in 1997 or 1998 three avant-garde poets, one of them Goldsmith, drinking in a basement bar in Buffalo during a blizzard, decided to start a revolutionary poetry movement, one that went on to endorse “uncreative writing,” a phrase and a field that Goldsmith invented. Goldsmith lives in New York. The other poets, Christian BÖk and Darren Wershler, are Canadian. They had driven from Toronto to listen to Goldsmith read from “No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96,” which is a collection of syllables, words, phrases, and sentences that Goldsmith gathered between the dates in the title. It’s a species of list poem. Chapter 1 has words of one syllable. It begins, “A, a, aar, aas, aer, agh, ah.”…

After Providence, Connecticut— the green defiant landscape, unrelieved except by ordered cities, smart and smug, in spirit villages, too full of life to be so called, too small to seem sincere. And then like Death it comes upon us: the plain of steaming trash, the tinge of brown that colors now the trees and grass as though exposed to rays sent from the core of heat— these are the signs we see in retrospect. But we look up amazed and wonder that the green is gone out of our window, that horizon on all sides is segmented into so many tiny lines that we mistake it for the profile of a wooded hill against the sky, or that as far as mind can go are buildings, paving, streets. The tall…

Mark parked his Vespa beside three others outside Yasmin’s school, in Manchester, where it would be safe. Yasmin never bothered going to school on Fridays, so they had to meet elsewhere. The day was dull and drizzly, and Mark had got damp riding into town. He felt a little uncomfortable. His jeans were spotted with mud, but his fingers were warm in nice new gloves. He loved his Vespa. He locked his helmet under the seat and, led by a series of text messages, took the bus three stops to Elmsley Street, where Yasmin said they could make love in an empty house; there was a way in through the garden, she said. She had been there before. But when he got to Elmsley Street it turned out that they’d…

Night is falling when the girl leaves her dance class at the Théâtre du Châtelet. It’s late afternoon, the cusp of December, 1941—the darkest month coming to close out what has been, for Paris, a very dark year. The anxieties and privations of the Occupation gnaw at the city. Winter is sure to be bitter. For the past few months, the girl has lived with her father in a shabby hotel on the Boulevard Ornano, a street that slices behind the blanched dome of the Sacré-Coeur to end just before the city does, at the Eighteenth Arrondissement’s northern limit. He is Austrian-born, registered as a Jew. So far, he’s been able to keep his job at the medical clinic where he works, though the doctor who protected him has fled…

AS THE FOUNDER, co-artistic director, and burning heart and soul of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the flutist Claire Chase is a model for a new generation of American classical musicians—her career embodies entrepreneurship, technical virtuosity, and performance charisma. Chase is also quite serious about leaving a legacy: she is now into year three of “Density 2036,” a twenty-two-year project to commission new works to mark the centenary of Edgard Varèse’s 1936 piece, “Density 21.5,” a bulwark of the solo-flute repertory. Her three-part engagement at the Kitchen (Sept. 29-Oct. 2) brings back music from the first two years of the project, by such composers as Philip Glass and George Lewis, with brandnew pieces on the final night by Jason Eckardt, Dai Fujikura, and the legendary Pauline Oliveros. THE THEATRE MOVIES…

The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze The eleventh annual Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, at Van Cortlandt Manor, in Croton-on-Hudson, starts on Oct. 2. But the carving of the more than seven thousand pumpkins (many of them artificial “art pumpkins,” or Fun-Kins) that will be displayed on the grounds of the eighteenth-century mansion started in June. In addition to the pumpkin dinosaurs, the pumpkin spiderweb, and the pumpkin tunnel, which visitors might know from previous Blazes, this year there will be pumpkin ghosts, a pumpkin planetarium, and a pumpkin circus train. The Blaze will be ablaze through Nov. 15. (525 S. Riverside Ave., Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. hudsonvalley.org/events/blaze.) Archtober A monthlong showcase of New York’s architectural highlights and history offers an abundance of opportunities to explore both the city’s iconic structures and its…

Steve Cohen, the lawyer and former chief of staff to Governor Andrew Cuomo, was born in Brooklyn but grew up on Chicago’s North Shore. He started playing hockey when he was six. His mother protested: “It’s a contact sport.” “Life is a contact sport!” his father said. The elder Cohen was from Bensonhurst and often told mythic tales of roughneck roller hockey. He also talked about a long-defunct professional team called the Brooklyn Americans: the Amerks. Puckheads speak of the socalled Original Six, the National Hockey League’s core clubs, but there was a time when the Amerks made it seven. Years later, Cohen, while working as the head of the violent-gangs unit in the U.S. Attorney’s office (and skating for a men’sleague team called Blind Justice), came across records from…

When Jorge Ramos travels in Middle America, nobody recognizes him—until somebody does. Ramos is the evening-news co-anchor on Univision, the country’s largest Spanishlanguage TV network, a job he has held since 1986. A few weeks ago, I was on a flight with him from Chicago to Dubuque. Ramos, who is fifty-seven, is slim, not tall, with white hair and an unassuming demeanor. Wearing jeans, a gray sports coat, and a blue opencollared shirt, he went unremarked. But then, as he disembarked, a fellowpassenger, a stranger in her thirties, drew him aside at the terminal gate, speaking rapidly in Spanish. Ramos bowed his head to listen. The woman was a teacher at a local technical college. Things in this part of Iowa were bad, she said. People were afraid to leave…

The split image, a glass box that can be divided in two like a warm-water aquarium with angelfish, some with tails lashing one way, others another. The high-rise windows all masquerading as insect eyes. Inside, a house for a room in which an apple is bitten almost in half. A chair one gets up from. Time can move from the general to the visual particular one piece at a time until you reach the infinitesimal where everything is airborne. Place a grid over that and what you have is a tall building that’s been imploded. The roof ripped off, the fixtures removed as scrap for melting. Even copper wire can be stripped of its red rubber cover. What’s left will look as if it could be reconstructed, become electric again,…

NEGROLAND, by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon). Defining “Negroland” as the stratum of black America “where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty,” this memoir by a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic recounts her upbringing in mid-century Chicago, the second daughter of a pediatrician and a social worker turned homemaker. Jefferson combines memoir with cultural critique in a series of unsparing vignettes that describe the pressures of her childhood, her anxieties about success, and a struggle in early adulthood with suicidal depression. The book interrogates the African-American élite’s class-consciousness and its “hard-earned pride.” Internalizing the values of white America, the people Jefferson writes about know that they must be “impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.” A GUEST AT THE SHOOTERS’ BANQUET, by Rita Gabis (Bloomsbury).…