Innholdsfortegnelse for May-18-15 i The New Yorker

NewMusicBox LIVE The online platform NewMusicBox, which was created in 1999, is a place for American composers and improvisers to share their music and their stories. On May 19 at 7, it puts on its first live event, showcasing the wide range of musicians who have been featured on the site. Merging musical performances with monologues, this event juxtaposes artists who wouldn’t normally share a bill. The participants are the historian, saxophonist, and sound-collage artist Matana Roberts, who explores black history and personal narrative; the composer, singer-songwriter, and musical-theatre writer Gabriel Kahane, who has drawn inspiration from Craigslist ads, Los Angeles addresses, and a Second World War-era Brooklyn commune; and the accomplished composer, conductor, and concert pianist Joan Tower, whose work has been performed by orchestras in all fifty…

Jack Black’s first acting job, at thirteen, was an Atari commercial. He wore a safari hat and bugged his eyes as he talked up a jungle-crossing video game called Pitfall. Last week, he sat at Barcade, a Manhattan pub stocked with more than four dozen vintage video games, and summoned up his line: “ ‘Just last night, I was lost in the jungle with Pitfall Harry, surrounded by giant scorpions and man-eating crocodiles!’” Black is now a stout and shaggy forty-five-year-old man, master of the overconfident slacker, rocker, and panda, but the chirps and burbles of Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga, their lipstick-red coin slots, call to him still. “If I wasn’t an actor, I’d want to make games and toys—blowing people’s minds with fun!” he said. “I’m not technically skilled,…

ANNA: Is that your little guy over there? SARA: Yeah, that’s Sebastian. ANNA: What a cutie. That’s my Tessa on the slide. SARA: She’s adorable. ANNA: I feel like I’ve definitely seen you here before. I’m Anna. SARA: You look familiar, too. I’m Sara. ANNA: Mind if I sit? SARA: Please. ANNA: We’re here a lot, Tessa and I. SARA: Yeah, this is like a second home for Sebastian and me. ANNA: This place is such a lifesaver. SARA: Total lifesaver. ANNA: We’re here every day. Sometimes twice. SARA: Tell me about it, we were here for ten hours yesterday. ANNA: I really treasure the time that Tessa and I spend here. SARA: Wouldn’t trade it for the world. ANNA: I’m always so happy when I’m here, and never feel…

On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents’ Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-sixyear-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world’s most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road’s newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm’s deal team and its seven general partners— the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm’s cofounder, fixed his gaze on Doshi…

It’s one of those airlines where you get your seat assignment at the gate, and they’re late to Logan and slow to get through security, so the lady at the counter can’t seat Charity and her mom together. Which means five-plus hours of freedom—hallelujah! Nonetheless, she pouts about having to sit with a total stranger, all because her mom was a spaz about the body scanner and they had to wait while a female agent was summoned to conduct a pat-down. Charity went through the scanner without protest, hands up like a criminal—it was kind of fun—standing in her sock feet in the chamber. She hustled out, in order to catch a glimpse of the agent’s screen, hoping to see her own skeleton, though she knew it wouldn’t be there.…

SPEAK NOW, by Kenji Yoshino (Crown). In June, the Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, likely deciding the question of whether there is a constitutional right to marry in all fifty states. Yoshino provides an engaging primer on the law behind the case and on what same-sex marriage means across America (including in his own life, as a man with a husband and two children). While granting the importance of United States v. Windsor, which overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, he focusses on Hollingsworth v. Perry, an earlier attempt to establish a right to marry. The Court turned it back on procedural grounds but not before establishing a factual record on the benefits of marriage for, among others, the children of same-sex…

EARTHSHAKING Rivka Galchen documents the reluctance of politicians and people in the oil industry to acknowledge that deepwell-fluid disposal is a near-certain cause of the recent order-of-magnitude increase in seismicity in Oklahoma’s oil-producing districts (“Weather Underground,” April 13th). In California, where I work as a geology consultant, there is a history of this kind of denial when it comes to oil production. In rural Northern California, exploitation of geothermal steam for electricity was also accompanied by small earthquakes, so many that the pen of the mechanical plotter that was used to record them broke through the plotting paper. This seismic activity came to be accepted by nearby residents, and the operating companies simply adopted a policy of paying for damage when it occurred. Assuming that destructive oil-production practices are…

Not long before the disappointing “fight of the century,” between Floyd Mayweather, Jr., and Manny Pacquiao, the former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield dropped by a recording studio above Jazz at Lincoln Center. “I’m not a singer,” he warned, as an engineer prepared the sound equipment. He was accompanied by an energetic man named Steve Hanley, who identified himself as the C.E.O. of Team Holyfield: a kind of post-career promoter. “He’s a fighter, not a singer,” Hanley reiterated. Nearby stood the author and record producer (and former investment banker) Kabir Sehgal, whom Hanley called “the grand facilitator.” Sehgal, who is from Atlanta, like Holyfield, had spotted the ex-champ at the airport, a few months earlier, and introduced himself: “Hey, I’m Kabir.” He said that he was producing a record called “The…

Five years ago, on the afternoon of May 6, 2010, the Dow and the S.&P. fell more than six per cent in a matter of minutes, losing a trillion dollars in value. The “flash crash,” as it came to be known, terrified investors: it was huge, it was fast, and it made absolutely no sense. Nothing happening in the real world that day, a few market jitters aside, could explain the plunge, and the market recovered almost as quickly as it had fallen. Now prosecutors claim that they’ve found a culprit: a Londonbased trader, Navinder Sarao, who may be extradited to the U.S. to face charges of market manipulation. Sarao is hardly your idea of a devious financial mastermind. He’s a thirtysix-year-old private investor who often made his trades from…

Never decorative, it embodies a chair’s provisional character. Utilitarian, never just there, called upon to serve. Communal, egalitarian, levelling its occupants, gathered for an occasion. Rarely will it hold the sitters captive. Its precariousness invites walkouts, even when secured by an admittance fee. Repositionable, it favors assorted geometries of attention: the frontal and single-focussed, the shifting and radial. Irreverent, whether in an institutional setting or not, signalling reversible orders. Possibly carnivalesque, displaying an upside-down world, as in: a projection of the high-desert landscape and transit surrounding an old ice plant in Marfa requiring no other technology but a lens and a dark room; ironically inverted in this picture of a tiny fraction of the planet— with no Google logo and copyright date camouflaged to appear like a wisp of a…

Shamir Bailey, a twenty-year-old from Las Vegas, who performs as Shamir, has a high-pitched voice that has been compared to Michael Jackson’s, though the closer comparison might be to that of the jazz singer Jimmy Scott, whose remarkable contralto seemed to float between genders. Shamir’s singing voice is thinner than Scott’s was, but, like Scott, when he sings he sounds both ageless and genderless. Shamir moves freely: his songs draw on the history of dance music, especially disco and house, without being burdened by it. His androgyny, while genuine, feels light in spirit. Pop performers who look androgynous outnumber the sort who, like Shamir, really sound it. Shamir’s voice also recalls that of Sylvester, the disco vocalist whose 1978 anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” sounds like a kiss-off…

For the schoolteacher, the changes had come slowly. First, his walking had grown unsteady; then his hearing had worsened. He had become stooped, and had begun walking with a cane, even though he was only in his late fifties. Now he sat with his wife and son in the consulting room of Henry Marsh, a London neurosurgeon, looking at a scan of his brain, which showed a tumor growing near the base of his skull. The question was whether it could, or should, be removed. Marsh, who had been practicing neurosurgery for only a few years, was unsure. The tumor was massive—he was startled by its size—and it was situated in the brain stem, a vital area. Left to itself, it would destroy the schoolteacher’s hearing, rob him of his…

MAY 2015 13TH WEDNESDAY 14TH THURSDAY 15TH FRIDAY 16TH SATURDAY 17TH SUNDAY 18TH MONDAY 19TH TUESDAY NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Faith No More When this band broke up, in 1998, it left behind a complicated legacy, having given the world such rap-metal hybrids as its 1990 breakthrough hit, “Epic,” as well as profoundly challenging albums like “Angel Dust,” from 1992. The group cast a long shadow, inspiring sympathetic acts and spawning a raft of inferior imitators. After its demise, the keyboardist Roddy Bottum moved on to the power-pop outfit Imperial Teen, and the restless vocalist Mike Patton did everything from noir-core (Fantômas) to hip-hop (Lovage, with Dan the Automator) and film work…

IN 2006, ZANELE MUHOLI, the South African artist—she prefers the term “visual activist”—took a photograph of her friend Busi Sigasa, a poet and political advocate who contracted the H.I.V. virus after being brutally raped by men she considered friends to “cure” her of being lesbian. Sigasa died less than a year after the picture was made. She was twenty-five. The portrait is the earliest image in Muholi’s incandescent “Faces and Phases,” an ongoing series documenting black African lesbians and trans men, sixty of which are the heart of the artist’s first major show in the U.S., at the Brooklyn Museum. In the past eight years, more than two hundred and fifty people have gazed frankly, shyly, proudly, defiantly at Muholi’s camera, including the artist herself. “I’m one of us,” she…

30-09 34th St., Astoria (718-777-2570) As the Scottish bard Robert Burns must have known well (“My muse! Guid auld Scotch drink! . . . Inspire me, till I lisp an wink”), few things are more intoxicating than the pairing of poetry and a good pint. To name a pub after a two-hundred-year-old pastoral ode to serenity, then, seems like a natural move—especially if that pub, housed in a former smoke shop and owned by three Irishmen (proprietors of the Wren and the Penrose), unabashedly exalts in the riparian. “The ceiling beams are taken from the floorboards of old tugboats, and the side of the bar is from shipping crates,” a bartender with a thick Cork brogue explained on a bustling Friday. Then he put down his espresso to tend to…

The Civilians, a Brooklyn-based theatre company, is nearing the end of a yearlong stint as artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum. The term “residence” is only loosely applicable to the Civilians’ status within the institution’s walls. “We don’t have an office space,” Micharne Cloughley, a head writer with the company, explained the other day. “I spend a lot of time in the cafeteria.” Recently, Cloughley and her colleagues could be seen roving the galleries of the American Wing, researching the production that is to serve as the culmination of their residency: an ambitious investigation of what it means to be an American, titled “The Way They Live.” The Civilians specialize in “investigative theatre”—interviewing people, then compiling a play out of their words. Curators in the department have been among their interview…

The kookaburra in the Berlin Zoo is ten thousand miles from home, squat, top-heavy, large of beak, attractive of plumage, and making what is, ounce for ounce, the loudest, strangest sound I have ever heard emerge from a living creature. It begins with a classic evil laugh, bwaaahahahaha, à la Vincent Price in “Thriller,” then the bird throws back its head and lets out a series of hoots, like a plump British woman with an unbecoming but infectious laugh or a parrot that grew up in a frat house, dissolves into giggles, transitions to a chortle, appears to become an entire dinner party going to pieces, then starts to pull it together, O.K., O.K., the guests wiping their eyes and settling down, until out comes a little chuckle and hahahahoik!…

And then, in the morning, the stillness of the quiet skirts of the dark, on the ground, around the full-moon trees, 4 A.M.— I can feel the moon moving, actually circling us, as we seem to circle the sun, as we rotate toward it, the Sheffield mountain like the corolla of a flower turning toward our birth star. Before I leave, I go into his room, where there is the being suffering. “Oh!—it’s still da-ark,” I say, with the falling music of surprise on dark. “Ye-es,” he says, on the same notes, like a rhyme with the music. Then he groans, prone on the bed, holding to the covers, holding to the turning earth, and he sleeps. It is just past the Days of Awe— the New Year, and Yom…