Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-02-14 i The New Yorker

KEN AULETTA (“THE HILLARY SHOW,” P. 28) is the author of eleven books, including “Googled” and “Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way.” IAN FRAZIER (COMMENT, P. 23; THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 26) has contributed to the magazine since 1974. His recent books include “Travels in Siberia” and “The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days.” ADA LIMÓN (POEM, P. 30), the author of “Sharks in the Rivers,” will publish her next poetry collection, “Bright Dead Things,” in 2015. ALEX ROSS (“NOTES OF DISSENT,” P. 36), the magazine’s music critic, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.” EMMA ALLEN (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 27) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff. IAN PARKER (“INHERITANCE,” P. 42) has been…

SUMMER IS HIGH SEASON for music festivals in New York City. SummerStage brings concerts to Central Park celebrating hip-hop, local Latin music, and Pete Seeger. Okayplayer—the online community that the Roots’ drummer, Questlove, started in 1999 for fans—which has grown into a full-fledged media company, marks its fifteenth anniversary with five performances, starting with a show on June 15, in honor of twenty years of democracy in South Africa, featuring Nathi (Black Coffee) Maphumulo and DJ Spoko, and ending, on Aug. 16, with an appearance by Devonté Hynes’s Blood Orange. Fania Records, the legendary label that was co-founded by the salsa innovator Johnny Pacheco, has partnered with SummerStage for a run of shows celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, including, on Aug. 24, a huge blowout with the Fania All-Stars, forty-one years…

WHEN THE WHITNEY MOVES to the foot of the High Line next year, it returns to its roots: in 1914, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened the first version of the museum just a few blocks away, in her studio in Greenwich Village. Her mission was to show living American artists, so it’s fitting that the Whitney’s last show on Madison Avenue surveys the career of Jeff Koons, one of the most famous artists alive. Like Andy Warhol, Koons is a native Pennsylvanian who moved to New York and shot to superstardom, straddling the worlds of fine art and pop culture. His objects have penetrated the palace interiors and formal gardens of Versailles, and they’ve floated overhead at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. To those who argue that his reputation is overinflated,…

703 Fifth Ave., Brooklyn (347-227-7166) This nautical South Slope bar isn’t far from the famous gravestones and wild parrots of Green-Wood Cemetery; visiting both in one day makes for a pleasingly gothic surf-and-turf adventure. Sea Witch’s façade resembles a boat’s stern. At a window by the entrance, you can order food—oysters, fried clams, a veggie cutlet—and then wait for it at the bar, drinking craft beer, sitting on a barstool made of welded anchor chain, and listening to Thin Lizzy. “I wonder what it would involve to buy a real shrunken head these days,” a man said, peering at a high shelf. There’s plenty to stare at: a mermaid mural, the skeleton of a shark’s jaw, and, mesmerizingly, live tropical fish, swimming in a glowing oval tank. Out back, there’s…

Richard Williams, the world’s most successful tennis dad (Venus, Serena), was in the penthouse of a midtown hotel earlier this month, answering questions from aspiring Richard Williamses. Richard, how did your daughters get mentally tough? “Same way they got human tough,” he told one parent. “Running for their life! In the ghetto, no matter what color you are, you’re gonna run for your life.” When should I get my kid on the court? “I feel like I started too early—at four years, six months, and one day,” he said. Better, he now thought, to let kids grow up; a more sensible age to start serious training, he said, would be six years old. Before his daughters left for Paris this week to compete in the French Open, Williams, who wore…

Hamish Linklater, the actor, moved to Los Angeles in 2000, and, until recently, when he came back to New York he’d stay in the spare room of his mother’s Upper West Side apartment with her two cats, whom he loathes. But, while preparing to appear as Benedick in the Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in June, he’s upgraded to his girlfriend’s place on the Lower East Side, which is cat-free. The other day, he was juggling errands: getting a drink with an old friend (their matching tattoos: a Picasso drawing of Don Quixote), and dropping in on his mother’s third-year M.F.A. acting class. Kristin Linklater, a professor of Shakespearean acting at Columbia, was about to decamp to the Orkney Islands, and Hamish was being trotted…

The Manischewitz Company, which is known for many products, including matzo, gefilte fish, and wine, is planning “to promote ‘kosher’ as a quality-control designation, rather than simply a religious one,” according to the Times. Yaakov Y. Horowitz, the company’s chief rabbi, said, “There was always a good feeling in American culture about kosher.” According to the Times, the company has “introduced advertisements that took a secular approach, with scant mention of religious themes.” Memo From: Bain Capital, the new owners To: Manischewitz marketing team Guys, we are so excited about the possibility of extending our market share to consumers of every possible religious background. To encourage this strategy, we’d like to make both Judaism and our product line as up-to-the-minute and user-friendly as possible. A few thoughts: 1. Let’s brainstorm…

ANDY’S HAIKUS Hey, why the long face, Mr. Smooth Fox Terrier? Dog jokes never die. Stay down, crazy pooch! Stop jumping all over me. Enough love—O.K.? Petal ears on top, Triangles of attention, Pick us up also. Aloft and agog, My old dads, depanniered, Cancelled fox’s plan. Unacceptable, 4 A.M. nose in my ear. Oh, well—c’mon under. Prewash your plates Is what I do around here: Lift that door and die! Circling your cushion, Settled on your spot to nap: Curvature ensues. Black patches on white Form an archipelago: Terrierana.…

Tolkien’s “Beowulf.” In the nineteen-twenties, there were probably few people better qualified to translate “Beowulf” than J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien. He had learned Old English and started reading the poem at an early age. He loved “Beowulf” and would declaim passages of it to the private literary club that he had founded with his schoolmates. “Hwæt!” (“Lo!”) he would begin. (He did the same, later, as a professor, at the beginning of Old English classes. Some of the students thought “Hwæt!” meant “Quiet!”) He also loved stories, especially medieval ones, with lots of wayfaring and dragon-slaying—activities prominent in his books “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.” In 1920, he began teaching Old English at the University of Leeds. He needed money—by now he had a…

Edgar Oliver’s park stories. I’m afraid it was the limited, prejudiced part of my nature that prevented me from acknowledging, before now, the writer and performer Edgar Oliver and his emotionally grand work. Although Oliver and I are both gay and share similar interests—he has been a ubiquitous presence on New York’s downtown theatre scene for almost thirty years—I tended to dismiss his earlier performances as affected and self-conscious, camp that built on camp. But his current monologue, “In the Park” (respectfully directed by Randy Sharp, at the Axis), is so beautiful—so enthralling in its undisguised but never tedious self-absorption, in its command of the spoken word, and in its demand for love—that to remain unmoved by it, or to dismiss it as fairy folderol, begs the question: Why? My…

QUALITY EDUCATION Dale Russakoff’s report on the attempted rescue of the Newark school system contains echoes of the social-reform efforts of a century ago (“Schooled,” May 19th). When Cory Booker, Newark’s “rock-star mayor,” called for topdown reform because an open political process could potentially be taken captive by opponents, he reminded me of the social reformer John Purroy Mitchel, the wondrous “Boy Mayor” of New York City, who took office in 1914. Convinced of his own pure motives, Mitchel felt himself to be uniquely capable of transforming the lives of the downtrodden, and so never bothered to consult the folks he was uplifting. Neither Mitchel nor Booker thought that serious participation could be a positive force in his grand plans, and both appeared to believe that the dilemmas of…

SOMETIMES A HALF-FORGOTTEN OPERA SURVIVES on the edge of the repertory, either because it is just too beautiful to throw away or because its style summarizes the achievements of a particular national culture. Carl Maria von Weber’s “Euryanthe” (1823), which Leon Botstein will conduct at Bard SummerScape (July 25-Aug. 3), is sterling on both counts. Weber was not the only early-Romantic composer to write a sung-through German opera, but it was his that spurred Schumann and Wagner to aim higher. This medieval romance is saddled with a creaky libretto, but musically it is full of treasures, hinted at in the popular overture. Ellie Dehn takes the demanding title role; Kevin Newbury, who won praise for his Bard production of another “problem opera,” Strauss’s “Die Liebe der Danae,” in 2011, directs.…

SINCE TRISHA BROWN’S ANNOUNCEMENT, early last year, that she would step down from the helm of her company, the troupe has been on an international tour. It is not a farewell but, rather, a celebration: Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas, two longtime company members, will take the reins and continue presenting Brown’s dances. This summer, on Governors Island, the River to River Festival honors Brown’s relationship to New York City, presenting exhibitions, talks, and open rehearsals devoted to her role as one of the earliest practitioners of site-specific dance. Brown, whose works range from pure dance to pure concept, has asked her troupe to perform on roofs, on walls, and on rafts. In 2011, she created three final dances, including “I’m Going to Toss My Arms—If You Catch Them They’re…

THE NEW YORK-BORN, IRISH-EGYPTIAN playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis was an actor first. With his friends John Ortiz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and John Gould Rubin, he was an early member of the Labyrinth Theatre Company, and he wrote his first play for the group in 1995. In works such as “Jesus Hopped the A Train” and “Our Lady of 121st Street,” Guirgis drew on his experiences as a Catholic-school student in Harlem and a violence-prevention counsellor at institutions like Rikers to compose energetic, curse-ridden odes to the struggles of regular people in New York City that were also trenchant examinations of the relativity of faith and morals. In 2011, on Broadway, his wonderful play “The Motherf **ker with the Hat” brought out the tragic beauty in a crew of hilariously foulmouthed,…

Weaving backward, two docents in dark couture led Harmony Korine through the white labyrinth of offices and private exhibition areas at the Gagosian Gallery on Park Avenue. Korine’s first big solo show, “Shooters,” was about to open in the gallery’s space, and he kept remarking that he’d just got off the plane from Nashville. His hazel eyes were wide, and he held his arms out with his fingers spread, like a small boy boarding an escalator. He stopped before a jaunty red canvas and asked, “What’s the title on that one?” He’d only recently, and hastily, titled his pieces. Virginia Coleman, in brown, said, “Chrissie?” Chrissie Erpf, in black, purred, “‘The Zooter.’” “Zooters are potheads,” Korine explained. He examined “Tornado Check,” a large canvas covered with a checkerboard of tiny,…

Since stepping down as Secretary of State, fifteen months ago, Hillary Clinton has kept a calculated distance from the press and the public. She has been working on a memoir about her years at the State Department, “Hard Choices,” to be published in early June; making occasional speeches, often for a fee said to exceed two hundred thousand dollars; and talking with close advisers about a possible second Presidential run. Despite the absence of a story, the media can’t stop discussing her. The mainstream press recycles talking points concerning her hypothetical campaign while casting about desperately for something new: Will Chelsea’s pregnancy and the prospect of becoming a grandmother mean that Clinton will be less likely to run? Would she support Marjorie Margolies, the Democrat vying to represent Pennsylvania’s Thirteenth…

On an icy January night in Budapest, with the temperature descending through the teens, a group of young people huddled outside the Millenáris Teátrum, a performance space on the west side of the Danube. They were waiting to see a midnight concert by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, a thirtyyear-old ensemble that has gained international renown not only for its grainy, potent music-making but also for its disruptive approach to the business of putting on concerts. Many curious things have happened at B.F.O. events. The arrangement of the orchestra often changes, with flutes showing up amid the violins, and vice versa. The program is not always announced in advance. On certain nights, the music is picked by an audience member, the chooser determined by a slip of paper drawn from a…

There was the crassness of the idea: to build a kitschy shopping mall in a reconstituted Ottoman military barracks, in the middle of Istanbul’s treasured Gezi Park. There was the whiff of cronyism in it, too. There was the obstinate micromanagement from the office of the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoðan, who appeared unable to fathom that people might not want a kitschy shopping mall instead of a park. (His reaction to a national-heritage board that rejected the plan was typical: “I reject your rejection.”) Then, there were those initial days when a handful of people tried to prevent earthmoving equipment from uprooting Gezi’s sycamores. There was the courageous member of parliament who threw himself in front of the machines, and the tent city that sprang up to house protesters…

Poetry and prose by Rachel Zucker. Motherhood isn’t war, madness, or addiction, but for a writer it can be an adverse condition, undermining the very work it inspires. The problem is time: writing and attending to children are contesting emergencies, each an existential threat to the other. The best contemporary poetry on motherhood understands the subject to be this temporal crisis. Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” is, among other things, a book about working at dawn, before “the child’s cry / melts in the wall”; the wall between art and life, at that moment, melts as well. After centuries of sentimental poems about mothers and babies, Plath and others—Adrienne Rich, Alice Notley, Louise Glück—came to write poems that were tensed by the incipient threat of interruption. Glück’s were often taut and epigrammatic,…

“Night Moves” and “The Double.” In Kelly Reichardt’s “Night Moves,” Jesse Eisenberg plays a lonely and reticent man, Josh, who works on an organic farm and food co-operative in southern Oregon. Eisenberg has grown a tentative beard; his eyes are hooded and hostile; he hauls, loads, does unending physical labor without apparent pleasure. His scowling appearance and his withdrawn temperament are a bit of a shock: his usual persona, a bright urban boy whose mind races ahead of the world, had seemed too good to give up. But Eisenberg is thirty now, and, however self-deprecating in interviews, he’s ambitious, launching himself in many directions: appearing in movies large and small, and writing provocative plays as well as humor pieces for The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. In “Night Moves” and another…

AT LEAST A HUNDRED and thirty-eight languages are spoken in Queens, and the Queens Museum reflects the borough’s mosaic. It has organized shows on the diasporas of Cuba and South Asia, and it exhibited contemporary Chinese art before it was fashionable. On May 31, the museum hosts “Oye, Corona,” a daylong festival in Corona Plaza that incudes a performance by New York’s all-female mariachi band Flor de Toloache. (Like Queens, the group is pan-cultural: its nine members are Dominican, Mexican, Colombian, Cuban, Italian, German, Puerto Rican, Indian, and American.) The museum owes its populist vision, in part, to the community-minded Tom Finkelpearl, who was its director from 2002 until April, when Mayor de Blasio wisely chose him to become the city’s new Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. NIGHT LIFE CLASSICAL…

SUMMER MOVIES ARE A SPECIAL breed. They’re rarely unveiled at film festivals or given long-lead screenings, because their element of spectacle is its own news. Nobody knows anything—except for what’s in the trailers. These are some of the ones that appear the most promising this season. Clint Eastwood’s musical “Jersey Boys” (June 20), based on the Broadway show about the mid-sixties pop group the Four Seasons and its lead singer, Frankie Valli, seems like an anomaly in his career. But the trailer, highlighting the conflict between the artists’ private lives and their public image, as well as the way that history is raised to legend, places the project firmly at the heart of Eastwood’s concerns as a director, and conveys the verve that Eastwood has always brought to stories that…

5 W. 8th St. (212-321-0100) THE RESTAURANT INSIDE THE NEW Marlton Hotel, on West Eighth Street, was inspired in part by “Tender Is the Night,” but even Dick Diver might find it challenging to get a drink here. Before sitting down to eat, there’s the lobby’s bar to negotiate, inevitably packed, and dominated on a recent evening by British tourists laden with Century 21 shopping bags and by men using the word “iterate” who looked like UrbanDaddy subscribers. Eye contact with the bartender, let alone an elaborate mescal cocktail, was an impossible dream. What a relief it was, then, to enter the comparative calm of the dining room—where the walls glow Ladurée green, and the décor is like Wes Anderson’s fantasy of a French bistro—heartened by the promise of a…

The New York Public Library’s announcement that it is abandoning its Central Library Plan has been praised as a good and sensible thing, and indeed it is. The C.L.P. would have sold off the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry, and Business Library (called SIBL; five of its floors not open to the public have been sold already). The collections of those libraries would have been moved to the main research library, on Fifth Avenue, and elsewhere. That hundred-and-three-year-old edifice (now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building), with the stone lions out front, would have been reconfigured: seven floors of its stacks taken out, a lending library added to what had been a research library only, more than a million books moved off-site, and a four-level atrium and other…

Here is a basic urban object: the crowd-control barricade, as seen at events all over America, especially in New York City. In Times Square on New Year’s Eve, at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue, at the West Indian-American Day Parade on Eastern Parkway, a certain familiar type of waist-high metal barricade keeps the many on one side, the few on the other. Some of the interlocking units bear a small silver label that says, “Friedrichs Custom Mfg. Inc., 303 Butterworth St., New Orleans, LA 70121.” On other units, the label says, “Jefferson, LA,” instead of “New Orleans.” Suspiciously, the Zip Code given for both municipalities is the same. Art critics sometimes describe objects as being of such overwhelming beauty that it is impossible to look at them…

Confession: I did not want to live here, not among the goldenrod, wild onions, or the dropseed, not waist high in the barrelaged brown corn water, not with the milliondollar racehorses, or the tightly wound round hay bales. Not even in the old tobacco weigh station we live in, with its heavy metal safe doors that frame our bricked bedroom like the mouth of a strange beast yawning to suck us in, each night, like air. I denied it, this new land. But, love, I’ll concede this: whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird, the loud, obvious blur of song people point to when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.…

In 1991, as Edward St. Aubyn was about to publish “Never Mind”—the first of five highly autobiographical novels, in which extremes of familial cruelty and social snobbery are described with a tart precision that is not quite free of cruelty and snobbery—he went for a walk with his mother in the English countryside and told her that his father had repeatedly raped him as a young boy. Her response “wasn’t totally satisfactory,” St. Aubyn said, several weeks ago. “She said, ‘Me, too’”— meaning that his father had raped her as well. “She was very, very keen to jump the queue and say how awful it was for her.” St. Aubyn was eating lunch in an almost empty restaurant a short walk from his home, in the Notting Hill area of…

For a long time they do nothing but hide and wait. Very little light creeps in under the pantry’s double doors. Brooks examines the cans on the shelf level with his head: beans, corn, soup. This pantry does not belong to him—or to his sister Mary. They are in someone else’s home. Mary has her eye pressed to the door crack. “Do you have to breathe so loud?” she asks. “I’m trying to listen.” The pantry is small but not coffin-small, not so small that Brooks can’t stretch his arms wide like a—well, like a what, exactly? Like a scarecrow on a pole. O.K., a scarecrow, sure, but where did that image come from? From the muck of the way back when, no doubt. “Your long-term memory seems to be…

THE SNOW QUEEN, by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). At the start of this novel, Barrett Meeks, a gifted underachiever in his late thirties, sees a “celestial manifestation” in the night sky over Central Park. The semi-religious experience inspires him to look hard at his life and to question his youthful assumptions about love. Meanwhile, his equally aimless older brother, Tyler, cares for his frail, cancer-ridden fiancée, for whom he struggles to compose a wedding song that is also an elegy. Tyler’s lyrics are mawkish, however, and something of their spirit seems to pervade the novel. Set between George Bush’s reëlection and the coming of Barack Obama, it charts that period’s waves of despair and hope, but the characters too often come off as overeager and almost adolescent.…