Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-23-15 i The New Yorker

At the start of its second decade, The New Yorker remained devoted to the sophisticated pleasures of what Harold Ross called “metropolitan life.” Depression at home, Fascism and Communism in Europe, and the spectre of war initially slipped into the magazine’s pages without dimming them. In 1936, Janet Flanner wrote a three-part Profile of Hitler, which discussed the Führer’s race hatreds but put more emphasis on his vegetarianism and his celibacy. If The New Yorker had stuck to its founding voice throughout the cataclysms of the thirties and forties, it might have faded into irrelevance. The Second World War changed the magazine for the better, and for good. Half the staff went into the military—Ross had to beg the War Department for draft deferments— and New Yorker writers in and…

On Monday, September 10, 2001, a new issue of The New Yorker, with a cover date of September 17th, went on sale. It was a lighthearted “Style Special,” and it featured a selection of the unpublished office memorandums of Diana Vreeland (1903–89), the legendary editor of Vogue. “In my opinion,” a 1967 memo began, “in the year 2001 so many physical problems will have been eliminated that a woman’s beauty will be a dream that will be completely obtainable.” In conclusion, Mrs. Vreeland predicted exultantly, “The future holds a golden world.” On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, with terrible suddenness, that future darkened. More lives were violently taken on American soil that day than on any day since the Civil War, including at Pearl Harbor, and this time…

WHEN IT FIRST APPEARED, in 1968, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Stimmung” must have seemed like the ultimate in Aquarian high culture. Paul Hillier, the director of the renowned vocal group Theatre of Voices, which released a recording of the piece in 2007 (and which will perform the piece at Zankel Hall on Feb. 21), has noted that “for many people, ‘Stimmung’ belongs to the sixties,” and the work’s embrace of non-Western religious traditions, its occasional but intense eroticism, and its general laid-back vibe mark it as a totem of its time. Yet today, with brilliant young ensembles of solo vocalists, like Ekmeles and Roomful of Teeth, defining a fresh and virtuosic American sound, Stockhausen’s masterpiece seems as relevant as ever, as much a landmark of the chamberchoral genre as the Italian and…

“Gazillion Bubble Show” The bubble scientist, artist, and performer Fan Yang holds numerous Guinness World Records, all pertaining to his soapy craft. In 2008, he earned the record for Encasing the Largest Land Mammal in a Bubble, using a nearly nine-thousand-pound elephant as his subject. His show, which has been running for nine years (Feb. 15th was its thirty-one-hundredand-fiftieth performance), is a kidfriendly spectacle spotlighting ingenious bubble wizardry, accompanied by lights, lasers, and other special effects. A true family affair, the extravaganza has been known to include Yang’s wife, Ana Yang; his brother, Jano Yang; his son, Deni Yang; and his daughter, Melody Yang, who also perform the show around the globe. (New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and other special performances. gazillionbubbleshow.com.) “You Like…

After her tap-dance lesson, Kat Edmonson had lunch at a Cuban restaurant. Edmonson is a singer and songwriter who has a new record, called “The Big Picture.” She is petite, with short, fine hair, delicate features, and pearly teeth. Her accent sounds Midwestern, but she grew up in Texas and now lives in Brooklyn. She began writing songs when she was nine years old, keeping them in a binder that says “Katherine’s Songs” on the cover, in letters made from little plastic jewels. She never learned an instrument well, so her songs are built around melodies as they occur to her, rather than on patterns of chords. She calls her style “vintage pop.” Her singing voice is supple and adept and capable of suggesting several shades of feeling within a…

Marcello is betrothed to Magdalena,who believes that he is in love with Mirabella,her identical twin sister. Both indeedare infatuated with Marcello,who, however, unbeknownst to them,has forsworn the company of womenand resolved to take monastic vows.Fleeing the city to avoid the wrath of his father,the Duke of Mantua, who has arrangedthe match with Magdalena for purely monetary reasons,Marcello meets on the road a young monk, Fra Martino,who is in fact his fiancée’s sister’s maid, Martina,in disguise. Martina has a plan to bring Marcelloand her mistress together by means of a magic potionbrewed in the mountains by an old witch, Morgana,the Duke’s half sister, banished there many years before.Meanwhile, a malcontent courtier, Malcontento,has been plotting the abduction of Magdalenawith two henchmen, Muffo and Mosca,instructing them to carry her off to a cavein…

Early last year, General Khalifa Haftar left his home in northern Virginia—where he had spent most of the previous two decades, at least some of that time working with the Central Intelligence Agency—and returned to Tripoli to fight his latest war for control of Libya. Haftar, who is a mild-looking man in his early seventies, has fought with and against nearly every significant faction in the country’s conflicts, leading to a reputation for unrivalled military experience and for a highly flexible sense of personal allegiance. In the Green Mountains, the country’s traditional hideout for rebels and insurgents, he established a military headquarters, inside an old airbase surrounded by red-earth farmland and groves of hazelnut and olive trees. Haftar’s force, which he calls the Libyan National Army, has taken much of…

Six months before Joan Rivers died, last year, she went on the “Howard Stern Show”: two old friends, serial offenders, knocking down targets. They talked about Mayor Bill de Blasio. (“Rich against the poor!” she sneered.) Stern asked her opinion of Woody Allen, with whom Rivers had come up in the club scene, in the early sixties. “I think he’s brilliant. What Woody does in his private life is his private life. You want to be a pedophile, be a pedophile. I like . . . what’s her name? Ping-Pong. The wife. She wears yellow too much. Too matchy-matchy.” Then, abruptly, Rivers changed the subject, to a topic more divisive than class warfare or Woody Allen: Lena Dunham’s body. “Let me ask you something!” she said. “Lena Dunham. Who I…

HAPPY ARE THE HAPPY, by Yasmina Reza, translated from the French by John Cullen (Other). The twenty-one interconnected monologues in this meditation on parenting, death, and relations between the sexes manage to make domestic trifles seem electrifying. With implacable wit and a dramatist’s sense of timing, Reza offers snapshots from the psyches of eighteen characters, including a couple who squabble over Morbier cheese and stuffed hamsters, and a retired financier and statesman who taunts his exasperated wife with instructions for his funeral. The tone is wry, warm, and accepting. “The couple is the most impenetrable thing there is,” one character muses. “You can’t understand a couple, even if you’re part of it.” INTERNAL MEDICINE, by Terrence Holt (Liveright). This sequence of short narratives inhabits a shadow zone between fact…

THE THIN BLUE LINE The reality of the Albuquerque Police Department’s record of violence is even grimmer than it’s portrayed by Rachel Aviv (“Your Son Is Deceased,” February 2nd). I am a public defender in New Mexico. From 2013 to 2014, I was a member of the Albuquerque Police Oversight Task Force, an adhoc body created by the City Council to make recommendations for a new civilian police-oversight ordinance. I watched the city’s mayor, Richard Berry, dismantle the city’s oversight commission. The city attorney’s office issued a bizarre opinion stating that, because there are checks and balances among branches of government, there must be checks and balances between citizen police overseers and the paid staff they supervise. This left the commission with no control over a staffer found to…

In 1948, the movie director John Huston sent a telegram to Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker, complimenting the work of a young reporter named Lillian Ross, who had interviewed him for a piece about the blacklist. In “Come In, Lassie,” Ross had demonstrated a fine ear for the vanities and the inanities of Hollywood, positing that the famous dog was the only safely nonpolitical movie star. “We like Lassie. We’re sure of Lassie,” one M-G-M suit told her. “Katharine Hepburn goes out and makes a speech for Henry Wallace. Bang! We’re in trouble. Lassie doesn’t make speeches.” A couple of years later, Huston—presumably confident of his own lack of vanity and inanity—invited Ross to observe what turned out to be the troubled making of his new film,…

Recently, in Silver Spring, Maryland, drivers at a busy intersection witnessed a spectacle you don’t see much these days, outside of the “Hunger Games” franchise: two children, aged ten and six, walking alone. An onlooker alerted the police. The cops scooped up the kids, drove them home in a patrol car, and reprimanded their father, Alexander Meitiv, a physicist at the National Institutes of Health. Within an hour, five squad cars had arrived. Meitiv insisted that he was not guilty of negligence. He’d dropped o! the children at a nearby park, with the idea that they would walk home. He and his wife are devotees of Free-Range Kids, a movement committed to rolling back the excesses of the helicopter-parent era. (From the group’s Web site: “Fighting the belief that our…

Last month, when “American Sniper” earned ninety million dollars in its first weekend of wide release, it demolished one of Hollywood’s hoariest myths—that opening a big movie in January is a recipe for disaster. For decades, Hollywood’s release strategy has been governed by a simple calculus: summer is for blockbusters, the end of the year is for classy Oscar bait, and the other months are for stu! you fear no one wants to see. As John Fithian, the head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, put it to me, “Most big releases have been clustered into just five and a half months—May through mid-August, and then November and December—while the other six months of the year have been a pretty fallow period.” Now that paradigm is shifting. Hollywood’s reliance…

During my senior year in college, forty-two years ago, I spent a lot of time reading old issues of The New Yorker. My purpose was to write an English honors thesis about them, if possible. I had no real focus; my brother, who had been sick for a while, died soon after I started. I sat in a remote study carrel in the library’s stacks, next to a narrow, dim window with an interior view, and idled through the brittle pages in bound volumes. In the end, I turned in the thesis (such as it was) too late and graduated in General Studies. The one success I can point to is that I read every issue, more or less cover to cover, from the magazine’s first three years—from February 21,…

1. LAUNCH DAY In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vicepresident of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has a bench-pressing bulk that he carries a little sheepishly, as if it belonged to someone else—has described himself as both “deeply, deeply tired” and “always anxious.” When he sits down, on an aluminum stool in Apple’s design studio, or in the cream leather back seat of his Bentley Mulsanne, a car for a head of state, he is likely to emit a soft, half-ironic groan. His manner suggests the burden of being fully appreciated. There were times, during the past two decades, when he considered leaving Apple, but he stayed, becoming an intimate friend of Steve Jobs and establishing the build and the…

The man always sat in the same seat, the stool farthest down the counter. When it wasn’t occupied, that is, but it was nearly always free. The bar was seldom crowded, and that particular seat was the most inconspicuous and the least comfortable. A staircase in the back made the ceiling slanted and low, so it was hard to stand up there without bumping your head. The man was tall, yet, for some reason, preferred that cramped, narrow spot. Kino remembered the first time the man had come to his bar. His appearance had immediately caught Kino’s eye—the bluish shaved head, the thin build yet broad shoulders, the keen glint in his eye, the prominent cheekbones and wide forehead. He looked to be in his early thirties, and he wore…

By the time the British artist Isaac Julien’s iconic short essay-film “Looking for Langston” was released, in 1989, Julien’s ostensible subject, the enigmatic poet and race man Langston Hughes, had been dead for twenty-two years, but the search for his “real” story was still ongoing. There was a sense—particularly among gay men of color, like Julien, who had so few “out” ancestors and wanted to claim the prolific, uneven, but significant writer as one of their own—that some essential things about Hughes had been obscured or disfigured in his work and his memoirs. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, and transplanted to New York City as a strikingly handsome nineteen-yearold, Hughes became, with the publication of his first book of poems, “The Weary Blues” (1926), a prominent New Negro: modern,…

On a recent visit to Oliveto, a nouvelle Italian restaurant in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, California, I paid attention less to the food than to the sound. I was at a table of six, in the restaurant’s upstairs section. It was a Friday night, and by the middle of the meal the room was crowded. Conditions were primed for restaurant cacophony: that inexorable crescendo of talking, barking, cackling, and clanking, which threatens to drown out any conversation and prompts diners to shout at one another, adding to the din. On this night, though, I found myself able to tune out the noise and hear only what I wanted to hear. When someone at a nearby table began guffawing at his own jokes, I could still follow the remarks of…

Conceived and goaded into life in the winter of 1925 by the hayseed cosmopolite Harold Ross, The New Yorker took tremulous wing with the contributions of evening friends of his like Robert Benchley, Frank Sullivan, and Dorothy Parker, and with the uneasy backing of a bakery mogul, Raoul Fleishmann. Another critical forefather was the art editor, Rea Irvin, who installed the sensual typeface, drew the Eustace Tilley cover, and began publishing the work of brilliant artists (never “cartoonists,” in house parlance) like Helen Hokinson, Al Frueh, Otto Soglow, Richard Decker, Mary Petty, Gluyas Williams—and, in profusion, that of the magazine’s first genius, Peter Arno. Irvin’s own stuff lit up almost every issue. (Minister blesses foxhounds, runs hill and dale, blesses fox, too.) It seemed all in fun at first, an…

ANTICIPATION IS HIGH for “Surround Audience,” the New Museum’s 2015 triennial, which was organized by the prescient curator Lauren Cornell and the maverick artist Ryan Trecartin (pictured here in Trecartin’s studio in L.A.) with an eye on the Internet age. “You Can’t Unsee This” reads a tagline from the show’s ad campaign, which was cooked up by K-Hole, a group of young New Yorkers who don’t distinguish between their work as a trend-forecasting agency and their output as artists. Such blurred lines—between physical and virtual, avant-garde and commercial, aesthetics and activism—are par for the course in this exhibition of sculptures, paintings, videos, comedy, poetry, sound art, and dance by fifty-one millennial artists and collectives from more than twenty countries. It opens on Feb. 25. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP…

261 Madison Ave. (212-544-9862) A dressed-up, aspirational crowd—a midtown mishmash—is having the time of its life at Zuma bar, above the newly opened branch of Rainer Becker’s London-based, Japan-inspired restaurant with locations including Miami and Dubai. Downstairs, a host station is staffed like a check-in table at a première party; upstairs, so is another. Start a tab and you get a claim ticket for your credit card: “levels of efficiency not normally required,” a patron observed on a recent weeknight. Women with giant leather handbags and men in sports coats, many with chin-length slicked-back hair like fun-loving bankers, flirted and hollered, fuelled by Japanese whiskey and fruity house specialties (the lychee-rose-petal Martini, the Mandarin Cosmo). A wavy-haired man with an unbuttoned collar asked his neighbor for her drink menu—“It would…

Larry David, back in New York to headline his first play, recently visited his childhood apartment, in Sheepshead Bay, to see whence his “no hugging, no learning” viewpoint had sprung. Standing in a cement courtyard just o! the Belt Parkway, the co-creator of “Seinfeld” and the creator and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” said, “This was my little world.” Four identical red brick buildings framed the winter sky. “When you wanted your friends to come out, you’d just scream at the windows.” Wearing a charcoal scarf and striding backward, tour-guide style, David noted, “We used to play skelly here, and I had a fistfight there.” He laughed so joyously, recalling the ancient triumph, that his bat wings of hair bounced. Unlike his crabbed screen persona, David is lithe and friendly,…

I didn’t set out to be a comma queen. The first job I ever had, the summer I was fifteen, was checking feet at a public pool in Cleveland. I was a “key girl”—“Key personnel” was the job title on my pay stub. I never knew what that was supposed to mean. I was not in charge of any keys, and my position was by no means crucial to the operation of the pool, although I did clean the bathrooms. Swimmers had to follow an elaborate ritual before getting into the pool: tuck your hair into a hideous bathing cap (if you were a girl), shower, wade through a footbath spiked with disinfectant that tinted your feet orange, and stand in line to have your toes checked. This took place…

Testifying about a request for a protective order against him, race car driver Kurt Busch told a Dover, Del. court this week that his former girlfriend is an assassin. —NPR. [Her] alleged background . . . killing drug lords via long-range sniper rifles and close combat tactics—including the use of knives and poison—became a major talking point during the later stages of the hearing. —USA Today. I’ll admit it: I’m an all-or-nothing type of person. I’m emotional. I fall in love easily. I know you had a right to end it— obviously, you do. But you could have handled it better, and been kinder. Now that I think about it, this goes back to the very beginning, when I entered the party from the balcony, put my suction-climbing gear into…

In a certain town in New Jersey where now will be found malls cardealerships drive-throughshighways with synchronized lights a motor-vehicle office a storeselling discount something or otherI can’t remember what else but haven’t we all experienced such postagrariantransmogrificationsIn a certain town in New Jersey once was a farm farmed by a Jewishfarmer a Jewish farmermy goodness a notion I’d never entertained Jews were lawyersaccountants doctors maybe salesmenuntil a friend took me to meet one his uncle his mother’s brother wholived somewhere I’d never heard ofIn a certain town in New Jersey not far from where I am now existed afarmer who was also a Jewwho’d eluded the second war murders by leaving for the States withnothing in his wallet or satchelbut a hammer and saw and a handful of nails…

I want to wake in the lagoon of the skywhere sunlight binds the mutilated palm-tree dawnlike duct tape, an aerial shot rolling and rollingout of town in the muffled trunk of a brown panel vanalong the death roads, the desert roads, the hairpinturns, California, the desert silvering in my eyelike a coyote, I want to swim in the jewel jade poolof your lonesome foothill vowels,stretch out under the mirroring cloudslike a million rooftop deck chairs, feelthat blankness unfurl in my mind like luxury,California, your beautiful blankness, your sheen.O, shake me a basil gimlet at Silver Lakeand tell me about your tattoos, hermana, how deathis that bad tooth wobbling in my head,in my head, California, that skyline that breaksinto backdrop hills I know like nostalgia, pink saguaroand sumac, the ripe berries…