Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-09-15 i The New Yorker

On May 1, the Whitney Museum opens in its new location, on Gansevoort Street. The eight-story building, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, has sweeping views of the Hudson River, but they won’t pull focus from the inaugural show, an in-depth look at the permanent collection, which is anchored deep in the American modern and contemporary canon, from Marsden Hartley to Rachel Harrison. Titled “America Is Hard to See” (after both Robert Frost’s revisionist ode to Christopher Columbus and Emile de Antonio’s documentary about Eugene McCarthy’s Presidential campaign), the exhibition will include plenty of crowd-pleasers—Hopper, O’Keeffe, Calder’s “Circus”—but, with the Whitney’s brilliant chief curator, Donna De Salvo, at the helm, expect major twists in the conventional art-historical plot. Decades before “performance” devolved into a buzzword, the Whitney was hosting…

Peter Bogdanovich, a master of screwball comedy and a connoisseur of classic movies, fuses these talents in “She’s Funny That Way” (May 1), a New York-centric satire, starring Imogen Poots as a former prostitute, now an actress, who auditions for a play directed by a former client (Owen Wilson). The film’s original title, “Squirrels to the Nuts,” is a line from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1946 comedy, “Cluny Brown,” and Bogdanovich puts it at the center of the action. Will Forte co-stars as the playwright, who falls for the actress; Jennifer Aniston plays a therapist with an attitude. A Danish-Argentine Western is an unlikely but effective formula in “Jauja” (March 20). It stars Viggo Mortensen as an army engineer in nineteenth-century Patagonia, who pursues his teen-age daughter (Viilbjørk Agger Malling) after she…

Amazing physical feats that evoke animated special effects—gliding on the tips of toes, the surreal twisting of joints—are some of the elements that define the street-dance form called flex. It emerged in Brooklyn in the early nineties, on the streets and in the dance halls of East New York. Now flex is coming uptown. In “FLEXN,” at the Park Avenue Armory (March 25-April 4), personal stories and reflections on such events as the killing of Eric Garner—expressed through dance—are woven together by the dancers, in collaboration with the directors, Peter Sellars and the flex choreographer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray. Liz Gerring’s dances are clean, athletic, and elegant. Beneath their gleaming surface, one detects such influences as Merce Cunningham (in the witty footwork) and Trisha Brown (in the fluid use of…

With the arrest last week of two Brooklyn roommates who were allegedly on their way to Syria to join ISIS, water-cooler conversation around town turned, once again, to the secret lives of youths. “Young people, they don’t have much to lose. They can easily be brainwashed,” Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who runs the Soufan Group, a security firm that tracks Islamic extremism, said. So what makes them join a jihadist movement? Before their arrest, Akhror Saidakhmetov, nineteen, who worked in electronics kiosks, and Abdurasul Juraboev, twenty-four, who had a job chopping vegetables at the Gyro King on Foster Avenue, resided in Midwood, a diverse neighborhood of Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and immigrants from Poland and South and Central Asia. The arrests flew in the face of the local conventional…

As soon as the battle between Greece and its creditors ended, with the two sides agreeing to a four-month extension of Greece’s financial bailout, the battle over who had won began. Wolfgang Schäuble, the hard-line German finance minister, declared that the new Greek government, led by the leftist party Syriza, had been forced into a “date with reality.” Greece’s Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, called the agreement a “decisive step” that would help end austerity and lift the Greek economy from its deep depression, and the Greek public seemed largely pleased with the deal. At first glance, Tsipras’s positive comments look like spin. Syriza came to power vowing to win a reduction in Greece’s enormous debt burden, to reject the budget commitments that the previous Greek government had made, and to…

We have the town we call home wakening for dawnwhich isn’t yet here but is promised, we haveour tired neighbors rising in ones and twos, we havethe sky slowly separating itself from the housesto become the sky while the stars blink a last timeand vanish to make way for us to enter the greatstageof an ordinary Tuesday in ordinary time. We haveour curses, our gripes, our lies all on the stale breathof 6:37 A.M. in the city no one dreams, the Tuesdaycityin which we shall live for this day or not at all.“Where are the angels?” I ask. This is a visionarymomentin the history of time, incomplete without angels,without at least Argente of the tarnished wings,or the mangled half-assed Incondante who speaksonly in riddles, or one-winged Sylvania who glowsin the…

When John Joseph returned to New York, in 1981, punk rock was almost dead, and he was determined to help kill it. He had grown up hard in Queens, abandoned by his father and then by his mother. (Eventually, he stopped using his last name, which was McGowan.) He wound up living in a Catholic boys’ home in the Rockaways, which in time came to seem less appealing than a life on the streets. Among the many things he found on the streets was punk, in the form of a wild concert at Max’s Kansas City, the night club on Park Avenue South where such heroes as Sid Vicious and Johnny Thunders liked to debauch themselves. John Joseph had visited Max’s under the influence of a sedative called Placidyl, which…

Like many pioneering TV series, ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat,” a sitcom about a Taiwanese-American family running a Western-themed chophouse in Orlando, Florida, débuted to impossibly high expectations, hand-wringing, and prickly waves of preëmptive backlash. In an unusual twist, this hazing came from the man whose life the show was based on. In an essay in New York, Eddie Huang, the celebrity chef, Vice TV host, and author of the memoir “Fresh Off the Boat,” merrily trash-talked his own collaborators, including a Chinese-American producer, whom he called an “Uncle Chan,” and the showrunner, Nahnatchka Khan, an Iranian-American. “What did you buy my book for?” Huang yelled, frustrated that the show had bowdlerized his story, which included whippings by his father, an immigrant restaurant owner. “Just make A Chink’s Life .…

PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE In reporting on the use of psychedelic drugs to treat cancer and other pathologies, Michael Pollan could have turned his attention to more critical studies (“The Trip Treatment,” February 9th). In my work as a psychiatrist, I have read research on psilocybin—the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”— that is at odds with the benign outcomes he mentions in his piece. In a 2013 article in the Schizophrenia Bulletin, the psychopharmacologist Robin Carhart-Harris proposed that psilocybin-induced brain changes could be used “as a model of early psychosis.” This fits with another study, by Franz X. Vollenweider, from 1998, in which he reported a schizophrenia-like psychosis lasting about two hours in twentyfive healthy volunteers after they were given psilocybin. In many cases, the volunteers who participate in psychedelic research…

“The Lives of Hamilton Fish” Art in General, a nonprofit art space, presents a multimedia storytelling event about people who lived in New York State during the Great Depression. The piece chronicles the deaths, one day apart in 1936, of two different men named Hamilton Fish, one a statesman and one a serial killer. The interdisciplinary exploration is the brainchild of the sculptor, songwriter, and performer Rachel Mason, and it takes the form of a “cinematic rock opera performance.” In other words, a film is projected, and the vocal parts are performed live by actors, who also act out what happens on-screen; live musicians play along to the film’s score. (Root Studios, 443 W. 18th St. artingeneral.org. March 6-7.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The contemporary-art specialist Phillips holds its first…

Broadway is an old dog, slow to learn new tricks. But every now and then it aces one of its old tricks. The audiences who flocked to Lincoln Center’s 2008 revival of “South Pacific” won’t soon forget its thrilling first moments: the lights dimmed, the opening strains of “Bali Ha’i” filled the Vivian Beaumont, and a moving platform revealed a sumptuous thirty-piece orchestra. For theatregoers accustomed to dinky offstage bands, it was an anachronistic marvel, instantly evoking Broadway’s golden age. Lincoln Center Theatre is clearly trying to re-create the magic with “The King and I,” beginning previews March 12. Not only is it another Rodgers and Hammerstein classic (with some dated attempts at multiculturalism), the revival shares with “South Pacific” a director, Bartlett Sher, and a winsome leading lady, Kelli…

Imagine Dragons, the Las Vegas rock band, was in town recently to promote its new album, “Smoke + Mirrors.” On a night off, the band’s members decided to check out Fat Cat, a jazz, pool, and shuffleboard joint in the West Village that Dan Platzman, the drummer, had heard about. “So, Platz,” Wayne Sermon, the group’s long-haired guitar player, said as their hired van pulled away from the Dream Hotel, on West Fifty-fifth Street. “This is a jazz place? Is it good jazz?” Sermon has a deep, rumbling voice; when he talks, he sounds as if he were giving a sermon. “It’s diverse,” Platz said. “It could be wanky.” “Oh, if it’s jazz it will be wanky.” Sermon trained as a jazz guitarist, which gives him license to say that.…

My Chinese censor is Zhang Jiren, an editor at the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, and last September he accompanied me on a publicity tour. It was the first time I’d gone on a book tour with my censor. When I rode the high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing, Zhang sat beside me; at the hotel in Beijing, he stayed on the same floor. He sat in on my interviews with the Chinese media. He had even prepared the tour schedule on a spreadsheet, which was color-coded to represent five types of commitments, with days that lasted as long as thirteen hours. Other authors had warned me about such schedules, so before the tour I sent Zhang a request for more free time. His response was prompt: “In my experience, the…

In 2000, Abe Crystal, an undergraduate from Columbia, South Carolina, was enrolled in a writing class I teach at Princeton, and one of his assignments was to compose a profile of another student, whose name was Grainger David. This Grainger happened to be the undergraduate president of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s University Cottage Club and was as smoothly verbal and self-possessed as any of Fitzgerald’s characters, including Amory Blaine, of “This Side of Paradise.” In the profile, Abe Crystal mentioned, without amplification, that Grainger David had “sprezzatura.” Sprezzatura? Of course, in this advanced age of the handheld vocabulary, everyone on earth knows what sprezzatura means, but in 2000 I had no idea, and I reached for an Italian dictionary. Nothing. I looked in another Italian dictionary. Nothing. I looked in Web…

The boys have gone out hawking. The year is 500 A.D., give or take, when young men of a certain social class fly hawks for sport. One of these boys belongs to that class: his father is a knight, and he will grow up to be one, too. His name is Kay. The other boy will grow up to be a king, but he doesn’t know that yet. For now, he is Kay’s inferior: younger, adopted, of unknown lineage, saddled by the older child with the unfortunate nickname the Wart. At present, in an arrangement that is typical, the Wart is trudging along carrying a dead creature to serve as a lure, while Kay, walking in front of him, carries the hawk. It is a goshawk, a huge bird with…

There is so much good will and enthusiasm these days among theatregoers who have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s complicated, valuable musical “Hamilton” (directed by Thomas Kail, at the Public) that introducing anything less into the conversation makes one feel rather like Debbie Downer at a buoyant fête. But a critical take on Miranda’s work—which does everything it can to stand outside the American-musical canon and then doesn’t—should only add to the production’s gold-star success, since nothing succeeds like controversy. Alexander Hamilton knew from discord. Born in Nevis, in 1755, he had a childhood marked by waste and brutality. At sixteen, his mother, Rachel Faucette, the daughter of an Englishwoman and a Frenchman, inherited her father’s Nevis plantation and was married off, to Johann Michael Lavien, an older Danish man in St.…

BJÖRK CAN SOMETIMES fail her songs by writing lyrics that are overlush and insistent, but she managed to untangle her words to superb effect on “Vespertine” (2001), and, now, on “Vulnicura,” her new album, she makes much of a common occurrence: the dissolution of a marriage. By working with artists such as the late John Tavener, she has learned how to use the emotional power of an aging singer’s voice (she turns fifty next year) to make music that is not pop but a kind of classical melodrama. This month, the Icelandic star performs concerts at Carnegie Hall, Kings Theatre, and City Center, and on March 8 MOMA opens a retrospective of the artist’s work that will no doubt be interesting and complicated, since museums are known to fix…

It’s not just hope that springs eternal—it’s youth itself. On March 26, the twenty-nineyear-old piano-playing crooner Tobias Jesso, Jr., makes his local début, with a show at the Mercury Lounge (followed the next night by an appearance at Baby’s All Right, in Brooklyn), performing the attenuated and piercingly sad ballads on his first album, “Goon,” which comes out on March 17. Molly Rankin is a twenty-seven-year-old singer with a beguiling, windswept voice (she was born into the Rankin family, a legendary folk group from Nova Scotia). She fronts the band Alvvays (pronounced “always”), which released a self-titled first album of fuzzy, upbeat, and romantic pop last year and is now looking forward to two of its biggest shows yet in New York: a headlining gig at the Bowery Ballroom, on…

Major institutions are focussing on audience appeal with uncommon intensity this spring. At the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert’s emphasis is resolutely on contemporary music. Gilbert will personally lead performances of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Nyx” (March 19-20 and March 24); the world première of John Adams’s “Scheherazade.2,” a symphony for violin and orchestra featuring Leila Josefowicz (March 26-28); a new concerto for violin and oboe by Thierry Escaich, with the violinist (and Philharmonic favorite) Lisa Batiashvili and her husband, the oboist François Leleux, as soloists (April 8-11); and the U.S. première of “Senza Sangue,” a one-act opera by the Hungarian modernist Peter Eötvös that features the mezzosoprano Anne Sofie von Otter and the baritone Russell Braun (May 8-9). At Carnegie Hall, “Before Bach” offers a feast of works by the great…

A few weeks ago, Irving Bierman, a seventy-two-year-old Brooklyn native, sent an e-mail to James Dolan, the owner of the Knicks. “As a Knicks fan for in excess of sixty years, I am utterly embarrassed,” Bierman wrote. The team had the N.B.A.’s worst record even before Carmelo Anthony, its best player, decided that knee surgery sounded more appealing than finishing a season in which ESPN had replaced a scheduled Knicks broadcast with a celebrity bowling tournament. Last week, Phil Jackson, the team’s president and resident mystic, declared that the Knicks were giving the basketball gods “heartburn.” Bierman went on, “You have done a lot of utterly STUPID business things with the franchise. Please NO MORE.” The stress of the season seemed to have got to Dolan, too. He responded to…

Years passed and I received no letter with the word “trombone.”The distant cousins wrote, offered their shriller sympathies.“What’s wrong with us?” Nothing I knew. Plugboard and isinglass,grimoire and cwm, friends all. Still I felt horribly alone.Until one day it dropped through roundel light onto the mat.I was tearing my dictionaries of hope—who, why, and what—apart when it sounded, that note pressing for home. Trombone.And fearing it a dream was like waking in the wrong room,not daring to believe in your return, or having cometo my senses after sickness. Veneer, mirror, and comb:objects that shivered as relief swelled under them, they drewlots to be turned to words which, soon as said, I knewwere brass. Years sliding past alone until—avast!—trombone.…

Jim Trusdale had a shack on the west side of his father’s gone-to-seed ranch, and that was where he was when Sheriff Barclay and half a dozen deputized townsmen found him, sitting in the one chair by the cold stove, wearing a dirty barn coat and reading an old issue of the Black Hills Pioneer by lantern light. Looking at it, anyway. Sheriff Barclay stood in the doorway, almost filling it up. He was holding his own lantern. “Come out of there, Jim, and do it with your hands up. I ain’t drawn my pistol and don’t want to.” Trusdale came out. He still had the newspaper in one of his raised hands. He stood there looking at the sheriff with his flat gray eyes. The sheriff looked back. So…

THE UNFORTUNATE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY, by Amanda Filipacchi (Norton). Barb Colby, a costume designer in Manhattan, is gorgeous, but finds her looks a hindrance: people respond to her face, not her spirit. After her best friend leaps to his death, confessing love for her in a suicide note, she constructs an elaborate disguise, including “a simple-but-convincing jiggling fat suit,” a frizzy gray wig, and crooked fake teeth. Meanwhile, another friend, a brilliant but plain musician, falls in love with a handsome cad, raising alarm among the members of their close-knit, artsy circle. A caper involving a murder plot ensues. Filipacchi works with clear themes, but her sure comic touch steers clear of didacticism; smart and sweet, the novel becomes a tribute to the pleasures of friendship. ETTA AND OTTO…