Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-16-15 i The New Yorker

AS THE CURTAIN RISES on Paul Taylor’s 1985 piece “Last Look”—it will be part of his company’s current season at the Koch Theatre—you see, under a low, grimy light, a big pile of God knows what in the middle of the stage. It starts to move. It is a pile of human beings. Slowly, they crawl apart. One man stands out from the others. He rises; he falls; he rises and falls again and again, flinging his arms and legs so violently that he seems to be trying to cast them of his body. The dancer here is Robert Kleinendorst. Much of Taylor’s best work depends on the performers looking human and inhuman at the same time, and no one in the company looks more human than Kleinendorst, down to…

NYC Craft Beer Festival: Spring Seasonal The craft-beer revival is like a happy hour that never ends—this is the tenth edition of the biannual event. Driven by a renewed interest in the fermented beverage, the gathering features seventy-"ive breweries from around the nation. More than a hundred and "ifty brews will be available for tasting, with an emphasis on seasonal and limited releases. Artisanal food, music from the High and Mighty Brass Band, and cocktail-making tips from Jonathan Pogash will also be on tap. (Lexington Avenue Armory, 68 Lexington Ave. handcraftedtasting.com. March 13-14.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The New York auction circuit embarks on a week of Asian art sales, a category encompassing everything from Himalayan mandalas to Ming bowls. Christie’s sales begin on March 15, with a two-day spread…

Reggie Watts is weird, but weird works for Reggie Watts. Example: his 2012 TED talk. He starts out speaking gibberish, which morphs into a British accent (“there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories”), and is followed by a gru" “Ya know what I’m sayin’?” Ya don’t, but that’s the point. Watts, the soon-to-be house bandleader of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” on CBS, could be called a comedian or a musician. In his signature act, he improvises monologues and songs over beats that he records onstage and loops using an e"ects pedal. The result is like watching a “Saturday Night Live” audition on acid. The other day, Watts was due at the Tiger Lounge, a secret rehearsal space…

Jean McConville had just taken a bath when the intruders knocked on the door. A small woman with a guarded smile, she was, at thirty-seven, a mother of ten. She was also a widow: her husband, Arthur, had died eleven months earlier, of cancer. The family continued to live in Divis Flats—a housing complex just of the Falls Road, in the heart of Catholic West Belfast—but had recently moved to a slightly larger apartment. The stove was not connected yet, so Jean’s daughter Helen, who was fifteen, had gone to a nearby chip shop to bring back dinner. “Don’t be stopping for a sneaky smoke,” Jean told her. It was December, 1972, and already dark at 6:30 P.M. When the children heard the knock, they assumed that it was Helen…

One day not long after New Year’s, 2012, an antiquities collector approached an eminent Oxford scholar for his opinion about some brownish, tattered scraps of writing. The collector’s identity has never been revealed, but the scholar was Dirk Obbink, a MacArthur-winning classicist whose specialty is the study of texts written on papyrus—the material, made of plant fibres, that was the paper of the ancient world. When pieced together, the scraps that the collector showed Obbink formed a fragment about seven inches long and four inches wide: a little larger than a woman’s hand. Densely covered with lines of black Greek characters, they had been extracted from a piece of desiccated cartonnage, a papiermâché-like plaster that the Egyptians and Greeks used for everything from mummy cases to bookbindings. After acquiring the…

To watch Larry David make his Broadway début, in his self-penned “Fish in the Dark” (at the Cort), in the same week that Helen Mirren stars as Queen Elizabeth II, in Peter Morgan’s “The Audience” (at the Gerald Schoenfeld), is to learn something about the benefits and the limitations of shtick. Derived from the Yiddish word shtik, meaning “an act” or “a gimmick” (from the German Stück, for “piece”), it can also refer to an adopted persona that is consistently maintained. David’s shtick is familiar to legions of fans of his HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” in which he played a thin, sour-voiced TV writer and producer. Mirren’s shtick, on the other hand, is to transform herself into what she is not: in this case, Elizabeth II, a role she…

CUOMO’S WAY Jeffrey Toobin’s Profile of Governor Andrew Cuomo is excellent, but it does not reflect his practice of deceit (“The Albany Chronicles,” February 16th). In 2012, some of the people whom Cuomo had appointed to a commission to review the Long Island Power Authority’s response to a storm did not endorse the recommendation he wanted (that LIPA should be disbanded). His response was to rewrite parts of the commission’s final report. In 2013, he claimed that the Moreland Commission would be independent, and could investigate anyone, but when the commission subpoenaed a firm that had made ads for the Governor’s campaign, Cuomo’s staffdemanded that the subpoenas be recalled; he also intervened when the commission sought to subpoena a trade group that had supported him. He ultimately shut down…

Three Fridays ago at Balthazar, the SoHo brasserie, a large cloudedglass mirror detached from a wall and landed on some people who were having breakfast. One of them was a man— debonair, in a fine scarf and a dark coat—who identified himself to police officers responding to a 911 call as Arnaud Française. He was wheeled out of the restaurant on a gurney and taken to Bellevue. Doctors examined him; he was unharmed. Later, it emerged that he was not M. Française but Arnaud Montebourg, until last August the French Minister of the Economy. One guesses that he tendered the false surname out of embarrassment, not wanting to be known, newly arrived on the East Coast—he was spending the week as the Syngman Rhee 1910 Lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson…

Let’s review the gentrification of Brooklyn: ten years ago, the Gowanus Asteroid landed in Prospect Park, imbuing a group of passersby with awesome superpowers. This band of heroes, calling themselves the League of Victory, now spend their days putting out subway fires, stopping muggers, and generally keeping Brooklyn safe for vegan bakeries and bicycle collectives. That, anyway, is the version put forward by the new musical “Brooklynite,” which recently opened of Broadway. The show is the rare musical based on a store. (“Walmartopia,” a Fringe Festival hit in 2006, is another.) Its inspiration is the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, which opened in Park Slope eleven years ago and specializes in capes, masks, ray guns, invisibility coating, and other crime-fighting accoutrements. Behind a secret moving wall—designed to elicit “whoa”s—is a spacious…

The stars in their magnificent arrayLook down upon the Earth, their cynosure,Or so it seems. They are too far away,In fact, to see a thing; hence they look pureTo us. They lack the textures of our globe,So only we, from cameras carried high,Enjoy the beauty of the swirling robeThat wraps us up, the interplay of skyAnd cloud, as if a Wedgwood plate of blueAnd white should melt, and then, its surface stirredWith spoons, a treasure too good to be true,Be placed, and hover like a hummingbird,Drawing all eyes, though ours alone, to feastOn splendor as it turns west from the East. There was a time when some of our young menWalked plumply on the moon and saw Earth rise,As stunning as the sun. The years since thenHave aged them. Now…

In the course of Mario Vargas Llosa’s seventy-nine years, Peru has alternated between dictatorship and democracy with the sort of regularity that other countries experience through mere shiftings from one political party to another. During his nation’s most violent and despairing periods, Vargas Llosa must keenly have felt the truth of his own repeated assertion that the writer of fiction wishes to replace the world as it is with another one entirely. His novels, the latest of which, “The Discreet Hero” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), appears this month in the United States, have arisen from what Vargas Llosa calls Peru’s “effervescent structure of prejudices and sentiments,” the racebased obsession with social hierarchy which has helped produce the country’s calamitous political history. His books ignore none of Peru’s clashing, kaleidoscopic elements,…

MARCH 2015 WEDNESDAY 11TH THURSDAY 12TH FRIDAY 13TH SATURDAY 14TH SUNDAY 15TH MONDAY 16TH TUESDAY 17TH FOR MORE THAN half a century, the American choral sound has been defined by the great college ensembles of the Upper Midwest, such as the St. Olaf Choir, with its lusciously layered tones. But recently young New Yorkers in groups like Roomful of Teeth (pictured above) have been blazing a new trail, forming intimately scaled ensembles of brave solo singers whose lean timbres resemble those of the early-music and new-music vocal groups of Europe. On March 17, Roomful of Teeth collaborates with the outstanding instrumentalists of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble at the Met Museum’s Temple of Dendur. They will perform “Drone Mass,” a world première by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose…

BAR TAB Livingston manor 42 Hoyt St., Brooklyn (347-987-3292) New York abounds with old things made new—just consider this storefront on Hoyt Street, in downtown Brooklyn. Some sixty years ago, it was the Garfield luncheonette, where bemused detectives once watched a thief crawl over the transom with sixteen eggs in his pockets and a slice of cake jammed in his mouth. More recently, the site belonged to a bodega—narrow, dusty, smelling of cat food—adjacent to a one-stop shop where checks are cashed, shoes repaired, and keys copied. The latter establishment remains (basic needs endure), but recently it was out with the bodega and in with the craft-beer-and-cocktail joint. The bar is named for both nearby Livingston Street and the Catskill trout-fishing hamlet where the Manor’s owner, Matt Roff (also of…

A legend: In ancient India, a noblewoman named Parvati had a crush on the god Shiva. But he wasn’t open to dating. His previous wife had died, and he was an ascetic; he meditated all day on a mountaintop, wearing only a tiger skin. Rebuffed, Parvati tried to woo him on his own terms. She took up an austerity regime—fasting, meditating for years in the wilderness. It worked. Shiva was impressed, and he came out of seclusion. The Hindu ceremony of Shivaratri honors their marriage. Devotees fast and stay up all night to celebrate it with chanting. “It’s a long haul,” the yoga teacher Eddie Stern said the other day, at the Broome Street Temple, in SoHo. “But, once you get late into the night— 2, 3, 4 A.M.—the whole…

For about a century, economic inequality has been measured on a scale, from zero to one, known as the Gini index and named after an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, who devised it in 1912, when he was twenty-eight and the chair of statistics at the University of Cagliari. If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. The United States Census Bureau has been using Gini’s measurement to calculate income inequality in America since 1947. Between 1947 and 1968, the U.S. Gini index dropped to .386, the lowest ever recorded. Then it began to…

Tonight outside the plate glasseach insect is made of a long tube of wood,as if the insect had become a treeto give the tree a voice.And these pink spatters,these crumbled parlor doilies,these milkweed blossomsfade as if antique,and the milkweed does not report on the condition of its leaves,the height of its flowers,its life without bureaucracy,nor does the lilac filtering the mentholated air,or the bee drowsing on the sillafter straining through the broken window screenlike Rilke wheedling his way into a palace.Or the brook that runs by the cabintalking nonsense.Or the willow that slouches as if it were in a classroomwhere the teacher bores it.So forgive me please already.I am sorry for speaking for nature.But it was asking for it.…

It was 1972 and Sid Baumwell was hungry. For the salt at the bottom of the pretzel dish, for frozen Mars bars, for appreciation from someone who wasn’t a blood relation—preferably a girl with pink cheeks and big sleepy eyes, like the one in “The Graduate,” his second-favorite movie of all time. He could do two dozen pull-ups. No acne. He wasn’t truly handsome but not bad-looking— handsome enough, he felt, to deserve his hunger. Freckles across the bridge of his nose, slightly splayed feet, respectable height. Smart. He knew this. His teachers told him so when they pulled him aside to say that he wasn’t working up to his potential. He had potential, and this mattered more than grades, comforted him more than any A. He held a secret…

SATIN ISLAND, by Tom McCarthy (Knopf). This experimental novel takes the form of a brilliant series of numbered digressions on parachute accidents, Lévi-Strauss, hub airports, and many other things. The narrator, who calls himself U., is an anthropologist working for the “Company” on something called the Koob-Sassen Project. The project’s goals are oblique, but its influence, we are told, is all-pervasive. U.’s job is to draw connections, and he does so with frenzied panache; an imagined presentation on oil spills concludes, “Is not the flow of oil the flow of time itself: slowly but inevitably crawling, in a series of identical, repeating pulses, to some final shoreline?” If the novel ultimately feels like a bravura display of empty rhetoric, who’s to say that’s not precisely the point? ALL DAYS…