Innholdsfortegnelse for Apr-13-15 i The New Yorker

LAST NOVEMBER, the New York Times Magazine published a feature entitled “A Brief History of Failure,” which listed, among various devices and technologies that have fallen by the wayside, the viola da gamba, or viol, a mainstay of Renaissance and Baroque music. The article presented the viol as a sweet-natured weakling among instruments, one that had been supplanted, in the eighteenth century, by members of the violin family, which project more easily into a concert hall. This attempted epitaph elicited a social-media outcry from early-music aficionados, who pointed out that the viol has been enjoying a renaissance in recent decades. Indeed, the viol has produced a certifiable superstar: the august Catalan musician Jordi Savall, who plays a solo recital at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall on April 13, as part…

In the third act of Chekhov’s 1901 masterpiece, “Three Sisters,” a character looks out a window at the aftermath of a terrible fire and says, “Completely wiped out—everything burned to the ground.” Two Thursdays ago, a little after 3 P.M., the third-year students of N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate acting program were rehearsing that scene at their theatre space, on Second Avenue at Sixth Street. There were five hours to go before the opening-night performance. Suddenly, the building shook. A half block north, an explosion had occurred, igniting a conflagration that immediately brought down two buildings. In the Chekhov play, the weary Prozorov sisters and their soldierly comrades scramble to salvage what they can of their house and to aid the dispossessed. That afternoon, there was a similar…

The title of the Egyptian funerary papyrus “Book of the Dead” is more accurately translated as “Coming Forth by Day.” It was called “Book of the Dead” by Wallis Budge, who translated the manuscript for the British Museum, in 1895. “Coming Forth by Day” is also the title of Cassandra Wilson’s new record, which is an homage to Billie Holiday, who would have turned one hundred on April 7th. The other morning, Wilson visited the Egyptian wing of the Met, waiting in the security line among schoolchildren on field trips. She has long, caramel-colored hair, and she wore large dark glasses with black frames. The night before, she had flown in from Paris, and she wasn’t feeling great. “I need a Bloody Mary,” she said. “That’s my regimen when I…

In the fall of 2011, students in Katie Keranen’s seismology course at the University of Oklahoma buried portable seismograph stations around the campus, in anticipation of a football game between the Sooners and the Texas A. & M. Aggies. The plan was to see if the students could, by reading the instruments, detect the rumble of eighty two thousand fans cheering for a touchdown. “To see if they can figure out if a signal is a passing train or a cheering crowd—that’s much more interesting for them than discussing data in theory,” Keranen, an assistant professor of geophysics, told me. But at 2:12 A.M. on November 5th, the day of the game, people in seventeen states felt an earthquake of 4.8 magnitude, centered near Prague, Oklahoma, a town of roughly…

In his poem “An Urban Convalescence,” James Merrill wrote of the “dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent.” It is a classic Merrill formulation. People are supposed to “make” houses out of blossoming aspirations and love, before busting them up in resignation and defeat. Merrill, rich since birth, as he said, “whether I liked it or not,” and one of the greatest formalist poets this country has ever produced, had seen this pattern play out in his family’s houses (especially the Orchard, his father’s Southampton summer estate, designed by McKim, Mead & White) and, painfully, in his own, in Key West; Stonington, Connecticut; and Athens, Greece. But poetry starts building when love starts dying; it erects its structures…

NUCLEAR VULNERABILITY Eric Schlosser usefully describes the vulnerabilities of U.S. nuclear-weapon sites by highlighting the break-in of the Y-12 National Security Complex by peace activists (“Break-In at Y-12,” March 9th). But his discussion of the possibility that terrorists might steal a weapon or build one without being caught or killing themselves does not reflect how difficult that would be. I am a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and I served as staff director of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and its Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation. Schlosser is correct in pointing out that the amount of nuclearweapons-grade material needed to create an explosion of significant yield is relatively small, but a terrorist seeking to build even a crude weapon would face a number…

AS HURRICANE SANDY SLAMMED into the eastern United States, in the fall of 2012, something similar happened in the life of the movement-theatre artist David Neumann, and out of it he made a piece called “I Understand Everything Better,” which will be presented, April 15-25, by Abrons Arts Center and the Chocolate Factory. What happened was the death of both his parents, Honora Fergusson and Frederick Neumann, veteran actors of the experimental theatre company Mabou Mines. David describes his mother as “a tough Irish gal from New England.” When you asked her if she needed something, she said no, she was O.K. And that’s how she died, abruptly and quietly, one night in July, 2012. At that time, Fred Neumann, too, was dying, but not quietly. The process lasted about…

This rumpled East Harlem bar is not, as it might seem, a mob cover—a dark, eerily empty front room is defended by a gargantuan bouncer, but the place propagates no iniquity other than serving rapscallions of all stripes. Like the Patriot, its sister bar, in Tribeca, the Duck celebrates a merry mood of casual dishabille— once upon a time, patrons of the fairer sex received a free shot for every undergarment removed. On a recent evening, a lintel grapevine of red, white, and blue bras welcomed a group of out-of-towners, who committed the minor misdemeanor of asking for a menu. “We are a super-dive!” Aisha, a sprightly barkeeper wearing a septum ring and a “Brooklyn” cap, said. Cocktail recipes are erratic, but the criminally low beer prices—eight-dollar pitchers, three-dollar drafts—more…

New York has always attracted outsiders. Last Monday, one showed up on the rooftop of LIC Bar, in Long Island City. Neighbors noticed a fur coat slinking around: a coyote. Someone called the authorities. Sarah Aucoin, the director of the Urban Park Rangers, was among the first to hear the news. “It probably came over the Triborough Bridge,” she said. “The bar had a band called the Coyote Anderson Quartet playing that night. It was too weird.” After a while, the coyote hopped onto an adjacent rooftop and vanished. Twenty years ago, there were virtually no coyotes with New York City addresses, but they have been coming down from Westchester lately, making their way through green corridors of restored parkland, where there’s good eating. “A breeding pair establishes a territory,…

In the fall of 1979, while on a flight from Hartford to Austin, the writer Daniel Okrent was struck by an idea for conducting an auction of baseball players— or, rather, baseball players’ names and their future statistics. Nothing fancy: this was before the spread of personal computers and sabermetrics. His notion was that, using only the stats that could be tallied or figured from the box scores in the morning paper, you could approximate the potency of a virtual team, compare it against other virtual teams, and thereby imagine yourself as a reallife general manager in training. “It was because I was a shitty athlete,” he recalled recently. Fantasizing about what it would be like to play third base was too implausible. In Austin, he accompanied a few editors…

When Glenn Stewart enrolled at the University of Oxford, in 1975, he was not a typical first-year student: a twenty-year-old American with mediocre grades, he had taken neither A-level exams nor Oxford’s entrance test. But he had an unusual degree of confidence, and, after securing a strong reference from an English grammar school that he’d attended for a year, he persuaded an Oxford admissions officer to let him in. Stewart had grown up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of College Park, Maryland, where his father taught chemistry at the University of Maryland. An enterprising kid, he made money on weekends by selling soda in the bleachers at college football games. After Stewart’s junior year in high school, his father went to England on sabbatical and took the family along. As…

The only Novacell was in the kitchen so I hesitatedbefore ambling down the hall and glancing in our Beanto check that Yip was Uberliving®, ironing Ken’s blousesand co-hosting a Meet-and-Greet for Bebop enthusiasts,a form of Original Music she’d quite recently Addicted to.I slipped in and flicked the MoodChute, whispered the visor’sname onto the Eardrive and hollowed at his off-site.Over-all demazing: semi-helpful; size, age, general appearancenot dissimilar to mine though he was just 28 per centBlasian and had won Freestyle Bronze in 4-6-Summeron the PetSafe moon of the Eternal Insurance System®.I de-acked the stream and saw his temples were graying,indicating wilting, and that he could do with a TreatWeekin a JumpCoat® to vigorate the T’s. Underwhelmed whenmemflicking to find it 10-80 since he’d stoked. As he codedthe Sunrise Raisinana Patch®, allowing…

THE SELLOUT, by Paul Beatty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything,” Beatty’s narrator and protagonist says at the outset of this outrageous, riff-strewn satire on race in America. An urban farmer angered by the country’s racial politics, he decides to resegregate his mostly black town, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, starting with a local school and the bus his girlfriend drives. He also enslaves a close friend and ends up before the Supreme Court, sitting on “a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.” The book combines effervescent comedy and stinging critique, but its most arresting quality is the lively humanity of its characters. THE ILLUMINATIONS,…

When the deal was announced for a spinoff of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” based on one of the show’s minor comic characters, the legal shyster Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), even superfans weren’t sure what to think. At the time, Vince Gilligan’s drama about a science teacher turned meth king was in its final season, whipping out brilliant episodes like fastballs. Media coverage, mine included, was caught up in worshipful celebrations. Though the last episode ended up being something of an anticlimax, a sleek set of showdowns between a clever badass and his cartoon foes, that still left sixty-one other rowdy, rich installments, forming the morally intricate backstory of an archetypal villain, Walter White. Why spin off, then? Just to keep things spinning? “Better Call Saul,” on the verge of its own…

APRIL 2015 WEDNESDAY 8TH THURSDAY 9TH FRIDAY 10TH SATURDAY 11TH SUNDAY 12TH MONDAY 13TH TUESDAY 14TH RHIANNON GIDDENS, one of the founders of the beautifully intimate group the Carolina Chocolate Drops and a Greensboro, North Carolina, native, has a Southern twang to her very clear voice. She sometimes plays the banjo, and her voice can move along like a banjo, too, especially when she sings slowly, and with pluck. Her new album, “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” is a solo effort, made with the estimable producer T Bone Burnett. Giddens’s version of “Shake Sugaree,” by Elizabeth Cotten, sounds like a precursor of the blues that points toward the folk music of the nineteen-sixties. But Giddens is of her time. Her syntax and harmonic strength are part of a tradition of…

“Rex Manning Day” In the fall of 2013, the legendary London music retailer Rough Trade opened an enormous record store and venue in Brooklyn. When teen-agers today see it for the first time, they’re likely to think of it as an iTunes library come to life, but for those born in the eighties and earlier visiting the store elicits nostalgia. For many, that sentimental experience will be heightened this week, when Rough Trade is converted into Empire Records, in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the iconic coming-of-age film “Empire Records,” about employees who try to stop an independent record store from being sold to a large chain. The event includes a screening of the movie, skits, and performances by local indie bands. The most meta and exciting moment…

A group of high-school students from Friends Seminary arrived the other day at the David Zwirner Gallery, on Nineteenth Street, for a crash course in how to sell art. The buyers, it was hoped, would be their mothers and fathers, at a cocktail party later that evening. Friends (students, 761; tuition, $38,300) was founded in 1786 by Quakers. It has an artsy reputation; alums include Liev Schreiber, Vera Wang, and Wylie Dufresne. The teen-agers were to receive talking points on some sixty-six art works, collectively valued at five hundred and forty thousand dollars, that had been donated by gallerists, artists, and collectors (many of them Friends parents), for an auction to raise money for financial aid and school programs. Tanya Traykovski, who has a son in the third grade and…

Some things can surprise you in both directions,coming and going.Like a stretch of single train track with shuntings over.The auto-correct I don’t know how to stopsuggested, just now, “overwhelming,”with shuntings overwhelming. Almost I took that.Almost I took you as husband, love. Then you left me.I took surprise for husband instead.The Phoenician letter for “h,” pronounced heth,resembled at firsta slanting, three-runged ladder.Later it straightened, becoming a double-hung window.Husband surprise, I climbed you, I climbed right out you.…

Twice a month, like a dutiful son, I visited my parents in Enugu, in their small overfurnished flat that grew dark in the afternoon. Retirement had changed them, shrunk them. They were in their late eighties, both small and mahogany-skinned, with a tendency to stoop. They seemed to look more and more alike, as though all the years together had made their features blend and bleed into one another. They even smelled alike—a menthol scent, from the green vial of Vicks VapoRub they passed to each other, carefully rubbing a little in their nostrils and on aching joints. When I arrived, I would find them either sitting out on the veranda overlooking the road or sunk into the living-room sofa, watching Animal Planet. They had a new, simple sense of…

It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything. One characteristic spell, recorded by the British polymath John Aubrey around 1680, instructs you to begin by acquiring the severed head of a man who has committed suicide. You then bury the head, together with seven black beans, on a Wednesday morning before sunrise, and water the ground for seven days with fine brandy. On the eighth day, the beans will sprout, whereupon you must persuade a little girl to pick and shell them. Pop one into your mouth, and you will turn invisible. If you don’t have eight days to wait, you can, instead, gather water from a fountain exactly at midnight (invisibility spells are fetishistic about…