Innholdsfortegnelse for Apr-27-15 i The New Yorker

DANCE, THEY SAY, is the art that vanishes, but it is now vanishing more slowly. Time was, people would give talks, even write books, about famous dances on the basis of memory or, worse, without ever having seen the piece, but just trusting what someone else had said. A film or videotape might exist, but you’d have to go to a special library, where the staff would often look at you as if you were there to steal something. There were pirated tapes, and tapes dubbed in libraries after hours by people on tiptoe. But to have access to such contraband you needed connections. Once, I had to go out of town to give a talk on Balanchine’s great Stravinsky ballet “Agon.” Years before, I had seen a tape of…

To the list of political figures who will spend much of the next year in early-decision states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, we can now add the ex-con formerly known as Inmate No. 84888-054: Bernard Kerik. Owing to his status as a felon, for tax fraud and for lying to the White House, Kerik is not currently eligible to vote, and this, among other lost privileges, is part of his point. “You never pay your debt to society,” he said last week, at a small gathering in a loft on lower Fifth Avenue. “If you’re a convicted felon, you’re punished until the day you die. It’s not right, and the land of second chances is a farce. There are no second chances, unless you’re somebody like Martha…

JoAnne Akalaitis, the theatre director and writer who co-founded the avant-garde theatre group Mabou Mines, in 1970, lives in a ground-floor apartment on the edge of Tompkins Square Park, in the East Village. Each month, on a Sunday afternoon, she hosts a salon there, for women who are in the theatre or interested in the theatre. “Conversation goes from serious intellectual discourse to lowdown, showbusiness gossip, and the age range is from twenty-five to eighty,” Akalaitis, who is a vigorous seventy-seven years old, said recently. She launched the salon in collaboration with Jean Wagner, a professor at Bard. Usually, a topic for discussion is chosen in advance: the group has covered the work of Gertrude Stein, ancient Greek drama, and the oeuvre of Joan Rivers. The group’s members recently turned…

It’s been a long while since I was up before youbut here I am, up before you.I see you sleeping now that I am up before you.I see the whole morning before you.How dare the sun be up before youwhen the moon last night promised to hold off the sun just for you!I hear the church bells ring before you.Most days it’s true the birds are up before you.I should make the coffee, as I am up before you.I might just lie here though before youwake up. Let me look at you, since I am here before you.I am so rarely simply quiet before you.The orange cat who’ll soon wake you is always up before you.In Morocco or Lamu the muezzin would be up before you.And yes it’s true most…

The Whitney Museum of American Art, long the odd duck among the Big Four of Manhattan art museums— a cohort that includes the mighty Metropolitan, the starry Modern, and the raffish Guggenheim—takes wing on May 1st, when it reopens in a new, vastly expanded headquarters downtown. The fledging owes a lot to the Italian architect Renzo Piano’s ingenious building, on Gansevoort Street, which features six floors of shapely galleries, four open- air terraces, spaces for performance and screening, a library and reading rooms, a restaurant, a café, and an over-all feeling of seductive amenity—a bar on the piazza-like ground floor bodes to be one of the toniest trysting spots in town. It is likely to win far more fans than the Whitney’s old home, Marcel Breuer’s brutalist “inverted ziggurat,” which…

STILL TROUBLED I read with interest Patrick Radden Keefe’s article about the disappearance of Jean McConville and the violent history of the Irish Republican Army (“Where the Bodies Are Buried,” March 16th). As an Irish citizen, I found Keefe’s descriptions of the activities of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.’s political party, during the past forty years to be painful reading. The lies and the sublimation of the “disappeared” seemed inevitable outcomes for a subjugated people who have sought self-determination. I grew up in the Republic in the seventies and eighties. My mother’s father was a proud I.R.A. man who fought in the Irish Civil War and was a decorated prisoner of war. In our house, there was much sympathy for the plight of the Irish nationalist minority (mostly Catholic) in…

Certain wine bars require some method of grandstanding: a debonair jacket, say, or an expense account. The Baroness, a Napoleonic-themed bar in Long Island City, favors swords. A patron might be asked by an amicable, baroquely tattooed bartender to use one to open a champagne bottle. “It comes from the time of French cavalrymen,” the sabre coach said one Wednesday night. “They would be on horseback, and to save time they would just do this”—grinning, he drew the blade of his palm to his Adam’s apple with a clean, slick swipe. The sabre gesture promises to be triumphantly heroic, as if summoned from Dumas or Hugo, but New York has rituals of its own; before releasing the sword, the coach cordially served his pupil with an “injury waiver.” After some…

Louis Sarno was born in Newark and has lived for thirty years on the edge of a forest in the Central African Republic, among the Bayaka—one of the peoples sometimes described as pygmies. A couple of weeks ago, Sarno flew by five-seater plane to Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, and from there to Istanbul, where he caught a flight to J.F.K. After watching “Whiteout,” “The Maze Runner,” “Son of Rambow,” “The Internship,” and a film that he later recalled had something to do with bike messengers, he loped into the arrivals hall at Terminal 1, carrying a small backpack that contained “Infinite Jest” and little else. It was early evening. Sarno is six feet tall, a little leathery, with a John Waters pencil mustache. He was wearing a battered fedora…

It feels like an achievement, emptinessReorganized to make the matter plain.In the long pool trapped behind the shingle bank The sky is blue and bitter. Amstel cratesAnd ragged scalps of weed have likewiseBeen reconsidered, while the sea Has gone somewhere as if for good:No distance has been sparedAnd the horizon is revealed as yet another Obsolescent form of measurement,Leaving only the sublimeBy which to take a sun-blind bearing. It’s freezing when we stroll onstage—We find the rake is steeper now—As if at last we ought to broach The fundamentals wisely put asideLong since in weatherproof compartmentsFor such a day as this. But instantly it’s clear That ours will not be speaking parts.The gulls will do all that. In this austerityOf blazing salt-charged air and stunned geology We’re only here to…

One Saturday in 1994, Bennie Lydell Glover, a temporary employee at the PolyGram compact-disk manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, went to a party at the house of a co-worker. He was angling for a permanent position, and the party was a chance to network with his managers. Late in the evening, the host put on music to get people dancing. Glover, a fixture at clubs in Charlotte, an hour away, had never heard any of the songs before, even though many of them were by artists whose work he enjoyed. Later, Glover realized that the host had been d.j.’ing with music that had been smuggled out of the plant. He was surprised. Plant policy required all permanent employees to sign a “No Theft Tolerated” agreement. He knew that…

APRIL 2015 WEDNESDAY 22ND THURSDAY 23RD FRIDAY 24TH SATURDAY 25TH SUNDAY 26TH MONDAY 27TH TUESDAY 26TH MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP returns to BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House for the first time in three years, April 22-26. “Spring, Spring, Spring” is Morris’s 2013 interpretation of Stravinsky’s revolutionary “Le Sacre du Printemps.” He’s done away with the scenario—sacrificial virgins aren’t his thing—and instead features pure, full-bodied movement with hints of bacchanalian revelry. To make the music sound fresh, Morris chose a cleaned-up version by the jazz trio the Bad Plus, who will play in the pit. (Morris’s credo is live music, always.) “Words,” set to Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words”—get it?—uses a theatrical device from South Asian dance: a curtain conceals dancers as they enter and leave the stage. “Whelm,” the one world…

“Sakura Matsuri” The Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s “Sakura Matsuri” (which is Japanese for “Cherry Blossom Festival”) welcomes in spring, with performances and activities under a glorious array of pink and white blossoms. There will be Kabuki dances, taiko drumming, samurai sword fighting, and Japanese standup comedy. New this year is Akim Funk Buddha’s Urban Tea Ceremony, a hip-hop reimagining of the traditional ritual. Other highlights include a “cosplay” fashion show (“cosplay” being a portmanteau of the words “costume” and “play”), a flower-hat dance parade, and workshops in origami, bonsai, and manga drawing. (For more information, visit bbg.org. April 25-26.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Henry and June Weldon were avid collectors who filled every wall of their apartment with paintings, mosaic style. Their particular passion was for art by Dutch masters, especially…

If you had been a guest at the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Plains Indians exhibition, last month, you might have been wondering, as you sipped your special brown cocktail (called Earth) or your blue one (called Sky), why so many people were pushing their business cards on a shy-looking teen-age girl. “We need to figure out a project to work on together,” William Wierzbowski, from the Penn Museum, told her. “Are you serious?” said the teen-ager, who had on a cotton skirt, crocheted flats, and large round earrings hand-beaded by her cousin. “Are you a New York-based artist?” a New York-based artist asked her. “I am an amateur Montana nobody” was the reply. Shania Rae Hall, eighteen, and a member of the Blackfeet Nation, lives with her…

I was living in the armory on Lexington Avenue. First Sergeant Diaz had given me the keys. I slept on a cot in the medical-supply closet. “Two weeks, max,” I’d told Diaz. But as the months went by I kept postponing a reunion with my wife. I was comfortable where I was. The armory took up an entire city block. There were secret passageways, subterranean firing ranges, a gym with an elliptical. At night, if drunk, I connected to a bag of saline. I always woke up hydrated. I never had a hangover. It was peacetime, more or less. It was for us, the New York National Guard, at least. Between drills, I worked as a paramedic for a hospital in Queens. My partner on the ambulance, Karen, had applied…

MICHELLE OBAMA, by Peter Slevin (Knopf). After Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Legislature, his wife warned him, “This business is not noble.” Slevin argues that the question of how to make a difference while also having a good life has been a constant one for Michelle Obama—from her childhood, on the South Side of Chicago, to Princeton, Harvard, and her legal career. His book is better at explaining how she became the person who arrived at the White House than how she operates now. The Michelle who emerges fully understands the transformative value of being an African- American First Lady; she also has a conservative streak. When Barack, dawdling over proposing, would ask if marriage really mattered, she’d say, “Marriage is everything.” HANNIBAL, by Eve MacDonald…