Innholdsfortegnelse for May-04-15 i The New Yorker

177 Grand St., Brooklyn (347-294-4642) Sometimes a bar embodies its owner, down to its very bones. One recent evening, Kristina Kozak, a metalsmith and, since November, the proprietor of a cocktail den with metal-themed drinks (the Hearth and Anvil, the Draw and Temper), mused, “I’ve ripped this building apart. It envelops me.” She took a sip of crisp Gazela Vinho Verde and recalled how, in 1997, she and her father bought the place, for six thousand dollars down (from cops who were running a burger and beer joint; Kozak found porn in the rafters). They converted the ground floor into a store where Kozak could sell her furniture, and the upstairs into an apartment where she still lives. “As I get older, as a metalworker, my body might give out;…

On a recent Tuesday evening, Philippe Bertineau, the chef at Benoit, a bistro in midtown, was pushing a suckling pig through the dining room on a trolley. “I wanted to do something different this time,” he said, addressing a table of regulars. Then he realized that someone was missing. “Your husband!” he said. “Where is he?” “He’s outside,” the wife said. “He’s on the phone.” Bertineau didn’t move. “It’s an important call.” Everyone was admiring the animal. It was crisp and golden, with a pert snout and a petite tail. “Do you want me to get him?” “Yes, please. The pig has arrived. He mustn’t miss the pig.” For the past three years, Bertineau has offered a suckling pig on Tuesday evenings in April. This year, he explained (to the…

There is a place in the California desert where a pipe pokes out from a berm made of broken concrete and delivers freshwater to a dying sea. I stood there recently, on a beach of crumbled barnacles, and watched it gush. The sea was the dull blue of a cataract, surrounded by small volcanoes, bubbling mud pots, and ragged, blank mountains used for bombing practice by the Navy and the Marines. The air smelled sweet and vaguely spoiled, like a dog that has got into something on a hot day. When the wind blew, it veiled the mountains in dust and sent puckered waves to meet the frothy white flow from the pipe. The sea, which is called the Salton Sea, is fifteen times bigger than the island of Manhattan…

Ocean, don’t be afraid.The end of the road is so far aheadit is already behind us.Don’t worry. Your father is only your fatheruntil one of you forgets. Like how the spinewon’t remember its wingsno matter how many times our kneeskiss the pavement. Ocean,are you listening? The most beautiful partof your body is whereveryour mother’s shadow falls.Here’s the house with childhoodwhittled down to a single red tripwire.Don’t worry. Just call it horizon& you’ll never reach it.Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s nota lifeboat. Here’s the manwhose arms are wide enough to gatheryour leaving. & here the moment,just after the lights go out, when you can still seethe faint torch between his legs.How you use it again & againto find your own hands.You asked for a second chance& are given a mouth…

Once upon a time, before “The Sopranos” broke the monopoly, PBS was America’s primary source for prestige television. With little competition, the network perfected that brand, as exemplified by “Masterpiece Theatre,” an oracular phrase used without irony and with a kind of innocence. The network’s costume dramas might let you commune with genius, the logo hinted: they’d improve and elevate you, like a lecture at the 92nd Street Y. But, as TV drama grew out of its insecurities, the PBS lineup, despite small charmers, like “Call the Midwife,” began to seem stuffy, snoozy, and rather silly, an artifact of a time when the medium had to put on airs. “Wolf Hall,” the BBC adaptation of two Booker Prize-winning novels by Hilary Mantel, looked ominously like the same old, same old:…

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES We read with interest Judith Thurman’s piece on attempts to save dy ing languages (“A Loss for Words,” March 30th). There’s a quip among workers in New England nursing homes that goes, “They come in speaking English, and they go out speaking gibberish.” Most often, this is not a result of the patient’s presumed dementia but, rather, the failure of these workers to recognize Yiddish, Canadian French, Lithuanian, Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, and other languages that Americans rarely hear. To an astonishing extent, heritage languages spoken at an early age are not forgotten. They are repressed because of stigma or trauma associated with the loss of communities, politely referred to as “assimilation.” Like the former Selk’nam speaker in Thurman’s article, who begins remembering words and phrases with a little…

“The Great Saunter” Shorewalkers, a nonprofit group dedicated to step-by-step explorations of the region’s littoral zones, sets out on its circumambulation of Manhattan. Its waterfront treks first took place in the early eighties, when a few charter members of the group wended their way along the decaying piers and bulkheads out of curiosity. They liked what they saw so much that they returned to it every year, and the first official circumnavigation took place in 1985. Several waterside parks have been created along the thirty-two-mile route since then, and the City Council recently recognized the first Saturday in May as the Great Saunter Day. Registration for the journey starts at 7 A.M. in the financial district, outside the Porterhouse at Fraunces Tavern, which is also its handy, thirst-quenching end…

“Look at that,” Julie Taymor said, stepping out onto Lafayette Street from the Public Theatre. She was pointing at the sidewalk. “Two gloves on the ground. What is that about?” She kept walking, but the image lingered. When Taymor directs, she begins with an “ideograph”— a symbol that conveys the essence of the piece. For “The Lion King,” it was the circle of life. For “Grounded,” the play that she is now directing at the Public, it was a stream of sand falling onto the helmet of an F-16-fighter pilot. “What you feel by that simplified vision, I hope, is invulnerability,” she said. “Power. Can’t be touched.” The pilot is Anne Hathaway. “Grounded” is a one-woman show staged in a two-hundred-and-ninetyone-seat theatre—a significant downsize from the Broadway spectacles for which…

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the English novelist Anthony Trollope, and maybe the fourth decade of the Trollope boom that has put him back into the most-read ranks of the English novelists. The metrics of such things are shaky; still, one professor has discovered that as many books were published about Trollope in the five years between 1976 and 1981 as had appeared in the entire near-century since his death, in 1882. That scholarly industry goes on, and now includes books called “Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope” and “The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels”—stern studies in sex, race, and colonialism, with modern academics enforcing the orthodoxies of our time as Trollope’s Barsetshire clergymen enforced the orthodoxies…

ALAIN MEDITATES ON THE NAVEL It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls: every one of them showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated, captivated and even disturbed: it was as if their seductive power resided no longer in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts but in that small round hole at the center of the body. This provoked him to reflect: if a man (or an era) sees the thighs as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: the length of the…

If American composers and lyricists were to jettison the idea of difference from their plotlines, would they still be writing American musicals? In genre-defining Broadway shows, from “Oklahoma!” (1943) and “West Side Story” (1957) to “Sweeney Todd” (1979) and “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” (2008), difference is usually synonymous with danger: it’s the outsider or the outcast who introduces sex and violence into the musical’s relatively moral world. (American musicals almost always argue in favor of the status quo.) Difference doesn’t have to be racial or sexual; sometimes the other looks like the devil you know. In “Oklahoma!,” for instance, it’s the seething, strong farmhand, Jud Fry, who so gets under the skin of Laurey, the female protagonist, that her sunny disposition darkens; she’s disturbed that she finds Fry’s bullying sort…

BILLIE HOLIDAY, by John Szwed (Viking). In this concise and sharply focussed critical biography, Szwed writes that Billie Holiday, at the height of her fame, “seemed to erect a fourth wall onstage and sang to herself, assuming the character she sang about and allowing the audience to become voyeurs in a life they imagined.” Because this life was one of drug addiction and tragedy, many listeners hear Holiday’s affecting, singular voice as a “mise-en-scène of her suffering.” Szwed is aware of the danger of the Holiday legend, and is determined to show that she was much more than an emotive performer blessed with a unique gift. Tracing her musical influences and analyzing her thoughtful vocal artistry, he makes the case that she is, if anything, underrated as a musician.…

APRIL/MAY 2015 WEDNESDAY 29TH THURSDAY 30TH FRIDAY 1ST SATURDAY 2ND SUNDAY 3RD MONDAY 4TH TUESDAY 5TH 3-D TECHNOLOGY, OFTEN DERIDED as a sensational spice for action films, has been put to exotic uses by innovative filmmakers in many formats, as shown in BAM Cinématek’s “3D in the 21st Century.” Alongside the blockbusters—“Avatar” and “Gravity”—the series offers the wizardry of “Hugo,” in which Martin Scorsese applies new techniques to a tale about the first special-effects genius, Georges Méliès. The experimental filmmakers Ken Jacobs, in “Seeing the Monkey King,” and Jodie Mack, in “Let Your Light Shine,” find substance in pure vision. Remo D’Souza’s “ABCD—Any Body Can Dance” is a Bollywood musical; Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” and Jeff Tremaine’s “Jackass 3D” are documentaries; and in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Goodbye to…

Forty-three days before the new Whitney Museum, in the meatpacking district, was to open to the public, some construction workers still clambered around the rafters of the eighth-floor gallery. In a corner, a few others argued about the best way of cutting a hole in the wall to bury an art work that many people believe does not exist. They were supposed to have broken the wall open by 9 A.M., but at ten-thirty it was still intact. “We’re having a little bit of a problem,” one of the construction guys said. The work—what is left of a sculpture by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan— rested on a dolly by the elevators. The sculpture was fabricated in 2000 and intentionally destroyed four years later, for the Whitney Biennial, its boxed-up…

Few phrases are duller than “corporate restructuring.” So you can be forgiven if your eyes glazed over when, two weeks ago, Jeff Immelt, G.E.’s C.E.O., announced that the company was going to sell off most of G.E. Capital, its financial-services arm, and concentrate on the company’s industrial businesses (which range from aircraft engines and locomotives to medical devices and power generation). But this is a genuinely momentous move. Not only is G.E. reinventing itself; the move from financial services back to industry could herald the close of an entire chapter of American capitalism. In the public imagination, G.E. never stopped being an industrial company, but for the past three decades it’s also been, essentially, a huge bank. Its finance division got started during the Great Depression, as a way of…

Here we have another moment of blue-sky thinking,when no one loves you in the morning.The tinderbox as empty as a train at 5 A.M.It is 5 A.M.: a tin knife and fork packed in your pants,you yank the sheets up where your neckplaced an envelope of nerves.Acrid sky over us, streaked with the tarblur of gasoline: the sky knows the machinesare being fed—that is blue-sky thinking,when no one loves you less. I want to touch the rawcloth of your coat sleeve while you put your bodyinside it: it’s like I’m the voice from the beginningof an opera that speaks from the ceilinggilded with octagonal tiles to say, there are exitson all sides. But you are moving like a wheelriding over a rope, and your loveris your hand, lacing up boots…

In the early nineteen-seventies, Denny Gioia worked in the recall office of the Ford Motor Company. His job was to read field reports from the engineers Ford had posted around the country. If a safety problem was spotted, the Ford representative in that district would write up the case on a standardized form—single sheet, two sides, sometimes with a photograph stapled to the page—and send it on to Detroit. Gioia looked for patterns. “You have to be able to identify something that’s breaking,” he said not long ago. “Otherwise, I’ve got an imaginary event. I try not to engage in magical thinking. I’ve also got to have a pattern of failures. Idiosyncrasies won’t do. Question is, do you have enough here indicating that these failures are not just one-off events?”…

Who is Ultron? What is he? I went into “Avengers: Age of Ultron” not knowing whether the name referred to a man, a concept, or a laundry powder, and I came out none the wiser. All I can tell you is that it speaks in the voice of James Spader, and that it can’t make up its humongous mind whether to save the world or to trash it. (This is a Marvel movie, so the third option—simply leaving the world to get on with its daily business, in its own sweet and shambling way—is not on the table.) To start with, Ultron seems to be a computer program, and at one point it even squares off against another computer program—a ball of sparky golden light versus a ball of sparky…

Writers aiming to tell us about human life have often done so under cover of telling us about animals. Animals are fun—they have feathers and fangs, they live in trees and holes— and they seem to us simpler than we are, so that, by using them, we can make our points cleaner and faster. With Madame Bovary, you pretty much have to say who her parents were. With Sponge-Bob, you don’t, and this keeps the story moving. Most important, the use of animals to stand in for human beings creates a fertile ambiguity. We know that the author is not proposing a one-for-one equivalence between human and nonhuman life, but some kinship is certainly being suggested. Think of Swift’s Houyhnhnms, trotting down the road, their withers shining in the sun,…

“What do I think of life? A little and a lot. Sometimes a great deal, sometimes a very little.” So says mild, sweet-natured Pastor Niemeyer, near the end of Theodor Fontane’s novel “Effi Briest,” in response to Effi’s anguished interrogation. An artist needs to have attained great maturity, and great simplicity, in order to dare such open, sunlit evenness of tone. I can think of other writers who sound like this, but the people who immediately come to mind are filmmakers—like Ozu, or Bergman, or Satyajit Ray— whose cameras linger gently on life itself, on mundanities and fugitive details and the slow transit of things. “Isn’t life disappointing?” Kyoko asks in Ozu’s “Tokyo Story.” “Yes, it is,” comes Noriko’s seasoned reply. But life does not seem disappointing to the calmly…