Innholdsfortegnelse for July 10-17, 2017 i The New Yorker

Inner Landscape Jazz and classical music mix freely in the work of Tyshawn Sorey. Something vital is happening at the boundary between classical music and jazz. The border has long been an active and porous one, going back to the days when Duke Ellington adopted symphonic forms and Maurice Ravel assimilated the blues. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, what Gunther Schuller dubbed the Third Stream movement encompassed modernist compositions with jazz features and large-scale conceptions by the likes of Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman. Since the nineteen- seventies, John Zorn has been crisscrossing the divide in kinetic patterns. The striking thing about twentyfirst- century explorations of this terrain is that they no longer require a name or a justification; rather, a growing community of creative musicians—from elders like Anthony Braxton…

Bastille Day French culture, cuisine, and entertainment will be on display at this annual street fair, presented by the French Institute Alliance Française, in commemoration of the historic storming of the Bastille prison in rebellion against King Louis XVI, in 1789. This year, in the Skyroom of FIAF, guests can sample champagne at tasting tables hosted by Drappier, Pol Roger, Bollinger, and others, as well as hors d’oeuvres from Maman Bakery. On the street, take in dance lessons, mime shows, car exhibitions (featuring classic Citroën models from personal collections), and the iconic choreography of the cancan, performed by Karen Peled and her troupe. The evening closes out with a performance from the renowned baritone David Serero. (60th St. between Fifth Ave. and Lexington Ave. bastilledayny. July 9 at noon.)…

It took sidestepping a drum circle, a propot rally, a dozen venders hawking greens (garlic scapes: four dollars a bunch), and a psychic on her cell phone, near Union Square, to reach the extreme quiet of the Om Lab, a recording studio on the sixth floor of the Rubin Museum. Once inside, with the foaminsulated door firmly shut, a visitor could revel in the blissful nonsound. Then, from an iPad, a recorded trio of monks intoned the word “om.” Two weeks after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, the Rubin quietly began collecting the oms of stressedout New Yorkers. Visitors were invited to take a seat in a small booth, put on headphones, and om along with the monks. “The idea was to bring the voices of everyone who came into the lab…

The clear, clean line was always the ideal. Though there was subtlety in how Miles muttered, One always ached to hear a song line uttered With definition, lyrical and real: A well-timed silence puncturing the swing Only to add propulsion. Play that thing! Bunk Johnson used to do that, way back when, Inheriting the clean articulation Of Buddy Bolden. The controlled sensation Of vaulting gold that drove a funeral then Linked death to dancing people, grief to joy: The rich, sweet notes rang like the real McCoy. The open horn was king. There was no mute, Not even Cootie’s, that could set the measure Of confidently opened casks of treasure Lighting the cave, and turning the blue suit Of tactful mourning to a pirate kit: The lawlessness, the skipping lilt…

“Survivors pay with their conscience,” the novelist Sybille Bedford wrote in her memoir, “Quicksands.” “Some have paid to the end of their own road. Those who have got off lightly paid perhaps too little. . . . I feel I am one of those.” I often wonder what Bedford would have made of the detective known to readers as Bernie Gunther, commissar of the Murder Squad of the Kriminalpolizei, in Berlin. (Call it the Scotland Yard of Germany.) Bedford, born in Berlin to an elderly German baron and his young, wealthy Jewish wife, was a month shy of her ninetyfourth birthday when her memoir appeared, in 2005. She had survived the First World War in the relative safety of a Berlin mansion and was able to flee Europe and spend…

There’s something about the twang and drawl of country music that feels particularly well suited to the way we like to tell the American narrative. Country began as a rural genre, born in isolated Southern enclaves; its first stars yodelled or sang their way out of obscurity, then revelled in relating the tale, disclosing everything they’d gained and lost along the way. Country musicians have shouldered much of the work of establishing a national identity in song. Gratitude, pride, and swashbuckling self- determination synchronize nicely with pedal steel. So does a deeply embedded sense of grief. John Moreland, a songwriter from Tulsa, Oklahoma, is not only a country artist—his work is just as indebted to folk and rock music—but he seems to draw from the same winsome, melancholic well as…

AGE OF EMPIRES Ian Buruma, in his review of recent books on China, considers the country’s military might but neglects its most daunting challenge to American global dominance: its growing economic influence (Books, June 19th). In 2013, President Xi Jinping unveiled an initiative to build a vast trade network of road, rail, and sea routes that will span four continents. The following year, he launched the Asian Infrastructure Investments Bank to challenge the power of the World Bank and the I.M.F.; the A.I.I.B. is now backed by more than fifty shareholding members, including Germany, France, the U.K., and Israel. The dollar remains the world’s leading reserve currency, partially because oil and other major commodities are still traded in dollars. But last year, the I.M.F. made the Chinese yuan one…

The public is not allowed to applaud in the chambers of the New York City Council. “Just as dancing is illegal, it’s illegal to clap here,” the city councilman Rafael Espinal told a group of citizens. “You have to do jazz hands.” It was a recent Monday, and the citizens, many wearing T-shirts that read “DANCING IS NOT A CRIME,” were only too happy to comply. They had gathered to argue for the repeal of New York City’s cabaret law, which dates to 1926 and prohibits dancing in venues that don’t have a cabaret license. The law does not specify what, exactly, constitutes dancing, but it defines a public dance hall as “any room, place or space in the city in which dancing is carried on and to which the…

On February 23rd, two venture capitalists, both early investors in the ride-sharing company Uber, circulated an open letter in response to a female engineer’s published account of sexual harassment at the company. “Silicon Valley prides itself on pattern recognition,” Freada Kapor Klein and Mitchell Kapor wrote. “Here are a couple of toxic patterns we have observed.” Despite several scandals, they went on, Uber had failed to reform its culture, and investors “in high growth, financially successful companies rarely, if ever, call out inexcusable behavior from founders or C-suite executives.” They argued that both of these patterns needed to change. Four months later, when Uber’s C.E.O., Travis Kalanick, stepped down after other influential investors demanded his resignation, Klein and Kapor’s words appeared to have resonated. Kalanick, who helped found Uber, in…

I attended university in a very different world from the one in which I now teach and live. For a start, Yale College, which I entered in 1961, was all male. Women were not matriculated until five years after I had received my B.A. degree. Among the undergraduates, there were only a handful of students from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and very few African-Americans, Asian- Americans, or Hispanics, unless one counted a couple of prep-school- educated heirs to grand South American fortunes. The Yale that I attended was overwhelmingly North American and white, as well as largely Protestant. It was difficult for the admissions office to identify Catholics, but applicants with conspicuously Irish, Italian, or Polish names were at a disadvantage. For Jews, there was a numerus clausus,…

Oghi opened his eyes to a faint glimpse of white clothing. He heard his name: “Oghi. Oghi.” The voice was soft, kind. Eight days had passed since his emergency surgery, eight days during which he had slipped in and out of consciousness There had been a car accident. The moment of impact had felt like someone hitting him very hard with something. Not with a blunt wooden instrument but, rather, with something sharp and metal. A chisel or a claw hammer, perhaps. Both legs, several ribs, and his collarbone were broken. Face mangled, teeth shattered. Oghi’s body, to put it simply, had been reduced to shreds. He struggled to talk through a fractured jaw. “My wife?” The nurse didn’t answer. Oghi’s words had not made it out of his mouth.…

Kierkegaard relates a chilling parable in “The Sickness Unto Death.” An emperor summons a poor day laborer. The man never dreamed that the emperor even knew of his existence. The emperor tells him that he wants to have him as his son-in-law, a bizarre announcement that must strike the man as something he would never dare tell the world, for fear of being mocked; it seems as if the emperor wanted only to make a fool of his subject. Now, Kierkegaard says, suppose that this event was never made a public fact; no evidence exists that the emperor ever summoned the laborer, so that his only recourse would be blind faith. How many would have the courage to believe? Christ’s kingdom is like that, Kierkegaard says. The French writer Emmanuel…

Three shows I saw recently all feature death as an imminent possibility or reality, and, although each production handles what Henry James called “the distinguished thing” differently, they all, like most weak or sentimental plays on the subject, include a lot of talk or foreshadowing about It before It happens. When Bessie (Lili Taylor) is told by the befuddled, empathetic Dr. Wally (Triney Sandoval) that she has leukemia, in the current revival of Scott McPherson’s 1990 play, “Marvin’s Room” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at the American Airlines), she looks acutely embarrassed, as if the doctor had just walked in on her in some private space, unhappily nude. Bessie doesn’t know who she is in her reduced, vulnerable state. For most of her adult life, she has protected herself against…

After twenty distinguished years, the Caramoor festival’s Bel Canto at Caramoor series, conceived by the scholar and conductor Will Crutchfield, will come to a close this summer, ending a glorious run of trills, roulades, and high-flying coloratura fireworks. The Italian bel-canto style is nothing if not star-driven, and to wrap up his series Crutchfield has chosen one of the Met’s brightest young talents, Angela Meade (above), to take the role of Imogene in a semi-staged performance of Bellini’s florid “Il Pirata,” on July 8. JULY 5 Ð 18, 2017 NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements (Sandy) Alex G The songwriter-guitarist Alex Giannascoli has a sharp ear for concise, shy phrasing and casual arrangements that…

Cape House 2 Knickerbocker Ave., Brooklyn (718-821-2580) This riff on a New England clam shack has a cheery coastal décor and a vast range of warmweather amenities—a spacious patio lined with wooden picnic tables, draft cocktails available frozen by request, and littlenecks on the half shell, at a clam a pop. “We just wanted a place to hang outside and smoke, really,” the bartender Wes Badrigian said, on a recent Sunday evening. Badrigian, with his jovial Northeastern accent and handlebar mustache, set a laid-back, cozy tenor, as he poured terrific takes on the Paper Plane (bourbon, Aperol, Montenegro, lemon) and the Ancient Mariner (rum, grapefruit liqueur, lime). He grew up in New England, and was pleased that the establishment reflected his upbringing—he hails from a line of lobstermen. And it…

Holly Hunter’s Georgia twang pierced the rumble of traffic. “When I started here, thirty-seven years ago, the Upper West Side was grittier and more knockaround,” she said. She was striding down West Seventy-second Street, wearing a sack sweater and jeans. Hunter is petite, but her unblinking wariness— her brown-eyed, hawklike vigilance— gives her an outsized presence. “People don’t come to New York out of resignation,” she went on. “They come here with a dream. Mine was to be an actress.” In front of the Chatsworth, an ornate building overlooking the Hudson River, she said, “I moved to the city in August of 1980, and someone I thought was a friend had an apartment in this wedding cake of a building, so I slept on her couch for a few days.…

Nick Kyrgios, the twentieth-ranked tennis player in the world, stepped to the baseline. He briskly bounced the ball and rocked forward to begin his serve, his arms swinging. He has a narrow waist and strong shoulders, a greyhound’s look, and a greyhound’s air of languid indifference. Kyrgios, a twentytwo- year-old Australian, is the only active player ever to defeat Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic in their first meetings; he has beaten Nadal and Djokovic twice, in fact, and came within a few points of a second victory over Federer earlier this year. “I think Nick is the most talented player since Roger jumped on the scene,” Paul Annacone, a former coach of Federer and Pete Sampras, has said. Kyrgios is also the most mercurial. Jon Wertheim, the executive…

What is the most familiar piece of classical music? The most thoroughly roasted chestnut? A piece so overplayed that it has passed into the automatic schlock-recognition zone of every American? Surely it is the final, galloping section of Rossini’s “William Tell” Overture—the Lone Ranger music, the musical image of righteousness on horseback. The music seems almost a joke. But there was one conductor who rode this piece as if his life, and the lives of his players, depended on it. I remember my parents calling me out of my bedroom. The year was 1952, so I must have been eight. On our television, a tiny black-and-white screen sunk into a large mahogany console, an old man with a full head of white hair and an elegantly clipped mustache was beating…

Paradise Lost, by David S. Brown (Harvard). This incisive biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald attempts to distance the writer from the “literary world of flappers, romancers, and boozers” with which he is often conflated. Brown, a historian, sees Fitzgerald as an essentially conservative social critic who was dismayed by “the collapse of older moral codes before the growing cultural influence of moneymakers and movie stars.” Yet, despite Brown’s insistence on the rigor of Fitzgerald’s thinking, the book suggests that he was ensnared by the very social trappings he disdained. In his story, like those of his bestknown characters, “a man of great potential is destroyed by wealth and beauty.” Abandon Me, by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury). “I had a one-word list of things I needed: everything,” the author of this…