Innholdsfortegnelse for March 11, 2019 i The New Yorker

Reckless adventure takes diverse cinematic forms in the season’s new movies. Elisabeth Moss’s furious incarnation of an out-of-control rocker on a quest for redemption is matched by the lacerating dialogue and pugnacious cinematography of Alex Ross Perry’s “Her Smell” (opening April 12). Her powerful performance is met by the supporting cast, which includes Amber Heard, Eric Stoltz, and Virginia Madsen; when the tale’s furies burn out, the acting and the direction alike rise to a state of grace. In Claire Denis’s long-planned science-fiction drama “High Life” (April 12), a spaceship on a doomed mission serves as a prison camp where a captive (Robert Pattinson) tries to raise a child. Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, and Mia Goth co-star. In outer space again, “Ad Astra” (May 24), directed by James Gray, stars…

In 1965, the legendary Lyonnais chef Paul Bocuse, who had just earned his third Michelin star, travelled to Japan. In Osaka, he met with Shizuo Tsuji, a former crime reporter who, in his late twenties, decided to pursue his passion for classical French and Japanese cuisines by opening a cooking school. Tsuji introduced Bocuse to kaiseki, an elaborate, formal meal that is considered the pinnacle of Japanese cuisine. Kaiseki is not a specific dish or technique but a format, often involving a dozen or more tiny courses. It shares a history with the austere rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony, and incorporates aesthetic elements from Japanese art forms such as calligraphy and flower arranging. In its exactitude and restraint, Bocuse saw an approach that was in many ways the very…

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message. But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling…

I bet I’ll never appear in a dream or a summer dressor next door. Displaying on one hand my prowess, the othermy difficultness, I bet there will be just enough painto keep me alive, long enough for the moon to be mine,just as the sea is of women: the cockle, the star,and the movements of the earth. Just asthe whale, stuck in its baleen grin, climbs upout of the depths and moves to its hiddenspawning grounds— I don’t know. What is it to be seen? I can forgetit’s language I long for. Man and his cipherscannot save me. Meaning cannot not pile me upwith more meaning. I go off like a fireworkin the yard. I take the limbs off myselfand club the air—for the dead women of televisiondisplayed artistically in…

“Marys Seacole,” the revelatory new drama by Jackie Sibblies Drury (at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow), revolves around the life of its namesake, the nineteenth-century Scottish-Jamaican nurse and businesswoman Mary Seacole, who was determined to live a life of adventure, and did—as evidenced in her 1857 autobiography, “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” The play takes us to some of those lands—among them, colonial Jamaica and a Crimean War battlefield—and to the present-day United States, its six actors shifting roles as they travel. In her earlier work, Drury, who is thirty-seven, has taken on such subjects as zombies, genocide, and surveillance, and in Seacole she’s found an ideal protagonist: a historical marvel who resists hagiography, because she’s so tough and wry. Under the inspired direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, the…

DAN MALLORY’S DECEPTIONS As a literary agent, I thought that Ian Parker’s Profile of the best-selling author Dan Mallory, which reveals the deception underpinning Mallory’s career, provided a damning portrait of the publishing industry (“Unreliable Narrator,” February 11th). Publishing may seem like a great place for women, who hold more than eighty per cent of editorial positions. But, from the inside, it’s clear that men receive far more support, enabling them to ascend swiftly to positions of power regardless of the quality of their work. The women who fill the lower ranks of the industry often watch for years as their male colleagues get quickly promoted despite doing less work. People look at a man in publishing, particularly a passably attractive white man, and see someone who just feels…

On a recent Sunday, the spoken-word poets Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye sat on couches in their dressing room at the Bell House, a Brooklyn concert venue, and composed a set list for their sold-out show. “I would like to do ‘Postcards, ’ but we’ll see,” Kay, who wore red lipstick and a varsity jacket, said. Kaye, whose thin beard and flowing hair earn him comparisons to Jesus, nodded. “It’d be nice to hear it again,” he said. “Is that the one with the tug-of-war metaphor?” “Yeah,” Kay said. “It’s a banger!” She laughed. “Thanks, bruh!” Kay and Kaye, thirty and thirty-one, are not related or married: their last names happen to be homophones. They’ve been friends since 2006, when they met during a freshman talent show at Brown. “We…

One of my lifelong ambitions is never to go to Italy. When I was a boy, in Ohio, my parents urged me to wish for something more realistic, such as never going anywhere in Missouri (several states away). Mom and Dad knew that never going to Italy would be unattainable for people like us. But I kept dreaming, as I pored over my lists of places in Italy I dreaded to see, foods I hoped not to eat, and famous cathedrals I did not want to go on tours of. After all, a big part of the fun of never travelling somewhere is in the planning. My folks had the wisdom to allow me that, though they knew the disappointment sure to come. My own inborn artistic temperament created an…

Suddenly there was no housebut most important the hand-sewn curtainswere on the living-room windowsill facing the front porchthough they constantly presented a confusionsince at the same time all the windowsin the front room were already coveredwith lace to add a certain stiffnessto accompany the formally placedfurniture: armchairs, cupboards, rugs, includingthe one I carried across Crete, up a steep hill,on a plane, a car, some steps, but Lord,the rug on the second floor is the Greek one,the Mexican rug is on the first floornear Gershom Scholem and Ralph Waldo, the mind,which I love above all things, is so sloppy.In the meantime, the poet, whateverhis honors, always writes his new poemsin obscurity, he’s always a beginner,even if he’s already living in his hut.…

Once upon a time, I was addicted to a salon. I never called ahead, and rarely had to wait—not everyone went to Lily’s for a haircut. The old men Lily called uncles sat at a card table, reading newspapers and magazines in Chinese and Vietnamese. The television above the counter was tuned to a channel based in Riverside, and the aunties—related or not related to the uncles—watched cooking shows and teledramas in Mandarin. I was the only customer under sixty, and the only one who spoke in English. With others Lily used Vietnamese, Cantonese, or Mandarin. The first time we met, I lied and said that I had been adopted by a couple from Holland when I was a year old and that we moved to America when I was…

The Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter has built a decades-long career on a fulsome voice that crackles with feeling and intent. Stylistically fluid, she can modulate her singing for clarity and consonance, Romantic-era extravagance, or writhing experimentalism. On March 12,she joins the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo at Alice Tully Hall, for a program that leaps from Handel to Arvo Pärt, and then on to the future with a brand-new piece by the riveting composer Caroline Shaw. MOVIES Black Mother Filming in Jamaica without a crew, the New York filmmaker Khalik Allah—the movie’s director, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor—assembles a grand-scale and intricately detailed mosaic of personal, civic, and mythic portraiture in a mere seventy-six minutes. It’s centered on the physical, emotional, and cultural…

Before moma closes in June, to prepare for its grand reopening, in October, it plants a flag for the future with the exhibition “New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century.” Curated by the keenly intelligent Michelle Kuo, who joined the museum last year, after seven years at the helm of Artforum, the show spotlights recent acquisitions of works by artists who favor innovative methods and materials, including Wade Guyton, Camille Henrot, Josh Kline, and Annicka Yi. (Opens March 27.) When the Oklahoma-born Kiowa artist T. C. Cannon died in a car accident near Santa Fe, in 1978, at the age of thirty-one, the tragedy was compounded by the fact that he had survived two years as a paratrooper in Vietnam, where he earned two Bronze Stars during the…

Five days a week, Victor Ibarra rides a bicycle through North Brooklyn, collecting food waste from restaurants, coffee shops, and other small businesses and packing it into plastic tubs on a trailer that he tows with his bike. There are two substantial hills on his route, and when the tubs are full the entire load—waste, trailer, bike, Ibarra—adds up to almost eight hundred pounds. “Uphill is really hard,” he said the other day. “But, actually, uphill is a lot easier than downhill. Going downhill, I have the hand brakes pressed on, but the bike is still going.” To stop completely, he has to use his feet, Fred Flintstone style. Ibarra is twenty-three. His employer for the past six years has been BK ROT, a nonprofit hauling-and-composting operation in Bushwick. The…

We like the heart to behave—no skipped beats, no atrial flutter, just the regular, precious, plodding cadence. For this we will sacrifice much. The medicine my father began taking for his irregular heartbeat, in 2014, could have turned his skin gray, or caused him to grow breasts, or collected in tiny granular deposits behind his eyes, so that everything he looked at would have had a blue halo. None of this happened to him. Instead, he was cold all the time. Inside my parents’ house, a century-old structure north of New York City whose thin walls testified to the golden age of cheap petroleum, he took to wearing a heavy tweed overcoat. He wore it when he watched television, or napped on the sofa, or read through old copies of…

It’s a winter night in Chicago. Buddy Guy is sitting at the bar of Legends, the spacious blues emporium on South Wabash Avenue. He hangs out at the bar because he owns the place and his presence is good for business. The tourists who want a “blues experience” as part of their trip to the city come to hear the music and to buy a T-shirt or a mug at the souvenir shop near the door. If they’re nervy, they sidle up to Guy and ask to take a picture. Night after night, he poses with customers—from Helsinki, Madrid, Tokyo—who inform him, not meaning to offend, that he is “an icon.” “Thank you,” he says. “Now, let’s smile!” Buddy Guy is eighty-two and a master of the blues. What weighs…

“Painting,” painted by Joan Miró in 1933, in Barcelona, is a composition of black, red, and white blobby shapes and linear glyphs on a ground of bleeding and blending greens and browns. It hangs in “Joan Miró: Birth of the World,” an enchanting show at the Museum of Modern Art that draws on the museum’s immense holdings of Miró’s work, along with a few loans. “Painting” is a bit sombre, for him, but it has the ineffably friendly air of nearly all his art: adventurous but easy-looking, an eager gift to vision and imagination. It invokes a word inevitably applied to Miró: “poetic,” redolent of the magic, residual in us, of childhood rhymes, with or without figurative elements. Never unsettling in the ways of, say, Matisse or, for heaven’s sake,…

Dreyer’s English, by Benjamin Dreyer (Random House). The goal of this “guide to clarity and style,” by the copy chief of Random House, is not to propagate an absolute standard of grammatical rectitude but to teach readers how to give a sentence structural integrity, making it “even more like itself.” Dreyer discards the “Great Nonrules” loved by sticklers (such as not splitting infinitives) and is breezy and chatty as he lays out the logic and “fancy little tricks” of grammar. He can also be noncommittal; those seeking a definitive ruling on thorny points of usage, such as on the singular “they,” will be disappointed. But his accommodating approach is always in the service of better sentences, and the book’s virtue is its extended demonstration of what it means to…