Innholdsfortegnelse for December 21, 2020 i The New Yorker

On Pointe Serendipitously for ballet lovers, in this season devoid of live performance, Disney+ filmed a documentary series about the School of American Ballet—the training academy of New York City Ballet—just last year. The six-part series, available on Dec. 18, follows several children from various backgrounds, from eight to eighteen years old, through their classes at the prestigious school, and documents their preparations for George Balanchine’s “Nutcracker.” The kids involved are extraordinary in their focus, desire, and rigor, and the filmmakers reveal how hard they work; their level of discipline often surprises even their own parents. Thankfully, the series also avoids the usual cliché about ballet: that it’s a world filled with mean-spirited, abusive control freaks. To the contrary, the teachers, many of them younger than one might expect, come…

Some years before Joseph Bunevacz came to America, and decades before he got sick, he taught the Beatles how to ski. Or so he told me when I visited him at his home, on the arid northeastern slopes of the mountains that separate Los Angeles from the Mojave Desert, to learn more about an experimental medical treatment that he was hoping to receive for a strange and persistent infection in his blood. His wife, Filomena, took me through his medical history, consulting a stack of yellow legal pads in which, for the past five years, she has recorded countless tests and treatments. Yet Bunevacz, a bright-eyed seventy-nine-year-old with a shock of white hair, wearing an official Hungarian Olympic tracksuit, just wanted to tell wild, improbable stories about his younger years.…

The most spellbinding art work of the past decade is a seven-and-a-half-minute film called “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” by the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. Word spread quickly after its New York première, in November, 2016, at Gavin Brown’s gallery. People crowded the gallery to see it, but nothing they had heard prepared them for the rapidfire sequence of a hundred and fifty film clips of Black people in the maelstrom of American life: a teen-age girl being thrown to the ground by a white police officer, burning cars and hip-hop dancers, Martin Luther King, Jr., in an open car, a man being beaten by several uniformed policemen, LeBron James soaring in for a gorgeous dunk, Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at a memorial service in…

The real star of the director George C. Wolfe’s film of August Wilson’s play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (on Netflix, starting December 18th) is Viola Davis’s makeup. Designed by the industry veteran Matiki Anoff, it is a masterpiece of Black American style. Anoff gives Davis, who plays Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, the singer often described as the “Mother of the Blues,” the rouged look we associate with the era—the play is set in 1927—but filters it through the singer’s extravagant and scrutinizing vision. Bottom-heavy but light on her feet, the forty-five-year-old Rainey is a renegade, with long, sharply drawn eyebrows and a layer of too much shine on her face. She also has a mouth full of gold teeth that flash like artillery whenever she issues a directive or criticizes the…

For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters. Clotheslines were webbed between stray standing pillars, evidence that survivors were somehow living among the ruins. Nobody knows how many thousands of residents died, or how many are now homeless or confined to a wheelchair. What is certain is that the decimation of Raqqa is unlike anything seen in an American conflict since the Second World War. As…

How did “How To with John Wilson” make it onto HBO? I mean that as a compliment. The show, an endearing, oddball comic documentary in six half-hour episodes, isn’t glamorous, or suspenseful, or slick. It has minimal drama and no murder, and looks as if it were shot for roughly the same budget that the network once allotted for a pair of Carrie Bradshaw’s shoes. There’s no sex—though one episode contains an astonishing, if chaste, display of male nudity—but there is a ton of city. Wilson’s subject is human behavior, and his terrain is New York, which he trawls with the obsessive devotion of a beachcomber, sifting through the streets with his camera to find the treasures buried among the trash, and not just the figurative kind. The show opens…

PRINCESS DI ONSCREEN Hilton Als, in his fine review of the new season of “The Crown,” on Netflix, says that Emma Corrin, who plays Princess Diana, seems “disembodied” in the role (On Television, November 23rd). I find his criticism to be overly harsh. Corrin nails the young Diana’s graceful movements and shy gaze. The season ends before Prince Charles and Diana’s divorce; it was not until afterward that Diana lost her shyness and became the confident woman whom people remember and admire. Aphrodite MoissisAthens, Greece I agree with Als that “The Crown” shows how the British Royal Family’s reality is “more like [ours] than not.” This is most evident in the character of Diana, whose struggle with bulimia and depression holds important lessons. As an eighteen-year-old, I am surrounded by…

Silvia lived alone in a rented apartment of her own, with a five-foot-tall pot plant on the balcony and a giant bedroom with a mattress on the floor. She had her own office at the Ministry of Education, and a salary; she dyed her long hair jet black and wore Indian blouses with sleeves that were wide at the wrists and silver thread that shimmered in the sunlight. She had the provincial last name of Olavarría and a cousin who had disappeared mysteriously while travelling around Mexico. She was our “grownup” friend, the one who took care of us when we went out and let us use her place to smoke weed and meet up with boys. But we wanted her ruined, helpless, destroyed. Because Silvia always knew more: if…

Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dotcom boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in high school, and we merged them to form a single, teen-age megacorp. For around six hundred dollars a month, we rented office space in the basement of a building in town. We made Web sites and software for an early dating service, an insurance-claims-processing firm, and an online store where customers could “bargain” with a cartoon avatar for overstock goods. I lived large, spending the money I made on tuition, food, and a stereo. In 1999—our sophomore year—we hit it big.…

An invitational show of international artists, “100 Drawings from Now,” at the Drawing Center, in SoHo, speaks to our lockdown epoch with startling poignancy. All but one of the works have been created since the pandemic’s onset. They are mounted on walls with magnets, unframed, and arrayed seemingly helter-skelter. Few are thematic. There are scant visual references to the spiky virus, though there are some good jokes on homebound malaise. Among the better-known artists, Raymond Pettibon pictures himself bingeing on episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and Katherine Bernhardt reports a homeopathic regimen of cigarettes and Xanax. Stylistic commonalities are scarce, aside from a frequent tilt toward wonky figuration. The show confirms a delta-like trend—or anti-trend—of eclectic eccentricities without any discernible mainstream. (Does this signal the end of art history? It…

DECEMBER 16 – 22, 2020 The tree at Rockefeller Center may have its own prime-time special, but for seasonal spectacle it’s hard to compete with the lights of Dyker Heights (pictured). Since the mid-nineteen-eighties, the residents of this Brooklyn neighborhood have been turning their homes into high-wattage displays between Thanksgiving and the New Year. (The event has become so synonymous with Christmas in New York City that it’s the theme of a holiday window at Saks Fifth Avenue this year.) Optimal viewing is between dusk and 9 P.M. MUSIC The Avalanches: “We Will Always Love You” ELECTRONIC Robbie Chater, a member of the Australian electronic group the Avalanches, once characterized the band’s 2000 début, “Since I Left You,” as “a light, FM-pop record” crafted “using dance music techniques”—specifically, some nine…

I share my house with a colony of bats.They live in the roof peak,enter through a gap. At dusk they fly out, dipinto inverted arcsto catch what flutters or stings, what can only be hunted at night.Sunlight stops their flight,drives them into their hot chamber to rest and nest, troll-facespinched shut. I hear them scratch.In darkness they chop and hazard through the sky, around blue outlines of pines,pitch up over the old Dutch housewe share. They scare some but not me. I see themfor what they seem—timid, wee, happy or lucky, pinned to the roof beams,stitched up in their ammonia reekand private as dreams.…

Now out of this vast silencethe cherry trees scraping their gnarled limbson the sky, and the wind hurls downa flurry of petals, a snowstorm really, a thousand prints on the wet pavement,each one a pair of white shutters, opening. Numinous, the souls of the dead, and now you,… among them—an intake of breath. How little it seems to me now,we knew each other. But still, it is so beautiful, the place where you were—a table, two chairs, a tree growing upright through the floor, and outside, a flicker of swallows in the hedgerows,the tulips’ purple chevrons a row of arrowheads. … It is wherever youwant to be, although by now you are beyond wanting. Or at least that’swhat they say of the dead. The place where you were holds the…

The Nine Lives of Pakistan, by Declan Walsh (Norton). The author, a foreign correspondent who was based in Pakistan for almost a decade, here tells the story of this complicated nation through some of its most influential personalities, including Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founder; the human-rights activist Asma Jahangir; and the legendary spy Sultan Amir Tarar. Equally perceptive about the megacities of Karachi and Lahore and the remote regions of Waziristan and Balochistan, Walsh portrays a Pakistan that is “more concept than country … strained under the centrifugal forces of history, identity and faith.” After examining the legacy of partition, the grip of the Taliban, and a web of ethnic and sectarian fault lines, Walsh concludes that “the most pertinent question might be not whether Pakistan will fail, but how…

Since the Beatles officially broke up, in 1970, Paul McCartney has released more than thirty original albums and dozens of singles. They have included ragged, folksy home recordings; propulsive, glossy rock; children’s music featuring singing frogs; covers of fifties R. & B. favorites; duets with Carl Perkins, Michael Jackson, and Stevie Wonder; collaborations with members of Led Zeppelin and the Royal Liverpool Symphony Orchestra; and excursions into disco, ambient techno, and cut-and-paste soundscapes. By comparison, the Beatles released only twelve full studio albums—about nine hours of music. They made statements with their records, but McCartney seems to be perpetually sketching, pursuing a career of whims and compulsions. In 1971, he and his then wife, Linda, formed a new band, Wings, perhaps so that their family could spend more time together.…