Innholdsfortegnelse for March 14, 2022 i The New Yorker

In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, some antlers are easy to find. A large arch of intertwined elk antlers greets passengers as they arrive at the local airport, and, in town, antler chandeliers hang from tall ceilings at a high-end furniture store. Jackson’s trademark is a town square with four archways; each arch was made from some fourteen thousand pounds of antler. Most of the antlers come from the National Elk Refuge, an expanse of hills and meadows on the outskirts of Jackson where roughly eight thousand elk spend the winter. The animals eat government-funded alfalfa pellets, living in a carefully managed symbiosis with a town that presents itself as a frontier outpost, and which has a median home price of three million dollars. Unlike horns, which are permanently attached to an…

I’m gonna wash Batman right outa my hair. That was my plan, at any rate, after watching as much of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” (2021) as I could take; even the most loyal fans of the Caped Crusader must have wondered, over the decades, if the crusading would ever end. Is there not a lingering suspicion that this most enigmatic of superheroes might merely, in fact, be the dullest? How much dramatic juice remains to be squeezed from Bruce Wayne, the chumless billionaire, brooding over his man cave and his gaggle of gizmos? The catalogue of squeezers runs from Adam West to Ben Affeck, taking in actors as skilled as Michael Keaton, George Clooney, and Christian Bale. Now Robert Pattinson joins the list. The film in question, directed by Matt…

FEMINISTS IN FILM As a feminist film scholar and an associate professor at Rutgers University, I greatly appreciated Elif Batuman’s Profile of the director Céline Sciamma (“Now You See Me,” February 7th). Sciamma speaks about the strong impression that Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein’s film “La Maternelle” made on her grandmother. I felt similarly when I first saw the film, in 1977, at the urging of Epstein herself. Since then, I have devoted a significant part of my scholarship to Epstein’s work, and to “La Maternelle” in particular. The only complete print of the film is housed at the Cinémathèque Française, in Paris. A hard-to-find DVD contains a censored version of the film that circulated in the U.S. in 1935. Cuts were made to poetic passages that both exemplify the…

The “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept” is the eightieth edition of the museum’s influential and inevitably divisive take on the current state of American art. The exhibition’s co-curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, began envisioning the show before the pandemic shutdown, which delayed their efforts by a year. The plans they’ve announced reflect the exceedingly fractious and polarized national mood but also promise a semblance of sanctuary. The Biennial will be concentrated on two floors of the museum, one conceived as a dark maze, the other open and bright; certain walls will be intermittently reconfigured, in keeping with our unpredictable times. Expect a mix of poetry and politics in the works on view, from an intergenerational group of sixty-three artists and collectives. (Opens April 6.) The Brooklyn-born Jamel Shabazz,…

In Fairfax County, Virginia, two landmarks of early American history share an uneasy but inextricable bond. George Washington’s majestic Mount Vernon estate is one of the most popular historic homes in the country, visited by roughly a million people a year. Gum Springs, a small community about three miles north, is one of the oldest surviving freedmen’s villages, most of which were established during Reconstruction. The community was founded in 1833 by West Ford, who lived and worked at Mount Vernon for nearly sixty years, first as an enslaved teen-ager and continuing after he was freed. Following Washington’s death, in 1799, Ford helped manage the estate, and he maintained an unusually warm relationship with the extended Washington family. Awareness of West Ford had faded both in Gum Springs and at…

Rebecca Johnson, a teacher for more than twenty years, approached the first day of class at Lowell High School last fall with unusual anxiety. “I am used to having my plans and procedures mostly ready to go, and I am just excited to meet a new crop of kids,” she explained before the term began. “While I am still experiencing much of that excitement, I am also feeling some trepidation, and I am not sure exactly why.” On the first morning of school, she dressed the way she always does: an untucked button-down shirt, this one with flowers; gray slacks; and extraordinarily sensible black shoes. On arriving, she prepared herself, as usual, a mug of milky tea. Lowell is in western San Francisco, near the ocean, and a thick, low…

When the biographer of Emanuel Teller came to see me, he left behind his hat. It was the kind of hat a gaucho would wear, flat on top, wide-brimmed, but without the strings that tie under the chin. It was a very dark green, soft and fuzzy to the touch. It seemed familiar. I thought I knew that hat. As the biographer trotted down the stairs to the waiting taxi, I called out, “Hey! You forgot your hat!” He didn’t hear me; the driver was leaning on his horn. I picked up the hat. It looked exactly like Emanuel Teller’s hat in his photos. Two weeks earlier, the biographer had informed me in an e-mail (it was easy to track me down online, he said) that he was coming from…

The word “salon,” for a starry convocation of creative types, intelligentsia, and patrons, has never firmly penetrated English. It retains a pair of transatlantic wet feet from the phenomenon’s storied annals, chiefly in France, since the eighteenth century. So it was that the all-time most glamorous and consequential American instance, thriving in New York between 1915 and 1920, centered on Europeans in temporary flight from the miseries of the First World War. Their hosts were Walter Arensberg, a Pittsburgh steel heir, and his wife, Louise Stevens, an even wealthier Massachusetts textile-industry legatee. The couple had been thunderstruck by the 1913 Armory Show of international contemporary art, which exposed Americans to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and, in particular, Marcel Duchamp. Made the previous year, his painting “Nude Descending a Staircase (No.…

White Lies, by A. J. Baime (Mariner). Walter F. White, the subject of this urgent, much needed biography, led the N.A.A.C.P. from 1929 until his death, in 1955. He joined in 1918, working undercover in the South—a light-skinned Black man, he could pass as white—to investigate lynchings, identifying perpetrators and sending reports to the press and to state capitols. White’s career, beginning three years after “The Birth of a Nation” came out and ending just before the Montgomery bus boycott, allows Baime to portray an entire society struggling and failing to reckon with its legacy of racial terror. None of the killers in the forty-one murders White investigated were convicted. And, though he spent decades campaigning for a federal anti-lynching law, only now does such a bill (named for Emmett…

In June, 1992, the Lemonheads released “It’s a Shame About Ray,” the band’s fifth record, and its first to garner international renown. The album featured the singer and guitarist Evan Dando, the bassist Juliana Hatfield, and the drummer David Ryan. Five months earlier, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” had landed at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and so-called “alternative rock,” as it was then known, was reaching a commercial zenith. I first learned about the Lemonheads through that most potent nineties triad: the group had been featured in Sassy magazine’s “Cute Band Alert,” it had a video in heavy rotation on “120 Minutes,” MTV’s late-night dumping ground forstuff too weird or grating for prime time, and Dando had scored a cameo in the film “Reality Bites,” in which he coolly ended a…

MARCH 9 – 15, 2022 “Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound,” which opens at moma on March 13, surveys the career of an Ivorian artist who dedicated his prodigious imagination to preserving the cultural heritage of his native people, the Bété. In one ambitious piece, Bouabré, who died in 2014, devised a written system for the Bété’s spoken language, in hundreds of colorful drawings. The museum’s new curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, who organized the exhibition, is pictured above with a selection of that sui-generis syllabary. DANCE Batsheva Dance Company On the heels of “YAG: The Movie” (2020), Ohad Naharin’s first film adaptation of one of his stage works, comes “Hora—The Movie,” a film adaptation of a fifty-minute work from 2009, premièring online on March 11. Naharin’s style—blunt, uninhibited, and dense with eccentric…

The season’s roster of releases teems with stories about real people and real animals. “The Duke” (April 22), the last dramatic feature directed by the late Roger Michell, is based on the true story of a theft, in 1961, of a Goya painting from the National Gallery in London; Jim Broadbent plays Kempton Bunton, a cabdriver convicted of the crime; Helen Mirren co-stars as Bunton’s wife, Dorothy.  “The Torch” (March 18), directed by Jim Farrell, is a documentary portrait of the great Chicago-based blues singer and guitarist Buddy Guy, who discusses what he learned in his work, decades ago, with such musicians as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and is shown mentoring the young guitarist Quinn Sullivan. “Aline” (April 8), a drama about the rise of a singer from a…

This air, its long-range gunning heart,May it bear witness, and in the dugoutsThe windowless ocean of ardor, all-doing,Omnivorous—substance and matter. These stars, slanderous stool pigeons!Snooping around, looking—for what?In the judgment of judge and witness,Windowless ocean, matter and mass. Rain, that cold-shouldered sower—Its nameless manna—remembers howWooden crosses, like scaffolds, like forests,Marked the ocean or wedge of battalions. Feeble and freezing, the people to comeWill murder, will freeze, and will starve,And rightfully the soldier must goUnknown to his famous grave. Teach me, feeble-winged swallow, tell me—You who have forgotten all of flight—How, without rudder or wing, to steer,To get hold of this floating grave. I’ll retort with a strict accountingFor what you did against Lermontov, M.—The way the grave instructs the stooping one,And the floating ditch draws him in. These worlds—these trembling…

Tomorrow will be eight weeks since I lost you (slightly longerthan I knew you). I threw out my underwear. Tucked the Polaroid-style ultrasounds in a drawer,with the self-help books and a harvest of cards. I threw out two pairs of pajama pants. You dotted one with blood; the otherI wore to the E.R., leaving it like molted skin on the linoleum. That first Sunday, I drove to Walgreens,came home, and peed on three sticks. I lined them up like baby dolls. I checked on them. Their double lineswere quiet highways. Cradling the phone, standing mud-deep in the driveway, I called my mother; she told me to wait to tellmy sister. I told my sister. I photographed the tests, texted them to my dearest friend. There are moments when I amconvinced…

Two formidable artistic creations bear the name “Rothko Chapel.” The first is an ecumenical spiritual space, in Houston, built to display huge, dark paintings by Mark Rothko. The second is a half-hour composition by Morton Feldman, which had its première in the chapel in 1972, a year after the site opened. Each work possesses a legendary aura. The chapel, the brainchild of the art patrons Dominique and John de Menil, projects an abyssal stillness that mesmerizes more than a hundred thousand visitors every year. Feldman’s composition, a sparse soundscape for viola, chorus, celesta, and percussion, long ago became a classic of modern music; according to the Feldman archivist Chris Villars, in the past two decades it has received more than a hundred and thirty performances, in twenty-seven countries. Together, the…