Innholdsfortegnelse for July 4, 2022 i The New Yorker

Twelve years ago, the filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp and the actress Jenny Slate, who were dating, went to a destination wedding. Their teeny hotel room, shared with five friends, was preposterously cramped, and Slate began to complain about the sardine-like conditions in a small, squeaky voice. She spontaneously named this voice Marcel; she claimed it belonged to a seashell so itsy-bitsy that it used a muffin as a mattress. When the pair returned home to New York, Slate couldn’t stop speaking as Marcel or inventing details about his life, such as the fact that he kept a piece of lint as a dog or used discarded human toenails as skis. When Camp was hired to shoot a short video for a comedy show, he bought a bag of googly-eyes, an…

Mavis Staples has been a gospel singer longer than Elizabeth II has worn the crown. During concerts, sometimes, she might take a seat and rest while someone in her band bangs out a solo for a chorus or two. No one minds. Her stage presence is so unfailingly joyful—her nickname is Bubbles—that you never take your eyes off her. Staples sings from her depths, with low moans and ragged, seductive growls that cut through even the most pious lyric. She is sanctified, not sanctimonious. In her voice, “Help Me Jesus” is as suggestive as “Let’s Do It Again.” When she was a girl, singing with her family ensemble, the Staple Singers, churchgoers across the South Side of Chicago would wonder how a contralto so smoky and profound could issue from…

FLIGHT ATTENDANCE Jennifer Gonnerman, in her reporting on flight attendants fighting for better treatment, mentions that my sister, Sandie Hendrix, a stewardess at United, was fired, in 1972, after weighing in at a hundred and twenty-seven pounds (“Highflier,” May 30th). It’s worth noting what happened afterward, too. Sandie played a pivotal role in a lawsuit against United, and she eventually got her job back, with back pay and seniority restored, as if she had never left. Unfortunately, the other flight attendants were none too welcoming upon Sandie’s return; they resented that she had kept pace in seniority (which determined flight schedules and home bases) without, as they saw it, having worked for it. Sandie and her fellow-returnees were ever after called the “wide-bodies.” Linda Hendrix McPharlinSan Francisco, Calif. GREAT DEEDS,…

He woke to an angry house and darkness in the windows. Aunt Maisie had packed his suitcase the night before and left it near the front door, and so he dressed himself without turning on the light and came out and dropped the pajamas on top of the suitcase. She was in the kitchen, banging the pans around. Buddy, she said when she saw him, set yourself down and get some of this food in you. Her eyes were funny, all red and puffy, and he didn’t like to see them like that. When he sat down, she came up behind him and hugged his head so hard it hurt, and her hands smelled like soap and cigarettes and grease, and he pulled away. He ate her eggs, which were…

Fire Island, by Jack Parlett (Hanover Square). This richly textured history of a place “equal parts real and imagined,” which has served as a queer summertime mecca for more than a century, unfolds like a pageant, populated by notable figures who have sought sun, sex, and solace on its beaches. Against a backdrop of tea dances, costume parties, and anonymous sexual encounters, we meet W. H. Auden, smoking at daybreak; Patricia Highsmith, brawling in Duffy’s Bar; Frank O’Hara, killed by a dune buggy. Parlett captures the giddy excesses, but his real aim is to show how a community sought to define, protect, liberate, and celebrate themselves, realizing “the fantasy of a world away from shame and silence.” The Hangman and His Wife, by Nancy Dougherty (Knopf). Assassinated in 1942 by Czechoslovak…

Audiences at the Ojai Music Festival, the Southern California new-music jamboree, are accustomed to unpredictable goings on, but this year’s edition may have caught even veteran attendees off guard. A percussionist ran in circles, banging tubular bells; a cellist played his instrument while sitting on a skateboard in motion; another cellist entered a performance venue with a wardrobe slung over his back; dancers in inflatable triceratops costumes waltzed in the town park. The festival culminated in a gloriously raucous rendition of Julius Eastman’s “Stay on It,” with dancers streaming off the stage and into the audience. The Ojai festival, which has been rattling an idyllic mountain valley for seventy-five years, has a different music director each season. This time, the job fell to the American Modern Opera Company (amoc),…

JUNE 29 – JULY 5, 2022 In 1998, the Asia Society introduced Americans to a new art scene emerging from China in the seminal show “Inside/Out.” Through Aug. 14, the museum presents a sequel of sorts: “Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity.” Its curator, Barbara Pollack, presents works by seven artists, all born after 1976, for whom the binary of East versus West is essentially moot. Pixy Liao—whose gender-norm-defying photograph “Shoulder,” from 2021, is seen here—grew up in Shanghai and is now based in Brooklyn. DANCE American Ballet Theatre A.B.T.’s production of “Swan Lake,” from 2000, staged by its outgoing artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, is lavish and traditional and ends with a spectacular leap into the lake for the lovers. The company rolls out seven different casts for this…

It was a beautiful place, horizon on all sideslike diner mirrors. I spedtoward its limit and hit the asphalt hard. My arm in the X-ray glowed like a jellyfish at nightand I wanted to slip into its ocean and gototally numb. I wanted to fix what I’d done, but the doctor saidStay patient, massaging my plasterwith soap. On the radio they spoke about a meteor shower, so we spread oldtowels in the darkest back yard. While we waitedsomeone laid out an endless riddle about albatrosses. Cannibalism was the answer.Inside me, minerals were mending themselves,sending collagen threads across the bad chasm I’d made. From behind a wide cloud slidstars like flecks of bone, old and glowing.They held their breaths. When one dashed across the black, I think I gaspedadmiring the platonic plummet:…

Nothing was what I wanted. The bread, whitechalk. The butter, rancidity. The marmalade,bitterness. The nail on my right hand, the raggedending to a difficult day. He’d said, Oh, really, you’re wearing that? I was, I said. But nowthere was no room for me in the room.The lights were too bright. Always a problemwhen windows faced the sun. Especially when the sky showed its face for too long.No rain for days, then, suddenly, rain. I’d wornthe red shoes and now they would be ruined.How to care less. That phrase, “I couldn’t care less,” as if zero were already a viewpoint.There were two doors into the house: the frontdoor, which was rarely used, and the side door,which was accessed by entering the screened porch where my stepfather’s wood was stackedagainst the wall.…

Hugh Eakin’s new book, “Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America” (Crown), isn’t really about Picasso, or about war, or about art. Its subject is the creation of a market for a certain product, modern art. One (mostly) good thing about the digital revolution, which is otherwise sucking us all into a plutocratic dystopia, is that the Internet has reduced the barriers to cultural production enormously. Many types of cultural goods are now much easier to make and much cheaper to distribute. You don’t need an investor to capitalize your production costs or a distributor to get your stuff before the public. You just need a laptop and a camera (and maybe an inspiration). And, no matter how small you are, you always open worldwide. It’s true that when…

Great lighting onstage has an unplaceable emotional effect. You feel it in its swelling or ebbing before you get a chance to think. Sometimes light’s power is totally belated: I realize how much certain arrangements of exposure and shadow have touched me only when, days later, I recover them in memory. One artist whose lightscapes tend to linger in my mind is Isabella Byrd, the designer whose work illuminates two furtively spiritual new plays: “Corsicana,” by Will Arbery, and “Epiphany,” by Brian Watkins. In terms of their structure and their pacing—and, therefore, the demands they heap upon a sensitive lighting deist for signer—these plays feel almost like opposites. “Corsicana” moves fleetly between its many scenes, with minimal set changes, and “Epiphany” unfolds with a slow, haunting mystery across one…