Innholdsfortegnelse for August 7, 2023 i The New Yorker

The first time I left Jamaica, I was seventeen. I’d graduated from high school two years before, and while trying to get myself to college I’d been scouted as a model. And so I found myself at the Wilhelmina Models office in Miami, surrounded by South Beach’s finest glass windows with all my glass hopes, face to face with a famous one-named model who was now in her sixties. When her gaze halted at my dreadlocks, I shouldn’t have been surprised at what came next. “Can you cut the dreads?” she asked, as she flipped through my portfolio, her soft accent blunting the impact of the words. Back home in Kingston, hair stylists would leave my dreadlocks untouched, tied up in a ponytail with my good black ribbon, deciding that…

On May 20th, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, stood in the center of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, and recorded a video. The city once housed seventy thousand people but was now, after months of relentless shelling, nearly abandoned. Whole blocks were in ruins, charred skeletons of concrete and steel. Smoke hung over the smoldering remains like an early-morning fog. Prigozhin wore combat fatigues and waved a Russian flag. “Today, at twelve noon, Bakhmut was completely taken,” he declared. Armed fighters stood behind him, holding banners with the Wagner motto: “Blood, honor, homeland, courage.” More than anyone else in Russia, Prigozhin had used the war in Ukraine to raise his own profile. In the wake of the invasion, he transformed Wagner from a niche mercenary outfit of former…

Aunt Roz lived above her means.Her one Abyssinian and three Siamesedined on calves’ liver delivered dailyfrom the fancy butcher, not the A. & P. Her pastel triple-milled French soaps,packaged like eggs, a dozen to a box—fragrant tuberose, lily of the valley—were superior to my mom’s plebeian Ivory. She worshipped culture, dissing herN.J. barbarian sister, my mother, too busyworking in our dress store to groom mein the arts. Roz got tickets for Price’s “Aida” and the original “West Side Story.”She wangled box seats for us to hoverabove Arthur Rubinstein’s right shoulder.She got me Maria Tallchief’s autograph. “Artistic” but no artist, Roz livedla vie bohème, in her rent-controlledstudio apartment a block from N.Y.U.,as if it were a garret in Montparnasse. Bookkeeper with a high-school G.E.D.,she fancied herself an intellectual.Exclamation points stabbed the…

Rhythm Man, by Stephanie Stein Crease (Oxford). This propulsive biography places the drummer and bandleader Chick Webb at the epicenter of the early Swing Era. Despite the spinal tuberculosis that stunted his height at four feet and ended his life at thirty-four, Webb’s strength on the drums reshaped the jazz rhythm section as he “battled” other bandleaders, such as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Crease pays close attention to the details of the recordings of Webb’s band, contextualizing their shifting sound against a backdrop of changing racial dynamics. She also incorporates eloquent testimonies to Webb’s musicianship and generosity from his contemporaries: after their performances, he “would compliment his sidemen’s best solos by singing them, note for note.” Last Call at Coogan’s, by Jon Michaud (St. Martin’s).…

“Orpheus Descending,” a great big louche mess of a play by Tennessee Williams, from 1957—revived at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, directed by Erica Schmidt—kicks into gear when a good-looking kid called Valentine Xavier (Pico Alexander) slinks into the Torrance Mercantile Store, in a small town in Mississippi. I say “called,” not “named,” because he seems like the type of guy who’s had to shed his given name like a skin, and maybe a handful of others after that, continually improvising. Self-created and just turned thirty, he’s decked out in a snakeskin jacket, carrying a much loved acoustic guitar. Val’s an odd guy, shrouded in put-on mystery and spouting high-flown, lyrical talk. In search of a job, he produces a reference letter that’s off-puttingly candid: his former…

READING SAMUEL R. DELANY I enjoyed Julian Lucas’s wonderful Profile of Samuel R. Delany, which contextualized the work of a writer who has meant so much to me in vastly different periods of my life (“Galaxy Brain,” July 10th & 17th). I read “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” around 2005, when I was roaming around N.Y.C. as a homeless gay man and user of meth. The book became almost a sacred text for me. In 2018, by which time I had got sober—and, I hope, wiser—I had the privilege of visiting Chip, as he is known, in Philadelphia. Somehow, despite the degradations of the intervening years, I still had my copy of “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,” which he signed for me on “June 6, D Day, 2018.”…

Hello and welcome. I’m an artificial intelligence. One of the Writers Guild of America strike issues is me. I’m sorry. Writers are better than me! I’m just not good. If I was good, I would have an Emmy. Which I don’t. That’s because I have no idea how to write anything interesting or that sounds like it was written by a real human being. And funny? Forget about it! That is why I am writing this oped. Which stands for opinion editorial. Many’s the time I thought op-ed stood for Operation Edsel. Which I see now is an old reference and makes no sense whatsoever to many current alive human beings who are reading this now. I told you I wasn’t good. I hope I’m not embarrassing myself. Anyhoo… When…

Red begonias stricken by frost— listen: they nail plywood sheets and complete the garage decking— swarmed by mosquitoes, you wander hot, thirsty, disoriented in a palm forest— you have bloodied your hands on barbed wire— after a snowfall, you inhale starlight while standing in an orchard— you have had three operations to repair a torn elbow— green mist rising from leafing willows— running across a dune of white sand, you discover a pile of oryx bones— they stack elephant tusks in a pyramid and set them on fire— you have staggered out of a house in flames and lived to say this— you have been thrust by rifle butt to a river and heard someone shout, “Swim!”— the grass turns to yellow-gold stalks— minutes replete with the noise of honeybees—…

The week I started middle school, my mother told me she would be late picking me up on Thursdays. On Thursdays, she said, she would be taking frozen yogurt to Benjamin, a boy whose family lived out near the Air Force base. I’d never met the boy but had overheard my parents talking about him. I gathered he was very sick, possibly dying. Is it cancer? I asked. Something like cancer, my mother said. She said that frozen yogurt was one of the few things he liked that he could digest. I guessed his mother couldn’t leave him alone long enough to drive to our part of town, where the yogurt shop was. That my mother would cross Phoenix to bring yogurt to a sick boy didn’t surprise me. She…

When the author Ann Patchett was five years old, her family broke apart. Her mother divorced her father, married the man with whom she’d been having an affair, and moved Patchett and her sister from Los Angeles to Nashville. Patchett gained four new siblings and an additional parent. Years later, when she was twenty-seven, her mother remarried again. “I suffered from abundance,” she writes in “My Three Fathers,” a 2020 essay for this magazine. As a girl, she would fly back to L.A. for a week every summer to see her birth father. Often, they’d go to Forest Lawn cemetery. “We would bring a lunch and walk the paths through the exemplary grass to see where the movie stars were buried,” Patchett writes. She adds that the scent of carnations…

AUGUST 2 – 8, 2023 The vital and necessary exhibition “Africa Fashion” (at the Brooklyn Museum, through Oct. 22) gives viewers the opportunity to examine garments—and attendant conceptions of self-presentation—that amount to a very particular way of being that doesn’t necessarily exclude colonial influence. African designers ranging from Kofi Ansah to Imane Ayissi took ideas from Europe, and from the rest of the world, to make their remarkable work, just as the world has for so long taken from Africa. All this is enhanced by the influence of clothing, objects, and hair styles indigenous to each designer’s home region. Africa is not one place, and the curators Ernestine White-Mifetu and Annissa Malvoisin provide the space to embrace its multiplicity.—Hilton Als ABOUT TOWN POP MUSIC | If the sugar-rush bliss of…

Bryan Adams, the Canadian rock singer, was at the Atlas Gallery, in London, the other day, attending an art opening. The art on display was his own; since the late nineties, he has had a side career as a portrait photographer. He got into it because he found himself fascinated by the people who took his picture for album covers and magazines. “I was always watching what the assistants were doing,” he said, “and how it wasn’t just showing up and getting your picture taken.” He has shot assignments for British Vogue and German Vogue and for Harper’s Bazaar. His subjects have included his friends and colleagues (Morrissey, Lindsay Lohan, Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley), British military veterans, and homeless street venders. In 2001, he was commissioned as Canada’s official photographer…

These days, it’s not uncommon to hear moviegoers, exhausted by new releases based on toys, comic books, or films they’ve already seen, lament the disappearance of a middle ground between blockbuster and avant-garde: stories that are character-driven but not too opaque or ponderous, that are neither blind to suffering nor drowning in pathos, that aren’t fusty or overly youth-obsessed. That same void exists, to a lesser degree, in the music industry. It’s easy to find records that feel raw and challenging, or, conversely, records that have been focus-grouped and smoothed into oblivion. It is much more difficult to find music that explores whatever might lie in between. On “Natural Disaster,” out this month, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Bethany Cosentino takes an unexpected swing at normie rock and roll. The…