Innholdsfortegnelse for January 11, 2016 i The New Yorker

CENTURIES BEFORE IT WAS an ill-advised soft drink, Red Bull was a theatre in Shakespeare’s England, a lesser-known competitor to the Globe. Starting around 1606, it was the home of Queen Anne’s Men, whose raucous spectators, sometimes provoked by what they saw onstage, often wound up in court for brawling. (Picture a Jacobean CBGB.) The Puritans banned all theatre in 1642, but didn’t quite succeed: the place was frequently raided for illegally hosting “drolls,” or comic sketches. The playhouse officially reopened after the Restoration, but it was torn down within the decade. Oh, well. Fittingly, this hotbed of transgression has a namesake Off Broadway. Since 2003, Red Bull Theatre has devoted itself to stylish mountings of the classics, with a nose for the perverse. The company’s ostensible mission is to…

At New York Sports Clubs’ Chelsea branch one recent Tuesday, employees were rushing to remove toy lightsabers from their plastic packaging. Amira Lamb, an exercise instructor, took her place in a brightly lit mirrored studio and explained that instead of her usual cardio-kickboxing class she would be leading a “Star Wars” workout, which she’d designed at the behest of Disney and Lucasfilm. Lamb, who is petite and has dark eyes, had her crinkly hair pulled back with two clips. She has a devoted following and is beloved by her mostly female students for her distinctive playlists and her efficient full-body approach. Many regulars seemed confused about the new workout, which was called Awaken Your Inner Force. One young woman said that she wasn’t really a “Star Wars” fan. “It’s still…

The biggest corporate deal of 2015 was also, in the view of many, the shadiest: Pfizer’s $160-billion merger with the Irish drug company Allergan. It’s a “tax inversion”—Pfizer will in effect be reconstituting itself as an Irish company, in order to lower its taxes—and that’s why so many people found it so offensive. Hillary Clinton said that ending inversions wasn’t just about fairness but about “patriotism”; Donald Trump called the deal “disgusting.” It’s got to make you wonder when even Trump finds your moneymaking schemes repugnant. Meanwhile, the inversion train seems only to be picking up speed. Such deals were once exceedingly rare—according to the Congressional Research Service, there was just one in the nineteen-eighties—but there have been more than fifty in the past decade, most since 2009. Although in…

I walk south on Manhattan’s High Line toward the Whitney Museum of American Art: international tourists with their selfie sticks, sunbathers on the wooden benches in various stages of undress. The power of the High Line—abandoned railway tracks repurposed as a popular park—is that it feels at once triumphant and post-apocalyptic. Grass grows over the rails, trees among the trestles; it’s almost as if nature had reclaimed the infrastructure of a civilization wiped out by an unspecified disaster. I feel as if I were wandering through a composite, the rails peeking through the C.G.I. And the elevation itself is eerie, an acknowledgment of rising seas. The park now terminates in a great ship: Renzo Piano’s nine-story Whitney building, one of many architectural nods to the largely vanished industries on which…

In the middle of December, the city experienced some peculiar pianist behavior. At the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, the fast-rising Russian-German pianist Igor Levit played the “Goldberg Variations” on a gradually rotating platform, as part of a classical-music installation designed by the artist Marina Abramović. At Carnegie Hall, the established virtuoso Evgeny Kissin intermingled pieces by earlytwentieth-century Jewish composers with his own dramatic recitations of Yiddish-language poems by I. L. Peretz. These departures from routine were welcome. The recital format has become so robotically predictable that we tend to forget its origins in the flamboyant self-display of Paganini and Liszt. The very idea of a piano “recital,” introduced by Liszt in 1840, took inspiration from stage monologues and poetry readings. The “Goldberg” project seems to have arisen…

THE MAN ON THE RIVER The piece by Ben McGrath was a beautiful remembrance of Dicky Conant, who made it his life’s work to navigate a long-distance canoe using a road atlas and river maps (“The Wayfarer,” December 14th). Everyone Conant met was captivated by his personality and impressed by his courage. My brother Peter was a part of Catfish Yacht Club, mentioned in the story, through which the Conant brothers and their friends explored the Nauraushaun Brook in a small boat. The excitement of those childhood summer adventures stuck with the boys. My brother joined the Coast Guard, Chris Kelly carries his membership card to this day, and Dicky continued to seek pleasure along the river. As he wrote, “The experience itself is the reward.” Nancy Wieting Chicago,…

BAR TAB THE CARNEGIE CLUB 156 W. 56th St. (212-957-9676) This elegant two-story cigar lounge has the aura of a friendly den of iniquity: leather couches, red striped wallpaper, stone fireplace, polite patrons, huge ashtrays, cottony clouds of smoke floating by like weather systems. On Sinatra Saturdays, Steven Maglio and the Stan Rubin Orchestra perform impeccable standards to a spiffy crowd drinking single-malt Scotch and puffing cigars to their heart’s content. “There ain’t no nicer witch than you,” Maglio sang on a recent evening, pointing at a woman walking by. Maglio, a fifty-seven-yearold New Jerseyite, has Sinatra’s easy charm, during and between songs. “As Dean Martin used to say, you can’t buy happiness, but you can pour it,” he told the audience. By the bar, an ex-prizefighter with a lighter…

So farewell, “Downton Abbey.” The sixth and final season of the series just began on PBS’s “Masterpiece,” providing resolution to its viewers’ most pressing concerns. Will Lady Mary remarry? Will Anna be able to have a baby? Will the accelerating demise of the British aristocracy—precipitated by the industrial revolution, hastened by the First World War, and decisively signalled by the election of Britain’s first Labour-led government, in 1923—consign the Granthams and their household to the rubbish heap of history, where they rightfully belong? Last month, Jim Carter, who plays Mr. Carson, the butler, and Phyllis Logan, who plays Mrs. Hughes, the housekeeper, met for breakfast at the Lambs Club. “Initially, the idea was that the series started in 1912, when the world of the big estates were in their pomp,”…

In September, 2014, Mohra Ferak, twenty-two years old and in her final year at Dar Al-Hekma University, in the Saudi port city of Jeddah, was asked for advice by a woman who had heard that she was studying law. The woman was the principal of a primary school for girls, and she told Ferak that she had grown frustrated by her inability to help children in her charge who had been raped; over the years, there had been many such cases among her students. Regardless of whether the perpetrator was a relative or the family driver, the victim’s parents invariably declined to press charges. A Saudi family’s honor rests, to a considerable degree, on its ability to protect the virginity of its daughters. Parents, fearing ruined marriage prospects, chose silence,…

The mother and father of Ashima Shiraishi, a fourteen-year-old New Yorker who has been called the most talented rock climber in the world, met in fashion school, in Tokyo, in the early seventies. Hisatoshi Shiraishi, the father, was from the southern island of Shikoku, and Tsuya Otake, the mother, was from Fukushima, where her family had a garment factory. After graduating, they travelled together to Europe and, captivated by the punk scene in London, settled there for a while. Upon their return to Japan, Hisatoshi, who went by the nickname Poppo, took up the study of Butoh, an avant-garde dance form. After a couple of years, Tsuya flew to New York on a tourist visa and sent word that the city was more exciting than Tokyo or London. Poppo followed.…

It’s a terrible day in Baltimore,and in Kathmandu, and in the portcity of Salerno gloom pervades, andyour own private sorrow’s throbbingin the exact center of your righthand, a pain that radiates outwardfrom palm to fingers that cannot findthe shape of your mechanical pencil,a Mont Blanc in the burgundy theydon’t make anymore, a gift givenlong ago, engraved, and obviouslytoo good for you since now you’ve lostit, and this lack fixes you in a placeof grief age-old and physical, anache so similar to the pulsing you’dfeel in the exact center of either palmafter your father killed himself andyou felt the immediate need to writelists, words invented for some selfadministeredspelling test, your thenbeing told this was an odd, wrong,cold thing to do. America, you’dwrite, if you had your pencil, will younow turn out…

THE PUBLIC THEATRE takes its art-for-all mission seriously, and, since 2005, its “Under the Radar” festival has been an essential showcase of the avant-garde. Programmed by Mark Russell and Meiyin Wang, it has welcomed artists from places as far-flung (and free-expression-averse) as Belarus; this year’s festival, Jan. 6-17, features companies from Chile, Japan, and Rwanda. But you don’t always need to look abroad to find perception-altering voices. The South Asian trans performance duo DarkMatter was formed by two New Yorkers, Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian. In “#ItGetsBitter” (at Joe’s Pub, Jan. 12-14), they offer a cheeky radical-queer critique of the gay-rights movement, employing spoken word, fractured nursery rhymes, and fluorescent lipstick: an urgent, funny dispatch from the margins. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives;…

Three Kings Day Parade For many New Yorkers, the holiday season doesn’t end with the calendar year. El Día de los Reyes, or Three Kings Day, gives children one last grab at gifts on the twelfth day of Christmas, marking the Biblical adoration of Jesus by the Three Wise Men. The thirty-ninth annual Three Kings Day Parade in East Harlem invites families to join a morning procession through the neighborhood, starting on the corner of 106th Street and Lexington Avenue and ending at 115th Street at Park Avenue. Attractions include live camels, colorful puppets, musical performances from local bands, and traditional Puerto Rican food. El Museo del Barrio hosts the parade, and offers free admission throughout the day. (elmuseo.org. Jan. 6 at 11.) Lovesick Expo Burlesque dancers, eccentric facial…

Henry Hey met David Bowie in 2012, when the producer Tony Visconti asked him to play some keyboard parts on Bowie’s album “The Next Day.” It went well. “I was told that David asked for me back,” Hey said recently. “I think we had a good rapport. ” Hey, now the music director of the Bowiedriven musical “Lazarus,” at New York Theatre Workshop, was sitting on a chaise longue in the theatre’s basement, an hour before curtain, surrounded by wilted bouquets, prop gin bottles, and bags of inflated balloons. He wore black. Hey has curtains of wiry dark hair and a kind face. He described getting a call from Bowie’s people. “They said, ‘Can we meet and talk about something?’ ” He laughed. “And I signed some paper that said…

It was for the wind as much as anything.It was for the tidal flats, for the miles of barsand the freezing runs between them,blued and darkened in the withering gusts.For the buckets, for the long-tined rakes.For our skin burning and the bonesbeneath, all their ache. For the bent backs,for the huddle toward warmth beneathour incapable layers, how we beatourselves with our arms. The breathwe blew, the narrow steam that spun away.How we searched their tell-draggle marks.Then the feel of them as we furrowed. Then itwas surgery and force together. Like stones.Opal or pearl or plain rock, ugly exceptthey were beautiful, their whorls andpurple stains. The bucket’s wire cuttingwith their weight. For the sky blazing, itssinking orange fire. For the sky’s black streakswith night rising, winter-sudden. Back,shoreward, home, the tide creeping…

She visits others. Before they’re up, dawn, she walks to the lake, listening to Bach, the first clavichord exercise, which she plans to have played at her funeral someday, has had this plan since she first heard the music and, thinking of it, she weeps lightly. The lake is whipped by wind and tides (big lake) doing what tides do, she never knows in or out. There is a man standing on shore and a big dog swimming back to him with stick in mouth. This repeats. The dog does not tire. She peels a swim cap onto her head, goggles, enters the water, which is cold but not shocking. Swims. High waves in one direction. The dog is gone. Now she is alone. There is a pressure to swim…

THE BIG GREEN TENT, by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Spanning the period from the fifties until the collapse of the Soviet Union, this epic chronicle of dissidence daringly subverts the reader’s expectations of the classic Russian novel. The story begins during the school years of three promising friends initiated into the cult of great literature by a new teacher. Gradually, the bildungsroman unravels into a web of interconnected stories, depicting the friends’ lives, and the lives of their families, lovers, friends, and neighbors from a multiplicity of angles. The most memorable and affecting portrait is that of a daughter of Party officials who finds her life’s purpose in the production and dissemination of samizdat. MARTIN JOHN, by Anakana Schofield (Biblioasis).…