Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-07-15 i The New Yorker

Music Video Time Machine The year’s most scenic Seaport days may be behind us, but here’s one last excuse to sample a fresh lobster roll. The v.j. and self-described music-video historian Stephan Pitalo catalogues the sky-high hair and blown-out budgets of MTV’s golden era with his Music Video Time Machine series. Guests are invited to watch classic music clips on big screens in venues across the city while enjoying food and drink specials, giveaways, and rare music memorabilia. He’ll pull from eighties and nineties classics for “Rock Lobster 3: The Perch for Rock,” the third installment, hosted at this low-profile South Street Seaport restaurant specializing in seafood and named after the nearby lightship docked in New York Harbor. (Ambrose Beer and Lobster, 18 Fulton St. 212-480-0301. Dec. 4 at…

In the past two decades, Marlis Petersen, the German soprano, has starred in ten different productions of “Lulu,” Alban Berg’s dark, atonal opera about a young woman who, having been despoiled—raised on the streets, she is taken as a much older man’s mistress at the age of twelve—despoils back, ravaging husbands and lovers before meeting a gruesome end. After more than ninety performances in the role, Petersen is retiring it: her current Lulu, in William Kentridge’s acclaimed production at the Met, will be her last. “It matures,” she said backstage the other evening. “In the beginning, you start like a virgin in the approach to this role. Then, after you have done it two or three times, you suddenly get a revelation: maybe she does this because of this. It…

Night is at hand already: it is well That we yield to the night. So Homer sings, As if there were no Heaven and no Hell, But only peace. The gray dove comes down in a storm of wings Into my garden where seeds never cease To be supplied as if life fits a plan Where needs are catered to. One need is not: I do not wish to leave yet. If I can I will stay on And see another autumn, having got This far with all my strength not yet quite gone. When Phèdre, dying, says that she can see Already not much more than through a cloud, She adds that death has taken clarity Out of her eyes To give it to the world. Behold my shroud:…

ROUSEY’S STRENGTH The other night, I sat alone in my dorm room streaming the Ultimate Fighting Championship and watched Holly Holm best Ronda Rousey, which Kelefa Sanneh wrote about for the Web site (“Ronda Rousey, Routed”). Unlike most eighteen-year-old girls, I have been in martial arts since the age of four. After nearly eleven years of Tae Kwon Do, five years of kickboxing, and the occasional jujitsu and Muay Thai lesson, I knew who Rousey was long before Beyoncé ever sampled her at a concert. I was devastated when I saw her out cold on the floor. Despite her trash talking, despite the tiff at the weigh-in, despite her not having touched Holm’s gloves, despite the fact that my fighting style is more similar to Holm’s, I was crushed.…

In the office of a refugee-resettlement nonprofit in New Haven, Connecticut, last week, a volunteer showed a colleague her wedding photographs, on a laptop. A Syrian man, in his early forties, wearing a leather jacket and a mustache, joined them; the volunteer laughed, and switched to Arabic. The man, who used to own a takeout grilled-meat shop in a now ruined and emptied neighborhood of Homs, smiled at a photograph of Central Park in driving rain. He had been in the United States for ten weeks, and although he spoke only a few words of English, and although his classes in cultural orientation had not introduced him to the notion of Donald Trump, he was conscious of the fact that, in the days since the terrorist attacks in Paris, the…

These are tough times for the coal industry. Coal-burning plants generate less than forty per cent of the electricity in the U.S., down from more than half just a few years ago. At least twenty-six coal companies have gone bankrupt since 2008. The Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan requires power companies to cut carbon emissions, which almost certainly means using less coal. And if this week’s climate-change summit in Paris succeeds in establishing firm goals for cutting emissions coal will undoubtedly be the biggest loser. So it’s no surprise that congressional Republicans, who cast a symbolic vote last week to scuttle the Clean Power Plan, complain of a “war on coal.” But if there really is a war the U.S. government doesn’t seem to know what side it’s on. Consider,…

As the chairman of the neurosurgery department at the University of California at Davis, Paul Muizelaar saw patients on Wednesdays, at a clinic housed in a former cannery in East Sacramento. Among the people waiting to see him on the afternoon of November 10, 2010, was Terri Bradley, a fifty-six-yearold woman on whom he had operated the previous May, to remove a malignant brain tumor the size of a lime. Sitting in his office, Muizelaar reviewed Bradley’s file. He read a letter from her oncologist, asserting that Bradley was doing well: a brain scan had found no evidence of the tumor. “I think, This sounds great,” Muizelaar, a sixty-eightyear-old Dutchman, recalled. “So I go to her exam room with a big smile on my face, and there she is with…

The most popular Orson Welles video on YouTube, edging out the trailer for “Citizen Kane” and “The War of the Worlds” broadcast of 1938, is called “Orson Welles Drunk Outtake.” It shows him slurring his way through one of those ads in which he intoned, “Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time.” Whether he was drunk, experiencing the effects of medication (he suffered from diabetes and other ailments), or simply very tired is immaterial. What’s striking about the video is its popularity. This is largely how today’s culture has chosen to remember Welles: as a pompous wreck, a man who peaked early and then devolved into hackwork and bloated fiascos. The video points to a decades-old fissure in the reputation of Welles, whose centennial fell on May 6th.…

THE COMPOSER JULIA WOLFE has a striking ability to channel three streams of American music—Appalachian vernacular, post-minimalist classical, and rock—into a mighty river. She did so in “Anthracite Fields,” which won the Pulitzer Prize this year, and in “Steel Hammer” (2009), a work that distills the many folklore versions of John Henry—the legendary railroad steel driver who died after winning a contest of strength against a steam-powered hammer—into a compelling, unified image. Scored for three female voices and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the work has been reinvented as music drama (at BAM’s Harvey Theatre, Dec. 2-6) by the director Anne Bogart; actors from SITI Company (including Eric Berryman, above) perform new texts by the playwrights Kia Corthron, Will Power, Carl Hancock Rux, and Regina Taylor, interspersed between…

“High-low humor is really the name of the game right now,” Eben Freeman said of his choice to make electric-blue Hpnotiq the liquor of the month at his new bodega-chic bar in Little Italy. A sheet of car-wash plastic stands in for the door; Tecate boxes prop up chrome-rimmed tables. Freeman may be one of New York’s most talented bartenders (his molecular mixology, honed at wd~50, is often credited with creating the current cocktail craze), and his technical skills are on display with his Hpnotiq Fizz (ethereal, balanced, citrusy without being overly acidic), but his expertly crafted drinks are very much beside the point here. “I thought it’d be funny,” Freeman says. But after drinking a cha-chunker you can’t help but feel that the joke’s on you. The drinks are…

Uzo Aduba stepped out onto the ice. It was dusk in Prospect Park. The skating rink at the LeFrak Center was hosting an event called Monster Skate. Witches and bumblebees orbited to “The Addams Family” theme song. Aduba, who wore black (blazer, Valentino shades), took a few warmup strokes, her center of gravity low over rental skates. Then she pivoted and, in a fluid motion, spun around and began skating backward. “It’s like flying!” she said. She offered pointers to a wobbler: “You have to let go of the fear. Stand in your body. Own it. If you think you’re going to fall, you will.” Her fellow-skaters tried not to stare. Aduba stars in “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix women’s-prison series, in which she plays an inmate known…

EXILE My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation. Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not readily encounter it. I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic outpost, surrounded by alien sounds. I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her language. In a sense I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language…

Nelson Kargbo was eleven years old when rebel soldiers attacked his village, Kamalo, in northern Sierra Leone. He was playing soccer on a dirt field at the edge of the village. When he saw houses on fire, he and his best friend, Foday, ran toward the jungle, following Foday’s mother and dozens of other people. They walked until late at night, when they came across a cluster of abandoned mud houses. Foday’s mother, who used to cook for the boys after their soccer games, told them to sleep under a grove of mango trees. “Tomorrow, we’ll keep walking,” she said. “We’ll make it to the city.” The country’s civil war, which had begun five years earlier, in 1991, had seemed remote to Kargbo. He’d considered it only when he overheard…

I sat drinking black tea in the foyer of the hotel. (This was in Munich.) A lady wearing a lustrous purple trouser suit was seated at the keys of the baby grand in the far corner, her rendition of “Hungarian Rhapsody” (with many adornments and curlicues) for now unable to drown out the inarticulate howling and baying from the bar beyond the lifts. It was the time of Oktoberfest, and the city was playing host to six million visitors, thereby quintupling its population—visitors from all over Bavaria, and from all over Germany, and from all over the world. Other visitors, a far smaller contingent, were also expected, visitors who hoped to stay, and to stay indefinitely; they were coming from what was once known as the Fertile Crescent. “Let’s see…

THE ONLY STREET IN PARIS, by Elaine Sciolino (Norton). After recent events, it’s easy to feel that the “real” Paris lies beyond the streets that foreigners love. Yet, as a genre, the American-in-Paris memoir has proved hardy in weathering the vicissitudes of history, as this new entry demonstrates. Sciolino, a former Times Paris bureau chief, focusses on the lively Rue des Martyrs, on the Right Bank. The narrative takes the form of a ramble through shops, courtyards, cabarets, and time, revealing a street somewhat unique but also representative, in the polite but exacting attitudes and customs of its inhabitants. Sciolino’s sharply observed account serves as a testament to the persistence of old Paris—the city of light, of literature, of life itself. THE LOVE OF STRANGERS, by Nile Green (Princeton).…

Racial diversity on television is in a state of rapid acceleration. In 2012, when “Scandal” débuted, starring Kerry Washington as a Capitol Hill fixer, it was the first network drama to feature a black female lead in thirty-eight years—a shameful milestone. The same fall, “The Mindy Project,” on Fox, made a brown girl the madcap heroine of a sitcom, not her best friend. Just three years later, “Scandal” faces off with “Empire”; “Black-ish” and “Fresh Off the Boat” have helped rebrand ABC as “the diversity network”; Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None” struts on Netflix; the Latina-centric “Jane the Virgin” lights up the CW; and Priyanka Chopra plays the lead on “Quantico.” There has been an especially remarkable migration of black actresses from movies to TV, among them Taraji P. Henson,…