Innholdsfortegnelse for Aug-03-15 i The New Yorker

RAISING A SALUTARY RUMPUS for summer’s dog days, the Matthew Marks gallery gives three locations over to “What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present.” Organized by the independent curator Dan Nadel, the show features eighteen artists and one collective, whose outlandishness stems from non-New York (even anti-New York) roots. In the sixties, at the high noon of the Manhattan art world’s imperium, renegade painters, sculptors, ceramists, and graphic artists in Chicago and the Bay Area took pride in grossing out reputable tastes and flouting formal protocols. They did so for the immediate hell of it, shrugging off mainstream appeal. It’s wonderful how authentic, vital, and even inspiring their whippersnapper principles feel, fifty years later. The main cohort here is the Hairy Who, a tight group of…

Round 1: Uber, New York City division. Last week, the de Blasio administration dropped its plans to limit the car-service app’s growth while it studies the impact of ride-hailing apps on traffic. The decision ended weeks of public squabbling. On its side, Uber had David Plouffe, its new chief adviser; robocalls; TV ads; celebrity Twitter accounts (Kate Upton, Neil Patrick Harris, and Ashton Kutcher weighed in); and the Governor, who called Uber a “great invention” of the “new economy.” On the other side were supporters of the yellow-cab industry—a diverse and not altogether harmonious coalition, including fleet owners and drivers. On Wednesday night, about fifteen yellow-cab drivers assembled in a conference room at the headquarters of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, in Long Island City, to come up with…

Joshua Katz, professor of classics at Princeton (dark suit, high forehead, merry eyes behind Santa Claus glasses), lectured to a group of eighteen New York City high-school Latin teachers on a recent morning in a room at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, on East Eighty-fourth Street, and revved their brains to almost redline speed. These teachers could easily handle it. They sat and listened and asked pertinent questions like the students whom teachers hope to have. Sam Swope, the white-maned president of the Academy for Teachers, made a welcoming speech telling them how outstanding they were. The academy regularly rewards the best city-area K-12 teachers with high-powered daylong enrichment gatherings like this one. Subject of lecture: The Proto-Indo-European roots of the Latin language. Professor Katz loves…

On July 4th, the night before a referendum asked the Greek people to decide how far their debt-ridden government should accommodate the demands of its main creditors—the “troika” of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—Yanis Varoufakis, the country’s minister of finance, sat outdoors at an Athens restaurant, wearing a T-shirt with an outline of Texas on the front. In January, Varoufakis, an economist who had been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, abruptly entered Greek politics, becoming the public face of the country’s defiant negotiations with European leaders. After months of fatigue, he had slept for much of the day, and he was in a good mood. Varoufakis, who is fifty-four, had the peace of mind of someone who was certain of…

CHOOSING TO DIE As a psychiatrist who treats patients with personality disorders, many of whom struggle with chronic suicidality, I was dismayed to read Rachel Aviv’s article about the use of medical euthanasia on depressed people in Belgium (“The Death Treatment,” June 22nd). To compare a depressed patient’s wish to die with that of someone suffering from advanced terminal cancer is a mistake. The rate of recovery from chronic depression is significant—one study, of patients who suffered from a form of the illness for an average of fifty-two months, found that almost three-quarters of them got better. It is also important to recognize the tremendous ambivalence—as is depicted in Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy— that surrounds patients’ suicide attempts and the relief that follows when they…

91 S. 6th St., Brooklyn (718-384-2904) Few moments cinch the illusion of being chosen—Amy Schumer retweeting your joke, perhaps, or scoring an invite to the Met ball. But, for some, becoming a regular at the nominally New Orleans-themed bar Loosie Rouge is the latest mark of truly making it. Started in April by four friends, each his own flavor of scruffy hipster, the place has already been blessed by the cool kids. On a recent Sunday, the city’s surfing élite, it seemed, had come ashore to drink in the white-washed-brick room. One of the owners, Vincent Marino, threw double kisses all around. Panties, petite enough to fit the models clustered around the bar, hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles. Fittingly, and unfortunately, food isn’t available in the barroom.…

Listening party: Is this a thing now? A recording artist has a new album, and the record company invites journalists to come listen to it, prior to its release, with the artist in attendance. The presence of the artist is the lure. Actually, this kind of thing has been a thing for as long as anyone in the music industry can remember, but now that no one sits down and listens to albums anymore— and now that the easiest way to get someone to listen to something new is to send a link—this thing may be more of a thing than it used to be. Last Tuesday night, Republic Records threw a listening party, at Electric Lady Studios, on Eighth Street, to allow select guests (which is to say merely…

At 8:52 P.M. on July 11th, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug kingpin known as El Chapo, sat on the bed of his cell in Altiplano, Mexico’s only super-maximum-security prison. Surveillance footage appears to show a small screen glowing on a table nearby—inmates are not allowed cell phones, but this rule is not always enforced. Guzmán changed his shoes, walked to a shower area in the corner of the cell, and knelt behind a waisthigh concrete partition, out of view of security cameras. Six seconds later, he was gone. A rough-edged opening, about twenty inches square, had been cut into the floor. According to Mexico’s national-security commissioner, Guzmán climbed into the hole and down a ladder, entering a 4,921-foot-long tunnel. Fluorescent lights hung from a ceiling-mounted PVC pipe, which also brought…

When Sue Hoag was twelve, she read a book, “The Family Nobody Wanted,” about a couple in the nineteen-forties who adopted a multiracial posse of twelve children, despite having very little room or money. Sue thought it would be wonderful to be part of such a family, and she begged her parents to adopt. They had only four kids in their family, she pleaded— surely there was room for more. Her parents said no. But Sue kept thinking about the book, and by the time she was fifteen she had met her future husband, Hector Badeau, and by the time she was eighteen she and Hector had planned their family: they would have two kids and adopt two. By the time they were four years out of college and four…

Yongsu and I launched the flat-bottomed boat from a muddy part of the river I didn’t recognize. It seemed the bank of the river had moved much closer to the village, though I knew it hadn’t rained much that year. We took our places and, as Yongsu pulled the oars, I scanned the far shore for a good place to land—a landmark that Yongsu could aim for to counter the current. “Ya, I haven’t done this in a long time,” Yongsu said, flipping some water into the air. “You remember the last time you were out on this river?” That was five years ago. The water was so clear back then that it seemed only a few palm widths deep, shallow enough for me to reach down and touch the…

Sara Solovitch, in “Playing Scared: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright” (Bloomsbury), says that while she was a good pianist as a child, she fell apart—sweating, trembling—when she had to play for an audience. She got through the Eastman School of Music’s preparatory program. Then she quit studying piano, grew up, got married, had children, and became a journalist. In her late forties, though, she drifted back to the piano, taking a course at a community college. By this point, she had no professional ambitions. Surely, she thought, she would now be able to perform calmly. But when her teacher asked her, one night, to play in front of the class, her hands began shaking so hard that she could barely strike the keyboard: “I gazed down at myself…

The essayist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm was one of the great figures of the late Victorian and Edwardian era in London—and then had a surprising Indian summer in America in the early nineteen-sixties, when Edmund Wilson wrote at length in his praise, and the playwright S. N. Behrman serialized a book of conversations with the very elderly Max (his admirers always call him by his first name, a not entirely honorable honor) in this magazine. John Updike and W. H. Auden, too, wrote about him, here and elsewhere. Since then, his reputation, like that of most of his contemporaries, has not so much collapsed like a house of cards as shrunk like a boiled head. It remains sharply chiselled, feature by feature, but on a much smaller scale: still intently…

JULY/AUG 2015 WEDNESDAY 29TH THURSDAY30TH FRIDAY31ST SATURDAY1ST SUNDAY2ND MONDAY3RD TUESDAY4TH THE GREAT AMERICAN BASS-BARITONE Eric Owens has spent the past decade challenging the received wisdom that low male voices exist in opera merely to advance the plot for the soprano and the tenor. With the soulful grain in his bassoonlike voice, Owens awakens the inner life of his characters and makes them compelling in their own right; he is especially potent in works written by the twin titans of the nineteenth century, Wagner and Verdi, including the latter’s “Macbeth,” which is running through Aug. 22 at the Glimmerglass Festival, in Cooperstown. On Aug. 2, he teams up with another trailblazing African-American artist and Metropolitan Opera favorite, the bel-canto tenor Lawrence Brownlee—who, like Owens, refreshes every role he touches—for a…

Animation Block Party This annual event, now in its twelfth year, features work from around the world. The four-day affair kicks off on July 30, at Brookfield Place, in lower Manhattan, with live music and a free screening of animated shorts, but the main action is on the weekend, at BAMcinématek. Friday features a selection of favorites from “Eyeworks,” an annual festival of abstract animation in Chicago, and a twentiethanniversary showing of Mamoru Oshii’s highly influential sci-fi film “Ghost in the Shell.” On Saturday, Tom Stathes, a collector of animated shorts from the early twentieth century, shares rare and saucy clips from the pre-Code era of Hollywood. On Sunday, the highlights include a retrospective of “Sesame Street” animations and a 35-mm. screening of “The Care Bears Movie,” from 1985.…

Rob Gronkowski, the New England Patriots tight end, is an affable redwood celebrated almost as much for his beer chugging and his shirtless dancing as for his touchdown spiking—Gronking, to some. He is far from studious. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel’s show last year, he said that the last book he could recall reading (in ninth grade) was “A Mockingbird to Remember”: a slip or a joke, in either case echoing a contemporary work of fan fiction called “A Gronking to Remember: Book One in the Rob Gronkowski Erotica Series,” an excerpt of which he then read aloud for Kimmel’s viewers. “I took my white underwear and turned it into a man thong, which brought the craziness to an even higher level.” Oops, sorry—that comes from page 118 of “It’s Good…

The bees were working the contentsof the fenced-in metal trash bin,zigging and scribbling past the gooof candy wrappers and the sticky rimsof dented cans, entering, as they mighta blossom, the ketchup-smeared burgerboxes and the mold-fuzzed, half-eatenfruity snack packs, those food-grade waxesmingling with Band-Aids and a limp“We’re #1” foam finger while on topof the disposable wet mop redolent of solventsand fresheners the F.D.&C. Red No. 40nontoxic food pigment leakedfrom a bloated dip packet where the beeswere buzzing and collecting the high-fructosecorn nectars of that uncompacted jumbleand returning, smudged with the dustof industrial pollens, to, perhaps, somerusted tailpipe hive where their queengrew fat on the froth of artificial sweetenersout back of the little oily gas stationin the middle of Arkansas where we pulled offto change the baby’s diaper and had to askfor…

1.today a truckcarrying a Tomahawkmissile reportedly tippedover on the interstatesomewherelabelled an “unarmed warhead”its fabulous smoke had to beplacated with priestlikewords being murmured byyucca-wieldingauthorities & while coveringthe dormant but cross entitywith tarps that had paintingsof blue mountaintop lakesthey affirmedtheir presence with nudges& reminders this valleywas sculpted by the once lovelywings of a vulture & hereis whereyou will quietly attend tothe disorder we heard plainlyover the traffic’s ubiquitousdin & before a smolderingstar’s song2.from one winter nightan inquisitive firefly has directeditself toward my three children& through its testamentof cold lightfloral patterns appear overtheir snowy tracks replacingshadows with light that’s detailed& compelling us to place ourselvesbeside the weepingwillow grandfather to ask himplease behold the witnesswitness3.previously as a winsomeghost that’s awash in green& yellow pulsating colorsit taunted the blue heelernamedSimon simon ese who lungedthereafter fishlike…

It’s remarkably difficult to find words for the flustering magnetism of the color abstractions by the painter Stanley Whitney, whose first solo museum show in the city, “Dance the Orange,” has just opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The works present wobbly grids of variously sized and proportioned blocks of fullstrength color in friezelike arrays, separated by brushy horizontal bands. Whitney, sixty-eight, grew up outside Philadelphia. He has lived and worked mostly in Manhattan since 1968, with sojourns in Parma, Italy, where he and his wife of twenty-five years, the painter Marina Adams, have a second home. He belongs to a generation of resiliently individualist American painters— Mary Heilmann, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Jack Whitten come to mind—who have hewed to abstraction throughout periods of artworld favor for…

AMONG THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS, by Julia Pierpont (Random House). This inventive take on the traditional family novel nods at bellwethers of the genre but feels as if it could only have been written yesterday. The milieu of the Shanley family is one of women “always in yoga pants,” sitcom fan fiction, and bad yet arresting Times Square art. The novel’s crux is the potential dissolution of Jack and Deb’s marriage, yet, daringly, Pierpont races forward in time midbook, defusing suspense and allowing readers to relish instead her garish but pleasurably textured New York, “like one of those living history exhibits, commemorating an old war.” The Shanley children, bumbling explorers of marijuana and pornography, are sweetly inept, yet Jack and Deb marvel at their sangfroid in the immense and…