Innholdsfortegnelse for Aug-10-15 i The New Yorker

IF AN AMERICAN FESTIVAL of Mexican music were organized as a popularity contest, then the winner would certainly be Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940), whose orchestral works “Sensemayá” and “La Noche de los Mayas” have been standard repertory for decades. Leon Botstein, however, has sensibly decided to name the next Bard Music Festival, at Bard College (Aug. 7-9 and Aug. 13-16), in honor of another composer: “Carlos Chávez and His World.” Audiences love Revueltas’s passionate lyricism, Technicolor orchestration, and spicy evocations of popular mestizo music, while Chávez’s brand of modernism is more severe and self-contained, like an Aztec temple. But twentieth-century Mexico was indeed Chávez’s world; Revueltas just lived in it. Chávez (1899-1978) was indisputably the most powerful Mexican artistic figure, musical or otherwise, of his time, an era that stretched from…

On a recent Wednesday, Olivett Tisson, a rising senior at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, in Brooklyn, stood with a group of her classmates at the edge of Cadman Plaza Park, holding a stack of leaflets. “I’m not the type of person to go out and, like, protest,” she said. “I keep to myself.” “It’s kind of scary for me to go up to people,” Nande Trant, fifteen, said. “I’m shy. Most of the time when I have opinions, I don’t know how to get them out.” “But I’m on Tumblr all the time,” Tisson said. “Eric Garner, the Confederate flag—I see the things that are going on.” “I know about catching people’s attention,” Shavonnie Victor, another rising senior, said. “But the denial is…

Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again!” A better one might be “Only in America.” You could not ask for a better illustration of the complexity of ordinary Americans’ attitudes toward class, wealth, and social identity than the fact that a billionaire’s popularity among working-class voters has given him the lead in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, Trump was the candidate of choice of a full third of white Republicans with no college education. Working-class voters face stagnant wages and diminished job prospects, and a 2014 poll found that seventy-four per cent of them think “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” Why on earth would they support a billionaire? Part of the answer is Trump’s nativist and populist…

The city of Asyut sits in the heart of Upper Egypt, at a crescent-shaped bend in the Nile River, where the western bank is home to a university, a train station, approximately four hundred thousand people, and three shops in which Chinese migrants sell racy lingerie to locals. These shops are not hard to find. The first time I visited Asyut, I hailed a cab at the entrance of the city and asked the driver if he knew of any Chinese people in town. Without hesitation, he drove along the Nile Corniche, turned through a series of alleyways, and pointed to a sign that said, in Arabic, “Chinese Lingerie.” The two other shops, China Star and Noma China, are less than a block away. All three are owned by natives…

How impossible can a mission be, if it is successfully completed five times? The big-screen franchise that began in 1996 has now reached “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation,” directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Some things have held firm along the way, not least a resolute belief that the globe is made for trotting. The new film kicks off in Belarus and whisks us to Cuba, Virginia, Paris, Vienna, Casablanca, and London, where our hero, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), pulls off his most amazing stunt to date by finding a functioning phone booth near Piccadilly Circus. Cruise is in excellent fettle, relaxing like a high-wire artist into the tensest of predicaments, and securing his status as the Dorian Gray of action movies. So what if his portrait decays with age in a vault at…

POWER BROKERS Bill McKibben’s article on green energy discusses problems that must be resolved in order to realign economic incentives for utility companies (“Power to the People,” June 29th). The Green Mountain Power model he describes is a step in the right direction: end users save money in the long run without corresponding revenue decreases for utility companies. Homeowners undergo an energy audit and finance the recommended improvements by monthly payments through their utility bills. But this model often does not apply to rental units. In New York and other urban areas, renters almost always foot the bill for electricity, while landlords are responsible for property improvements, including renovations following energy audits. Making energy-efficiency improvements does not result in savings for the property owner, since the costs are borne…

310 Spring St. The summer Hamptons hordes cling to the comforts of Manhattan, with their East End Ralph Laurens, SoulCycles, and Citarellas. Meanwhile, those sweating it out in the city dream of ocean breezes—reveries not lost on the team behind Lazy Point, a new bar in “Hudson Square” (near the Holland Tunnel) that’s “bringing the seaside vibe to life” in an “urban beach house setting.” It’s named after a scenic spit of land in Napeague Bay, just west of Montauk, but borrows its aesthetic from raucous hot spots such as the Surf Lodge and Ruschmeyer’s, or maybe a Nautica store. The floor is teal, the exposed brick is whitewashed, and many remaining surfaces have been painted the colors of maritime signal flags. A recent Thursday felt like the weekend; a…

Back when Jason Isbell was drinking, he spent a lot of his New York City downtime at the Lakeside Lounge, on Avenue B. “It’s gone now,” Isbell, an Alabama-born singer-songwriter, said on a recent visit to the city. “I spent every hour I wasn’t working in that place getting fucked up.” Sometimes when he was working he’d get fucked up, too. He recalled a disastrous show at Webster Hall, when, after hitting the vodka backstage (“Rednecks can’t drink clear liquor”), he got into a fight with his bass player—who happened to be his wife at the time—and she ended up hurting her hand and had to perform with a bandage. “So much misery there,” he said. Now when Isbell, who is thirty-six, has time off in the city, he wanders.…

Fitzgerald’s is an Irish pub in Chapel Hill, near the campus of the University of North Carolina, that counts among its attractions cheap burgers, flip-cup tournaments, and jolly music. One night last year, the soundtrack included “Blurred Lines,” the 2013 Robin Thicke hit, in which a night-club Lothario delivers a breathy proposition to a “good girl”: I hate these blurred lines I know you want it I know you want it I know you want it A patron stepped into the d.j. booth to ask that the song be cut short—she later explained that she wanted to “create a safe space,” and that Thicke’s lyrics evoked threats of sexual violence. The d.j. rebuffed her, and in the days that followed she and her allies took to social media to voice…

You fell the trees,You limb them, peel them,And skid them out.You raise a heavy houseWith heavy rooms,A heavy loft.A heavy wet snowFalls in May,Snows you inFor five days.That snow makes new grass heavy,And heavy with flowers.There is a heavenAnd you are alone in it—Not even a voiceTo talk to yourself in—Just swerving memoriesOf hope and fearSo lethally ephemeral—A girl playing guitarAnd horses in the yard.You wait for the horseThat comes to your gateWith a bullet hole in his forehead.He doesn’t want anything.He stares at you,Then wheels and gallops away,Leaving youIn the heavy houseYou made from life.A heavy wet snow.It’s like the floor of the skyFell out.…

SPECTACLE, by Pamela Newkirk (Amistad). In 1906, Ota Benga, a Congolese man, was put on display at the Bronx Zoo as a “pygmy,” often caged and left in the company of an orangutan. Benga had been brought to New York by a missionary and adventurer who claimed (falsely) to have saved him from cannibals; for three weeks, visitors gawked at, and often taunted, the star attraction. Ten years later, having led a lonely and desultory life in America, Benga committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. Newkirk’s account of this shocking and shameful story is forceful, though Benga’s voice is unfortunately absent. He never wrote about his experience and gave no interviews, so he remains, inevitably, a mysterious figure. ENCOUNTERS, by George Braziller (Braziller). The heyday of small…

Harry Partch, the rigorous wild man of American music, wrote, in 1935, “This isn’t Germany, and this isn’t the eighteenth century, and I’m trying to give myself, and others, a good basis for a new and great music of the people.” Partch was arguing, with his usual pugnacity, against the Germanic tradition and against American dependence on that tradition. His urge to break with the past led him, at the height of the Depression, to assume a hobo life, travelling the rails and notating hobo songs. He emerged with an incorrigibly radical musical language, at once intricate in method and rugged in manner. Partch wrote, “In the early days of presenting my music, the mere mention of the words Bach or Beethoven, twin gods of classical musicians, turned on a…

AUGUST 2015 WEDNESDAY 5TH 12TH THURSDAY 6TH 13TH FRIDAY 7TH 14TH SATURDAY 8TH 15TH SUNDAY 9TH 16TH MONDAY 10TH 17TH TUESDAY 11TH 18TH RATKING, THE HARLEM-BRED TRIO at the forefront of the city’s hip-hop revival, delivers music that’s a pure product of Gotham, with washes of noise and beats intercut with sirens, subway doors opening, and snippets of street conversation. Their ace in the hole is Wiki, a charismatic young m.c. whose nasal, machine-gun style harkens back to the heyday of lyric-driven rap. On Aug. 5, Ratking holds court in a high temple of local hip-hop: the East River Park amphitheater, which figured prominently at the close of Charlie Ahearn’s seminal 1983 rap film, “Wild Style.” The venue’s crumbling remains long stood as a monument to the city’s rap…

A few days before the Adam Sandler movie “Pixels” was released, Bob Chipman saw an advance screening. “I was bored within two minutes, angry after five, and by the time all hundred minutes had run out I was sad and numb,” he later said. Chipman, who is thirty-four and lives outside Boston, blogs about video games under the moniker the Game OverThinker and reviews films as MovieBob. (Tagline: “Film. Gaming. Politics. Geek.”) “Pixels” is an actionmovie mashup of classic arcade games, such as Pac-Man. Chipman found the movie unequal to its subject matter. A few hours later, when his sadness had “simmered into pure, white-hot, pantsshitting rage,” he wrote down nineteen hundred words, read them into a microphone, paired the audio with a slide show and clips from the “Pixels”…

Forest shade, lake shade, poplar shade, highway shade,backyard shade, café shade, down-behind-the-high-schoolshade, cow shade, carport shade, blowing shade, dappledshade, shade darkened by rain above, shade under ships,shade along banks of snow, shade beneath the one tree in abright place, shade by the ice cream truck, shade in the new-car sales room, shade in halls of the palace as all the electriclights turn on, shade in a stairwell, shadein tea barrels, shade in books, shade of clouds running over a distant landscape,shade on bales in the barn, shade in the pantry, shade in theicehouse (the smell of shade), shade under runner blades,shade along branches, shade at night (a difficult research),shade on rungs of a ladder, shade on pats of butter sculptedto look like scallop shells, shade to holler from, shade in…

Darren Wilson, the former police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African-American, in Ferguson, Missouri, has been living for several months on a nondescript dead-end street on the outskirts of St. Louis. Most of the nearby houses are clad in vinyl siding; there are no sidewalks, and few cars around. Wilson, who is twenty-nine, started receiving death threats not long after the incident, in which Brown was killed in the street shortly after robbing a convenience store. Although Wilson recently bought the house, his name is not on the deed, and only a few friends know where he lives. He and his wife, Barb, who is thirty-seven, and also a former Ferguson cop, rarely linger in the front yard. Because of such precautions, Wilson has been leading…

What if you had a child? If you had a child, your life would be about more than getting through the various holiday rushes, and wondering exactly how insane Mrs. Witters in Accounts Payable is going to be on any given day. It’d be about procuring tiny shoes and pull toys and dental checkups; it’d be about paying into a college fund. The unextraordinary house to which you return nightly? It’d be someone’s future ur-house. It’d be the place that someone would remember, decades hence, as a seat of comfort and succor, its rooms rendered larger and grander, exalted, by memory. This sofa, those lamps, purchased in a hurry, deemed good enough for now (they seem to be here still, years later)—they’d be legendary to someone. Imagine reaching the point…

In 1983, when I was a teen-ager, my brother told me that you could reach a BBS—an early online community— through our phone line, using a modem. I dialled in, and was met by that digital shrieking sound, the now nostalgic “handshake.” The sysop greeted me with a message in neon-green letters, something like “Hello, friend.” Unnerved, I signed off, and didn’t go online again until college. “Halt and Catch Fire,” an AMC drama about the battle to create the first portable computer, takes place during that period, back when the pinging, whirring devices that have come to dominate our lives were still revolutionary and potentially frightening. The show is now completing its second season, which has been such a startling upgrade of the first that it begs for technological…