Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-26-15 i The New Yorker

Peter Barbey, the Pennsylvania-based heir to a retail fortune (The North Face, Timberland, Lee jeans), has a new professional home: he’s just become the owner of the Village Voice, the alternative weekly that, in its heyday, channelled the feisty, countercultural spirit of Greenwich Village. Now he needs an actual home. So last week, in town to meet with the Voice’s editorial staff, he went apartment shopping. Between stops, he and his wife, Pam, took a break at a bistro on First Avenue. Barbey is fiftyeight and diminutive. He had a lawyerish look: tweed jacket, glasses, thin white beard. Pam, who sat across from him, has platinum-blond hair. “I love Greenwich Village, but she’s an uptown girl,” Barbey said. They’d just visited a three-bedroom at River House, the Art Deco co-op…

Sierra and Bianca Casady, the two sisters who form the freak-folk band CocoRosie, were grabbing lunch in a Williamsburg loft the other day before heading to a concert. The loft used to belong to Bianca, and it is still filled with her art work, including a photograph of a brown dildo encased in purple quartz. (“I’m interested in exploring black-male sexual stereotypes,” she said, laconically.) Now it serves as home to a group of the sisters’ women artist and filmmaker friends, who were dishing out homemade tacos at a long trestle table. The mood was convivial. The other CocoRosie bandmates, a French beatboxer named Tez and the instrumentalist Takuya Nakamura, ate quickly. The sisters sipped maté tea and sorted through fright wigs for that night’s concert. Costume is a crucial…

“Please bring the lady one green tea,” went the request. “She has won the Nobel Prize.” Svetlana Alexievich, the sixty-seven-year-old winner of this year’s prize in literature, was at a table for ten in the front of a noisy restaurant in Berlin, where she held her Nobel press conference, two weekends ago. Alexievich is a little over five feet tall and stocky; her straight shoulder-length hair is dyed a redder shade of brown than it once was. The waitress nodded respectfully, motioning toward a stack of books on the table to show that she understood. Germans were protesting a trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, and the center of the city was closed to traffic. After answering an hour’s worth of questions— most of them about…

When Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” opened on Broadway, in 1993, in a production directed by George C. Wolfe, the play ended with a winged angel crashing into a dying man’s bedroom from above, shattering lath and plaster. Subsequent directors, including Mike Nichols, who filmed “Angels” for HBO, have also hewed closely to Kushner’s stage directions, which call for unearthly lighting, “a terrifying CRASH as something immense strikes earth,” and an Angel who floats. In a radically stripped-down interpretation by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, which was first staged in Amsterdam in 2008, none of that happens. Van Hove’s Angel is a wingless male nurse in white hospital scrubs. There is no ceiling, no bed. The Angel quietly approaches as Prior Walter, who is suffering from AIDS,…

The new Steven Spielberg film, “Bridge of Spies,” begins with a man in a mirror. The man is Colonel Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), and we see three versions of him in one frame: Abel himself, holding a brush; his reflected image; and a self-portrait that he is carefully painting, in oils. The whole thing is not just a dazzling composition with which to kick off a movie but a formal introduction to the world of espionage—a haven for multiple identities. The year is 1957, the winter solstice of the Cold War, and Abel is a Soviet spy. He lives in Brooklyn, and art is both his hobby and his cover story; he sets up an easel beside the Manhattan Bridge and, after a while, feels the underside of the bench…

On September 14, 1869, the centenary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth was commemorated in New York—a city Humboldt had never visited—with a parade, a torchlight procession, a proclamation by the mayor, a formal banquet, and the unveiling of a bronze bust in Central Park. The following day, the Times devoted its entire front page to chronicling the festivities. The unveiling was scheduled for 2 P.M., but long before the appointed hour, the paper reported, “an immense throng of people had gathered,” and when the statue was finally revealed “there were not less than 25,000 persons” in attendance. Flags waved from public buildings, military bands played, and homes were decorated with Humboldt’s portrait. The whole city, according to the Times, “seemed to be in holiday dress.” In Boston, another city Humboldt…

THE FATE OF IRAQ’S WOMEN Rania Abouzeid’s piece about a former prostitute in Baghdad who is now working to monitor sex trafficking gives a sobering picture of the situation of women in Iraq (“Out of Sight,” October 5th). Abouzeid discusses what happened to a country that, as of the nineteen-seventies, was in the forefront of women’s rights in the Middle East. She argues that successive conflicts—in the eighties, with Iran; in 1990, with the Gulf War; and then thirteen years of international economic sanctions—reversed the momentum. The United States’ contribution to this setback was the “chaos that ensued after the U.S.-led invasion,” she writes, at which point crimes against women increased. It is important to remember that the U.S. also provided aid in the war with Iran, led the…

128 Elizabeth St. (212-925-8219) “I can’t recalled how many buttcheeks and fronts I rubbed,” a “FAN” of Tropical 128 wrote on Yelp, about a January evening at the establishment. Some of those cheeks belonged to “hot chicks which was okay I guess.” Other cheeks impressed him less. For fourteen years, the place has been a haven for low-key drinkers and near-dawn gyrators; a few months ago, Dave Delzio (knuckle tattoos: “HARD,” “LOOK”), who owned the late music venue Tammany Hall, took it over, with a partner. When it’s not jumping, the bar evokes a Rainforest Café post-zombie apocalypse (cloudy fish tank, drooping plants, crooked dolphin painting). Delzio explained via e-mail that they’d given the place a “cosmetic facelift”; a downstairs lounge with “a private feel” is nearly complete. But the…

In 2010, the Newton South High School newspaper asked, “Is Jonah Reider the next Martha Stewart?” He was sixteen; it didn’t seem likely. Last month, in his final year at Columbia University, Reider started a “restaurant” called Pith in his dorm room. He’d cook a multi-course meal for as many as four friends, who’d chip in for groceries. After the college paper and the Post wrote about him (“The hottest table in town is in a Columbia University dorm”), calls poured in from talent agents, TV producers, and BuzzFeed. “There’s a thousand people who have hit me up, trying to get a reservation, who are lawyers and magazine editors,” Reider said last week, in Hogan Hall. The door of suite 4-B features roommates’ names paired with photos of Ben &…

On Friday, October 2nd, Jeb Bush was onstage at a college auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina, for a public interview with Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general and a prominent figure in the right-wing firmament. Bush is sixty-two, but, thanks to a low-carb Paleo diet, he looks younger than he did when he left the Florida governor’s office eight years ago for a life in the business world. A trim physique, however, hasn’t boosted his appeal to potential voters. A new national poll showed that Bush’s support had sunk to four per cent; South Carolina, which has one of the most conservative Republican electorates in the country, and will hold its primary early next year, just after Iowa and New Hampshire, is crucial to winning the nomination. Once considered the…

Once: those long wet Vermont summers. No money, nothing to do but read books, swim in the river with men wearing their jean shorts, then play bingo outside the church, celebrating when we won. Nothing seemed real to me and it was all very alive. It took that long to learn how wrong I was— over the rim of the horizon the sun burns. Heidegger: “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” The bones in us still marrowful. The moon up there, too, an arctic sorrow. I’m sorry, another Scotch? Some nuts? I used to think pressing forward was the point of life, endlessly forward, the snow falling, gaudily falling. I made a mistake. Now I have a will. It says when I die…

Some dragonflies down there some static and dirty diapers I’ll never get back to sleep this way Dandelion teeth drop from a spring sky and skitter the surface of a pond and the perfectly still grass Shake shake shake it but don’t break break break it I can almost get it with these tweezers Chlorine in the cupola Feedback out of ferns * The eyes in frogs like eggs all burst at the same time from eggshells Green sky Green sky Green sky Some moss up there some clouds getting sick See those hummingbirds? I painted those with a silver-tipped paintbrush and an unopened bottle of mint-cream amitriptyline The peas in the pod cry out and then roll to the floor In flames the rind on the watermelon smiles *…

TWO MILLENNIA BEFORE Luis Barragán and Oscar Niemeyer became modernist icons, pre-Columbian craftsmen were fashioning scaled-down versions of their cities’ buildings in stone, wood, clay, and silver. From as early as the second century B.C. until the Spanish arrived, eighteen hundred years later, wealthy Incans, Aztecs, and their forebears were laid to rest with miniature palaces, ball courts, houses, and temples (including the ceramic example above, made in Colima, Mexico). The first show on the subject in the United States, “Design for Eternity: Architectural Models for the Ancient Americas,” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Oct. 26. One high point, excavated in Peru just two decades ago, offers a glimpse of good times at the pre-Incan palace at Chan Chan, complete with figurines serving beer. ART MUSEUMS…

“Thrill the World” In this annual global tribute to seasonal ghoulishness and to the memory of Michael Jackson, zombie-painted hoards gather in cities around the world to perform the dance from Jackson’s “Thriller” video. In the past, the event has set world records for “Largest Thriller Dance” (last year, almost sixty-five hundred dancers participated, in a hundred and thirty-four events in twenty-two countries), and this year organizers will attempt to break the record for “Largest Simultaneous Dance Ever.” Dance classes are available to get a head start on learning the moves. Part of the proceeds from tickets and (optional) professional zombie makeup goes to charity. (21 A Clinton St. thrilltheworldnyc.com. Oct. 24 at 2.) Big Apple Circus New York’s own Big Apple Circus returns to Lincoln Center for its…

Gad Elmaleh has been voted “the funniest person in France.” He is also probably the funniest person around the Monegasque royal family. (He and Charlotte Casiraghi have a twenty-two-month-old son.) He was definitely the funniest person, the other Friday afternoon, in the lobby restaurant at the Carlyle Hotel. “I think I’m going to have to add another show,” he said, opening a menu and clocking a thirty-two-dollar salad. “C’est quoi, Cobb?” As for his place in the American comedy hierarchy, he ventured, “Like, seventeen?” Then he turned his gelcap-blue eyes toward the tablecloth and started messing with the saltshaker. “No, I’m not even in the rankings yet.” Elmaleh was born in Casablanca in 1971. He grew up introducing his father, a mime, with a placard; by the age of four,…

In 2012, the Syrian civil war reached the suburbs of Damascus. Army tanks rolled over anti-government protesters in Ghouta; artillery shells fell on Darayya. One morning that May, a car bomb exploded in the town of Jdeidet Artouz, southwest of the capital. The blast jolted Ghaith, a twenty-twoyear-old law student, out of bed. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment with his mother; his father had died when he was an infant, and his siblings— four sisters and a brother, all older— had left the house after getting married. Ghaith stepped to the window and pulled back the curtain. Across the street, a sedan was spewing flames. Body parts littered the road. The victim was Ghaith’s neighbor, an Alawite man whom rebels had apparently targeted for assassination. In the weeks that…

The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unravelled as she continued walking, mistaking its little huffs for the beginnings of hunger, not the cries of an infant being undone. By the time she noticed, it was too late, the leg a tangle of fibre, and she pulled the string the rest of the way to end it, rather than have the infant grow up maimed. If she was to mother a child, to mute and subdue and fold away parts of herself, the child had to be perfect. Yarn had been a foolish choice, she knew, the stuff for women of leisure, who could cradle wool in the comfort of…

A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN, by Lucia Berlin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Berlin died in 2004, in literary obscurity, but this new selection of short stories establishes her as a singular, remarkable writer worthy of a wide audience. Berlin led a hard life: she lived all over North and South America, bringing up four sons while working as a cleaning woman, an emergency-room nurse, and a high-school teacher. She also struggled with alcoholism, as do many of her literary creations. Her stories trace this life with precision and deadpan verve, as in “Tiger Bites,” a stark, compassionate account of a journey to an illegal abortion clinic in Mexico, or “Strays,” about a group of addicts bonding tentatively at a rehabilitation center until a pack of dogs stuck full of…

Joanna Newsom’s e-mail address is unicorntears2000@yahoo.com. At least, it was in 2002, when she began handing out copies of “Walnut Whales,” an eight-song homemade CD that had a photocopied drawing on the front cover and her contact information on the back. Newsom had ties to the Bay Area indie scene—she played keyboards in one of those stylized garage-rock bands that the era supplied and (to a lesser extent) demanded. But “Walnut Whales” sounded radically out of time: the work of a peculiar singer-songwriter who was also, even more peculiarly, a harpist. Over the next few years, Newsom attracted a throng of eager fans, some of whom paired their enthusiasm with condescension. She was sometimes celebrated as a naïve outsider artist, because she sang about dragons and bumblebees, in a squeaky…