Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-08-15 i The New Yorker

Dark Wonderland The nonprofit arts producer MAPP International Productions and the Green-Wood Historic Fund are marking the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” On Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays this month, visitors to Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, will be greeted at its gates by lantern-toting guides, who will lead them in small groups to explore graves, statuary, and rolling expanses with Manhattan views. Musicians, dancers, and actors will be on hand. June 4-6 features the performance artist Sacha Yanow; the alto-saxophonist and composer Andrew D’Angelo; and the guitarist Vernon Reid, who will perform a requiem for Eric Garner. The following week, June 11-13, the poet and performance-art therapist Queen GodIs, the installation artist Arturo Vidich, and the electronic pop band SLV are on tap. Through June 27. (green-wood.com/darkwonderland.) AUCTIONS…

In the late nineteen-nineties, Elise Engler asked an upstairs neighbor a vexing philosophical question: Is a safety pin a thing? Engler is an artist, and she was working on a sequence of drawings called “Everything I Own,” and the answer to the safety-pin question would affect the size and the character of the finished work. (She owned a lot of safety pins.) In the end, she and the neighbor, Mark Getlein, the author of the textbook “Living with Art,” decided that a safety pin is not a thing, but a box of safety pins is. That was a help. Still, the resulting piece, which she executed in pencil and colored pencil, covers eightyfive square feet. It consists of thirteen thousand one hundred and twenty-seven individual images, many of them no…

Listening to the wind when you have gone is like having an African Grey to keep me ghostly company, who at night speaks from under a shroud in the kitchen corner in your voice. One picks up constantly after the departed. They, too, require food and water. One’s shoulder smarts from where they, habitually, stand. I try to move carefully, now, as though to avoid your good-natured rebuke that something as simple as opening a bag could’ve been handled with a little more grace.…

Who reads “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”? The answer used to be: Anyone who can read. From the tangled tale of mass literacy one can pluck a few specific objects— books that were to be found in every household where there was somebody who could read and people who wanted to listen. Aside from the Bible, a typical list would run like this: “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” to which were later added “The Pickwick Papers” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Notice that Alice is not the sole adventurer. Every one of those titles contains the leading character, whose fate is to go on a journey, and whose mettle is tested in the process. Each explores a different landscape, or body of water, but all five traverse what…

After my family died there was a replacement family. I lost my dog but soon a replacement one arrived in tassel bow the color of goose stuffing and liver. My replacement house followed after the real one was blown apart. A replacement head and tunic of lilac and locust came in the mail for me soon after. Later, replacement hands retrofitted my actual ones, their lines resembling the rivers that span the district where I was born between the replacement Garden State Parkway and the Turnpike. Replacement light and replacement shadow congregate on the ceiling though it’s still the same old ceiling above my bed. Blue replacement pelicans must be lovely to behold. A replacement sun rises in the East and sometimes sets softly like the smell of burning hair…

The entire ride would take eleven minutes. That was what the boy had promised us, the boy who never showed. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to find the chairlift. Not through the maze of old-growth firs and not in the dwindling light. Not without our escort. A minute earlier, I’d been on the brink of suggesting that we give up and hike back to the logging road. But at the peak of our despondency we saw it: the lift, rising like a mirage out of the timber woods, its four dark cables striping the red sunset. Chairs were floating up the mountainside, forty feet above our heads. Empty chairs, upholstered in ice, swaying lightly in the wind. Sailing beside them, just as swiftly and serenely, a hundred chairs came…

SAFE GROUND Sarah Stillman’s moving article on the dangers faced by unaccompanied children from Central America crossing into the United States touches on immigration court, but that is only one in a series of bureaucratic hurdles. (“Where Are the Children?,” April 27th). I am an attorney for Casa de Esperanza, a nonprofit organization that provides legal, educational, and social services to more than three hundred children and about a hundred of their family members. Children entering the country must pass through a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Asylum Office, where some are granted asylum but others—who face beatings, rape, or death in their home country—are denied for arcane reasons. In immigration court, judges are bound by out-of-date policies, which take a narrow interpretation of the law of asylum. My…

Harper Lee’s published output is about to be doubled: on July 14th, HarperCollins will bring out “Go Set a Watchman,” which is being described by the publisher as a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird.” (“Mockingbird” came out in 1960; “Watchman,” though set later, was written earlier.) “Watchman” went to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list as soon as its impending publication was announced, propelled by readers’ enduring affection for Lee’s singular novel, and by an equally enduring fascination with an author who has, for the most part, declined to live a public life, even while her work is considered cherished public property. This interest in Lee—who is eightynine and reportedly compromised by various ailments, and who resides in an assisted-living facility near Monroeville, Alabama, her home town—no doubt also…

Last week didn’t start well for Beijing Baofeng Technology Company. An online-video company whose products include a cheap virtual-reality headset, it saw its stock tumble twelve per cent over two days of trading, after Chinese regulators said that they were looking into possible share-price manipulation on the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Exchange, where Baofeng trades. Still, Baofeng shareholders can’t really complain. The company went public just two months ago, and in the first thirty-four days of trading its stock rose by ten per cent every single day except one. Even after the recent stumble, Baofeng is up twenty-five hundred per cent this year. Baofeng isn’t an outlier, either. Of seventeen hundred stocks on the Shenzhen Exchange, only four have fallen this year, and more than a hundred have seen…

The church on Siegfeldstrasse was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the friends of the Earth, the misfits who defended human rights or didn’t want to fight in World War III—he was no less an embarrassment to himself. For Andreas, the most achievedly totalitarian thing about the Republic was its ridiculousness. It was true that people who tried to cross the death strip were unridiculously shot, but to him this was more like an oddity of geometry, a discontinuity between Eastern flatness and Western three-dimensionality that you had to assume to make the math work. As long as you avoided the border,…

A t a recent party, a couple from upstate New York told me about a neighborhood in Brooklyn, how housing there had been affordable in their youth, if only they’d acted. In certain cities, this sentiment is repeated thousands of times a day, to the point that many people have joined the order of real-estate flagellants, staggering around public gatherings and scourging themselves with memories of cheap, decent property spurned. The conversation took a sci-fi turn, and the couple began fantasizing about travelling back in time to buy a now priceless brownstone for what my progenitors used to call a bagel. I pictured the couple hunched in some rattling claptrap wormhole-traverser—because all time machines are built with scrap iron and held fast with duct tape and cutrate rivets, even those…

On October 11, 2014, according to Islamic Stateaffiliated Twitter accounts a woman going by the name Ahlam al-Nasr was married in the courthouse of Raqqa, Syria, to Abu Usama al-Gharib, a Vienna-born jihadi close to the movement’s leadership. ISIS social media rarely make marriage announcements, but al-Nasr and al-Gharib are a jihadi power couple. Al-Gharib is a veteran propagandist, initially for Al Qaeda and now for ISIS. His bride is a burgeoning literary celebrity, better known as “the Poetess of the Islamic State.” Her first book of verse, “The Blaze of Truth,” was published online last summer and quickly circulated among militant networks. Sung recitations of her work, performed a cappella, in accordance with ISIS’s prohibition on instrumental music, are easy to find on YouTube. “The Blaze of Truth” consists…

JUNE 2015 WEDNESDAY 3RD 10TH THURSDAY 4TH 11TH FRIDAY 5TH 12TH SATURDAY 6TH 13TH SUNDAY 7TH 14TH MONDAY 8TH 15TH TUESDAY 9TH 16TH CHAKA KHAN’S 1984 INTERPRETATION of Prince’s “I Feel for You” begins with Grandmaster Melle Mel rapping her name, followed by drums and Stevie Wonder’s harmonica; it’s not until the forty-five-second mark that Khan’s vocals arrive, a fittingly late entrance for a diva. That song remains her biggest hit, but there are many others: the slinky “Tell Me Something Good” and the insistent “Ain’t Nobody,” both recorded with the group Rufus; the triumphant “I’m Every Woman”; and “Through the Fire,” sampled by Kanye West on his first single, “Through the Wire.” Khan brings these and many more songs from her funky back catalogue to Prospect Park on…

The keyboard wizard Joe McGinty is the longtime leader of the downtown music-tribute collective the Loser’s Lounge; Paul Devitt is the owner of the Beauty Bar. In early May, they opened this elegant punk-and-pop piano bar, where you can sit in an alcove booth or on a barstool around the piano, drink Hemingway Daiquiris, eat clams casino, and perform anything from Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” As at a Loser’s Lounge show, the mood is both appreciative and wry: shambling, joyous sing-alongs of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” alternate with, say, an impassioned “Lola” or a shy “Lovefool.” McGinty, bobbing along at the baby grand, provides backup vocals and says things like “I think we’re the only two…

Bob Weir visited New York recently to prepare for the Fare Thee Well tour, the reunion, last performance, and pension plan of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, the others being the bass player Phil Lesh and the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. Weir was rehearsing with Trey Anastasio, the guitar player from Phish, who will occupy the role of the band’s lead guitarist, which, to use a theatre term, was created by Jerry Garcia. Weir and Anastasio met for a few days in a studio on an upper floor of a building in the far West Fifties, where the car dealers are. It was their fourth set of meetings. “We holed up for three days in early March, out in Stinson, where I have a cottage on…

It had been a very long time since he’d been responsible for another human. Never had he organized travel for himself or anybody. But it was his fault they were all three in the city, and so it fell to him. There was perhaps even something a little exciting about discovering, for the first time in his life, that he was not useless, that his father was wrong, and in fact he was capable. He called Elizabeth first. “I’m in a state of terror,” Elizabeth said. “Wait,” Michael said, hearing a beep on the line. “Let me bring in Marlon.” “The world’s gone crazy!” Elizabeth said. “I can’t even believe what I’m looking at!” “Hi, Marlon,” Michael said. “So—where are we?” Marlon said. “ ‘Where are we?’ ” Elizabeth said.…

My father kept him in a stall, because he didn’t know where else to keep him. He had been given to my father by a friend, a sea captain, who said that he had bought him in Salonika; however, I learned from him directly that he was born in Colophon. I had been strictly forbidden to go anywhere near him, because, I was told, he was easily angered and would kick. But from my personal experience I can confirm that this was an old superstition, and from the time I was an adolescent I never paid much attention to the prohibition and in fact spent many memorable hours with him, especially in winter, and wonderful times in summer, too, when Trachi (that was his name) with his own hands put…

O.K., I travel through time to 1955, and I’m back in my grandmother’s house at 306 Brownell Street, a “three-decker,” with its portrait of my Uncle Red in his Boston Braves uniform, and, because most family members have grown up and moved away, the third floor was rented to Frances Gardella, the mother of six-year-old Hazel. Fall River is a Balkanized place, with little compassion among its duchies. Frances Gardella, Italian and husbandless, circulates silently up the back stairs. We are Irish Catholics and have other Irish Catholics in most directions, up and down North Main and down to the Taunton River. The Sullivans and the McDermotts are right across the street, with a few “shawlies,” in black widow’s weeds, scattered here and there. Every neighborhood has its own church,…

Nicola Lo Calzo is a thirty-six-year-old Italian artist who now makes his home in Paris. He began his professional life as an architect, but buildings and landscapes proved less interesting—less inspiring—to him than the terrain of the face. In 2008, he began to travel in Africa, where he immersed himself in various societies that opened windows not only onto present-day life in Africa but onto the African diaspora. I first became aware of his work last year, when this magazine’s Web site published a portfolio of images that he had produced in the American South. There he recorded (in color) a black-and-white world in which antebellum mores were not so much acted out as displayed; everything had changed, and nothing had changed. For his 2010 project “The Promising Baby,” Lo…

OUR SOULS AT NIGHT, by Kent Haruf (Knopf). This final novel by Haruf, who died last November, is a delicate, sneakily devastating evocation of place and character. The plot is simple: Addie and Louis, widowed neighbors in a small Colorado town, start spending their nights together, “lying warm in bed, companionably.” As their relationship develops, they reveal intimate details of their lives—the death of Addie’s young daughter, the infidelity that almost destroyed Louis’s marriage. The story develops urgency when Addie’s grandson comes to stay, following a crisis between his parents, exposing Addie and Louis’s burgeoning relationship to outside scrutiny and disapproval. Haruf’s story accumulates resonance through carefully chosen details; the novel is quiet but never complacent. EARLY WARNING, by Jane Smiley (Knopf ). This king-size American quilt of a…

In his 1992 collection, “The Man with Night Sweats,” Thom Gunn included a wry poem titled “Lines for My 55th Birthday”: “The love of old men is not worth a lot, / Desperate and dry even when it is hot. / You cannot tell what is enthusiasm / And what involuntary spasm.” At the precocious age of forty-six, Henry Best is already mid-spasm: within a week, he’s fled his devoted partner, been suspended from his job, shacked up in a loft with some Grindr-surfing youngsters, and begun mooning after one of them, Freddie, a bisexual with the frigid prettiness of a Hitler Youth. A short, bald voyeur in a sexual marketplace ruled by youth, Best (played with rancid brio by Vincent Franklin) is the uneasy center of the British series…

How many actors does it take to play Brian Wilson? The answer, according to “Love & Mercy,” is a minimum of two. Paul Dano plays him in his uneasy prime—the period of “Pet Sounds” and “Good Vibrations,” at the heart of the nineteen-sixties. The older Wilson, two decades on, is incarnated by John Cusack, who moves across the screen in a stunned and gingerly fashion. Bill Pohlad’s film, hopping between the time zones, makes room for extra Brians as it goes. A merry montage near the start shows him larking with the other Beach Boys—carrying surfboards, in the spree of their youthful fame. We also get Brian as a kid, already looking lost, and footage of the true Brian, over the final credits, singing the lean, post- traumatic number that…