Innholdsfortegnelse for May-25-15 i The New Yorker

The Norwegian-American Literary Festival Writers from the land of the midnight sun, including Dag Solstad and Karl Ove Knausgaard, visit the Westway, a club in Manhattan; 192 Books; and Sunny’s Bar, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for discussions. There will also be performances by Knausgaard’s band, Lemen, and the Fun Stuff, which is led by the New Yorker critic James Wood and counts among its members the guitarist Knut Schreiner, a.k.a. Euroboy, of the ribald Norwegian hard-rock band Turbonegro. (theparisreview.org/events. May 20-22.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The next stop on the spring itinerary is American art, which at Sotheby’s begins with two niche sales, one of Tiffany pieces, the other of early-American coins (both on May 19). The main auction of the week (May 20) features some real lookers, including a…

Midway through Mark Ronson’s recent stay in New York, his British accent had all but disappeared. Born in London, brought up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and now living in London again, Ronson absorbs the vocal patterns of his milieu. “I can hear it change while I’m over here,” he said during his visit. “It would be nice to have one accent and one identity. Not this Zelig-y thing where you turn into whatever you’re around.” He shook his pomaded head. Ronson’s Zelig-y sensibility has been a boon to his music career so far. He made his name as a party d.j. in the nineties by mixing seventies soul and funk with hip-hop. “You’d have hip-hop parties, but you wouldn’t play your first hiphop record until one in…

Plaintive is the song of the modern pit player. The size of the orchestra for Broadway musicals has dwindled since the nineteen-fifties, when it was not unheard of for thirty-seven players to squeeze into the pit. Musicians’ placement in the house, too, has been downgraded. Morris Kainuma, a tuba player, recalled recently, “When I played ‘The Lion King’ at the Minskoff, the brass players were in a separate room by the front of the lobby and piped in through a soundboard.” Charles duChateau, a cellist, said, “For ‘Spider-Man,’ the orchestra was in the basement, in two different rooms. We could have been anywhere.” So it is with delight that ticket holders walking into the Vivian Beaumont Theatre for Lincoln Center’s new production of “The King and I” behold a ten-foot-deep…

When Louise Trubek and her husband, Dave, drove from New Haven to Washington to listen to oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Trubek v. Ullman, she was pregnant. The Trubeks had met at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and married in 1958. The next year, while they were both students at Yale Law School, they filed a complaint against the State of Connecticut about a statute that prevented their physician, C. Lee Buxton, the chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale Medical School, from discussing contraception with them. They wanted to have children one day, according to the complaint, but “a pregnancy at this time would mean a disruption of Mrs. Trubek’s professional education.” By the time that Trubek v. Ullman reached the Supreme Court, in the spring of…

There is a moment, in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” when Max (Tom Hardy) washes blood off his face. This is unsurprising, since he has just engaged in one of many fights, but two points are worthy of note. First, the blood is not his. Second, he washes it off not with water but with mother’s milk, siphoned from a gas tanker. And there, in one image, you have George Miller’s film—wild and unrelenting, but also possessed of the outlandish poetry, laced with hints of humor, that rises to the surface when the world is all churned up. The movie is set in the near future. There are no cities or civilizations left. The landscape is dying of thirst; water— known as Aqua Cola—is severely rationed; and other resources, notably gasoline,…

The suffering-artist narrative is as old as Socrates chugging that hemlock, but you can’t blame dramatists for returning to the cracked-creator myth as often as they do. In theatrical terms, happiness—especially the powerful and inexpressible high that artists feel when creating a world—doesn’t play: conflict is the theatre’s lifeblood, and it’s the exploration of uncertainty and anger, fear and longing that makes most stage stories, not acceptance or contentment. Dael Orlandersmith, the author and the performer of “Forever,” an eighty-minute monologue (at New York Theatre Workshop, directed indulgently, but not unintelligently, by Neel Keller), is no stranger to chaos and conflict. There are many clouds in her life and few silver linings—certainly none that she could slip into easily, delight being as foreign to her as love and self-awareness were…

DISTURBING EVIDENCE I was shocked to read Ariel Levy’s piece about John Restivo, who spent eighteen years in prison after seemingly being framed by the Nassau County detective Joseph Volpe (“The Price of a Life,” April 13th). Restivo’s sentence would have been longer if not for the work of Innocence Project attorneys, who used DNA evidence from a vaginal swab in the case file. Still, as a former New York Police Department lieutenant and an attorney who has prosecuted members of the N.Y.P.D., I was not surprised to read that a detective or a police officer could have let an innocent man pay the penalty for a crime that he did not commit. What is surprising to me is that Fred Klein, then a Nassau County assistant district attorney,…

IF YOU WERE WOWED by the titanic powers of Sigmar Polke at MOMA last year, mark your calendar for June 10, when the New Museum surveys the career of his influential student Albert Oehlen. The German painter, sixty, was also a close friend and frequent collaborator of German art’s hard-charging bad boy Martin Kippenberger (who died in 1997). While Oehlen’s approach is just as radical, he has kept a more modest profile, and “Home and Garden,” as the show is titled, is his New York museum début. Oehlen brings both refinement and a spiked, punk irreverence to painting, treating canvas as a lab for restless experimentation, in which distinctions between abstract and figurative, feral and tame, color and black-and-white, even digital and analog, become meaningless. Art in the age of…

Paolo Javier, the effervescent young poet who served as poet laureate of the borough of Queens from 2010 to 2014, wrestled at a hundred and ten pounds in high school. Dark, slim, vivid, un-aged, he looks as if he could still make the weight. “Actually, now I’m more like one-thirty-five,” he said, as he walked around his neighborhood on a recent Saturday morning with a guy who likes his poetry and had come out to Sunnyside to meet him. Javier wore black jeans, dark shoes, a light-gray hoodie, a dark-gray thigh-length topcoat, and tortoiseshell shades. His mood was buoyant— his new collection, “Court of the Dragon,” was about to be published. The Callery pear trees had reached peak bloom. The cold spring sun shone. Everybody was on the street. Only…

I say WilcoxOn your side of the pondThe deer have free run of the parkOr that’s the way it was then whatNot so anymore dear Burke that fenceRuns now like a netThe deer fight tooth and clawTo get over over hereHa ha the skies extending what are they stillGray and wet and green cool grassYet crowded in fog as was or have suchThings then heated up there sinceBy God things are stark yes enoughAnd ever in contrast to what they were lastAs no one knows better of course than yourself of whichTo whom we oversold that old script onceCome come there must be at least some proxy lawTo land one’s ancient cargo in as then I’d betIt’s a mindwarp in truth in fact at bestThat nothing remains at all of…

Just as the evening’s about to move on, they appear, not as theapparitional deer—here, & gone in the next moment, without a sound—but one by one,bumbling through briar, chewing through poison ivy, sniffing at trees.A slow procession walking beneath elms & birches that hold up thelast light.And you’re alone with the traces of things, the news in front of you:the crooked skeleton of Richard III was dug up from a parking lot,humpbacked, once buried in his boots & battlefield wounds. Nearby alost riverhas been uncovered, & coughed up its mouthful of Roman skulls.No relic is safe, it seems, from an invisible tide that presses themupward.Sometimes it’s not the loss that hurts but the indignities of thediscovery.And yet beside the diggers & builders of new things is this mangycongregation,pushing through the…

Family life can seem metaphysically enormous, comprehensively intense, and everything at once: a little society and a conspiracy against society; an inherently conservative unit bristling with radical splinters; the most efficient imaginable conduit for the transfer of misery and the source of all joy. It engrosses, it stuns, it distracts, and it overwhelms. It drags one in the wake of its moral inertia. “Family happiness completely absorbs me,” Tolstoy wrote in his diary, in 1863, “and it’s impossible to do anything.” But family unhappiness would doubtless have been as absorbing, unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. More than most contemporary writers, the Irish novelist Anne Enright finds it hard to escape the tidal pull of the family. In a series of funny, bleak, radically unsentimental novels, she has…

On May 7th, two weeks before the end of “Late Show with David Letterman,” on CBS, the host delivered one of his final lists, “Top Ten Surprising Facts About Sesame Street.” The entries, every one a harsh gem, riffed on a documentary about the actor who played Big Bird, but they also satirized the way that the media had recently been strip-mining Letterman’s decades on television, seeking revealing nuggets. No. 9: “The earliest Muppets were made from hollowed-out animal carcasses.” No. 2 got a huge, rolling, in-on-it laugh from the audience: “Oscar the Grouch slightly nicer since announcing May 20th retirement.” The No. 1 fact about “Sesame Street”? “There’s also a guy working the puppeteer.” For more than thirty years, David Letterman has been the guy working the talk-show host.…

MAY 2015 WEDNESDAY 20TH THURSDAY 21ST FRIDAY 22ND SATURDAY 23RD SUNDAY 24TH MONDAY 25TH TUESDAY 26TH IN 2010, GRETCHEN GRIMM, Lydia Lund, Julia Shapiro, and Annie Truscott—four bored friends at Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington—formed a band and, with a certain irony, called themselves Chastity Belt. Revelling in a loose and uninhibited sound (they called it “neo-post-post-punk”) on songs like “Pussy Weed and Beer” and “Giant Vagina,” they were a hit with the fraternity-party crowd. They’ve since graduated, moved to Seattle, and cleaned up nicely. Their second album, “Time to Go Home,” maintains the fun-loving sex-positive approach with tracks like “Cool Slut” while also acknowledging the complexities of life. They open for the Australian charmer Courtney Barnett at the Bowery Ballroom May 19-21 and head to Brooklyn for…

The ecologist Jeremy Feinberg, who discovered a new species of frog on Staten Island recently, counts himself among New York’s “quirk celebrities.” Friends call to tell him about shout-outs on “The Daily Show” or “The Leonard Lopate Show,” but he knows who’s really being fêted. “It’s never about me,” he said. “It’s all about the frog,” the second new species found in North America since 1986. Feinberg was out in the marshes off the Staten Island Expressway one day when he heard a gurgling noise. “It sounded like the word ‘chuck,’ ” he said. Other naturalists had also been hearing the call, but Feinberg and his team were the first to put a name to the species with the outer-borough accent. Last year, they anointed it the Atlantic Coast Leopard…

SQUAW: Chief, your people are starving. There has been no rain. The crops cannot grow. NATIVE AMERICAN CHIEF: The rain gods have ignored all my pleas. SQUAW: It’s because you are not appealing to the gods in the right way. The only solution to our famine is the sacred rain dance. CHIEF: The only solution? SQUAW: Yes, you must do a rain dance, or we’ll all starve to death. CHIEF: O.K., I’ll just go into the woods and do the dance. SQUAW: No, in order to appease the rain gods, you must dance in front of the whole tribe while we point and laugh at you, as is our native custom. CHIEF: You know who’s actually a really good dancer? Two Dogs Prancing Unself-Consciously Across New Horizon. Two Dogs could…

When I think about it, the freezer chest, it’s with a sensation of the ferry rocking and the North Sea beneath us, black because it was January, and then the artificial lighting of the lounge where they were sitting, Mark and the others—Starling, Henrietta, Poul, and Susanna—and where I was also sitting, with our English teacher, Bo, who found me interesting to talk to, because, as he said, “One would never know that you were so young.” But, in any case, they were sitting together over in a corner, and it was 1989, the d.j. had left, no one wanted to dance, it was late and a long way to Harwich, and then he went to bed anyway, the English teacher, and I was actually friends with Henrietta, so I…

A LITTLE LIFE, by Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday). This exquisite, unsettling novel follows four male friends from their meeting as students at a prestigious Northeastern college through young adulthood and into middle age. Yanagihara deftly outlines the trials of JB, a brilliant but tactless painter; Malcolm, an architect with moneyed parents; and Willem, a would-be ranch hand turned award-winning actor. But her talent is most apparent in the depiction of Jude, a prominent corporate litigator haunted by a brutally abusive childhood and struggling with “the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world.” The book shifts from a generational portrait to something darker and more tender: an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship. THE LAST WORD, by Hanif Kureishi (Scribner). The seesawing relationship…

“Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, centers on a luxuriant installation in the institution’s grand old Conservatory. A long walkway is flanked by scores of plants that are, or reasonably may be, associated with the artist. Jacaranda, oleander, philodendron, roses, sunflowers, fuchsia, marigolds, palms, ferns, fruit trees, and many varieties of cacti and succulents are among those which grew, and in some cases still grow, in the walled garden of La Casa Azul, Kahlo’s stunning home in Coyoacán, a high-bohemian neighborhood of Mexico City. She wore some of the flowers—gardenias, dahlias, bougainvillea—to accent her flamboyant Tehuana hairdos and dresses. Other plants are depicted in a small exhibition of her paintings, drawings, and prints which the Botanical Garden has assembled. It’s the first…