Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-03-14 i The New Yorker

RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN (“A STAR IN A BOTTLE,” P. 42) is a staff writer. ANTHONY LANE (COMMENT, P. 23; THE CURRENT CINEMA, P. 84), the author of the essay collection “Nobody’s Perfect,” is a film critic for the magazine. ELIZABETH KOLBERT (“BIG SCORE,” P. 38), a staff writer, is the author of “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” which has just been published. DEBORAH TREISMAN (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 27) is the magazine’s fiction editor. JENNY ALLEN (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 36) wrote the one-person show “I Got Sick Then I Got Better,” which she has performed across the country. JAMES SUROWIECKI (THE FINANCIAL PAGE, P. 28) is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds.” DENIS JOHNSON (FICTION, P. 60) received the 2007 National Book Award for fiction…

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND is from the Deep South, but for decades the group has owned the Beacon Theatre, and has performed there more than two hundred and twenty times since 1989. The Allmans’ connection to the city runs deep: their first gold record, “At Fillmore East,” was recorded in 1971 at Bill Graham’s legendary hall, where they took the stage so often they were known by some as his house band. The group, which is celebrating its forty-fifth anniversary, returns to town on March 7 for fourteen nights, and it is likely to be its last run here. Two key members, Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks, have declared that they are leaving, and the founding member Gregg Allman, who is sixty-six, has announced that the band will stop touring…

IDINA MENZEL HAS A SPARE but formidable track record. In 1996, she made her Broadway début in the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Rent.” Her powerhouse voice insured that she held her own in a talented ensemble full of unique up-and-comers. Seven years later, she created the role of Elphaba, the misunderstood green girl fated to become the Wicked Witch of the West, in “Wicked,” opposite Kristin Chenoweth’s Glinda (no wallflower herself). Menzel left the show after two years (it’s still going strong), and she has recently resurfaced in the tween-girl sweet spot, as the voice of Elsa in the film “Frozen.” As the Disney animated movie (which is already in early development for Broadway) approaches a billion dollars in box-office sales, its soundtrack has been at the top of the Billboard…

WHEN BETH GILL’S “ELECTRIC MIDWIFE” premièred, in June, 2011, only twelve viewers were allowed into each performance at the Chocolate Factory’s industrial space. Onstage, six women, kept apart in two groups by tape on the floor, performed simple movements arranged in intricate patterns. Each dancer mirrored her counterpart in perfect symmetry; the pairs were so connected that they seemed to swallow in synch. The work won Gill a Bessie Award for best emerging choreographer. For her new piece, “New Work for the Desert,” which débuts at New York Live Arts on March 19, Gill draws inspiration from the landscapes of the American Southwest. To evoke those open, glowing skies, the lighting designer Thomas Dunn floods the intimate venue with vivid color. Four women and two men, including the appealing Kayvon…

A lot of people peak in high school. Until recently, it seemed that Governor Chris Christie was not one of them. But then came Bridgegate, the scandal that has sunk the Governor’s reputation as a Republican star and refocussed the spotlight on his high-school glory days. Some background: At the center of Bridgegate sits David Wildstein, the Port Authority official who ordered the lane closings leading to the notorious George Washington Bridge traffic jam last September. Wildstein, a Christie appointee, went to Livingston High School at the same time as Christie; newspapers have described him as Christie’s “high school friend.” At a press conference, Christie nixed this idea, citing their differences in social status as teens. “We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school,” he said. “You know,…

Since at least the days of Horatio Alger, a cornerstone of American thinking has been the hope of social mobility—the idea that, as Lawrence Samuel put it in a history of the American dream, anyone can, “through dedication and with a can-do spirit, climb the ladder of success.” In recent years, though, plenty of Americans have come to believe that, as President Obama said in his State of the Union address, “upward mobility has stalled.” So it was a surprise recently when a team of economists from Harvard and Berkeley released a comprehensive study showing that mobility in the U.S. hasn’t fallen over the past twenty years at all. “Like many people, we thought mobility would have declined,” Raj Chetty, one of the researchers on the project, told me. “But…

Taking the SATs is not something to do lightly. Nevertheless, on a frigid Saturday morning not long ago, I found myself filing into a classroom with twenty sleep-deprived teen-agers. One of the girls was carrying two giant SAT review books studded with pink Post-its. I couldn’t decide whether she’d brought them along to do some last-minute studying or to intimidate the competition. We’d been assigned to a chemistry classroom, and its walls were covered with placards offering a variety of emergency-evacuation instructions and motivational sayings. “If you aim for nowhere, that’s just where you’ll go,” one poster observed. “Some days you’re the pigeon,” another, written in runny, guano-colored letters, said. “Some days you’re the statue.” The proctor, who herself seemed oddly nervous, handed around the tests and the answer booklets.…

SILENCES After dinner, nobody went home right away. I think we’d enjoyed the meal so much we hoped Elaine would serve us the whole thing all over again. These were people we’ve gotten to know a little from Elaine’s volunteer work—nobody from my work, nobody from the ad agency. We sat around in the living room describing the loudest sounds we’d ever heard. One said it was his wife’s voice when she told him she didn’t love him anymore and wanted a divorce. Another recalled the pounding of his heart when he suffered a coronary. Tia Jones had become a grandmother at the age of thirty-seven and hoped never again to hear anything so loud as her granddaughter crying in her sixteen-year-old daughter’s arms. Her husband, Ralph, said it hurt…

OPERATION PAPERCLIP, by Annie Jacobsen (Little, Brown). This darkly picaresque account details the covert operation that brought Nazi scientists to work in the U.S. As the Third Reich collapsed, the Allied powers, in awe of its “wonder weapons,” scrambled to employ these scientists, even though they may have murdered or worked to death tens of thousands of people—whether on V-2 rocket assembly lines, in tubs of freezing water, or while testing experimental vaccines. Some scientists retired to a resort in the Bavarian Alps and sunbathed until the Allies arrived. Jacobsen persuasively argues that the mindset of the former Nazi scientists who ended up working for the American government may have exacerbated Cold War paranoia. EROTIC EXCHANGES, by Nina Kushner (Cornell). This history brings to life les dames entretenues—women who…

“Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe,” at the Guggenheim, is a spectacular survey of what has long been the most neglected canonical movement in modern art—because it is also the most embarrassing. An avantgarde so clownish, in its grandiose posturing, and so sinister, in its political embrace of Italian Fascism, has been easy to shrug off, but the show makes a powerful case for second thoughts. It arrays some superb paintings and sculptures, the best of them by Umberto Boccioni, whose death in the First World War, at the age of thirtythree, deprived the movement of its one great artist. And marvels of graphic and architectural invention reward a stroll up the Guggenheim’s ramp, through an eventful installation by the curator Vivien Greene. Yet even the most original Futurist art—such…

BLIGHT FLIGHT I was part of and witness to the white flight in the nineteen-fifties and sixties that transferred the wealth of Detroit to Oakland County, which Paige Williams writes about in her article on the longtime county executive L. Brooks Patterson (“Drop Dead, Detroit!,” January 27th). Every time Patterson bashes or ignores Detroit, he undermines his aim of making Oakland County “the epicenter of activity in the region,” for what Detroiter in his or her right mind would choose to follow and support such an aspiration? Patterson’s primary goal is to protect his county from Detroit’s largely black, low-income populace, which he fears will cross Eight Mile Road and encroach upon the sprawl he loves. This fear is what has driven white flight since it began, sixty years…

41 W. 57th St. (212-465-2400) “I GO TO THE HAMPTONS, but I don’t participate in the Hamptons” is the sort of thing you’re likely to overhear at Betony. On a recent evening, a septuagenarian who could have walked out of an Al Hirschfeld drawing expressed unadulterated rage at the mere suggestion that his party of two might not be seated at the table he desired, because it was meant for four. His companion, an ash blonde wearing white stockings, white cowboy boots, and a white fur vest, stared dully into space as he sputtered. If you live for people-watching, and for floor-length mink coats, and for lines like “I don’t want to be on the family dole,” you’ll be in Heaven at Betony. If you disdain those things, you’ll have…

THE GERMAN ARTIST SIGMAR POLKE, who died in 2010, has never had the name recognition of his peer Gerhard Richter, but a blockbuster at MOMA, opening on April 19, could change that. With more than three hundred figurative and abstract works, straddling painting, photography, printmaking, drawing, cinema, and sculpture, “Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010” encapsulates, to the extent that it’s possible, the quicksilver career of the reclusive titan, whose oeuvre was one long experiment. Arsenic, snail slime, and pulverized meteorites were just some of the materials Polke used on canvas, in addition to paint. But for all his forward thinking, Polke was steeped in history, lifting motifs from Goya and Hogarth, referencing the French Revolution, and revisiting Renaissance-era alchemical processes. While his images could be unnerving (notably, spectral paintings of concentration-camp…

“Ladies and Gentlemen . . . the Beatles!” This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles’ début on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and if you missed “The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to the Beatles,” the recent TV special, or “The Fest,” an annual celebration in New York City of all things Fab Four, check out this multimedia exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which is up through May 10. It focusses on the band’s early years and its first tours in the U.S., and there are rare behind-the-scenes photos by Bob Bonis, who was the tour manager in America during that period, along with listening kiosks, handwritten set lists from their concerts, and guitars owned by George Harrison, Elvis Presley, and…

When war broke out in Somalia in 1991, Barkhad Abdi was six; overnight, Mogadishu changed from being a place where he was afraid to toss a rock, lest a passerby reprimand him, to one where killing and rape were normal. His mother evacuated the family, and they joined Abdi’s father in Yemen, where he was teaching math. Several years later, they immigrated to the U.S., settling in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, home to many expatriate Somalis. Abdi entered high school, learned English from Biggie, played basketball, and eventually got a job driving a Lincoln town car for his brother’s limousine company. That’s what he was doing when he saw an ad for an open casting call at the local community center: Somalis needed for “Captain Phillips,” a film by…

A quarter century ago, as jubilant citizens took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an officer in the Dresden station of the K.G.B., fed a raging furnace with the documentary evidence of Soviet espionage activities in East Germany. Putin was grateful for his Dresden posting. He had grown up in Leningrad, an uneven student with early dreams of serving the state. One of his grandfathers was a cook for Lenin and Stalin. His father was an undercover operative during the war. Putin’s parents barely survived the Nazi siege; an older brother did not. After a rough upbringing, Putin had enjoyed a halcyon four years in Dresden. He had a pretty wife and two young daughters, and enough leisure to play Ping-Pong, fish in the rivers outside town, and…

Years from now—maybe in a decade, maybe sooner—if all goes according to plan, the most complex machine ever built will be switched on in an Alpine forest in the South of France. The machine, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. At its core, densely packed high-precision equipment will encase a cavernous vacuum chamber, in which a super-hot cloud of heavy hydrogen will rotate faster than the speed of sound, twisting like a strand of DNA as it circulates. The cloud will be scorched by electric current (a surge so forceful that it will make lightning seem like a tiny arc of static electricity), and bombarded by concentrated…

For months I’d moved across the open water like a wheel under its skin, a frictionless and by then almost wholly abstract matter with nothing in my head beyond the bliss of my own breaking: how the long foreshore would hear my full confession, and I’d drain into the shale till I was filtered pure. There was no way to tell on that bare plain but I felt my power run down with the miles and by the time I saw the scattered sails, the painted front and children on the pier I was no more than a fold in her blue gown and knew I was already in the clear. I hit the beach and swept away the town.…

The devastation visited on Warsaw during the Second World War also wiped out a fair amount of music. Witold Lutostawski and Andrzej Panufnik, two young Polish composers who had played together as a piano duo in cafés during the German occupation, saw most of their scores destroyed. The loss was, in a way, liberating: Lutostawski and Panufnik carried on with increasing audacity, testing the aesthetic limits that fell into place after the Communist takeover. Panufnik defected to Britain, in 1954; Lutostawski remained, becoming the pilot figure in a remarkable surge of musical activity that has been named the Polish Renaissance. A superficial liberalization of Polish culture in the post-Stalin era allowed for the importation of avant-garde ideas. Visitors to the Warsaw Autumn festival, which began unfolding in 1956, were surprised…

The music of Tinariwen, a Tuareg band whose members live in the Sahara Desert region that spreads across parts of Mali, Algeria, and Libya, is often compared to American blues. The band’s sound is rooted in electric and acoustic guitar, anchored by electric bass and some local percussion. The songs are in standard tuning, often lowered a half step and then played with a capo, making the strings slightly more taut and some fingerings easier. The yearning in the music and the sonorities of the strings resonate in ways that Americans are familiar with. It is less bright in tone and more dirgelike than the guitar patterns of masters to the south, like Diblo Dibala, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Tinariwen’s new album, “Emmaar,” is its best-engineered yet;…

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN IN THE RURAL PARISHES west of New Orleans, musicians keep dancers moving late into the night playing zydeco, an up-tempo style that evolved from music developed by Creoles in the area nearly a century ago. Performed by a band with an accordion, an electric guitar, and a frottoir (a percussion instrument resembling a wearable washboard), the music is hard-rocking and high-spirited. C. J. Chenier (pictured above) is the son of the legendary accordionist Clifton Chenier (1925-1987), who solidified the genre’s name with his 1965 recording of the anthem “Zydeco Sont Pas Salé.” On March 2, two days before Mardi Gras, he brings his Red Hot Louisiana Band to a “Let’s Zydeco!” party at Connolly’s, an Irish bar in midtown that will be hard to distinguish…

THREE NEW DOCUMENTARIES bring history to life in original ways. In “The Missing Picture” (March 19), the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh uses clay figurines in dioramalike landscapes to tell the story of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. In 1975, at the age of eleven, Panh was forced from Phnom Penh during the city’s total evacuation and confined in a rural labor camp, where his parents and sisters died, events that he reconstructs in miniature. He uses archival footage to recall the metropolis that was reduced to a ghost town, and his close study of Khmer Rouge propaganda films reveals hidden traces of the regime’s depravity. The title character of “Finding Vivian Maier” (March 28) is a justly admired street photographer whose work was completely unknown at the time of…

THERE’LL BE A LOT OF ACTIVITY in the orchestral world in the coming months, especially at the New York Philharmonic, where Alan Gilbert has launched what may be a visionary overture, the first NY Phil Biennial (May 28-June 7), a cavalcade of new music by composers young and old who hail from North America, Europe, and Asia. With the Met subsisting solely on revivals in April and May, the focus on contemporary opera will be doubly welcome. The schedule for the Biennial includes the U.S. première of Toshio Hosokawa’s monodrama “The Raven” (after Poe), performed by Gotham Chamber Opera, and of HK Gruber’s “Gloria—A Pig Tale,” a co-presentation with the Juilliard School and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the piece, a madcap comic opera with the ominous undertones unique…

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed, in 1927, with a brief “to raise the cultural, educational, and scientific standards” of film. That noble purpose was sustained until July 12, 2013, the release date for “Grown Ups 2,” in which a frightened deer urinates on Adam Sandler’s face. In the animal’s defense, one could argue that it was merely taking movie criticism to a higher and more clarifying level. Nevertheless, “Grown Ups 2” will not feature when the Academy doles out its garlands, on March 2nd, even in Best Visual Effects. What hope, then, for the standards of old? Could there still be cause for celebration? Well, like the nation, the Academy has its first African-American president; indeed, unlike the nation, it has its first female African-American…

“I’m forced to say that it seems very unsatisfying to me, and simply no story at all, if the ending is to be left so far in the air,” a New Yorker editor wrote in an internal memo about Mavis Gallant’s 1961 story “Two Questions.” (Between 1951 and 1995, Gallant, who died last week, at the age of ninety-one, published a hundred and sixteen stories in this magazine.) “Seems to me that something should be completed, or it’s just a long sketch. . . . It’s like life, and not—to me—like fiction.” William Maxwell, Gallant’s editor, replied, “The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out.” It’s that quality—Gallant’s “like-lifeness,” her unresolved presentness—that makes her stories sit so solidly, almost bad-naturedly, in…

You know what I’m tired of? People being so down on themselves for not remembering things. Doesn’t it seem like everyone you know over a certain age is spending way too much time saying, “Dammit, I just saw that movie yesterday, and I can’t remember what it’s called. This is terrible.” That’s so negative. Quitcherbellyachin’! Celebrate what you do remember! For example, I was in Duane Reade the other day, forgetting what I was there for, and, yes, getting bummed out about it. Then I remembered that I was there for some kind of hair product, only I couldn’t remember what it was. Then I remembered that it was the stuff that comes in a bottle that you wash your hair with, but I couldn’t remember what it’s called, so…

Give me your Greek myths and I’ll give you the Carmen Kief Bridge—forgotten, whatever it was called before— where thirty years ago Trey scaled the steel lift still hot from the sun of the day, with a spray can under his chin, to inscribe the I-beam with the promise of her memory and the imprimatur of his passion. Or when Oris G. did his girlfriend on the front lawn at lunch—I was speechless with admiration. The football coach looked him right in the eye and Oris looked right back, the coach hardly able to draw his smile or keep from pounding Oris on the back as if he were a safety just trotting off the field with his first interception. (What girl could I hold—even under the bleachers?) Trey sat…

The title that E. E. Cummings gave his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1952 and 1953, was predictably provocative: “i: six nonlectures.” To start with, there was the eschewal of capitalization, a feature that, combined with the near-absence of punctuation, most poetry readers would take to be defining of his style: Buffalo Bill ’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death What do all these typographical high jinks signify? Perhaps the disregard for punctuation allows the reader a more active role in the process of reading, providing the opportunity to entertain multiple interpretations. The conceit may even play, in an…

Judged purely on style, HBO’s “True Detective” is a great show. Every week, it offers up shiver-inducing cable intoxicants, from an over-the-top action sequence so liquid it rivals a Scorsese flick to piquant scenes of rural degradation, filmed on location in Louisiana, a setting that has become a bit of an HBO specialty. (“Treme” and “True Blood” are also set there.) Like many critics, I was initially charmed by the show’s anthology structure (eight episodes and out; next season a fresh story) and its witty chronology, which chops and dices a serial-killer investigation, using two time lines. In the nineteen-nineties, two detectives, Marty Hart and Rust Cohle (Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey), hunt down a fetishistic murderer, the sort of artsy bastard who tattoos his female victims, then accessorizes them…

The Israeli submission for Best Foreign Language Film, ahead of this year’s Academy Awards, was “Bethlehem,” a thriller about a young Palestinian man, with links to terrorist activities, who is secretly controlled by an Israeli handler. The Palestinian offering was “Omar,” a thriller about a young Palestinian man, with links to terrorist activities, who is secretly controlled by an Israeli handler. Who said the two sides in the conflict have no common ground? If you can share a plot with your neighbor, who knows what might yet bloom? In the event, only “Omar” was picked as a nominee. It stars Adam Bakri as the Omar of the title: a baker by trade, and a good-looking guy, as shown by a glowering closeup at the start. But he pales beside his…