Home//The New Yorker/July 10-17, 2017/In This Issue
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Classical Music: Inner LandscapeInner LandscapeJazz and classical music mix freely in the work of Tyshawn Sorey.Something vital is happening at the boundary between classical music and jazz. The border has long been an active and porous one, going back to the days when Duke Ellington adopted symphonic forms and Maurice Ravel assimilated the blues. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, what Gunther Schuller dubbed the Third Stream movement encompassed modernist compositions with jazz features and large-scale conceptions by the likes of Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman. Since the nineteen- seventies, John Zorn has been crisscrossing the divide in kinetic patterns. The striking thing about twentyfirst- century explorations of this terrain is that they no longer require a name or a justification; rather, a growing community of creative musicians—from elders like Anthony Braxton and Wadada…2 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Comment: Dignity and the FourthCOMMENTDIGNITY AND THE FOURTHMore than three-quarters of a century after the delegates of the Second Continental Congress voted to quit the Kingdom of Great Britain and declared that “all men are created equal,” Frederick Douglass stepped up to the lectern at Corinthian Hall, in Rochester, New York, and, in an Independence Day address to the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, made manifest the darkest ironies embedded in American history and in the national self-regard. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass asked:I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national…5 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Vibrations Dept.: Sonic HealingIt took sidestepping a drum circle, a propot rally, a dozen venders hawking greens (garlic scapes: four dollars a bunch), and a psychic on her cell phone, near Union Square, to reach the extreme quiet of the Om Lab, a recording studio on the sixth floor of the Rubin Museum. Once inside, with the foaminsulated door firmly shut, a visitor could revel in the blissful nonsound. Then, from an iPad, a recorded trio of monks intoned the word “om.”Two weeks after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, the Rubin quietly began collecting the oms of stressedout New Yorkers. Visitors were invited to take a seat in a small booth, put on headphones, and om along with the monks. “The idea was to bring the voices of everyone who came into the lab together,…3 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Poem: A Heritage of TrumpetsThe clear, clean line was always the ideal.Though there was subtlety in how Miles muttered,One always ached to hear a song line utteredWith definition, lyrical and real:A well-timed silence puncturing the swingOnly to add propulsion. Play that thing!Bunk Johnson used to do that, way back when,Inheriting the clean articulationOf Buddy Bolden. The controlled sensationOf vaulting gold that drove a funeral thenLinked death to dancing people, grief to joy:The rich, sweet notes rang like the real McCoy.The open horn was king. There was no mute,Not even Cootie’s, that could set the measureOf confidently opened casks of treasureLighting the cave, and turning the blue suitOf tactful mourning to a pirate kit:The lawlessness, the skipping lilt of it.Pure gold in Paris after WWII,Bill Coleman’s open horn proved mainstream muscleCould still outstrip the nervous,…1 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017BOOKS THE PLOT THICKENS“Survivors pay with their conscience,” the novelist Sybille Bedford wrote in her memoir, “Quicksands.” “Some have paid to the end of their own road. Those who have got off lightly paid perhaps too little. . . . I feel I am one of those.” I often wonder what Bedford would have made of the detective known to readers as Bernie Gunther, commissar of the Murder Squad of the Kriminalpolizei, in Berlin. (Call it the Scotland Yard of Germany.) Bedford, born in Berlin to an elderly German baron and his young, wealthy Jewish wife, was a month shy of her ninetyfourth birthday when her memoir appeared, in 2005. She had survived the First World War in the relative safety of a Berlin mansion and was able to flee Europe and spend…16 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017POP MUSIC AMERICAN ANYONEThere’s something about the twang and drawl of country music that feels particularly well suited to the way we like to tell the American narrative. Country began as a rural genre, born in isolated Southern enclaves; its first stars yodelled or sang their way out of obscurity, then revelled in relating the tale, disclosing everything they’d gained and lost along the way. Country musicians have shouldered much of the work of establishing a national identity in song. Gratitude, pride, and swashbuckling self- determination synchronize nicely with pedal steel. So does a deeply embedded sense of grief.John Moreland, a songwriter from Tulsa, Oklahoma, is not only a country artist—his work is just as indebted to folk and rock music—but he seems to draw from the same winsome, melancholic well as Hank…6 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017The MailAGE OF EMPIRESIan Buruma, in his review of recent books on China, considers the country’s military might but neglects its most daunting challenge to American global dominance: its growing economic influence (Books, June 19th). In 2013, President Xi Jinping unveiled an initiative to build a vast trade network of road, rail, and sea routes that will span four continents. The following year, he launched the Asian Infrastructure Investments Bank to challenge the power of the World Bank and the I.M.F.; the A.I.I.B. is now backed by more than fifty shareholding members, including Germany, France, the U.K., and Israel. The dollar remains the world’s leading reserve currency, partially because oil and other major commodities are still traded in dollars. But last year, the I.M.F. made the Chinese yuan one of its…3 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017The Theatre: American CarnageAmerican CarnageAssassins” returns for a concert run at City Center.A word of warning to anyone who protested the Trumpified “Julius Caesar” in Central Park: multiple Presidents are shot and killed in “Assassins,” the musical by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman. First staged Off Broadway, in 1990, the show bends time and space to bring together the motley band of outlaws who have slain (or attempted to slay) a Commander-in-Chief, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley, Jr. From its opening number—set at a shooting gallery, where a proprietor merrily invites the likes of Charles Guiteau and Giuseppe Zangara to “c’mere and kill a President”—the musical is an uneasy vaudeville of political bloodlust. What does it say about America, it asks, that these people belong to it?Naturally, the show is a…2 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Tables for Two: ChouchouTABLES FOR TWOChouchou215 E. 4th St. (646-869-1423)Chouchou, a new Mediterranean-Moroccan bistro on a quiet block in the East Village, takes its name from a 2003 French comedy about the travails of a North African transvestite in Paris. If you haven’t heard of “Chouchou” the movie, Mario Carta, the owner of Chouchou the restaurant, will be unsurprised and most likely pleased. “My guests should arrive here fresh and unsuspecting,” Carta said. “Can you imagine if I named this place Casablanca?”From the frosted hanging lanterns to the slinky, willow-waisted staff, the restaurant evokes a sultry night club where the mood is determinedly romantic and the lights are dangerously dim. When, after ordering, a parade of tiny saucers appears—a cucumber salad marinated in cilantro, parsley, and lemon juice; shaved fennel with raisins and…2 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017At City Hall: Dance OutlawsThe public is not allowed to applaud in the chambers of the New York City Council. “Just as dancing is illegal, it’s illegal to clap here,” the city councilman Rafael Espinal told a group of citizens. “You have to do jazz hands.”It was a recent Monday, and the citizens, many wearing T-shirts that read “DANCING IS NOT A CRIME,” were only too happy to comply. They had gathered to argue for the repeal of New York City’s cabaret law, which dates to 1926 and prohibits dancing in venues that don’t have a cabaret license. The law does not specify what, exactly, constitutes dancing, but it defines a public dance hall as “any room, place or space in the city in which dancing is carried on and to which the public…4 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017The Financial Page: Uber and OutOn February 23rd, two venture capitalists, both early investors in the ride-sharing company Uber, circulated an open letter in response to a female engineer’s published account of sexual harassment at the company. “Silicon Valley prides itself on pattern recognition,” Freada Kapor Klein and Mitchell Kapor wrote. “Here are a couple of toxic patterns we have observed.” Despite several scandals, they went on, Uber had failed to reform its culture, and investors “in high growth, financially successful companies rarely, if ever, call out inexcusable behavior from founders or C-suite executives.” They argued that both of these patterns needed to change.Four months later, when Uber’s C.E.O., Travis Kalanick, stepped down after other influential investors demanded his resignation, Klein and Kapor’s words appeared to have resonated. Kalanick, who helped found Uber, in 2009,…4 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Annals of Culture: If You Prick UsI attended university in a very different world from the one in which I now teach and live. For a start, Yale College, which I entered in 1961, was all male. Women were not matriculated until five years after I had received my B.A. degree. Among the undergraduates, there were only a handful of students from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and very few African-Americans, Asian- Americans, or Hispanics, unless one counted a couple of prep-school- educated heirs to grand South American fortunes.The Yale that I attended was overwhelmingly North American and white, as well as largely Protestant. It was difficult for the admissions office to identify Catholics, but applicants with conspicuously Irish, Italian, or Polish names were at a disadvantage. For Jews, there was a numerus clausus, not…26 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Fiction: Caring for PlantsOghi opened his eyes to a faint glimpse of white clothing. He heard his name: “Oghi. Oghi.” The voice was soft, kind. Eight days had passed since his emergency surgery, eight days during which he had slipped in and out of consciousnessThere had been a car accident. The moment of impact had felt like someone hitting him very hard with something. Not with a blunt wooden instrument but, rather, with something sharp and metal. A chisel or a claw hammer, perhaps. Both legs, several ribs, and his collarbone were broken. Face mangled, teeth shattered. Oghi’s body, to put it simply, had been reduced to shreds. He struggled to talk through a fractured jaw.“My wife?”The nurse didn’t answer. Oghi’s words had not made it out of his mouth. His jaw trembled…33 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017BOOKS PAUL IS DEADKierkegaard relates a chilling parable in “The Sickness Unto Death.” An emperor summons a poor day laborer. The man never dreamed that the emperor even knew of his existence. The emperor tells him that he wants to have him as his son-in-law, a bizarre announcement that must strike the man as something he would never dare tell the world, for fear of being mocked; it seems as if the emperor wanted only to make a fool of his subject. Now, Kierkegaard says, suppose that this event was never made a public fact; no evidence exists that the emperor ever summoned the laborer, so that his only recourse would be blind faith. How many would have the courage to believe? Christ’s kingdom is like that, Kierkegaard says.The French writer Emmanuel Carrère…21 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017THE THEATRE THE SICK ROOMThree shows I saw recently all feature death as an imminent possibility or reality, and, although each production handles what Henry James called “the distinguished thing” differently, they all, like most weak or sentimental plays on the subject, include a lot of talk or foreshadowing about It before It happens.When Bessie (Lili Taylor) is told by the befuddled, empathetic Dr. Wally (Triney Sandoval) that she has leukemia, in the current revival of Scott McPherson’s 1990 play, “Marvin’s Room” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at the American Airlines), she looks acutely embarrassed, as if the doctor had just walked in on her in some private space, unhappily nude. Bessie doesn’t know who she is in her reduced, vulnerable state. For most of her adult life, she has protected herself against her…7 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Goings On About Town: This WeekAfter twenty distinguished years, the Caramoor festival’s Bel Canto at Caramoor series, conceived by the scholar and conductor Will Crutchfield, will come to a close this summer, ending a glorious run of trills, roulades, and high-flying coloratura fireworks. The Italian bel-canto style is nothing if not star-driven, and to wrap up his series Crutchfield has chosen one of the Met’s brightest young talents, Angela Meade (above), to take the role of Imogene in a semi-staged performance of Bellini’s florid “Il Pirata,” on July 8.JULY 5 Ð 18, 2017NIGHT LIFEROCK AND POPMusicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements(Sandy) Alex GThe songwriter-guitarist Alex Giannascoli has a sharp ear for concise, shy phrasing and casual arrangements that find intimacy in mornings riding shotgun or…46 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Dance: Tap MastersTap MastersA great tap documentary gets restored and rereleased.When the filmmaker George Nierenberg made his documentary “No Maps on My Taps,” in the late seventies, a lot of people wondered whether tap was finished. The night clubs that had once showcased tappers had mostly closed down. Broadway, another important hatchery of tap acts, had switched to dream ballets and modern dance. Most important, jazz, the music that goes with tap, had been shoved aside by rock and roll.This situation helps to account for the highly personal tone of “No Maps on My Taps.” Nierenberg’s mother had been a tapper. (She said that the highlight of her career was dancing for the inmates of Sing Sing, when she was ten.) It hurt Nierenberg to see the tap masters of the mid-century…3 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017Bar Tab: Cape HouseCape House2 Knickerbocker Ave., Brooklyn (718-821-2580)This riff on a New England clam shack has a cheery coastal décor and a vast range of warmweather amenities—a spacious patio lined with wooden picnic tables, draft cocktails available frozen by request, and littlenecks on the half shell, at a clam a pop. “We just wanted a place to hang outside and smoke, really,” the bartender Wes Badrigian said, on a recent Sunday evening. Badrigian, with his jovial Northeastern accent and handlebar mustache, set a laid-back, cozy tenor, as he poured terrific takes on the Paper Plane (bourbon, Aperol, Montenegro, lemon) and the Ancient Mariner (rum, grapefruit liqueur, lime). He grew up in New England, and was pleased that the establishment reflected his upbringing—he hails from a line of lobstermen. And it would, in…1 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017The Pictures: The Mom SlotHolly Hunter’s Georgia twang pierced the rumble of traffic. “When I started here, thirty-seven years ago, the Upper West Side was grittier and more knockaround,” she said. She was striding down West Seventy-second Street, wearing a sack sweater and jeans. Hunter is petite, but her unblinking wariness— her brown-eyed, hawklike vigilance— gives her an outsized presence. “People don’t come to New York out of resignation,” she went on. “They come here with a dream. Mine was to be an actress.”In front of the Chatsworth, an ornate building overlooking the Hudson River, she said, “I moved to the city in August of 1980, and someone I thought was a friend had an apartment in this wedding cake of a building, so I slept on her couch for a few days. Then…4 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017The Sporting Scene: The Kyrgios EnigmaNick Kyrgios, the twentieth-ranked tennis player in the world, stepped to the baseline. He briskly bounced the ball and rocked forward to begin his serve, his arms swinging. He has a narrow waist and strong shoulders, a greyhound’s look, and a greyhound’s air of languid indifference. Kyrgios, a twentytwo- year-old Australian, is the only active player ever to defeat Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic in their first meetings; he has beaten Nadal and Djokovic twice, in fact, and came within a few points of a second victory over Federer earlier this year. “I think Nick is the most talented player since Roger jumped on the scene,” Paul Annacone, a former coach of Federer and Pete Sampras, has said. Kyrgios is also the most mercurial. Jon Wertheim, the executive…21 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017A Reporter at Large: The Future Is TexasWhen Frederick Law Olmsted passed through Texas, in 1853, he became besotted with the majesty of the Texas legislature. “I have seen several similar bodies at the North; the Federal Congress; and the Parliament of Great Britain, in both its branches, on occasions of great moment; but none of them commanded my involuntary respect for their simple manly dignity and trustworthiness for the duties that engaged them, more than the General Assembly of Texas,” he wrote. This passage is possibly unique in the political chronicles of the state. Fairly considered, the Texas legislature is more functional than the United States Congress, and more genteel than the House of Commons. But a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed the state’s reputation for aggressive know-nothingism and proudly retrograde politics.I’ve lived…89 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017BOOKS RUSHWhat is the most familiar piece of classical music? The most thoroughly roasted chestnut? A piece so overplayed that it has passed into the automatic schlock-recognition zone of every American? Surely it is the final, galloping section of Rossini’s “William Tell” Overture—the Lone Ranger music, the musical image of righteousness on horseback. The music seems almost a joke. But there was one conductor who rode this piece as if his life, and the lives of his players, depended on it.I remember my parents calling me out of my bedroom. The year was 1952, so I must have been eight. On our television, a tiny black-and-white screen sunk into a large mahogany console, an old man with a full head of white hair and an elegantly clipped mustache was beating time…19 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017BRIEFLY NOTEDParadise Lost, by David S. Brown (Harvard). This incisive biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald attempts to distance the writer from the “literary world of flappers, romancers, and boozers” with which he is often conflated. Brown, a historian, sees Fitzgerald as an essentially conservative social critic who was dismayed by “the collapse of older moral codes before the growing cultural influence of moneymakers and movie stars.” Yet, despite Brown’s insistence on the rigor of Fitzgerald’s thinking, the book suggests that he was ensnared by the very social trappings he disdained. In his story, like those of his bestknown characters, “a man of great potential is destroyed by wealth and beauty.”Abandon Me, by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury). “I had a one-word list of things I needed: everything,” the author of this bold collection…2 min
The New Yorker|July 10-17, 2017THE CURRENT CINEMA COME BACKIn his short novel “Pnin,” published in 1957, Vladimir Nabokov wrote:Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.I happen to find this the most beautiful passage in all Nabokov. (Substitute “living” for “quick,” and the effect is halved.) Moreover, the creed that he sketches out seems far from implausible, though I have often wondered what form the attending might take. Now, thanks to “A Ghost Story,” a new film by David Lowery, we have some sort of clue. Only a clue, mind you; the questions that Lowery raises hang in…7 min
