Susan Orlean: Jean Paul Gaultier’s world of inspiration.
One day, some years back, Jean Paul Gaultier was at home, feeding his cat. As he emptied a can of cat food, he was struck by how attractive the can was, and surmised that if he cut off both the bottom and the top of it what remained would bear . . . |
Steve Coll: Palestinian statehood, Israel’s isolation, American policy.
Nauru is a destitute Pacific island with a population of just over nine thousand. The country’s failed economic strategies have included offshore-banking schemes and providing Australia with refugee-detention services. For a time, the national airline had no plane—it had been repossessed. Nauru is also . . . |
Richard Brody: Buster Keaton in “Battling Butler” and “Go West.”
paragraph class="noindent">As a performer, Buster Keaton exhibited scintillating acrobatic skills while maintaining his trademark “stone face”; as a director—revealed in the 1926 feature “Battling Butler,” available in a two-disk set from Kino—he took his expressive reserve to a new . . . (Subscription required.) |
Rebecca Mead: Daphne Guinness, the tragic friend to fashion.
Of the more than half million visitors who attended “Savage Beauty,” the Metropolitan Museum’s blockbuster show dedicated to the work of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, few felt more intimately acquainted with the works on display than Daphne Guinness. Guinness was a friend of McQueen . . . (Subscription required.) |
Rae Armantrout: “Arrivals.”
Sign in the airport: It’s not how much Cloud, but what kind. * Welcome. “We don’t play requests, but we don’t play bagpipes, either. We figure that’s fair.” That’s the bad-boy sass of globalization kick-starting you on . . . (Subscription required.) |
Peter Schjeldahl: A Willem de Kooning retrospective at MOMA.
The Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art fills the building’s entire sixth floor with nearly two hundred works, but it is still too small. A show twice the size would do little enough justice to de Kooning’s seven-decade career, which ended . . . (Subscription required.) |
Peter Hessler: Pharmacist Don Colcord is sustaining Nucla, Colorado.
In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who lives in . . . (Subscription required.) |
Kay Ryan: “Tree Heart/True Heart.”
The hearts of trees are serially displaced pressed annually outward to a ring. They aren’t really what we mean by hearts, they so easily acquiesce, willing to thin and stretch around some upstart green. A real heart does not give way to spring. A heart is true. I . . . (Subscription required.) |
John Kinsella: “Dürer’s Rhinoceros.”
Rhinoceros of childhood seen through thick bars with sandpit and wagtails, zoo savanna or grasslands, country compacted to a round peg in a square hole, resigned in flesh if not eyes—vacuums of desire, armor the leathern shields of the most ancient myth, army writ into the single body . . . (Subscription required.) |
Jenny Diski: The psychology and history of shoplifting.
In October, 1980, Lady Isobel Barnett was found dead at her home in Leicestershire, electrocuted in her bath. The coroner’s verdict was suicide. Four days earlier, she had been convicted of stealing a can of tuna and a carton of cream and fined the equivalent of six hundred . . . (Subscription required.) |
Janet Malcolm: Thomas Struth’s monumental photography.
Last April, the German photographer Thomas Struth went to Windsor Castle and took a picture of the Queen of England and the Duke of Edinburgh for the National Portrait Gallery in London. This is not the kind of photography Struth usually does. He is one of today’s most . . . (Subscription required.) |
James Surowiecki: Obama, jobs, and the G.O.P.
There is no truer truism in American politics than James Carville’s catchphrase from the 1992 election “It’s the economy, stupid.” When people discuss Barack Obama’s current approval rating, which is at its lowest level ever, they may invoke his supposed lack of . . . |
Ian Frazier: The Attica prison uprising, 40 years later.
Another September anniversary just came and went—less noticed, and perhaps harder to talk about, than the famous one. The uprising at Attica Correctional Facility, a New York State maximum-security prison between Buffalo and Rochester, happened forty years ago. Disturbances in A Block began on September 8th, spread . . . (Subscription required.) |
Hilton Als: Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” revival.
The theatre can kill a man. As in the art and film worlds, which the stage sometimes brushes up against but never entirely submits to—Thalia and Melpomene are pretty haughty girls—much of the business of making theatre is social. Today’s drinking buddy is tomorrow . . . (Subscription required.) |
Hilton Als: “Porgy and Bess,” reimagined by Diane Paulus.
As audience members took their seats before a recent performance of the director Diane Paulus’s politically radical and dramaturgically original musical adaptation of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin’s “American folk opera” “Porgy and Bess” (at the American Repertory . . . |
Goings on About Town: Theatre Fall Preview
goatTitle--> OLD IS NEW The musicals of the season hark back to the classics. Daniel Goldstein directs a revival of “Godspell,” from 1971, with music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, at Circle in the Square (Oct. 13). | Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan star in the premi . . . |
Goings on About Town: Night Life Fall Preview
goatTitle-->“BROOKLYN BABYLON” As part of the Next Wave Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is celebrating its hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, presents this multimedia work. In the piece, which includes live painting onstage, the tallest building in the world is about to be constructed in . . . |
Goings on About Town: Movies Fall Preview
goatTitle-->MOVIES ABOUT MOVIES Michelle Williams stars in “My Week with Marilyn” (Nov. 4), Simon Curtis’s drama about Marilyn Monroe’s work with Laurence Olivier (played here by Kenneth Branagh) in the 1957 film “The Prince and the Showgirl.” Eddie Redmayne co . . . |
Goings on About Town: Dance Fall Preview
goatTitle-->POINTILLISM New York City Ballet presents masterpieces by George Balanchine (“Apollo,” “Episodes,” and “Jewels”) at the David H. Koch (Sept. 13-Oct. 9), but the big deal of the season is “Ocean’s Kingdom,” with music by Paul McCartney . . . |
Goings on About Town: Classical Music Fall Preview
goatTitle-->THE GREATEST With James Levine out of commission at the Metropolitan Opera, and with City Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra in dire straits, classical music in America can sometimes seem like a risky prospect. Thank goodness for Muhammad Ali; he’s the subject of “The Sweet . . . |
Goings on About Town: Art Fall Preview
goatTitle-->“CARSTEN HÖLLER: EXPERIENCE” It’s no surprise that the Stockholm-based artist started out as a scientist: his participatory installations feel like experiments in perception. Visitors to this twenty-year survey at the New Museum can float in a sensory-deprivation tank, ride . . . |
Eric Konigsberg: Matthew Russell Lee, Inner City Press, in the U.N.
What’s the proper honorific to use when addressing a diplomat at the United Nations? Mr. (or Madame) Ambassador? Your Excellency? For Matthew Russell Lee, acceptable options include “Hey, man!,” “C’est bon, isn’t it?,” and “Are you the chargé . . . (Subscription required.) |
David Owen: Colombia’s bulletproof clothing beats Kevlar.
On my first day in Colombia, two women in an old Toyota drove me to an industrial park on the outskirts of Bogotá. There, in a building that from the outside looked like a warehouse, the man I’d come to interview—early forties, black hair, not . . . (Subscription required.) |
Callan Wink: “Dog Run Moon.”
Sid was a nude sleeper. Had been ever since he was a little kid. To him, wearing clothes to bed seemed strangely redundant, like wearing underwear inside your underwear or something. And that was why he was now running barefoot and bare-assed across the sharp sandstone rimrock far above . . . (Subscription required.) |
Books: “White Heat.”
Set in the Canadian High Arctic, this début novel encompasses the hard, otherworldly beauty of the far north and the rapaciousness of energy moguls determined to exploit the area’s natural resources. At its center are Edie Kiglatuk, a half-Inuit, half-white guide, and Derek Palliser . . . (Subscription required.) |
Books: “Leningrad.”
Hitler’s troops surrounded Leningrad for nearly two and a half years; it was one of the deadliest sieges in history. During the first winter, under Stalin’s paranoid, incompetent rule, food reserves disappeared and mass hunger decimated the population, killing half a million people. Reid rebukes Soviet . . . (Subscription required.) |
Books: “Childish Loves.”
Two narrators cohabit uneasily in this elegant work of metafiction: the louche Lord Byron and a prim present-day writer, who happens to share the name—Ben Markovits—and particulars of his creator. While Markovits the character investigates the life of a dead former colleague who has written . . . (Subscription required.) |
Books: “A Book of Secrets.”
This elegant and quietly powerful book—part social history, part literary study, part memoir—takes its title from a diary and scrapbook, resembling a “dilapidated saddle of a horse,” kept by the minor British aristocrat Eve Fairfax, whom Holroyd describes, with a distinctive combination of empathy . . . (Subscription required.) |
Ben Greenman: Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman”: Review.
paragraph class="noindent">The soul vocalist Shirley Brown was discovered by Albert King in the early sixties, when she was a teen-ager singing at the Harlem Club in Brooklyn, Illinois. After a decade touring with King, Brown finally made her début as a solo artist with “ . . . (Subscription required.) |
Andy Borowitz: “Alarm Bells.”
When I’m on a first date, alarm bells always go off if the woman says, “Let’s play Nixon.” This happened a few weeks ago when I was out with a tax attorney from one of the big midtown firms whom I met on OkCupid . . . |
Andrea Scott: Maison Premiere, in Williamsburg: Review.
Recently, a small hand-painted sign—“Bar/Oysters”—appeared above a weathered verdigris door in Williamsburg, discreetly marking the arrival of a French Quarter-inspired speakeasy. But does the nation’s capital of artisanal bitters really need another nostalgia-soaked outpost for herb muddling? In . . . |
Alec Wilkinson: Drew Eckmann’s New Jersey home and concert hall.
Before you ask Drew Eckmann if you can headline in his living room, in Ringwood, New Jersey, about an hour northwest of Manhattan, ask yourself, Are you a national touring band? Graham Parker is—he has played Drew’s thirteen times—and so is Justin Townes Earle . . . (Subscription required.) |
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