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The New Yorker

  • Goings On About Town: Venues: Museum of the City of New York
    Open daily, 10 to 6, and Saturday evenings until 8:30.
    Fifth Ave. at 103rd St., New York , N.Y. 10029
    212-534-1672
  • Wyatt Mason: Adam Johnson’s novel of North Korea, “The Orphan Master’s Son.”Late in Adam Johnson’s second novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son” (Random House), a husband and wife sit down to dinner in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang with their little son and daughter. The children are telling stories. The son mentions a laborer who . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Sasha Frere-Jones: Jay-Z, at Carnegie Hall.On Feb. 6-7, Jay-Z will play Carnegie Hall, becoming the first hip-hop solo headliner. Ticket prices range from five hundred to twenty-five hundred dollars, though profits will go to the United Way of New York City and a scholarship fund Jay-Z created. I do, though, have . . . (Subscription required.)
  • John Lahr: Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” Daniel Talbott’s “Yosemite.”In 2008, nine years after Margaret Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for her rookie play, “Wit,” she addressed the graduating class of Smith College, her alma mater. She spoke about her lifelong passion for performing, which she called “a physical, breath-based eye-to-eye event.” . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Hilton Als: Rachel Dratch’s “Celebrity Autobiography,” at the Triad.Rachel Dratch, one of the finest comedic talents going, has the eyes of a woman who can’t believe what just happened really happened, and it might happen again, so she prepares for it with a jittery smile and wide-awake eyes that always end up registering terror, anyway . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Hannah Goldfield: Nights and Weekends, in Greenpoint.There’s a certain type of New York establishment that eludes classification: is it a bar with a kitchen, or a restaurant that takes drinks very seriously? In the end, Nights and Weekends, in Greenpoint, falls squarely in the former category; only at a bar does a waitress tell . . .
  • Goings on About Town: The TheatrePageBreak -->OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. ASSISTANCE Playwrights Horizons presents a new play by Leslye Headland (“Bachelorette”), a satire in which two young assistants to a powerful magnate wonder if their jobs . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Readings and TalksgoatTitle-->STRAND BOOK STORE The poet Billy Collins reads from his latest book, “Horoscopes for the Dead.” (Broadway at 12th St. 212-473-1452. Feb. 2 at 7.) “WORDTHEATRE VOICES” The Los Angeles-based nonprofit WordTheatre returns to Manhattan, with the actors Raviv Ullman, Malinda . . .
  • Goings on About Town: On the HorizonTHE THEATRE OLD FRIENDS Feb. 8-19 City Center’s “Encores!” series presents lively concert versions of oft-forgotten and cult-favorite musicals. The season begins with Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” from 1981, starring Colin Donnell, Lin-Manuel Miranda . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Night LifePageBreak -->ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. “AMERICAN SONGBOOK” Feb. 1: Keren Ann, a singer-composer-musician who splits her time between Paris, New York, and Tel Aviv . . .
  • Goings on About Town: MoviesPageBreak -->OPENING BAD FEVER Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening Feb. 3. (ReRun Gastropub Theatre.) BIG MIRACLE This adventure drama, directed by Ken Kwapis, is based on a true story about a journalist and a Greenpeace activist who work to save a pod of . . .
  • Goings on About Town: DancegoatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET “Russian Seasons” (2006), Alexei Ratmansky’s first ballet for the company, returns to the repertory after an absence of almost four years. Set to a song cycle by Leonid Desyatnikov, the piece is made up of scenes that are loosely based . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Classical MusicPageBreak -->OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA In a set of circumstances that evoke the Met of Rudolf Bing more than the era of Peter Gelb, the two sopranos, each with their legions of fans, who shared the title role in last fall’s new production of “ . . .
  • Goings on About Town: ArtPageBreak -->MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini.” Through March 18. | “Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965).” Through April 15. | “Photographic Treasures from the Collection . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Above and BeyondgoatTitle-->“BRAINWAVE” The Rubin Museum of Art’s annual festival exploring the mind through art, music, and meditation returns for its fifth year. The theme this time around is memory: how the brain creates it and how the subject has been treated throughout history, a particularly . . .
  • Dan Chiasson: Peter Gizzi’s “Threshold Songs,” D. A. Powell’s “Useless Landscape.”8220;Threshold Songs” (Wesleyan), the fifth book by the experimental American poet Peter Gizzi, arrives after the hardest of hard periods, when Gizzi lost three of the people dearest to him: a close friend, his mother, and his brother, the poet Michael Gizzi. The book is dedicated to them . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “The Lives of Margaret Fuller” review.This psychologically rich biography traces the brief, quixotic life of the leading female figure of the transcendentalist movement. A child prodigy, Fuller was reared by a father who focussed on cultivating her intellect to the detriment of, as he later ruefully admitted, her “female propriety.” Arrogant and forceful . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You” review.8220;Literary criticism is an indispensable stethoscope in the biographer’s bag,” Leibowitz writes, in this sweeping biography of William Carlos Williams, a titan of modernist poetry who also treated patients as a family physician in northern New Jersey. Leibowitz combs the poems for clues to Williams’ . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “Mr g” review.A note at the end of this concise but ambitious novel about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “Hope: A Tragedy” review.What’s the point of living if life ends in pain and fear? This cheerful thought preoccupies Solomon Kugel, a young family man who has recently moved his wife and toddler to a farmhouse in upstate New York. The meticulously absurd tale begins when Kugel climbs up to his . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Anthony Lane: “W.E.,” “Albert Nobbs” reviews.What drew Madonna to make a film about an ambitious, hard-lacquered American woman who sought to carve out a place in British society through pure steeliness of character we shall, of course, never know. But the result is “W.E.,” which joins the initials of Wallis Simpson (Andrea . . .
  • Sasha Frere-Jones: Lana Del Rey’s image on “Born to Die.”In 2008, Elizabeth Grant, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Lake Placid, recorded an album in Manhattan with the well-known producer David Kahne. It was released digitally in early 2010 as “Lana Del Rey aka Lizzy Grant,” but was pulled offline two months later. This week . . .
  • Steve Futterman: Paul Motian’s “Further Explorations.”With the unexpected death of the drummer Paul Motian, last November, “Further Explorations” (Concord), an album intended to be an homage to the pianist Bill Evans, has become a double tribute. Motian, an integral member of Evans’s landmark trio of the early sixties, joined the pianist . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Lizzie Widdicombe: David Burke Kitchen in SoHo.David Burke Kitchen, in the James Hotel, in SoHo, is the place to see David Burke—the man who brought cheesecake lollipop trees to Bloomingdale’s and pupu platters to the Hawaiian Tropic Zone, in Times Square—get on board with the farm-to-table craze. If . . .
  • John Lahr: Kevin Spacey in Shakespeare’s “Richard III.”The most underrated of Shakespeare’s many theatrical gifts—poetic, tragic, festive—is his tabloid mentality. Shakespeare knew the value of the sensational: ghosts, gore, and grievous bodily harm were all grist for his melodramatic mill. His plays were always aimed at two audiences: the court and . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Joan Acocella: Natalia Makarova at “Dance on Camera.”However fiery and proud they may seem onstage, ballet dancers are humble people, at least in the sense that they go back to school every day. On Jan. 27, the “Dance on Camera” festival at the Walter Reade will screen a film, “Makarova: In a Class of . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Goings on About Town: The TheatrePageBreak -->OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. CARRIE MCC Theatre presents a reworking of the 1988 musical, with a book by Lawrence D. Cohen (who adapted Stephen King’s novel for the 1976 De . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Readings and TalksgoatTitle-->“SELECTED SHORTS” Nathan Englander joins Nora Ephron to talk about Englander’s short story “The Twenty-seventh Man,” which is being adapted into a play at Ephron’s suggestion. The actor Michael Stuhlbarg will do the reading. (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th . . .
  • Goings on About Town: On the HorizonTHE THEATRE STAR BRIGHT Feb. 1 F. Murray Abraham plays the title role in “Galileo,” Bertolt Brecht’s 1947 play about the later years of the seventeenth-century physicist, astronomer, and philosopher. Brian Kulick directs for Classic Stage Company. (212-352-3101.) MOVIES FOR ART’S SAKE Feb . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Night LifePageBreak -->ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. B. B. KING BLUES CLUB & GRILL 237 W. 42nd St. (212-997-4144)—Jan. 31: The classically trained guitar virtuoso Uli Jon Roth . . .
  • Goings on About Town: MoviesPageBreak -->OPENING ALBERT NOBBS Rodrigo Garcia directed this drama, set in nineteenth-century Ireland, about a woman (Glenn Close) who pretends to be a man in order to preserve her independence. Co-starring Janet McTeer, Mia Wasikowska, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Opening Jan. 27. (In wide . . .
  • Goings on About Town: DancegoatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET The main attraction of the season, revealed this week, is the company’s evening devoted to Christopher Wheeldon (Jan. 28). A first for N.Y.C.B., the three-part program features an early work (“Polyphonia”), the company première of “DGV . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Classical MusicPageBreak -->OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA This week, the Met offers the final performances of “The Enchanted Island,” a lighter than light Baroque pasticcio with a fresh, faux-Shakespeare text by the writer Jeremy Sams, retrofitted to (wonderful) preëxisting music, operatic and otherwise, by . . .
  • Goings on About Town: ArtPageBreak -->MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini.” Through March 18. | “Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965).” Through April 15. | “Photographic Treasures from the Collection . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Above and BeyondgoatTitle-->“NEW SOUNDS LIVE: SILENT FILMS/LIVE MUSIC” The WNYC radio show and Arts Brookfield present four films by Bill Morrison, accompanied by music. The first, on Jan. 31, is “The Miners’ Hymns,” an homage to mining culture in northeastern England. Like much of . . .
  • David Denby: “Crazy Horse,” “Contraband,” “Haywire” reviews.In “Crazy Horse,” Frederick Wiseman’s documentary about the legendary Paris nude revue, all the women have the same body—tall, with small, high breasts, long waists, long legs, and full, rounded rumps. There’s a definite preference, bordering on fixation, at Le Crazy Horse . . . (Subscription required.)
  • David Denby: “Unfinished Business,” at Anthology Film Archives.Gregory La Cava’s “My Man Godfrey,” with William Powell and Carole Lombard, is one of the best-loved comedies of the thirties, but La Cava did some lesser films that are also great fun. In “Unfinished Business,” from 1941 (screening at Anthology Film Archives . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “Sometimes There Is a Void” review.Born into a prominent South African activist family, Mda fled to Lesotho at the age of fifteen to join his father, a radical lawyer living in exile. He went on to become one of the most celebrated playwrights and novelists of the post-apartheid era. In this long and unfailingly . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “Parallel Stories” review.More than eleven hundred pages long, this epic novel spans fifty years of Hungary’s history, from the start of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nádas chooses to focus on small, quotidian tales, each rendered in almost microscopic detail—an . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Adam Gopnik: Mass incarceration and criminal justice in America.A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the . . .
  • “Jack Holmes & His Friend” review.This story of two young men—one gay, the other straight—who come of age in literary New York in the sixties examines two unrequited passions: Jack’s love for Will, and Will’s literary ambitions, which end abruptly after a review disparages his first novel . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Patricia Marx: Treasure & Bond in SoHo.Virtue shopping comes to SoHo. You can be a giver—and, not to worry, also a taker—at the Nordstrom-owned emporium Treasure & Bond, which donates the entirety of its profits to children’s charities, the selection of which changes every three months. (Proceeds are currently . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Hilton Als: Lady Bunny in “That Ain’t No Lady!,” at Escuelita.In 1985, a performer named Lady Bunny founded Wigstock, in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, and the dream was this: drag artists like Bunny and RuPaul (then relatively unknown) would share the stage with fabulous pop stars such as Deee-Lite and Deborah Harry to promote wigs, glitter . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “The Quality of Mercy” review.This sequel to Unsworth’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Sacred Hunger,” much of which was set on an eighteenth-century slave ship, trades the high seas for the courtroom, where a series of cases bearing on the legal status of black men in British society plays out . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “Perlmann’s Silence” review.At an academic conference in Italy, Philipp Perlmann, a recently widowed linguistics professor, has lost faith in academic work. He contemplates passing off as his own a paper that he’s been translating by a Russian colleague, Vassily Leskov, but Leskov himself arrives unexpectedly, and Perlmann makes panicked plans . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “Haiti” review.8220;There are tons of idiots who have never used their ten fingers for anything, and who wander around constantly repeating, inanely: ‘Haitians are very lazy,’ ” the Haitian writer Louis-Joseph Janvier wrote in 1882, in a long and passionate rejoinder to his nation’s critics . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Books: “A Train in Winter” review.In January, 1943, two hundred and thirty women of the French Resistance, imprisoned under the Vichy regime for offenses ranging from pamphleteering to violent sabotage, were loaded into cattle cars bound for the Birkenau concentration camp, in Poland. Just forty-nine lived to see the end of the war, enduring . . . (Subscription required.)
  • Ariel Levy: Do or Dine in Bed-Stuy.It’s not every day that you find a restaurant with both a Michelin rating and a New York City Sanitation Grade B in the window. But, then, Do or Dine, in Bed-Stuy, is odd and aggressively irreverent in almost every way, from its name, a play on . . .
  • Alex Ross: “The Enchanted Island,” at the Met.8220;The Enchanted Island,” a lavishly zany production now playing at the Met (it will be broadcast in the company’s “Live in HD” series on Jan. 21), revives the concept of the Baroque pastiche opera, with extant scores repurposed to fresh dramatic ends. As Handel . . . (Subscription required.)

New York Times

Times Magazine

  • All Blogs Must Pass"All blogs must pass away." Okay, apologies to the spirit of George Harrison for that one, but it sums up the purpose of today's post — to lay "Looking Around" to rest. I started this blog in early 2007 as a way to get beyond the weekly newsmagazine format I usually work in and to [...]
  • Tim Burton at MoMAThe director Tim Burton doesn't just make enchantingly loony movies like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas. He also makes enchantingly loony paintings and drawings, which he's been scribbling away at since his suitably alienated childhood in Burbank, California. This week the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a big [...]
  • Toyo Ito in Berkeley — No GoThey tell us the Great Recession is in retreat, though it may not feel that way if you're unemployed. Even if it is, on the way out the door it took down a project I was looking forward to. Earlier this week the University of California at Berkeley announced that it was giving up on [...]
  • Jeanne-Claude: 1935-2009We got news this morning of the death of Jeanne-Claude, the artist and creative partner of Christo. They are of course the husband-and-wife team who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin, ran a vast curtain fence for miles across the northern California landscape and created the completely enchanting New York City project called The Gates. She [...]
  • Raymond Carver: Another Kind of MinimalismActually, the writer Raymond Carver never cared for the word "Minimalism" as the way to describe his taut, tight-lipped short stories. But that was the term they came to be known by in the late 1970s and '80s, when he was at the height of his influence in American fiction. In this week's Time I [...]

Boston Globe

ARTINFO

Lexington Hearld Leader

Arts Journal

  • How Iraq's Great Universities Were Destroyed"In just 20 years, then, the Iraqi university system went from being among the best in the Middle East to one of the worst. This extraordinary act of institutional destruction was largely accomplished by American leaders who told us that the US invasion of Iraq would bring modernity, development, and women's rights. Instead, as political scientist Mark Duffield has observed, it has partly de-modernized that country."...
  • Film School-As-Deeply-Seductive-Drug"Film school can be a cruelly Darwinian place, with the push-and-pull of competition and friendship, multiple layers of contest and reward, and a rigid hierarchy in which some write and direct and others find themselves unloading trucks and picking up coffee. Students want to be clever, perfect, special, the best. Competition infuses and informs every aspect of the experience."...
  • The Intensely Interior Philip Glass (Either You Get It Or You Don't)"That time-consuming transfiguration is at the core of the Glass mythology, but drugs work differently on different metabolisms, angels appear only to the elect, and I lack the gift of spinning Glassian tedium into bliss. In fact, I start to get his music at precisely the point where his first acolytes fall away."...
  • How Justice Department Shutdown Of MegaUpload Could Hurt Music"Despite the demise of Napster more than a decade ago, music fans continue to use file-sharing sites to discover and share music. In certain circles, especially more underground and fringe scenes, music blogs and sites are indispensible ways of discovering new artists, as they're mostly ignored by mainstream magazines and websites."...
  • Qatar Pays Record $250 Million For A Painting"The tiny, oil-rich nation of Qatar has purchased a Paul Cézanne painting, The Card Players, for more than $250 million. The deal, in a single stroke, sets the highest price ever paid for a work of art and upends the modern art market."...
  • Piracy Is The New Radio?"Comparing piracy to radio is a smart way of looking at the issue: in the early days of the music business, when live performances and record sales were the main revenue generator for artists and publishers, radio itself was seen as a form of piracy (as sheet music was before that)."...
  • Mixing Rodin And BreakdancingChoreographer Russell Maliphant was moved to create his Rodin Project by his visits to the sculptor's museum in Paris. Yet he realized that his typical fluid style didn't capture the size and weight of Rodin's bronzes. He found a solution to this problem at, of all places, a London street dance festival....
  • Liberté, Egalité, Hostilité - Do America's Political Battles Have Their Roots In 1789?Garry Gutting argues that "we have never gotten over the French Revolution. The revolution introduced the basic liberal idea that government must be fundamentally democratic ... We all, in principle, share in the power to govern ourselves. But this idea led (or, at least, was feared to lead) to a much more radical one: that everyone should have an equal share in power."...
  • Where Philosophy Class Is Mandatory For High Schoolers"A 2008 law requires Brazilian teenagers to study philosophy because it is 'necessary for the exercise of citizenship'." Carlos Fraenkel pays a visit to a class in Salvador....
  • Dorothea Tanning, 101, Last Of The Surrealist PaintersThough her own fame was overshadowed by that of her husband, Max Ernst, she had a successful career in her own right, moving from dreamlike portrayals of the female form to, by the 1950s, more abstract "prism paintings." In her 80s, she found new acclaim as a writer....

smArtHistory


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Modern Kicks

  • my world’s grown tired and sick‏You know, just to show some variety and range.
  • it continuesYou can write me off as white trash.
  • the new breed thingIs this now a blog devoted to Lydia Loveless? Could be, could be.
  • Testing, one, two, three, this is a test.
  • girl troubleI'm not exactly a fan of Dave Hickey, so I've been enjoying the comments here in which he gets roundly criticized, even if it did make me think, "Y'all postin' on a troll video." While I haven't had a chance...
  • can you relate?Apropos of nothing, I was struck by this passage from an interview with Hal Foster (via): OH: Yet I think the problem is raised anew by new social art practices and relational aesthetics, art practices that are still very much...
  • a heartfelt sentimentPerhaps a bit misogynistic, but impossible not to like: We've all been there.
  • recent rotationSeveral months ago a friend at work brought in a compilation of 1970's Philadelphia soul (this one, if I remember correctly.) A lot of it was more than familiar--like listening to my childhood--though none the less welcome for it. The...

Chasing Vincent


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