Art After the Quake
The New Yorker
Posted on 30 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
In this week’s magazine, Amy Wilentz writes about the upcoming Presidential election in Haiti, where a million people are still homeless or semi-homeless after the January 12th earthquake. The disaster brought destruction but also inspiration: here are some works of art made by Haitian artists since the quake.
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Leo Carey: Má Pêche, in Midtown.
Leo Carey
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
paragraph class="noindent">The name Momofuku—as in David Chang’s epochal East Village restaurant—means “lucky peach” in Japanese. And Má Pêche means not “my peach” in French, as you might suppose, but “mother peach” in Vietnamese . . .
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Goings on About Town: Movies
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
PageBreak --> OPENINGS THE AMERICAN George Clooney stars in this thriller, directed by Anton Corbijn, about a hit man in Italy who is distracted from his mission by romance. Opening Sept. 1. (In wide release.) ETIENNE! A comedy, directed by Jeff Mizushima, about a man whose best friend, a . . .
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Steve Coll: The best way to help Pakistan.
Steve Coll
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Last spring, according to a Pew Research Center poll, eighty-four per cent of Pakistanis were dissatisfied with the way things were going in their country. Inflation, terrorist bombings, and American drone strikes were among the causes of their discontent. Three-quarters disapproved of the job being done by the . . .
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James Surowiecki: The crisis in customer service.
James Surowiecki
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
American workers are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. That’s the clear message of flight attendant Steven Slater’s emergence as a “working-class hero,” after he threw his job away with a tirade against passengers and a . . .
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Sasha Frere-Jones: The delicate art of revivals.
Sasha Frere-Jones
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Let’s say you hear James Brown records as a teen-ager, as Gabriel Roth, the leader of the band Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, did. You may decide that there is no better template for making an entire band play in rhythmic unison, creating motion and a . . .
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Goings on About Town: Night Life
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
PageBreak --> ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. THE ACHERON 57 Waterbury St., Brooklyn (No phone)—Occupying the home of the now defunct Bushwick Music Studios, this raw space opened its doors in . . .
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Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
goatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY UNICYCLE FESTIVAL The city’s début celebration of the one-wheeled begins on Sept. 3, with a ride from Manhattan to Coney Island (in case you didn’t know that long-distance unicycling is a sport—or even possible), demonstrating that . . .
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Jill Lepore: Chronicling the Great Migration.
Jill Lepore
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
In May of 1939, Ralph Ellison, who was twenty-six at the time, asked an old man hanging out in Eddie’s Bar, on St. Nicholas Avenue near 147th Street, “Do you like living in New York City?” The man said: Ahm in New York, but New . . .
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Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
goatTitle-->MCNALLY JACKSON BOOKS A. L. Kennedy reads from her latest collection of short stories, “What Becomes.” (52 Prince St. No tickets necessary. Sept. 6 at 7.) 92ND STREET Y Arianna Huffington discusses her new book about the state of the country, “Third World America.” . . .
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Hilton Als: Rebecca Creskoff plays a pimp in HBO’s “Hung.”
Hilton Als
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
The character of Lenore on HBO’s “Hung”—a sad and humorous fable about a lower-middle-class man at the mercy of everyone else’s idea of masculinity in an economically challenged world—is a pimp who indulges her dogs more readily than . . .
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Robert Wrigley: “I Like the Wind.”
Robert Wrigley
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
We are at or near that approximate line where a stiff breeze becomes or lapses from a considerable wind, and I like it here, the chimney smokes right-angled from west to east but still for brief intact stretches the plush animal tails of their fires. I like how the . . .
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Anthony Lane: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Vampyr,” at BAM.
Anthony Lane
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
A tear slides from the eye of a young woman. In one evening, she has lost both her father and, to judge by the slash on her neck, her immortal soul. Soon, however, she stops weeping, looks up at her innocent sister, and smiles with bared teeth. This blend of . . .
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Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
ART DRAWING POWER Sept. 11-Nov. 18 It’s hard to believe that Gerhard Richter has never had a major drawing show in the U.S. The Drawing Center remedies this with “Lines Which Do Not Exist,” a selection of abstractions in graphite, watercolor, and ink. (212-219-2166.) THE . . .
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Peter J. Boyer: Francis Collins, the geneticist at the center of the renewed stem-cell debate.
Peter J. Boyer
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
When the geneticist Francis Collins was named director of the National Institutes of Health, last summer, he became the public face of American science and the keeper of the world’s deepest biomedical-research-funding purse. He was praised by President Obama and waved through the Senate confirmation process . . .
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Books: “Lyndon B. Johnson.”
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
In this slim but illuminating biography, Peters, the founder of Washington Monthly, combines original reporting with his own recollections of the era to create a resonant portrait of a man of prodigious political abilities, who was driven, but ultimately undone, by his temperamental flaws. Writing in calm, plainspoken prose, Peters . . .
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Goings on About Town: Classical Music
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
PageBreak --> CONCERTS IN TOWN MET SUMMER HD FESTIVAL Sept. 1 at 7:45: To wind down the summer—and stoke interest for the fall season—the Metropolitan Opera presents a series of free opera screenings in Lincoln Center Plaza, which concludes this week. Wednesday’s showing is . . .
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Goings on About Town: Dance
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
goatTitle-->SENS PRODUCTION / “MELT” Noémie Lafrance, who has situated her spectacles in a downtown clock tower, a Lower East Side parking garage, and the dry McCarren Park Pool and atop Frank Gehry’s curvy concert hall at Bard, expands an earlier, simpler piece in another . . .
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Books: “Instead of a Letter.”
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Athill, now ninety-two years old, won admiration here for her recent memoirs “Stet” and “Somewhere Towards the End,” but this book, one of two earlier memoirs that have now been reissued, shows that her talent has been evident for decades. Supple, frank, unafraid of contradictions . . .
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Goings on About Town: Art
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
PageBreak --> MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú.” The twin brothers, who made a splash in the eighties with very large, very distressed-looking photographs, are back—big time—with an . . .
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Cartoons from the Issue
The New Yorker
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
A collection of cartoons from the issue, plus this week's Cartoon Caption Contest.
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Cleopatra Mathis: “Western Conifer Seed Bug.”
Cleopatra Mathis
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
He’d become a house guest, noncommittal and impassive. She tried to see to it he wasn’t disturbed, nothing to trip him up: a book, perhaps, laid down in some rash motion might scare him off an edge, although he had a talent, it seemed, for focussing . . .
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Paul Rudnick: It's Time.
Paul Rudnick
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Are you sick and tired of the search for bogus eternal romance and some imaginary ideal “soul mate”? Are you interested in finding that special someone who’s just sort of O.K. in a dim light? Are you one of the millions of American singles who’ . . .
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Books: “What He's Poised to Do.”
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Infidelity and romantic disconnection pervade the fourteen stories in this brisk book, which ranges from a tale of familial dissolution on a lunar colony in 1989 to a factory that manufactures Karmic Boomerangs in a place called Australindia. Greenman, an editor at this magazine, conjures an infatuated man in 1940 . . .
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Nell Freudenberger: “An Arranged Marriage.”
Nell Freudenberger
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Theirs was the second-to-last house on the road. The road ended in an asphalt circle called a cul-de-sac, and beyond the cul-de-sac was a field of corn. That field had startled Amina when she first arrived—had made her wonder, just for a . . .
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Ben Greenman: Richard Thompson’s “Dream Attic.”
Ben Greenman
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
paragraph class="noindent">Richard Thompson has been turning out literate, moody, spiky albums for four decades, three on his own and a decade before that in partnership with his wife, Linda. There are so many highlights in his catalogue (“Shoot Out the Lights,” “Hand of Kindness,” . . .
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Books: “I Curse the River of Time.”
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
The fall of the Berlin Wall is the backdrop for more intimate collapse in this autumnal novel. It’s November, 1989, and Arvid Jansen, Petterson’s recurring alter ego and antihero, is facing, simultaneously, the disintegration of his fifteen-year marriage and his mother’s diagnosis of . . .
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Michael Schulman: Which eggs are safe to eat?
Michael Schulman
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
8220;How would you like your eggs?” This ordinary question turned fraught during the past two weeks, when a salmonella outbreak, originating on two farms in Iowa, caused the recall of more than half a billion eggs. By last Monday, Margaret Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, was making an unusually . . .
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Ben Greenman: Black Francis, the former Pixies frontman, at Joe’s Pub.
Ben Greenman
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
The former Pixies front man Frank Black—who is, these days, recording once again under his Pixies name, Black Francis—is the Michelle Duggar of alternative rock. During the past seventeen years, he has released more than a dozen studio albums, not to mention numerous singles and EPs . . .
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Alec Wilkinson: The singer Rebecca Pidgeon hits the road.
Alec Wilkinson
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Recently, Rebecca Pidgeon, the actress and songwriter, had an encounter at Kelly’s Logan House, in Wilmington, Delaware, with a young woman named Megan. (She didn’t get Megan’s last name.) A few months earlier, Pidgeon had decided that she wanted her music heard more widely . . .
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Anthony Lane: “Soul Kitchen” and “Centurion.”
Anthony Lane
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Food movies are an acquired taste. I have lost count of all the lip-smackers, the heart-warmers, and the spicy-noodle-slurpers, not to mention such molar-wrecking fables as “Chocolat” and “Like Water for Chocolate.” Few of them endure in the digesting mind longer . . .
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Goings on About Town: The Theatre
newyorker.com
Posted on 29 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
PageBreak --> OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. BOTTOM OF THE WORLD Atlantic Theatre Company presents the première of a play by Lucy Thurber (“Scarcity”), directed by Caitriona McLaughlin, about a young woman dealing with . . .
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Goings on About Town: Art
newyorker.com
Posted on 22 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
PageBreak --> MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú.” Through Oct. 31. | “Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein’s New York Photographs, 1950-1980.” Through Oct. 17. | “Side by Side . . .
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Goings on About Town: Night Life
newyorker.com
Posted on 22 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
PageBreak --> 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)—Aug. 27: A night of timeless reggae with Maxi Priest. CAKE SHOP . . .
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David Denby: “The Gay Divorcee,” at Film Forum.
David Denby
Posted on 22 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
From “The Gay Divorcee” (1934), two visions of the sublime. First: Fred Astaire getting ready to go out. He’s in a dressing gown, which he removes, slinging it behind his back to his butler. Singing all the while, he chooses one tie, rejects it, chooses another . . .
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Books: “Interstate 69.”
newyorker.com
Posted on 22 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
Dellinger’s nimble book chronicles the history of a largely unbuilt highway—if completed, it would stretch from the Canadian to the Mexican border—and tells the stories of the communities that stand to profit or to be imperilled by it. The narrative is sprawling by design . . .
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Vince Aletti: “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today,” at MOMA.
Vince Aletti
Posted on 22 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
If it did nothing more than provide a context for Brancusi’s luminous photographs of the sculptures in his studio, MOMA’s “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today” would be a success. But there are many pleasures in the curator Roxana Marcoci’ . . .
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Goings on About Town: Dance
newyorker.com
Posted on 22 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
goatTitle-->SENS PRODUCTION / “MELT” Noémie Lafrance, who has situated her spectacles inside a downtown clock tower, a Lower East Side parking garage, the dry McCarren Park pool, and atop Frank Gehry’s curves at Bard, expands an earlier, simpler work in an out-of-the . . .
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Yiyun Li: “The Science of Flight.”
Yiyun Li
Posted on 22 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
At lunch, Zichen told her two co workers that she was considering going to a new place for her vacation. Feeling more adventurous this year? Ted said. Since Zichen had begun to work with Henry and Ted, thirteen years earlier, she had taken two weeks off every November to visit . . .
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Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond
newyorker.com
Posted on 22 August 2010 | 10:00 pm
goatTitle-->TUG & BARGE WEEK Two historic vessels, the 1907 tugboat Pegasus and the 1914 Lehigh Valley Barge No. 79 (a.k.a. the Waterfront Museum, a Red Hook, Brooklyn, institution whose captain was once a professional clown and who still knows how to juggle), are on the move this week. They . . .
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