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J U N E 1 , 2 0 1 5
5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Adam Gopnik on
art-market records; an Uber for choppers; a school in
Malibu;
Vin Scelsa signs off; bat-mitzvah games.
ed cAESAR 22 HOUSE OF SECRETS
Questions surrounding an extravagant home.
Paul Rudnick 31 WHO’S HAPPY NOW?
michael sPECTEr 32 EXTREME CITY
Luanda endeavors to become the next Dubai.
BEN TAUB 38 JOURNEY TO JIHAD
How teen-agers are lured into Syria’s war.
william Finnegan 50 OFF DIAMOND HEAD
Lessons learned while surfing in Hawaii.
art spiegelman 59 “NARCISSYPHUS”
THE CRITICS BOOKS
thomas mallon 68 Kevin M. Schultz’s “Buckley and
Mailer.” Dan Chiasson 73 John
Ashbery’s “Breezeway.” 75 Briefly
Noted
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Elizabeth Kolbert 76 Why people want to get to
Mars.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
POEMS Monica Youn 46 “Goldacre”
Mary Ruefle 64 “Inglenook”
Mark Ulriksen COVER “Suiting
Up”
DRAWINGS Bob Eckstein, Emily Flake, Mike Twohy, Tom Chitty, Tom
Cheney, Liana Finck,
Michael Maslin, Julia Suits, Joe Dator, Jack Ziegler, Dan Roe,
Benjamin Schwartz, Drew Panckeri,
Harry Bliss, Jason Adam Katzenstein SPOTS Tibor Kárpáti
2 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015
CONTRIBUTORS ben taub “JOURNEY TO JIHAD” P , a 2015 graduate
of Columbia’s Journalism School, spent the past two summers in a
small town on the Turkish-Syrian border.
ed caesar “HOUSE OF SECRETS” P was named Journalist of
the Year for 2014 by the Foreign Press Association in London. His
first book, “Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon,”
will be published in October.
michael specter “EXTREME CITY” P covers science and
public health for the magazine. “Denialism” is his most recent
book.
dana goodyear THE TALK OF THE TOWN P won a 2015 James
Beard Founda- tion Journalism Award for her article “Élite Meat,”
which appeared in The New
Yorker last November.
monica youn POEM P is the author of the poetry
collections “Ignatz” and the forthcoming “Blackacre.”
william FInnegan “OFF DIAMOND HEAD” P is a staff writer.
His new book, “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life,” comes out in
July.
salman rushdie FICTION P has written twelve novels,
including “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights,” which
will be published in September.
thomas mallon BOOKS P is a novelist, essayist, and
critic and the author of “Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years,”
which is due out in September.
elizabeth kolbert A CRITIC AT LARGE P , a staff writer, won
this year’s Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth
Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
mark ulriksen COVER wrote and illustrated the children’s
book “Dogs Rule Nonchalantly.”
ALSO:
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NEWYORKER.COM
DAILY COMMENT / CULTURAL COMMENT:
VIDEO: New episodes of “The Cartoon
Lounge,” with Bob Mankoff , and
Richard Brody ’s Movie of the Week.
THE SCREENING ROOM: Short films we
love and the stories behind them.
New this month: the Oscar-nominated
short “A Single Life” and the BAFTA
nominee “The Kármán Line.”
join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the
U.S.’s hit-or-miss strategy with regard
to ISIS. Plus, on Out Loud, Joshua
Rothman and Sarah Larson talk with
Amelia Lester and David Haglund about
David Letterman’s retirement and the
future of late-night television.
Plus, the monthly Poetry Podcast,
with Paul Muldoon and Ada Limón.
sought the Pope’s favor. John surren- dered the kingdom of England
to the papacy, and Pope Innocent acknowl- edged the restoration of
the peace. Rec- onciling with the Pope, the King turned the tables
on the barons and persuaded him to annul Magna Carta. Shael Herman
Brookline, Mass. 1
MITCHELL’S CHARACTERS
I read with interest Charles McGrath’s review of Thomas Kunkel’s
biography of Joseph Mitchell (“The People You Meet,” April 27th). I
can attest to the fact that at least one of Mitchell’s sub-
jects was accurately portrayed. When I was thirteen
years old, I was given a copy of “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.” I
read one of the pieces, “Evening with a Gifted Child,” many times.
It dealt with a nine-year-old biracial musical prodigy whose
parents kept her on a strict dietary regimen of raw foods. I
reached out to the subject, Philippa Duke Schuyler, and suggested
that we correspond. We became pen pals. When I went to college, at
Barnard, we con- tinued our friendship, and I attended her piano
concerts. She was unassum- ing and somewhat emotionally guarded.
Eventually, we lost touch, but I later learned that she had
abandoned her mu- sical career, suffered from racial discrim-
ination, and become estranged from her family. While working as a
reporter in Vietnam, in 1967, she died in a heli- copter accident.
She was only thirty-five. Miriam Nelson Brown Sayville,
N.Y.
CORRECTION: “Sense of Self ” (May 11th) misstated where Terrance
Hayes is currently teaching. He is a profes- sor of English at the
University of Pittsburgh.
READING MAGNA CARTA
The central tenet of Jill Lepore’s essay on Magna Carta is
that its importance has been overhyped (“The Rule of His- tory,”
April 20th). But it is not surpris- ing that a thirteenth-century
document from a feudal kingdom doesn’t have a literal counterpart
in American law. What is surprising—and important— is that
some of the ideas in it have re- sounded through the English Civil
War, the English Revolution of 1688, the formation of the
United States, the rise of modern American democracy, the American
Civil War, the fights for racial and gender equality, and on to
today’s battles. Magna Carta contin- ues to play a role in the
demand for meaningful rule of law as opposed to arbitrary and
capricious exercises of power and coercion. To commemorate Magna
Carta’s legal significance is not to deny its role in political
fights. In- deed, the document is a potent reminder that law,
history, and politics are inex- tricably linked in any effort to
achieve ustice for all. Heidi Li Feldman Co-Director, Joint Degree
in Law and Philosophy, Professor of Law, Georgetown
University Washington, D.C.
Magna Carta has hallmarks of a con- stitution, but, as a medieval
docu- ment, the charter attested to King John’s reconciliation with
the Church in Rome. It reflected an ambitious Church bent on
expanding its hegemony by means of an astute political strategy.
The charter acknowledges the power of Pope Innocent III, who
had pro- found influence over England. In 1215, he was perhaps the
only figure in Chris- tendom capable of annulling the char- ter,
for it had stemmed from King John’s friction with the Church. John,
from the beginning of his reign, had scan- dalized the papacy by
seizing Church estates. The Pope tried to recover prop- erties and
curb the King’s excesses, and the barons rebelled. The King, be-
lieving his monarchy was threatened,
THE MAIL
Photograph by Peter Hapak
The writer Dave Malloy and the director Rachel Chavkin have found a
magical wormhole between
hipster Brooklyn and nineteenth-century Russia. In 2013, their
immersive electro-pop musical “Natasha,
Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” based on a swath of “War and
Peace,” had an extended run in a pop-
up supper club in the meatpacking district, complete with caviar
and unsmiling Slavic waitresses. (Malloy
played Pierre.) Their latest musical fantasia, “Preludes,” at
LCT3’s Claire Tow, is set in the febrile mind of
Sergei Rachmaninoff, who visits a hypnotist after the disastrous
première of his first symphony. The cast
includes Gabriel Ebert (who won a Tony for “Matilda the Musical”)
as Rachmaninoff, Eisa Davis (“Passing
Strange”) as his psychiatrist, and Nikki M. James (a Tony winner
for “The Book of Mormon”) as his fiancée.
DANCE | movies
classical music
NIGHT LIFE
ABOVE & BEYOND
FOOD & DRINK
2 N D1 S T3 1 S T3 0 T H2 9 T H2 8 T H2 7 T H
M A Y / J U N E W E D N E S D A Y • T H U R S D A Y • F R I
D A Y • S A T U R D A Y • S U N D A Y • M O N D A Y • T U E S D A Y
2 0 1 5
fifty shades Alexei Ratmansky stages “The Sleeping
Beauty.”
ballet lovers, if woken up in the middle of the night,
would probably admit that they’d like a vacation from at
least one of the “classics.” “Giselle,” with its fluttery-hearted
heroine? “Swan Lake,” with its messy, over-revised score? Actually,
those two are fine by me. The ballet that occasionally gives me a
little pain is the most enthroned of the classics, “The Sleeping
Beauty.” It is set to what most people believe is Tchaikovsky’s
greatest ballet score. It has a king and a queen, a castle and a
dark woods, an evil fairy, grinning nastily, and a good fairy who,
though she cannot countermand the bad fairy’s curses, can introduce
modifications, arrange for second chances, the way God does in the
New Testament. (Many early spectators would have noticed the
connection.) As for the historical importance of “The Sleeping
Beauty,” it is doubtful that any other art work, ever, has
influenced its own field so heavily. “Beauty,” in its original,
1890 production—choreographed by Marius Petipa, the chief ballet
master of the Imperial Theatres—was what converted the young Serge
Diaghilev to classical dance. It was therefore the seed of the
Ballets Russes, the company that revived the dying art of ballet in
Europe in the early twentieth century. In 1921, Diaghilev put on
his own
production of “Beauty,” in London, and that, in turn, was the
foundation of British ballet culture, which for many people in the
West, at least before (also during) Balanchine, was ballet culture
itself.
So “The Sleeping Beauty” is a grand thing, and modern performance
practice may have made it too grand, blaringly grand, or such was
the opinion of Alexei Ratmansky, the artist-in-residence at
American Ballet Theatre, when he set out to mount a new
production for A.B.T., last year. Ratmansky felt that the
original version had more subtlety, more nuance, than we
allow it. Now, this is the sort of thing Ratmansky might be
expected to think. In his own choreography, he is Mr. Nuance: lots
of steps, lots of complexity. But, when it comes to “Beauty,” he
can point to evidence. The ballet was notated, in what is
estimated to be 1903-1905, and Ratmansky spent a month studying the
movement scores. What he found was that Petipa liked degrees
of things: softer knees, and feet that were sometimes half-pointed
rather than fully pointed. His dancers’ extensions never looked
anything like today’s “six-o’clock.” At most, the leg was lifted
ninety degrees. (You never saw under the tutu.) Even the morals had
gradations. These days, the evil fairy is usually electrocuted, or
vaporized, or something, for her sins; in Petipa, she was invited
to the wedding party. Ratmansky restored all this. Wasn’t he
afraid of seeming old-fashioned? “I always said, anything looks
dated or boring, we won’t do it.” In the end, they did
it—Ratmansky’s production premièred in California in March—and to
judge from the reviews nobody found it boring. It opens in New York
on May 29, with performances through June 13.
—Joan Acocella
ILLUSTRATION BY CELINE LOUP
The Rose Adagio, in a new production for American Ballet Theatre,
at the Metropolitan Opera House.
DCE
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015 7
New York City Ballet In the irst program this week, Je- rome
Robbins’s “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz”—a period piece reminiscent
o “West Side Story,” but without the story—is performed alongside
Peter Martins’s swoony but overlong “Morgen” and Balanchine’s
lively “Raymonda Variations,” set to music by Glazunov. Another
program fea- tures Justin Peck’s rip-roaring take on Aaron
Copland’s “Rodeo,” from last season. The third is anchored by
Robbins’s hour-long meditation on Bach, “The Goldberg Variations.”
Then the company launches Balanchine’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,”
teeming with forest fairies brought to life by Mendelssohn’s
entrancing score. •May 27-28 at 7:30 and May 31 at 3:
“Raymonda Variations,” “Morgen,” and “N.Y. Export: Opus
Jazz.” •May 29 at 8: “Funérailles,” “Clearing Dawn,” “Varied
Trio (in Four),” “This Bitter Earth,” and “The Goldberg
Variations.” • May 30 at 2 and 8: “Symphonic Dances,” “Rodeo:
Four Dance Episodes,” and “Mercurial Manoeuvres.” • June
2 at 7:30: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (David H. Koch, Lincoln
Center. 212-496- 0600. Through June 7.)
American Ballet Theatre It’s a big week at A.B.T. On May 29, the
company unveils its brand- new production o “The Sleeping Beauty,”
staged by Alexei Ratmansky and based on notations o the 1890
original. The detailed, rococo sets and costumes, inspired by Léon
Bakst’s designs for the Ballets Russes, are by Richard Hudson. On
May 27, in back-to-back performances o “Giselle,” two o the
company’s longest-serving ballerinas, Paloma Herrera and Xiomara
Reyes, take their leave. Steven McRae, o the Royal Ballet, will
partner the spec- tacular Natalia Osipova in the same ballet the
following evening. •May 26 and May 28 at 7:30 and May 27 at 2
and 7:30: “Giselle.” •May 29 at 7:30 and May 30 at 2 and 8:
“The Sleeping Beauty.” • June 1-2 at 7:30: “La Bayadère.”
(Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center. 212-362-6000. Through
July 4.)
Wendy Whelan / “Restless Creature” A few years ago, Whelan, who
retired from City Ballet last fall, decided to take the reins in
the creation process, hand-picking four choreographers
for an evening o new works. She asked each for a duet, in which she
would partner the choreographer himself. Joshua Beamish’s work is
more formal, Brian Brooks’s more experimental; Alejandro Cerrudo’s
simmers with quiet sensuality; Kyle Abraham’s toys with gender
dynamics. Along the way, we get a complex portrait o a fascinating
dancer. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800.
May 26-31.)
Graham 2 This pre-professional troupe, which consists o top
students from the Martha Graham School, specializes in classics by
its namesake creator. “Diversion o Angels,” “Heretic,” and the
failsafe “Steps in the Street” are on the program. But, like the
main company it feeds into, this group also seeks relevance in
living choreogra- phers. “Turning Point,” a première, is by Blanca
Li, a hyper-eclectic artist whose work can be seen in Almodóvar
ilms and Daft Punk videos, and who in 1981 quit Spain’s rhythmic
gymnastics squad to train at the Graham School. (Martha Graham
Studio Theatre, 55 Bethune St. 212-229-9200. May 28-31.)
La Mama Moves In the second week o its tenth- anniversary season,
the festival oers the première o “Altiplano,” in which Jane Comfort
turns away from the chatty approach o recent years, instead
favoring corporal images and interlocking clusters meant to evoke
desert weather and animal behavior. In “Hyperactive,” four men from
the Irish Modern Dance Theatre roughhouse in the titular fashion.
Jon Kinzel’s “Pro- vision Provision” is much subtler and pared
down, a pencilled-in duet for the choreographer and Edisa Weeks.
(La Mama, 74A E. 4th St. 212-475-7710. May 28-31. Through June
21.)
Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor “Ship o Fools,” a 2011 work by this
Israeli team, is a “No Exit” kind o trio. It involves two men, one
woman, an acoustic guitar, and a blindfold. There’s everyday
movement, spoken dialogue, a sing-along, and a mock funeral.
Humorous high jinks twist into humiliations; laughter is induced as
something to choke on. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. 212-352-
3101. May 29-30.)
Now Playing
Le Amiche In his fourth feature ilm, from 1955, Michelangelo
Antonioni turns a glossy romantic melodrama o modern prosperity
inside out to reveal the essence o modernity itself. Clelia
(Eleonora Rossi Drago) moves to Turin to open a new branch o the
high-fashion boutique that she man- aged in Rome. When Rosetta, the
lighty bourgeoise in the adjoining hotel room, attempts suicide,
Clelia takes her under her wing, joins her circle o friends, and
gets caught up in their frivolous, desperate games o love. What
makes this conventional drama enigmatically original is the
details: the architectural contours o the ilm’s myriad locations
seem to determine the action o the people who traverse them, and
the assortment o portraits, relections, sketches, and eye-catching
clothing have more reality than the empty, miserable characters to
whom they lend identities. Antonioni’s quietly audacious attempt to
convey the inner workings o modern life is also a standard-issue
romance—o exactly the sort that ills his heroines’ minds. In
Italian.— Richard Brody (Film Society o Lincoln Center;
May 29 and May 31.)
Good Kill Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) is a major in the U.S. Air
Force, stationed outside Las Vegas. It’s an unlikely perch for a
combat pilot, especially one with thousands o lying hours to his
credit, but then Tommy, these days, never leaves the ground. He
sits in a metal box and directs unmanned aerial vehicles, or
drones, toward targets on the far side o the world—in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Yemen, and other hot spots. He dislikes the job,
despite his skill at it, and dislikes himsel even more for doing
it; he takes to drink, his wife (January Jones) inds him distant,
and his senior oicer (Bruce Greenwood) continues, against his
better judgment, to argue the case for drone warfare. Andrew
Niccol’s movie is almost Tommy-tight—in- creasingly airless, boxed
in by its own anxieties—and easier to admire, for its solid
construction and its command o tone, than to warm to. But the
scenes o destruction, calmly wrought by remote control, grow ever
more unnerving to the eye and the conscience alike, and Hawke does
a ine job o showing the progress o self-contempt as it eats into
the hero’s habits and into his stricken
face. With Zoë Kravitz.— Anthony Lane (Reviewed in
our issue o 5/18/15.) (In limited release.)
Heaven Knows What The destructive power o heroin—the eects o the
drug itsel and the des- perate eorts to get it—is in evidence
throughout this furious drama o destitute young addicts surviving
on the streets o today’s luxurious Upper West Side. The directors
Josh and Benny Safdie add an element that renders it all the more
toxic: love. Harley (Arielle Holmes) is devoted to Ilya (Caleb
Landry Jones) with a nearly religious fanaticism, despite his
brutal indierence to her suicidal threats. She makes an attempt and
recovers in a psychiatric hospital; upon her release, she takes up
with Mike (Buddy Duress), a motormouthed low- level drug dealer who
provokes Ilya’s violent jealousy. The script, written by Josh
Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, is based on Holmes’s memoir; it’s
illed with astonishing, geographi- cally speciic details o addicts’
daily practical agonies—the struggle for shelter and a place to
shoot up, the habits o theft and begging, their unwelcome patronage
o fast-food restaurants and public libraries, the
emotional deprivation o near-feral subsistence. The Safdies—aided
by the raw intimacy o Sean Price Williams’s camera work—capture
Harley’s panic-stricken rage and futile tenderness, as in a
harrowing macrophotographic shot o her inability to thread a needle
due to tremors.— R.B. (In limited release.)
In the Name of My Daughter The true story o a late-seventies murder
case, which is well-known in France, is a ready-made classic
melodrama. Catherine Deneuve is calmly ferocious as Renée Le Roux,
the elegant widow o a casino owner in Nice who is struggling to
keep the business aloat in the face o predatory competition from a
mob- ster (Jean Corso). Her lonely and socially awkward daughter,
Agnès (Adèle Haenel), returns home to ask for her inheritance,
which is tied up in the casino. There, Agnès gets involved with
Maurice Agnelet (Guillaume Canet), an ambitious but
unappreciated—and married—local attorney who is her mother’s right-
hand man. When Maurice’s drive for power puts him at odds with
Renée, he inluences Agnès to help him work some
behind-the-scenes
VIES
8 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015
mischief—and to get hold o her money. When Agnès disappears,
Maurice is accused o murder. The director, André Téchiné, has a
keen eye for the Balzacian furies behind the cold formalities o
business and the stiling mores o the provincial bourgeoisie. The
movie’s French title, “The Man They Loved Too Much,” suggests its
true focus: Maurice, the Machiavellian outcast who pulls the
strings. The story’s tension slackens when the action extends to
later years, but by that time a dramatic feast has already been
served. In French.— R.B. (In limited release.)
Love at First Fight This drama, directed by Thomas Cailley, is
centered on the rough physicality o two young adults in a cozy
lakeside town in western France. Arnaud (Kévin Azaïs) is a
carpenter who, with his brother (Antoine Laurent), is struggling to
maintain the small construction irm that they inherited from their
father. Madeleine (Adèle Haenel), a disaected college student from
a bourgeois family, is possessed o apocalyptic visions and paranoid
plans for survival. Meeting cute in a wres- tling match at an
Army-recruitment fair, Arnaud and Madeleine begin a brusque
lirtation that intensiies when they take a two-week Army
commando-training course. For a movie about bodily endurance and
rugged adventure, Cailley’s direction is oddly detached—he lets the
script (which he co-wrote with Claude Le Pape) suggest the tough
work and hardly bothers to ilm it. But near the end the long,
schematic setup delivers a remarkable twist: the near-couple’s
theoretical training for survival gets put to a severe practical
test. Here, too, Cailley leaves much o the most interesting action
to the imagination, but the power o his idea
overrides, albeit briely, the thinness o its realization. In
French.— R.B. (In limited release.)
M The police investigation at the heart o Joseph Losey’s 1951
remake o Fritz Lang’s 1931 German classic, about the hunt for a
serial child-killer, relects the McCarthyite inquisitions that
Losey was enduring at the time (and which led to his blacklisting
and exile). Sticking closely to the plot o the original, Losey
turns the story into pungent Americana through his attention to
alluringly grubby Los Angeles locations. Ernest Laszlo’s
cinematography renders the mottled sidewalks and grim façades
eloquent; urgent tracking and crane shots convey the paranoid
pairing o menace and surveillance. David Wayne brings a hectic
pathos to the role o the psychopath at war with his urges, and such
character actors as Howard Da Silva and Raymond Burr lend
streetwise lair to the of- icers o the law and the underworld posse
competing to catch the killer. The Brechtian irony o criminals
delivering punishment is a Berlin import, the Freudian psychology
is an American touch, and the corrosive view o the government is
the kind that could—and did—get a ilmmaker in
trouble.— R.B. (Anthology Film Archives; May 29 and June
1.)
Mad Max: Fury Road The fourth chapter in the saga o Max and the
best, even i you emerge with dented eyeballs. The loner’s role that
belonged to Mel Gibson now passes to Tom Hardy, who, as is only
proper, gets little to say but plenty to do, most o it involving
ire, dust, velocity, and blood. The time is the looming future, the
landscape is dry and stripped o greenery, and, to cap it all, Max
is a prisoner. Once
escaped, he teams up with Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a one-armed
and single-minded truck driver, who is carrying a cargo o young
women— stealing them, in fact, from a masked tyrannical brute named
Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who uses them as breeders.
The feminist slant o the movie comes as a welcome surprise, while
the rampant verve o the action sequences is pretty much what
admirers o George Miller, the director, have been praying for.
Rarely has a ilmmaker seemed less in need o a brake pedal. Luckily,
his sense o humor remains undamaged, and his eye for extravagant
design is as keen as ever; some o the makeup is so drastic that you
can barely distinguish between human lesh and the bodywork o cars.
The director o photography, keeping his composure in the melee, is
John Seale.— A.L. (5/25/15) (In wide release.)
Pickup on South Street Samuel Fuller’s bilious, streetwise drama,
from 1953, begins with what looks like a molestation on a crowded
New York subway train, o a glossy young woman, Candy (Jean Peters),
by a leering young wol (Richard Widmark). But something else oc-
curs: he slips into her handbag and gets away with her wallet—which
happens to contain microilm o a military formula that she’s
delivering to Communist agents. The man, Skip McCoy, is a
well-known pickpocket (or, in the trade, a “cannon”), who is named
to the police by Mo Williams (Thelma Ritter), an aging stool pi-
geon who lives above a tattoo parlor on the Bowery. Candy, who has
a criminal past herself, also consults Mo and traces Skip to his
waterfront bait shack beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, where both o
them use sex as a weapon along with ists and beer bottles. The
police are following
Opening Aloha
Cameron Crowe directed this comic drama, about a military
contractor (Bradley Cooper) who begins a relationship with a pilot
(Emma Stone). Opening May 29. (In wide release.)
Gemma Bovery
Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening May 29. (In
limited release.)
Heaven Knows What
Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening May 29. (In limited
release.)
Results
Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening May 29. (In limited
release.)
San Andreas
An action film, directed by Brad Peyton, about parents (Dwayne
Johnson and Carla Gugino) in search of their daughter (Alexandra
Daddario) after an earthquake. Opening May 29. (In wide
release.)
Uncertain Terms
Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening May 29. (In limited
release.)
Revivals And Festivals
Anthology Film
Archives
“This Is Celluloid: 35mm.” May 29 at 7 and June 1 at 9: “M.” •
May 31 at 9: “Moonfleet” (1955, Fritz Lang). • June 2 at 7:15:
“Taza, Son of Cochise” (1954, Douglas Sirk).
BAM Cinématek
“Black & White ’Scope.” May 29 at 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “The
400 Blows” (1959, François Truffaut). • June 1 at 7 and 9:15: “The
Red and the White.”
Film Forum
In revival. May 29-June 4 (call for showtimes): “Pickup on South
Street.”
Film Society of Lincoln
Center
Films produced by Titanus. May 29 at 4:15 and May 31 at 9: “Le
Amiche.”
movie OF THE WEEK
A video discussion of Peyton
Reed’s “The Break-Up,” from
2006, in our digital edition
and online. E V E
R E T
T B
O T H
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015 9
them, and Candy’s ex (Richard Kiley), himsel a Communist agent, is
being threatened by Party higher-ups. Fuller’s pugnacious direction
and his gutter-up view o city life romanticize both the criminal
code o honor and the jangling paranoia o global plots; his
hard-edged long takes depict underworld cruelty with reportorial
wonder as well as moralistic dread.— R.B. (Film Forum;
May 29-June 4.)
Pitch Perfect 2
Despite the ribald joke that sets the plot in motion, this musical
sequel is even more sanitized and frictionless than the original.
Because o a wardrobe malfunction at a high-proile performance (with
the Obamas in attendance), the Barden Bellas, America’s
collegiate-champion a-cappella group, are banned from domestic
competition—and must, instead, win a world title in order to be
spared dissolution. Meanwhile, with graduation looming, the members
o the group have life choices to make: Beca (Anna Kendrick), the
most musically talented, secretly takes an internship at a
recording studio; Chloe (Brittany Snow), the leader o the pack,
delays facing life after college; Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) can’t
admit that she’s in love. The group’s chemistry is altered by the
arrival o an over-eager freshman (Hailee Steinfeld) just as they’re
preparing to face the existential threat o a swaggering German
troupe. Meanwhile, the bickering commentators, John (John
Michael Higgins) and Gail (Elizabeth Banks, who also directed), oer
wan comic diver- sion. In her feature directorial début, Banks
doesn’t reveal much personality, though her aection for the
performers is evident; they’re a joy to watch, but they have little
to do. Ethnic clichés abound, college comes o as a free sleepaway
camp, and the simple wonders o unaccompanied singing are inlated to
Las Vegas-style bombast.— R.B. (In wide release.)
The Red and the White
In this historical epic, from 1967, the Hungarian director Miklós
Jancsó, a great screen choreog- rapher, deploys his forces on the
battleields o the Russian Revolution. The ilm opens with a bravura
three-minute crane shot as Bolsheviks and Hungarian volunteers are
iercely pursued by the White Army along a hilly riverbank. Some
survive through feral cunning, only to wander into an undeined war
zone o ambushes, arrests, and summary executions, where visual
points o view shift and multiply with the bewildering sudden- ness
o combat. Jancsó organizes the swarming and scattered ighters with
a stupendous, almost unnoticed virtuosity, delineating the chaotic
action in precise, lowing long takes. Though he ilmed in the Soviet
Union with oicial coöperation and duly depicts the tsarists’
haughty contempt for the passionate ragtag partisans o the popular
cause, he stays relentlessly outside his characters’ heads in order
to get past the rhetoric and bring the great forces o history to
life. As the revolutionaries slog through the embattled countryside
without leaders and without refuge, Jancsó’s bold, deiant
judgment emerges silently from the clamor o the bloody
pageant: Bolshevism is not the triumphal fulillment o history but
simply suicide. In Russian and Hungarian.— R.B. (BAM
Cinématek; June 1.)
Results
One o the strangest and strongest o recent roman- tic triangles
develops in the course o this lyrical, fanatically realistic
comedy, written and directed by Andrew Bujalski. His subject is the
overlap o business and pleasure. Kat (Cobie Smulders) is a trainer
at a gym in Austin, Texas, which is owned by Trevor (Guy Pearce),
who is also her occasional
lover. Trevor is a small businessman with a big philosophy; he sees
itness in terms o “physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual”
values, which appeal to Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a new client who’s
out o shape, well-to-do, and socially awkward. Kat be- gins to
train Danny in his palatial but unfurnished home; Danny’s big check
for future sessions will help Trevor expand the gym. But Kat begins
an aair with Danny as well, and their relationship gets in the way
o business. Bujalski pays close attention to money and its power,
seeing a small company as like a ilm production—a matter o comic
drama that runs on personalities. He stages the clashes o
idiosyncratic characters that give the enterprise its life while
observing the ininitesimal details o which that life is made—how to
make new friends, how to hook up cable TV—as well as the ethereally
intimate connections that result.— R.B. (In limited
release.)
Slow West
Whether the début feature from John Maclean was wisely titled is
open to debate. The story certainly ambles along, yet it lasts less
than ninety minutes, and there are times when it quickens into
bursts o compelling activity. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the youthful
Jay, who travels from Scotland (not that you would guess it from
his accent) to America—aiming for Colorado, where his beloved, Rose
(Caren Pistorius), is said to be. Enter Silas (Michael Fassbender),
who knows the country and oers to guide the hapless Jay to his
destination, for cash. Along the way, they are tested by various
incidents, some o which are no more than narrative doodling, bereft
o purpose; others, however, like a gunight in a secluded store,
make more o an impact, as does the climax, set amid ields o
ripe
corn. Maclean reserves the best for last, in a quiet reckoning o
all the human damage that has been left behind. In an uneven cast,
it is Fassbender and Pistorius who stand out—the irst, as sombre as
usual; the second, steady and lethal beyond her
years.— A.L. (5/18/15) (In limited release.)
Uncertain Terms
10 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON PRADES
stormy weather Sam Waterston plays Prospero, at the
Delacorte.
professor Mark Van Doren’s 1939 book, “Shakespeare,” is very
moving, in part because Van Doren is so alive to his subject.
Dedicated to each of Shakespeare’s plays and his poems, Van Doren
is especially fine when he gets to the maestro’s last play, “The
Tempest,” and one of my favorite characters, Caliban. A servant
once mentored by Prospero, Caliban is forsaken by his friend, the
better for the crafty older man—the man with words—to take
over the island that Caliban called home. Caliban says, “This
island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me.
When thou cam’st first, / Thou strok’dst me and made much of me.”
Caliban, writes Van Doren, “has no capacity for abstraction, and
consequently for the rational harmonies of music and love.” But how
you can be rational when you’re bereft?
In “Prospero’s Books,” Peter Greenaway’s riveting 1991 film version
of the play, the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark played
Caliban, and he did it without speaking, miming his disgust
with the rational mind: it’s Prospero’s two-faced reasoning
that got him in trouble in the first place. Clark’s nuanced
performance illustrates the amazing text, narrated in voice-over,
which describes the complicated love that can exist between the
colonized and the colonizer—and the betrayal that lies at the heart
of it.
This summer, the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park
kicks off its fifty-third season with Michael Greif ’s rendition of
“The Tempest” (previews begin May 27), starring Sam Waterston, as
Prospero, and Louis Cancelmi, as Caliban. It’s terrific casting to
choose Waterston for the role of the keeper of books, the greedy
and prophetic elder whose self-creation is his greatest creation.
(It is Waterston’s thirteenth production with the Public.)
For years, the young Waterston was one of our more awkward leading
men, skinny and elegant and troubled, with such pronounced features
and expressive eyes that you could not look away. His Prospero will
no doubt be infused with his characteristic romanticism, enhanced
by the setting—for what could be more appropriate than the
Delacorte’s venerable outdoor space to stage this work that feels
as though it were written under the stars?
—Hilton Als
“The Tempest,” directed by Michael Greif, opens the Shakespeare in
the Park season.
Openings and Previews
An Act of God Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) stars in a
play by David Javerbaum, in which God answers some o life’s eternal
questions. Joe Mantello directs. In previews. Opens May 28. (Studio
54, at 254 W. 54th St. 212-719-1300.)
ANT Fest 2015 The annual showcase for rising theatrical talents
includes Andrew Bancroft’s freestyle-infused evening “Orpheus and
Eurydice Are Fuck- ing in Love,” Lisa Clair’s “What’s YOUR
Problem?: A Deep Space Lounge Act,” and a special edition o
“Showgasm,” John Early’s brash variety show. Opens June 1. (Ars
Nova, 511 W. 54th St. 212-352-3101.)
Composition . . . Master-Pieces . . . Identity The writer-performer
David Green- span returns with this solo piece for Target Margin
Theatre, which draws on two lectures and a play by Gertrude Stein.
In previews. Opens June 1. (Connelly, 220 E. 4th St.
212-352-3101.)
Doctor Faustus Chris Noth stars in Christopher Marlowe’s tale o a
man who sells his soul to the Devil, directed by Andrei Belgrader.
Previews begin June 2. (Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th
St. 866-811-4111.)
Gloria A new play by Branden Jacobs- Jenkins (“An Octoroon”),
directed by Evan Cabnet, follows a group o ambitious editorial
assistants who dream o getting published by the time they’re
thirty. Previews begin May 28. (Vineyard, 108 E. 15th St.
212-353-0303.)
Guards at the Taj Amy Morton directs a new play by Rajiv Joseph
(“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), in which two imperial guards
in seventeenth-century India watch the sun rise on the newly built
Taj Mahal. In previews. (Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St.
866-811-4111.)
the
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015 11
A Human Being Died That Night In Nicholas Wright’s play, based on a
book by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a South African psychologist
inter- rogates the apartheid-era political assassin Eugene de Kock
in his prison cell. Opens May 29. (BAM Fishman Space, 321 Ashland
Pl., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100.)
Preludes A new musical from Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin, the
writer-director team behind “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet
o 1812,” in which the composer Sergei Rachmanino sees a hypnotist
after the ill-fated première o his irst symphony. In previews.
(Claire Tow, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.)
The Qualms Pam MacKinnon directs a new play by Bruce Norris
(“Clybourne Park”), in which a suburban couple attend a
spouse-swapping party that challenges their notions o free love. In
previews. (Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St.
212-279-4200.)
Significant Other The Roundabout stages a new play by Joshua Harmon
(“Bad Jews”), directed by Trip Cullman, about a young gay urbanite
searching for love as his female friends begin to settle down. In
previews. (Laura Pels, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300.)
The Spoils The New Group presents a play writ- ten by and starring
Jesse Eisenberg, about an angry grad-school dropout who tries to
thwart the impending marriage o his grade-school crush. Scott
Elliott directs. In previews. Opens June 2. (Pershing Square
Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)
10 out of 12 Anne Washburn’s new work, di- rected by Les Waters, is
set amid the drudgery and high tension o a technical rehearsal for
a play. In previews. (SoHo Rep, 46 Walker St. 212-352-3101.)
3
Now Playing
Forever Dael Orlandersmith, the author and the performer o this
eighty-minute monologue (directed indulgently, but not
unintelligently, by Neel Keller), is no stranger to chaos and
conlict. When we irst meet her, she is in Paris, at Père Lachaise
Cemetery, where she communes with the artists who inspired her and
who form, for her, a kind o ideal family. It doesn’t take us long
to realize that her will to dramatize is, to a great extent, about
upstaging the irst performer in the family: her mother, Beula. When
the young Orlandersmith turns to Beula for answers about
herself—Why am
I dierent? Why am I bigger than everyone else?—her mother beats
her, or exacerbates her self-doubt with more criticism. Unlike her
daughter, Beula is unable to stand outside her story long enough to
tell it, but Or- landersmith is unable to stand outside hers long
enough to transform it into mystery—into art that will transport an
audience. (Reviewed in our issue o 5/25/15.) (New York Theatre
Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-279-4200. Through May 31.)
The Other Thing Ghost hunting is a perilous pastime, best
approached with a healthy sus- picion about seemingly innocuous
details and incidental passersby. So we learn from Emily Schwend’s
mordant comedy, directed by Lucie Tiberghien, which blends
psychological drama with tales o the paranormal, conjuring a creepy
portrait o a journalist named Kim (Samantha Soule), who has a
serious Jekyll-and-Hyde dilemma. Kim begins reporting on ghost
hunters—guys who investigate spooky barns and haunted attics—but
soon her own phantasms erupt, wreaking havoc on her psychic and
social life. Ghosts serve as rich metaphors here, representing
memories, past selves, and unknowable parts o other people. The
play would be scarier i it explained less and ended sooner, and its
gender critique, emerging late, feels grafted on. But Schwend
writes with adventurous intelligence, lending the play a haunting
and wry beauty. (McGinn/Cazale, 2162 Broadway, at 76th St.
212-246-4422.)
Permission Robert Askins, whose raunchy comedy “Hand to God” is
running on Broadway, seems to have a few recurring motifs: Texas,
devout Christianity, repressed female lust, and what happens when a
perverse element explodes the whole whole- some picture. In “Hand
to God,” it’s a Satanic hand puppet. In this new play, directed by
Alex Timbers for MCC Theatre, it’s Christian Domestic Discipline
(“spanking for Jesus”), in which modern husbands submit their wives
to Bible-approved domination. When the mild-mannered Eric (an
unfocussed Justin Bartha) and Cyn- thia (Elizabeth Reaser) pick up
the practice from their steamy friends Zach and Michelle (Lucas
Near- Verbrugghe and Nicole Lowrance, both excellent), their
marriage picks up, too—the running joke being that C.D.D. is thinly
veiled S. & M. The blasphemies o “Hand to God” mount in giddy
accumulation; here they swim around in circles, never quite landing
comedically. (Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher St.
212-352-3101.)
Tuesdays at Tesco’s Simon Callow gives a thrilling per- formance as
Pauline, who used to be called Paul, as she recounts her weekly
visits to her diicult, distant,
disdainful father, helping with chores around the house and
accompanying him to the local supermarket in her old neighborhood.
Movingly directed by Simon Stokes, Emmanuel Darley’s play was
adapted and translated from the French by Matthew Hurt and Sarah
Vermande. The writing is generally narrative, but it veers o
expansively in some poetic, existentialist directions, with notes o
Beckett and Pinter. The eect is enhanced by Robin Don’s
surrealistic set and Chahine Yavro- yan’s perception-altering
lighting. But the evening is driven by Callow, a powerful actor
giving a master class in characterization, vocal technique, and
movement. Accompanied on- stage by some spiky, atonal music by
Conor Mitchell, Pauline occasionally, startlingly, interrupts her
monologue with an expert dance sequence. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St.
212-279-4200.)
The Way We Get By In the predawn hours, Doug (Thomas Sadoski) wakes
up in a New York apartment, hours after having “insane good”
sex with Beth (Amanda Sey- fried, uncharacteristically abrasive).
He’s awkward and puppyish and a bit o a man-child (“It’s vintage,”
he says o his “Star Wars” T-shirt); she’s sarcastic and
romantically jaded. What seems like a one-night stand between
strangers is revealed, during Neil LaBute’s eighty-ive-minute play,
to be something thornier and stranger. One o LaBute’s best skills
is knowing how to spoon out information at sat- isfying intervals.
The dialogue can be artiicially gabby—you wonder how these two ever
made it to bed, with all their talk about whether it’s Sunday or
Monday—but the play, directed by Leigh Silverman, relaxes into a
sweet, searching little love story. Has LaBute inally gone soft?
(Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)
What I Did Last Summer A. R. Gurney’s 1983 play is set in his
typical milieu—among the buzzing Wasps o Bualo, New York. During
the hot months o 1945, with his father still at war, the
fourteen-year- old Charlie (Noah Galvin) lees the neatly ironed
bosom o his well- to-do family to work odd jobs for Anna, the local
eccentric (Kristine Nielsen). Will he retreat to domes- tic comfort
or take on the tattered mantle o an artist’s life? The acting is
generally ine (Galvin is gifted at adolescent obnoxiousness;
Nielsen is day and melancholic), and the dialogue practiced. The
director Jim Simpson, a longtime Gurney enthu- siast, oers a few
stylistic eccentric- ities: the stage directions appear as
typewritten letters on the backdrop o Michael Yeargan’s set, and a
per- cussionist provides sound eects in the manner o Japanese
drama. But this revival can’t elevate the play beyond the
maddeningly inconse- quential. (Pershing Square Signature Center,
480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529.)
Also Notable
Airline Highway
Night-Time
Jacobs
Public
Museums Short List
Museum of Modern Art
Guggenheim Museum
Whitney Museum
Brooklyn Museum
American Museum of
Natural History
“Life at the Limits: Stories of Amazing Species.” Through Jan.
3.
Museums and Libraries
New York Botanical Garden “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life” In this
luxuriant installation in the institution’s grand old Conservatory,
a long walkway is lanked by jaca- randa, oleander, philodendron,
roses, sunlowers, fuchsia, marigolds, palms, ferns, fruit trees,
and many varieties o cacti and succulents associated with the
Mexican artist and La Casa Azul, her stunning home in Mexico City.
Other plants are depicted in a small exhibition o Kahlo’s
paintings, drawings, and prints, which combines scholarly
integrity, aesthetic air, and a calculated occasion, as i any
should be needed, for a visit to the two hundred and ifty acres o
Eden in the Bronx. This is the irst Kahlo show in New York in more
than a decade—too long, for an artist whose prestige and inluence,
worldwide, have ballooned in that time. Today, she inhabits in-
ternational culture at variable points on a sliding scale between
sainthood and a brand. Through Nov. 1.
SculptureCenter “Erika Verzutti: Swan with Stage” The Brazilian
artist’s witty New York début includes a room o small,
biomorphic sculptures based on pears and breadfruit, but the main
event is a twelve-foot-tall abstracted swan made o Styrofoam,
polyurethane, and ibreglass. In the Instagram-ready installation,
viewers can go face to beak with the bird by climbing steps and
walking onto a platform. In a related series o black-and-white
photographs, a performer serenades another swan sculpture (he also
gnaws it, kisses it, and falls asleep on it). In several shots, the
performer wears a jumpsuit embroidered with the artist’s name, as i
she had deputized him to fall in love with her work: a Pygmalion by
proxy. Through Aug. 3.
3
Galleries—Uptown
Robert Frank At ninety, the great photographer is in an
introspective, reminiscent mood. Interior views o his home in Nova
Scotia are accompanied by pictures taken in Zurich, New York, and
Arizona (where he snapped a pair o glazed doughnuts on a tray, then
printed the image twice) and portraits o friends (Paolo Roversi,
Eugene Richards, Richard Serra) and o his wife, the artist June
Leaf. There are
some recurrent motifs—pictures o pictures, signs, headlines—but,
over all, the mood is desultory. Among the brie texts on the wall,
one sums up Frank’s thoughts on the pictures: “They are quiet /
They demand no attention / They are not empty.” Through June 13.
(Pace/MacGill, 32 E. 57th St. 212-759-7999.)
3
Galleries—Chelsea
Emi Anrakuji The Tokyo-based photographer, who is ifty-two and has
been legally blind since her twenties, exhibits a quietly
sensational series o black-and-white nude self-portraits taken last
year. Whether posing on her bed, in her bathroom, or in a mirror,
she remains faceless; her head is either cropped by the camera or
obscured by a curtain o hair, which parts only once to reveal a
wide-open mouth. The erotic intimation o that image is explored
further in four color photographs in which the lens skims so close
to the body that the subject becomes lesh itself. Through May 30.
(Yoshinaga, 547 W. 27th St. 212-268-7132.)
Rivane Neuenschwander The Brazilian artist’s winning but disjointed
show includes pinhole photographs, wallpaper infused with the scent
o biscuits, a hanging fern, and a video o a parakeet eating seeds
painted with punctuation marks. In some cases, back story helps.
You’d be unlikely to guess that six small abstract paintings on
shelves are de- rived from the covers o bossa-nova records by Chico
Buarque, who left Brazil during the dictatorship. But
Neuenschwander’s inscrutability is also a virtue. Hovering beyond
lan- guage or logic, her intimate works have the lure o a forgotten
secret. Through June 20. (Bonakdar, 521 W. 21st St.
212-414-4144.)
3
Galleries—Downtown
Pam Lins I there is such a thing as “post-Internet” art, this
ambitious, rambunctious, and beautiful show might be its opposite:
scores o glazed-ceramic tabletop sculp- tures about pre-digital
networks. Along a corridor, on shelves lining opposite walls, are
endearingly goofy renditions o push-button phones, resting on U.S.
Postal Service boxes. (The boxes are “lat rate,” a gag about
pictorial versus sculptural objects that runs through the show.) On
one wall, the pieces are in gray scale, with grace notes o red; on
the other, they’re all in color. This sets up a marvellous trick in
the main room, in which tables full o small abstract ceramics
(based on models made in a Constructivist workshop) appear unglazed
as you approach them, but become polychrome when seen from behind.
The conceptual overload is a bit taxing, but, formally, Lins’s show
is a triumph. Through May 31. (Uner, 170 Suolk St.
212-274-0064.)
The domestic marries the architectonic in the intimate still-lifes
of the New York painter Sydney Licht. A show of her
new work (including “Fat Quarters,” above) opens at Kathryn Markel
Fine Arts, in Chelsea, on May 28. C O
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Opera
Opera Lafayette The Francophile company makes a point o unearthing
French operas from the B.C. (before “Carmen”) era. It concludes its
twentieth-anniversary season with “L’Épreuve
Villageoise” (“The Village Trial”), by André Grétry, an early
champion o the comic-opera form who gets little love today compared
to later masters like Oenbach. The director, Nick Olcott, sets the
rustic comedy during a Cajun Mardi Gras in rural Louisiana; Ryan
Brown conducts. (Florence Gould Hall, French Institute Alliance
Française, 55 E. 59th St. 800-982-2787. May 27 at 7:30 and May 28
at 7.)
American Opera Projects: “A Thousand Splendid Suns” Khaled
Hosseini’s follow-up to “The Kite Runner” gets the musical
treatment in a new opera by Sheila Silver. A.O.P. presents scenes
from the opera in progress, which the composer colors with Hindu-
stani ragas and traditional instruments (bansuri and tabla) to
evoke Afghanistan. The workshop’s cast includes the mezzo-soprano
Deanne Meek, who in 2007 created a memorable portrait o Ma Joad in
the première o Ricky Ian Gordon’s “The Grapes o Wrath.” (National
Opera Center, 330 Seventh Ave. operaprojects.org. June 1 at 5 and
7:30.)
3
Orchestras and Choruses
New York Philharmonic The Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck, an
author- itative presence when he made his début, in 2013, returns
with an all-Teutonic program. The performance begins with a spring
in its step, with Johann Strauss II’s Overture to “Die Fledermaus.”
Mozart’s spirited Violin Concerto No. 5 (“Turkish”), performed by
the celebrated virtuoso Augustin Hadelich, is the centerpiece o the
entertainment, before things close in gloomy Romantic grandeur with
Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E Minor. (Avery Fisher Hall.
212-875-5656. May 28 at 7:30, May 29 at 2, and May 30 at 8.)
New Amsterdam Singers Clara Longstreth and her excellent
avocational choir, with a long history o premières behind them, set
out for fresh territory in a program that combines French-language
classics by Poulenc, Hindemith (the exquisite “Six Chansons,” to
poems by Rilke), and Bernstein (the French Choruses from “The
Lark”), along with new and recent pieces by Ben Moore (“Dear Theo,”
settings o letters by Van Gogh), Michael Dellaria, and Eric
Whitacre. (St. Ignatius o Antioch Church, West End Ave. at 87th St.
nasingers.org. May 28 at 8.)
American Symphony Orchestra: “American Variations” The centenary o
the late George Perle, a lauded composer whose music was as much
admired for its eloquence and charm as for its impeccable intel-
lectuality, is the theme for a concert o music by a glorious
generation o late-twentieth-century American masters. Leon Botstein
conducts the orches- tra in two o Perle’s works (including the
impres sive “Transcendental Modulations”) as well as signature
pieces by Copland, Lukas Foss (“Baroque Variations”), and William
Schuman (the iery “New England Triptych”). (Carnegie Hall.
212-247-7800. May 29 at 8.)
Recitals
Ferus Festival The results o VisionIntoArt’s annual “incubation”
period for new projects get some exposure over two crazy days at
Pioneer Works, in Brooklyn. On Friday night, the
composer-performers Hafez Modirzadeh (on alto sax) and Agata Zubel
(a Polish singer whose interests range from Copland to the
avant-garde) join other musicians for an evening o improvisations
and new works; two concerts on Saturday feature, among other
provocations, a pair o works (by Cornelius Dufallo and Mikael
Karlsson, respectively) with texts by the ubiqui- tous Royce
Vavrek, “(The Many Trespasses o) Invisible Men” and “The Diana
Vreeland Opera.” (159 Pioneer St., Red Hook. pioneerworks.org. May
29 at 7 and May 30 at 3 and 5.)
Met Museum Presents The museum, nearing the end o its classical
performance season, presents two events show- casing legends o
crossover creativity. May 29 at 7: The composer and Wilco drummer
Glenn Kotche joins his friends in Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion
in a program that highlights one o the oddest elements in the Met’s
instrument collection—a rock harmonicon, or stone dulci- mer, from
1880. The concert also features two classic works by Steve Reich,
“Music for Pieces o Wood” and “Nagoya Marimbas.” (Fifth Ave. at
82nd St.) •May 30 at 1:30 and 3:30: The wondrously creative
John Zorn has curated a special program o his music for the
Fuentidueña Chapel at the museum’s northern branch, the Cloisters.
It’s headlined by the JACK Quartet, which oers the world première o
“The Remedy o Fortune” (for string quartet) and the New York
première o “Pandora’s Box” (with the soprano Tony Arnold); the
program begins with “The Holy Visions,” a work for female voices.
(Fort Tryon Park.) (212-570-3949.)
Glass Farm Ensemble: “Faint Objects” Music by Swiss composers (in
this case, Luigi Laveglia and Lars Werdenberg) is always featured
on the composer-pianist Yvonne Troxler’s programs with her
long-standing ensemble. But this one, a concert concerned with
matters o time and perspective, also includes such American works
as Cage’s “Ryoanji” (inspired by a rock garden in Kyoto, Japan),
Mary Ellen Childs’s “Faint Object Camera” (named for a device
inside the Hubble Space Telescope), and Paula Matthusen’s “In
Absentia” (a meditation on the power o memory). Assisting are the
clarinettist Eileen Mack and the percussionist Bill Trigg, among
others. (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th St. 212-864-5400. May 29
at 7:30.)
Sonnambula William Lawes (1602-1645), who died in the ser- vice o
his doomed king, Charles I, wrote music for viols that combined
stirring sensuality with commanding technique. The ine young New
York viol group plays his Consort Sets in Five Parts at the Church
o St. Luke in the Fields, with the gambist Joshua Lee and the
organist Avi Stein (o the Juilliard faculty) also on board. (487
Hudson St. sonnambula.org. May 30 at 7.)
cLSical IC
above beyod
World Science Festival With the advent o the Internet, mobile
phones, apps, and robots that can write prose and the prospect o
self-driving cars, science is taking over our lives. This
gathering, an annual aair since 2008, is organized by the string
theorist Brian Greene and the journalist Tracy Day. It features
ifty events in museums, parks, and other venues across all ive
boroughs. Highlights include a celebration o the hundredth
anniversary o Ein- stein’s general theory o relativity, a
stargazing session accompanied by live music, catch-and-release ish
counts, and a daylong science street fair in Washington Square
Park. I those activities don’t sound intel- lectually rigorous
enough, there are also presentations with the physicist and string
theorist Edward Witten;
Readings and Talks
John Waters The director, actor, and writer is in town to discuss
“Carsick,” his 2014 account o hitchhiking from Baltimore to San
Francisco. On May 27 at 12:30, he’s in Bryant Park with the
journalist Matthew Love. (42nd St. between Fifth and Sixth Aves.
bryantpark.org.) Later that day, at 8:30, he visits the Powerhouse
Arena, in Brooklyn, to talk with Mike Sacks, an editor at Vanity
Fair. (37 Main St., Dumbo. powerhousearena.com.)
National Arts Club Mary Norris, a copy editor at this magazine,
talks about her new book, “Between You & Me: Confessions o a
Comma Queen.” (15 Gramercy Park S. 212-475-3424. May 27 at
8.)
NASA’s chie scientist, Ellen Stofan; the paleoanthropologist Lee
Berger; the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg;
and many other leading thinkers. (worldsciencefestival. com. May
27-31.)
Auctions and Antiques
Christie’s devotes two days to Latin- American art (May
27-28), dominated by works by Mexican artists and European exiles
who converged on Mexico during the Second World War, such as
Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Varo’s cheekily titled
“Vampiros Vegetarianos” (1962), depicting three underfed ghouls
sipping fruit through long straws, is one o the highlights, along
with a folkloric scene o washerwomen and buzzards, “Lavanderas con
Zopilotes,” by Diego Rivera. This sale is followed by one
containing sumptuous articles for the home—Isfahan carpets,
gilt-wood chairs, and Sèvres porcelain (June 2). (20 Rockefeller
Plaza, at 49th St. 212-636-2000.) • Impressionist and modern
art works go under the gavel on May 28 at Sotheby’s,
in an auction that abounds in pretty seascapes, pastel still-lifes,
and charm- ing domestic scenes, as well as a stage design by
Maurice Denis for Vincent d’Indy’s opera “La Légende de
Saint-Christophe.” (York Ave. at 72nd St.
212-606-7000.)
Rock and Pop
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated
lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to conrm
engagements.
Robert Cray The B. B. King Blues Club & Grill has been open
since 2000, hosting all manner o classic rock, funk, and soul acts.
But after the recent death o King himsel it’s worth thinking about
the blues acts that populate the club. Cray is one o King’s most
interesting heirs—since he irst started recording, in the early
eighties, he has combined traditional blues guitar, Memphis soul
vocals, and sophisti- cated songwriting that often plays with
unreliable narrators. “Strong Persuader,” from 1986, remains Cray’s
best-known (and best) album, but he’s been consistently compelling
over the years, both as a recording artist and as a live performer.
(237 W. 42nd St. 212-997-4144. June 2.)
NYC Popfest In the late seventies in the U.K., when the punk scene
was dominated by angry men who screamed, indie pop developed as an
alternative way for mild-mannered cardigan-clad boys and girls to
be D.I.Y. Egalitarian, amateurish, childlike, and
deliberately
uncool, indie-pop devotees formed communities around small labels
with names like Sarah Records and Bus Stop. The bands wrote songs
about crushes and parents who fought, and the vibe was warm and
earnest. Their detractors called the movement “twee,” a word that
stuck. This four-day fes- tival, which was founded in 2007, is a
labor o love, without sponsorship or branding, that celebrates the
continued vitality o this underground movement. Dozens o bands are
attending, and highlights include a performance by the eighties
U.K. legends the Loft, who have never before played the
U.S., and rare appearances by Sweden’s Club 8 and the Welsh
band theDarling Buds, who haven’t played New York since 1999
and 1993, respectively. In addition, the documentary “My Secret
World: The Story o Sarah Records” is receiving its New York
première. In true, considerate indie-pop spirit, the festival,
which takes place in Manhattan and Brooklyn, has scheduled the
performances with no overlap, so fans won’t have to miss a thing.
(nycpopfest.org. May 28-31.)
Purity Ring Corin Roddick and Megan James, who make up this duo
from Canada, create electro-pop that is as warm and human as it is
cold and alien, an intoxicating combination that feels boldly
futuristic.
The pair crafted their 2012 début album, “Shrines,” while working
largely in separate cities, with Roddick composing dark, rickety
beats in Montreal and e-mailing them to James across the country in
Halifax, who added visceral lyrics and her ethereal vocals to the
tracks. The act’s second LP, “Another Eternity,” which came out in
February, was made mostly in the same room, and is cleaner and more
poppy than its predecessor, while staying the galactic course.
(Terminal 5, at 610 W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. June 2-3.)
3
Jazz and Standards
Terence Blanchard E-Collective Blanchard, a virtuosic trumpeter and
versatile composer, has never been easy to pin down stylistically,
slipping in and out o the post-bop mainstream for the past four
decades. He recently made yet another left turn by going electric
with this funk-fusion group. Retaining the pianistFabian
Almazan, who has worked with him frequently in the past,
Blanchard bulked up his band with the guitarist Charles
Altura, the electric bassist Donald Ramsey, and the
drummer Oscar Seaton. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St.
212-576-2232. May 27-31.)
George Cables A musician doesn’t have to break new ground to
achieve distinction; a case in point is the pianist Cables, whose
alert and ever-swinging play- ing has enhanced the bands o such
heavyweights as Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper (who dubbed Cables
“Mr. Beautiful”). Fronting his own trio, as he did on the recent
album
“Icons & Inluences,” Cables delivers mainstream satisfaction in
an elegant package. For this run, he’s joined by Essiet Okon
Essiet, on bass, and Victor Lewis, on drums. (Village
Vanguard, 178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. 212-255-4037. May 26-May
31.)
Mark Dresser A stalwart o the jazz avant-garde on both coasts since
the seventies, the bassist Dresser does whatever it takes to
achieve his musical ends, at times pummelling the strings and body
o his instrument to generate arresting tones. Among the players
joining this audacious improviser and composer are the
trombonists Roswell Rudd and Ray Anderson and the
saxophonist Ned Rothenberg, as well as the lauded ensembles
Trio M, with the pianist Myra Melford, and
C/D/E, with the saxophonist Marty Ehrlich and the drummer
Andrew Cyrille. (The Stone, Avenue C at 2nd St.
thestonenyc.com. May 26-31.)
“Bill Frisell: Up & Down the Mississippi” The guitarist
Frisell, an understated visionary, concludes his “Roots o
Americana” explorations at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Bringing
together the saxophonist Greg Osby, the cornettist Ron
Miles, the pianist Craig Taborn, and the drummer Kenny
Wollesen, Frisell tackles the musical idioms o the nation’s
heartland—this concert is subtitled “Traveling Highway 61.” Expect
the blues, folk, jazz, and gospel—respectfully yet radically
transformed in the inimitable Frisell manner—to each make an
appearance. (Appel Room, Broadway at 60th St. 212-721-6500. May
29-30.)
IGHT LFE
Tables for Two
BAR TAB The happiest hour
121 W. 10th St. (212-243-2827) It’s hard to imagine how people will
describe mid-century chic post-“Mad Men,” or to guess whether New
York’s virulent case of retro fever will clear up now that the
final final credits have rolled. But at the Happiest Hour, amid
palm-tree wallpaper and a flamboyance of flamingo tchotchkes, you
can still guzzle mai tais and hear jokes about Don Draper on
vacation. The bar is a sort of baby Bungalow 8, or, as one patron
described it, a place for “young people skewing old and old people
skewing young.” When someone requested a What the Doctor Ordered
(sarsaparilla, vanilla, wintergreen, soda, booze) a bartender with
a moony surfer vibe explained that it could be made with rye, rum,
or Scotch. (There are seven pick-your-liquor cocktails; you can put
vodka in anything.) The rye would make it “pretty Old Westy,” he
said; the Scotch, “pretty cool.” The rum made it taste like a
mind-bending root beer. A waitress in a mint-green mini- uniform
deemed the slushy du jour, which contained cognac, gin, rum, and
orange juice, “kinda citrusy, definitely alcoholic.” As “Let’s Get
It On” played, gorgeous cheeseburgers were ferried to a group of
lady friends. One said, “I think I R.S.V.P.’d when I got the
save-the-date, but who knows?” Another added, wistfully, “I thought
you were talking about bread ,” and somewhere in syndication
Betty Draper rolled her eyes.
—Emma Allen
’ about the idea that a restaurant in Paris run by a bunch of
Americans is elevating modern French cooking. That place, Spring,
is known for its precisely composed plates, which, even as they toy
with ashes and foams, skirt fuss. Now a chef who ran its kitchen,
Daniel Eddy, has come home to his native New York. At Rebelle, on
the Lower East Side, Eddy has, in a very short time, become a flag
bearer for the newly formal strain of downtown dining. Rebelle is
one of those places that regard the wine with as much seriousness
as the food, with a list that verges on a tome, and a sommelier
eager to show off the funkier corners of his cellar. The waiter,
meanwhile, is more focussed, and asks that each diner pick one dish
from each of the courses. Stern, sure—but also a source of relief,
a welcome bit of bossiness for diners accustomed to juggling small
plates that arrive on the kitchen’s idiosyncratic schedule.
So, four courses, fifteen hundred wines on offer, and food that
looks like it involves tweezers but also tastes good. Much of the
menu involves American tweaks to Gallic classics: fried shallots on
a lamb tartare haven’t been put to such good use since last
Thanksgiving’s green-bean casserole, and the creamy lobster
sauce on sweetbreads evokes a New England chowder. A first course
of fluke and lemon sounds familiar, but then you taste the brown
butter and sherry and it ’s new. What’s best about Rebelle is that
it is contemporary but not trendy. There’s a vegetable in quotation
marks, and it’s not gimmicky: a velvety, rich “beet” bourguignon,
better suited to May in New York than its beefy brethren. The
cherry clafoutis is to share, a spontaneous act of generosity from
the kitchen, hearty and delicate at the same time. It wears a
jaunty hat of Chantilly cream. By this point, there has been a lot
of wine. The experience is gouty but elegant, and, tonight, the
Bowery is our Boulevard Saint-Germain.
—Amelia Lester I L
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PHOTOGRAPH BY LANDON NORDEMAN
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
ART AND MONEY
The news that, in a week of contemporary-art auctions that
saw more than a billion dollars’ worth of art sold,
the record for the price of a single work sold at auction had once
again been broken—this time, with a hundred and sev -
enty-nine million dollars spent on a so-so Picasso, from his
just-O.K. later period—couldn’t help sending some observ-
ers, with what is technically called hollow laughter, back to 1980
and the conclusion of Robert Hughes’s great synoptic history of
modern art, “The Shock of the New.” There Hughes wondered at
how a “spiralling market” had made for “a bru- talized culture of
unfulfillable desire,” producing auction prices that had seen “a
mediocre Picasso from 1923” sell for three million dollars.
Yesterday’s outrage becomes yesterday’s bar- gain, as the price
spiral extends, upward and outward, with no end in sight. Two
arguments arise from such events: one mostly moral,
the other largely legal. The moral issue is about what rising
prices can do to our feelings about pictures. For good or ill, some
idea of money has always been constitutive to our idea of art.
Whatever Phidias or Praxiteles did it for, it wasn’t the
naches. The intertwining of art and money has even been part
of the positive charac- ter of the modern age, when artists fought
free of princely and church commissions, and began to paint
pictures intended for sale in a free market of collectors. What
would a sane, well-ordered art market look like? What is a
so-so Picasso really worth? Who knows? Markets are designed
to make their own rationality. Where peo- ple put their cash
reflects what they think and desire. That is why we have
auctions.
At the beginning of the twentieth cen- tury, as S. N. Behrman
documented in these pages, in his famous Profile of the art dealer
Joseph Duveen, the same kind of inflationary bubble afflicted the
world of Old Master art. The most striking thing about the current
craze is that the Old
Masters are among the least affected. The rising tide of money has
elevated the resale value of contemporary art and the work of
living artists sometimes close to the level of that of the
distinguished dead—though, like the dead, they don’t make money
from the resale. And so a movement has got under way, led by
Jerrold Nadler, who represents a chunk of this city in Congress, to
give artists and their estates a roy- alty, capped at thirty-five
thousand dollars, when their work is resold at a large auction
house. It’s a complex issue. Copy- right law is called copyright
law because it is meant to be concerned with the problem of copies.
Since books and re- cords can be copied freely (as,
indeed, they are, online), we impose a royalty on the copyist in
order to insure that the originator isn’t cheated for his labor.
The deal that visual art - ists typically make with their buyers is
different: the artist sells the original and reaps the benefit. The
logic here is that if the owner of a Jeff Koons sells it at auction
for a profit, that will be reflected in the next Koons that Jeff
Koons makes; the “royalty” that he reaps is the increase in the
value of his next work of art, sold to the next individual
buyer.
Yet the idea of paying royalties to art- ists probably still
resonates emotionally with most of us. That’s because what
dis- tinguishes a work of visual art is not merely that it passes
through many hands, in- creasing or losing value as it does, but
that it is made by a singular hand (or, at any rate, comes from a
singular vision), whose claim on it lingers, even after it changes
owners. A work by Chuck Close can be a wall decoration, an
investment, a leg- acy, and a tax deduction, but, before it is any
of these, it is, and remains, a Chuck Close. That’s why the French
doctrine of “moral right,” which holds that an artist has the right
to guarantee her work’s in- tegrity even when she no longer owns
it, seems to us both moral and right: if you possess an artist’s
painting, you can’t
deface I L
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UP AND AWAY
As Memorial Day approached, Hamp- tons residents girded
themselves
for seasonal headaches: traffic jams, guys in tank tops, the
Kardashians. For the next few weeks, at least, another irritant
will remain: helicopter noise. The East Hampton Airport, long
a haven for dis- creet private planes, recently imposed
restrictions on “noisy” aircraft, which avi- ation interests have
sued to block. Last week, a judge delayed ruling on the mat-
ter until June. Much of the controversy revolves around new air
services such as Blade, which allows people to crowd- source
helicopter flights.
Blade works like Uber. You down- load an app, and when you find
yourself needing a chopper you press a button to launch a charter
flight, splitting the fare with other passengers. The system has
brought the cost of helicopter travel from around thirty-five
hundred dol- lars—C.E.O. territory—to six hundred dollars for a
one-way forty-minute trip to or from East Hampton. Blade has been
downloaded by twenty thousand users, and it advertises with slogans
like “Beat your boss to work!” Locals hate it.
Patricia Currie, a consultant, lives in Sag Harbor, close to the
airport’s flight path. “It’s like the apocalypse is descending on
top of your house,” she said. “It’s an ill bird that fouls its
nest. And that’s what’s happening here. These people are
coming out to Paradise. And then they’ll foul the nest and leave.”
With that in mind, the app was
downloaded, and a trip was booked to East Hampton, departing from
the he- liport at Thirtieth Street and the Hud- son River. It was a
gray day, the Thurs- day before the long weekend. The parking lot
teemed with limos. Beside it were two double-wide trailers: one
tan, with dingy blue sofas—a waiting room for the grandees who
charter their own helicopters—and the other black, its interior as
glossy as a night club’s, with a purple-lit cocktail bar.
This was the Blade lounge. Inside, “Message in a Bottle” played on
a sound system, and two “customer experience” specialists— blond
women in tight black T-shirts— handed out free drinks.
At one-thirty, a group of men arrived. They were taking a
Bounce—a Blade helicopter to J.F.K., for seven hundred dollars—en
route to a bachelor party in Prague. The blond women handed out
vodka-and-sodas in plastic sippy cups. (Before flying, Blade
passengers turn their drinks over to the pilot, who then “serves”
the drinks back to them on board, in deference to F.A.A.
regulations.)
The party guys posed for pictures on the tarmac. A man at the
bar watched them through the window. “Taking a picture before
you get onto a chopper or a plane is called Bon Jovi style,” he
said, explaining that the band routinely did this. He wore a
cashmere sweater and sunglasses, and was on his way to East
Hampton. This was his first Blade ride, he said, but not his first
chopper. “I’ve got noise-cancel- ling headphones,” he said.
Another passenger arrived, a blond woman, also in cashmere.
“Hello. I’m Marcy,” she said. She is a Blade junkie. “It’s so
convenient,” she said, explaining that she is an “angel investor in
tech startups.” She added, “I’m fortunate
it or mutilate it or alter it without the artist ’s consent. Essen-
tially, what artists are asking for, through Nadler’s bill, is lit-
tle more than the courtesy of a tip. The counter-argument is that a
good chef is rewarded not with tips but with a better job in
a richer kitchen, but our moral intuition tells us that he deserves
one, especially if his dish is still mysteriously de- licious years
after he first served it.
In some ways, a mediocre Picasso that sells for three mil- lion
dollars is no more or less shocking than one that sells for nearly
two hundred million, but the increase suggests something more than
the inflation of time. It suggests the intrusion of oligarchy—the
ever-greater gap, hard to imag- ine even thirty years ago, between
people who have the money to buy art, and the human values that it
frames, and the rest of us. Neil Irwin, in the Times , by
factoring in inflation and a metric for how much of their worth
people are willing to spend, calculated that the number of those
who “could eas- ily afford to pay $179 million for a Picasso has
increased more than fourfold since the painting was last on the
market”—in 1997. It seems to be not inequality alone but also that
other four-star economic force, globalization, that drives the
art
market now. More wealth may be in more countries, but it remains in
few hands, and there are as many shoppers abroad as there are on
Park Avenue or in Beverly Hills. Their money is chasing the same
brand-name art goods, and there are only so many Picassos.
Pressed to an extreme, inequities, both visible and sym- bolic,
become a source of social outrage even if they are no worse
than older inequities. Paintings matter to us as visual symbols of
order and balance, of creative energy and innova- tion, so can we
be surprised that seeing works of art with- drawn to the top of the
oligarchic tower offends our moral sense? Even mediocre Picassos
derive from a modern belief that a liberal civilization can produce
social space for origi- nality, for self-expression and unhindered
invention. There is something admirable about a society whose
highest values in- clude such works of daring and imagination. And
there is something disturbing about one in which there seems to be
so little imagination left to find ways in which democratic
horizons of human possibility that such art once symbolized can
still be shared. For the time being, at least let’s tip the
chef.
—Adam Gopnik
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015 19
enough to be in Uber,” and rapped her forehead with her knuckles.
Marcy and the man introduced themselves and or- dered sippy cups of
rosé. They took pic- tures of the drinks with their phones and
posted them to an app called Wine ’n Dine. “It’s an Instagram just
for food,” the man explained. “It’s stupid, but it’s great.”
A roar of rotor blades announced that the chopper had arrived. Two
more passengers showed up, just in time: buff men in baseball caps,
carrying a fluffy dog exactly as blond as Marcy. The dog was named
Paddington. The men were married, and their hats adver- tised
each other’s business: Jon’s hat read “BARRY’S BOOTCAMP,” where
Joey is a trainer. Joey’s had the logo for Jon’s L.A. restaurant.
This was their first Blade trip, a treat for Jon’s birthday.
The passengers posed for pictures in
front of the helicopter, except for the man in sunglasses, who
muttered, “Bon Jovi style,” and climbed in back. The pilot
redistributed the drinks. “Cheers!” everyone said, and the sound of
clink- ing plastic was drowned out by the whirr of the blades.
The helicopter floated up the West
Side, making a right over Central Park. Marcy took pictures and
posted them to Instagram, with hashtags like #fly- blade and
#flygirl. She aimed her phone at Paddington, and Joey lifted him up
for a better angle. “He has his own Face- book page,” Jon said.
The chopper glided along the North
Shore of Long Island, Gatsby country, and the passengers grew
quiet. “I’ve seen people sleep on this thing,” Marcy said. She
reflected on her Blade trips: “You meet new friends. The crowd is
all different. It’s aspirational.” Asked about the noise
complaints, she said that she has a house in Sag Harbor and has
never been bothered by choppers. She said, “When I see a
helicopter, I think it’s cool.”
After thirty minutes, the chopper sailed over Gardiners Bay and
cruised toward East Hampton. Marcy took out her phone again. “Hey,
guys, I just or- dered an Uber!” she said, and the men cheered. The
helicopter made its shud- dering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups
spilled. Marcy said, “Wow! I love this part!” The pilot yelled,
“Touchdown!”
—Lizzie Widdicombe
MALIBU POSTCARD
D.I.Y. SCHOOL
“Hey, baby, come over here,” a tall, thin woman, dressed all in
white,
standing at the mouth of a shipping con- tainer, called out. “Come
check this thing out. This is the Wunderkammer . This is our
natural-history museum.” The woman was Suzy Amis Cameron, a
for- mer actress who is now an environmen- tal activist married to
the director James Cameron. He was “baby.” It was late af- ternoon,
and they were visiting the cam- pus of MUSE, a school in Malibu
Can- yon, California, that Amis Cameron founded with her
sister, Rebecca, in 2006. That evening was the school
fund-raiser.
A rusted-metal skeleton of a tricer- atops sat on the roof of the
museum; out front was a submersible orange robot that appeared in
Cameron’s “Titanic.” Inside the narrow space, Cameron in- spected
shelves full of artifacts the stu- dents had found and made: Día de
los Muertos skulls, fossilized trilobites. Amis Cameron picked up a
tiny mandible with forbidding teeth. “A sabre-tooth kitten?”
her husband asked. “Me-ow.”
MUSE, which has a hundred and for- ty-six students from Pre-K to
twelfth grade, is a radically sustainable school devoted to
hands-on learning. The lower-
school campus has organic garden beds and a large “maker’s space.”
The middle and upper schools occupy a building whose previous
tenant was a school started by the actor Will Smith. “They said it
wasn’t a Scientology school, but we think it was,” Rebecca
Amis said.
Jeff King, the head of the school and the husband of Rebecca
Amis, says the goal is to nurture autonomous and innovative
students. All students follow their “passions”: Grow eighty pounds
of lettuce! Make a scale model of a tennis court! Build a pinball
machine! “If I had a young Jim Cameron at our school, we
would be keeping up with him,” King said.
MUSE does, in fact, have three young Camerons: Rose, Quinn,
and Claire. Quinn, who is eleven, built a motor- cycle as a school
project. “There’s no bet- ter way to learn about a broad range of
subjects than to build a vehicle,” Cam- eron said. “At culmination,
he rode the motorcycle around here and did a cou- ple of jumps.”
Several years ago, Cam- eron, who is also an explorer, designed a
submarine, equ