Goings On

Cultural happenings in New York and elsewhere, both online and off.

May 23, 2012

Books Pick: Halftime Entertainment

billy-lynn.jpg

Ben Fountain’s excellent first novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” follows a group of soldiers at a Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving. Having recently survived a shootout in Iraq, they are on the last day of a government-funded media tour and about to return to the front lines. Through the eyes of the titular soldier (nineteen but, in the words of a smitten cheerleader, “an old soul”), Fountain creates a minutely observed portrait of a society with woefully misplaced priorities. A pitch-perfect ear for American talk drives the satire: the members of Bravo Squad speak in an endless stream of vulgarity, and the Texans that perennially surround them talk of “double y’im dees” and “acks of sack-ri-fice.” Lynn’s internal monologue takes in everything from potatoes “with the strangely pleasing texture of leavened mildew” to his stroke-addled father, “whose chief relation to the natural world was that of a carnivore toward his steak.”

May 22, 2012

Music Pick: Jonesing

tj.jpg

In the twilight of his career, Tom Jones, like Johnny Cash before him, is producing a series of sparse covers records that showcase his still-powerful vocals. The last time out, on “Praise and Blame,” he took a stab at songs by Bob Dylan, Billy Joe Shaver, John Lee Hooker, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. On his new record, “Spirit in the Room,” also produced by Ethan Johns, Jones has a slightly more contemporary bent, with recent compositions by Paul Simon (“Love and Blessings”), Tom Waits (“Bad As Me”), and the Low Anthem (“Charlie Darwin”), along with older songs by Leonard Cohen (“Tower of Song”) and Blind Willie Johnson (“Soul of a Man”). The vocals are heartfelt and powerful; the arrangements are unobtrusive; the results are impressive.

May 21, 2012

Movies Pick: Marriage Plot

certified-copy-233.jpg

To try to describe “Certified Copy” (coming to DVD May 22)—the first feature that its director, Abbas Kiarostami, made outside Iran—is to get caught in its self-questioning story. The English opera singer William Shimell plays an art historian who, introducing his new book in Italy, meets an antique dealer (Juliette Binoche) and embarks on a road trip with her that turns into an affair—unless, as it turns out, they were already married to each other and are playing out the backstory to their reunion, or even a counterfactual version of their relationship. The conundrums are as enticing as the romantic fencing, the performances, and the Italian locations. David Denby calls it “a brilliant, endlessly fascinating work,” and adds that “the movie celebrates marriage, which, after all, can be sustained only if it becomes a kind of narrative that a man and a woman create, develop, and vary as they go along.”

May 18, 2012

Art Pick: Smart Phone

dial-a-poem.png

“Any healthy man can go without food for two days—but not without poetry,” wrote Baudelaire. Now, thanks to MOMA, a poem is just a phone call away. In conjunction with the exhibition “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language” (on view through August 27th), the museum has installed John Giorno’s Dial-a-Poem, first conceived in 1969, which lets people access recordings of poets reading their own work—from Allen Ginsberg to Patti Smith—by calling the local New York number 347-POET001. (Dial-a-Poem is free, but your mobile phone fees will apply.) Better yet, visit the show and pick up one of the four black phones installed for that purpose. Out-of-towners averse to long-distance fees can visit the Web site.

May 17, 2012

Digital Pick: Trunk Show

louis-vuitton-trunk.jpg

“Louis Vuitton has a history of making special-order trunks: there was a trunk that transforms into a shower, and an iPod trunk commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld; a British lord had a trunk made for his special rubber ducky,” wrote Lizzie Widdicombe in a 2011 Talk of the Town story about the chef Eric Ripert and his specially commissioned knife trunk. “Not long ago, Ripert said, he’d been summoned to the Vuitton store for a birthday party that Alicia Keys was throwing for her future husband, the hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz. She’d bought him a ‘fantastically magical’ trunk that unfolds into a bed.” The new app “Louis Vuitton: 100 Legendary Trunks,” adopted from the book of the same name, features videos, sound clips, and rare texts and documents that detail the best of Louis Vuitton’s creations from 1854 to now, including trunks owned by Savorgnan de Brazza, Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth II, Jeanne Lanvin, and Takashi Murakami.

May 16, 2012

Music Pick: Shaping Up

SantanaShape_Shifter.jpg

Of all the guitar heroes of the late sixties and early seventies, Carlos Santana has had the best time of it in recent decades: his 1999 album “Supernatural,” which paired him with pop vocalists, was a massive success, and subsequent projects have cemented his reputation as a crossover star while not exactly advancing his reputation as a seminal player. On “Shape Shifter,” though, Santana goes the route previously travelled by artists like Jeff Beck, doing away with almost all vocals and delivering an album of instrumentals. While Beck trafficked in highly layered compositions with electronic effects, Santana tends toward more traditional songs that range from Latin-flavored (“Mr. Szabo,” a tribute to the Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo) to soul (“Never the Same Again”) to hard rock (“Nomad”). All foreground Santana’s legendarily liquid tone and penchant for improvisation. The album doesn’t always succeed, but it will satisfy fans of his playing—and, by extension, fans of the electric guitar—more than any record of recent memory.

May 15, 2012

Books Pick: Mao Factor

The-Little-Red-Guard.jpg

Humor may not be the first thing one expects from a memoir centered on burial rites, but Wenguang Huang's "The Little Red Guard," a lively chronicle of an Maoist-era family and its contraband coffin, inspires as many laughs as it does tears. The book opens in 1973, as the nine-year-old Wenguang tries to reconcile the ubiquitous slogans promoting a superstition-free “new society” with a grandmother who is afraid of ghosts. “Only Chairman Mao and the Communist Party are your closest relatives,” Huang is taught in school while his relatives at home also demand filial piety. The incompatible philosophies of Confucianism and communism, which repeatedly rupture the Huang household, also ravaged China at large. “Breaking an entire country away from long-held traditions practically overnight is a complicated business,” Huang writes. Nowhere was this more evident than in the nation-wide shock at the Great Helmsman’s passing: all good comrades shall die one day, the government preached, but Chairman Mao? Surely, he was immortal.

May 14, 2012

Movies Pick: Fly Boys

chronicle.jpg

The three teen-age boys at the heart of “Chronicle” (coming to DVD May 15th) make a pair of amazing discoveries. First, after visiting a strange underground hideout, they find themselves endowed with telekinetic powers that enable them to push shopping carts and automobiles around with the force of their minds. Then they turn their newfound gifts on themselves and learn to levitate—and, ultimately, to fly. The science-fiction drama, directed by Josh Trank, who co-wrote the story, captures both the exhilaration and the hubris of magical powers and sees both sides as exemplary elements of the adolescent psyche. One of the teens, Andrew (played by Dane DeHaan) videotapes the trio’s adventures, and the faux-home-movie setup has rarely been put to such giddy use. Richard Brody wrote that “when they fly, the camera flies with them, swirling around in the air, capturing the trio in fluid and exhilarating whirligigs, and turning Andrew into the Max Ophüls of the self-documenting adolescent set.”

May 11, 2012

Art Pick: The Whole Story

This week, Andrea K. Scott profiles the artist Sarah Sze, who creates sculptural installations of astonishing intricacy. (Sze will represent the U.S. at the 2013 Venice Biennale.) Sze, Scott writes, “joins things manufactured to help build other things (ladders, levels, winches, extension cords) with hundreds of commonplace items (Q-tips, pushpins, birthday candles, aspirin tablets), creating elaborate compositions that extend from gallery walls, creep into corners, and surge toward ceilings.” The sculptor Richard Serra told Scott that he believes Sze “is changing the potential of sculpture” and he compared the forty-three year-old to the titans of Abstract Expressionism, saying that the experience of seeing her work for the first time was “like seeing Twombly and Pollock in space. There’s a particular sensibility—a braveness of color, a sensitivity for line.” He added, “She creates a relationship of the part to the whole that’s very, very impressive. Here we have a woman who’s figured out a way to make architecture part of the whole.” Watch Sze discuss her current installation at the Mudam museum in Luxembourg—a building designed by I. M. Pei.

May 10, 2012

Digital Pick: Anatomy Lesson

da-vinci_opt.jpg

In 2005, Adam Gopnik wrote that Leonardo da Vinci was “weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it.” He went on to write that the artist’s “constant search for basic, rhyming, organic form meant that when he looked at a heart blossoming into its network of veins he saw, and sketched alongside it, a seed germinating into shoots; studying the curls on a beautiful woman’s head he thought in terms of the swirling motion of a turbulent flow of water.” This union of science and art is at the center of Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy, a new app that features all two hundred and sixty-eight of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings from the notebooks held in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The app includes the catalog text for the exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist,” now on view at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace.

Subscribe to The New Yorker
  • This Week: Links to articles and Web-only features in your inbox every Monday.
  • Cartoons: A weekly note from the New Yorker's cartoon editor.
  • Daily: What's new today on newyorker.com.
  • Receive all the latest fake news from The Borowitz Report.
I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement, and Privacy Policy.