Norman Mailer’s three movies of the nineteen-sixties are marked—or deformed—by his excessive devotion to the art of the actor, which he considered inseparable from improvisation. He made three features, two in 1967 (“Wild 90” and “Beyond the Law”) and one in 1968 (“Maidstone,” which is playing tonight at BAM Cinématek, followed by a panel discussion with Mailer’s son Michael; J. Michael Lennon, the author of the terrific new biography of Mailer, “A Double Life”; and the archivist and critic Michael Chaiken, whose notes to the Criterion set of these three films provide an excellent introduction). Mailer himself is the lead actor in all three of these improvised dramas, which, of course, helps to explain his emphasis.

• “Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace” (1906). Courtesy of Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner KG, Bremen/Berlin.
• “Portrait of Lee Hoetger in Front of Floral Background” (1906). Courtesy Museen Böttcherstraße, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.
• “Reclining Mother with Child” (1906). Courtesy Museen Böttcherstraße, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.
• “Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding Anniversary” (1906). Courtesy Museen Böttcherstraße, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.
• “Still-Life With Milchsatte” (1906). Courtesy Museen Böttcherstraße, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.
• “Old Armenhäuslerin in the Garden” (1907). Courtesy Museen Böttcherstraße, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.
• “Portrait of a Woman with Poppies” (c. 1898). Courtesy Museen Böttcherstraße, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.
• “Boy Under the Birches” (1900). Courtesy Museen Böttcherstraße, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.

Learning about a cult artist—those underappreciated geniuses whose influence on a given art form are not yet widely recognized—is one of life’s great pleasures. I count among such moments the day, in 1984, when my then-girlfriend (now wife) showed me an obscure, out-of-print monograph she had bought, in the late seventies, in Edmonton, Alberta, of the German modernist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). With her bold experiments in subject matter, color, modelling, and brushwork, Modersohn-Becker was among the painters, along with Picasso and Matisse, who created modernism in the first years of the twentieth century.

Halloween, All Souls, the Day of the Dead… Now is the literary season for backward-glancing strolls through the graveyard, and I know of no book in which ghosts play a richer, more haunting role than in H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine.” Of course, Wells’s novella, first published in 1895, isn’t usually viewed as a ghost story—rather, as a pioneering foray into science fiction. Still, when Wells’s unnamed hero, identified only as the Time Traveller, burrows thirty million years into the future, he comes out upon a world where everyone is dead; Wells brought the ghost story to its logical ne plus ultra. And the ghosts themselves? Thirty millions years hence, the human race is so long-extinguished that its spirits haunt us by their prolonged absence, their unbroken inactivity. They fail even to vibrate the air, on an exhausted planet where “the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”

This week’s column is about Tri Angle, a label run by Robin Carolan, an Englishman living in Brooklyn. For several years, the Tri Angle acts have been part of a loose cohort of artists that felt related, as if having similar thoughts at the same time, but very few artists like to be grouped under a specific genre name. Not shockingly, artists think that their impulses and ideas are theirs alone, not the epiphenomenal output of historical processes. What they might cop to is the luck of finding fellow-travellers whose work they admire and compete with (consciously or not). These artists may not agree on basic aesthetic terms—not out loud—but they’ll hang out. History will then scoop them up and bundle them with an organizing name that means not to belittle their work but to simply establish context.

One way to look at these moments is that a clump of musicians all see a patch of history and respond in roughly similar ways, even if they know nothing of each other and have no intention of forming a movement. I will do these artists the favor of coming up with no genre name. (I have a playlist containing most of the music below—it is titled “Ice Bats,” but that’s as far as I’ll go with taxonomies.) What you need to know is that a clutch of artists, mostly British, have responded to the past few years of sound and social context and software advancements and come up with material that is strongly linked. You have about two solid years of music to catch up on; if we’re lucky, this will go on for another year or so. What inevitably happens to break the streak is exposure and money—Evian Christ getting onto a Kanye West record may be the moment these guys get the Toyota commercials, and it might not.

Man, African-American, late twenties, with loud, percussive music audible from earbuds, wearing Yankees T-shirt and Yankees cap. I profile him as “Yankees fan.”

Man, Hispanic, twenties, riding bicycle slowly down street, two medium-sized unmarked bags in metal carrier basket, eyeing brownstone entrance levels for relevant information. I profile him as “delivery man.”

Caucasian couple, mid-thirties, speaking unidentifiable Eastern European language. Woman discreetly checking phone, man taking multiple pictures of well-known, highly popular local landmark. I profile them as “tourists.”

Do you remember the first time you met Darth Vader? If you were lucky, you were about seven years old. It was 1977, and you’d been taken to the theatre. Or it was 1991, and you were on a couch, with the VCR rolling. From that sweet spot of innocence, the original “Star Wars” movies could appear as unimpeachable and monolithic objects of awe and delight. The martial music, the dizzying space shots, Vader’s singular menace—all of it seemed thunked down from on high, more Biblical revelation than fictional invention. And, despite all the discoveries (other movies, better acting, improved C.G.I.) and disappointments (Jar Jar Binks, a warlike Yoda) that would follow, part of that wonder stayed intact.

I just caught Christopher Wheeldon’s “Cinderella,” at the end of San Francisco Ballet’s two-week season at the Koch Theatre. The first thing you want to talk about—forget the story, the steps!—is the sets and costumes, by Julian Crouch, an Englishman now headquartered in Brooklyn. Crouch has been working in opera lately, and that may account for the magnificence of the decors: a stage full of chandeliers, a tree that grows and waves and billows, occupying almost the whole upper stage. Actually, that tree was the work of the great puppeteer Basil Twist, who was brought in for special duty. Twist also designed the carriage that takes Cinderella to the ball. This was just four huge green wheels, drawn by horses, as a wind machine (I guess) lofted Cinderella’s golden train above her and gathered it into a great, glistening cupola—the most amazing sight of the show. But Crouch was responsible for many sights. I especially loved the sixteen Louis XVI-style chairs that the local women sat in as they tried to fit into the fatal shoe and then, once the ladies vacated them, rose on wires into the air, to form a kind of crown over Cinderella’s family’s parlor. I don’t know what this meant—perhaps it was a premonition of the coming triumph—but it was simply wonderful.

Notes from the New Yorker staff on their literary engagements of the week.

To get some perspective on my home town during election season, I’ve been reading “Low Life,” Luc Sante’s history of New York’s lower classes in what he calls the city’s adolescence and early adulthood, 1840 to 1919. Sante is quick to point out that his book is a mythology, “a pool of tales and cautions and ornaments and shibboleths,” not an academic study. Actually, “Low Life” is a hybrid beast, the learning and archive-combing of a scholar dressed in the fabulist’s perfervid prose. Sante’s New York is a city in love with flux, free from the traditions of a Rome or a Paris that might slow its forward charge. To dodge the clogged roads, nurses and clergy pick their way across the tar roofs of flophouses to visit the poor; reformers tear down slums and put in parks, but the city’s squalid pulse beats on. “Hellhole” is a favorite word of Sante’s, used lovingly. His city is full of noise—the rattling of the El train down Second Avenue, the drunken shouts from the pubs lining the Bowery, the snores from the next bunk over in the packed rooming house, the soft voices of the male prostitutes at the Golden Rule Pleasure Club—and full of stink. Those concerned about congestion in Times Square and inadequate bike lanes might do well to note that, at the turn of the last century, horses left 2.5 million pounds of manure on the streets a day, and sixty thousand gallons of piss.

Since Janis Joplin died, in the fall of 1970, her younger siblings, Laura and Michael Joplin, have jointly watched over her estate. “I was twenty-one when she died, and Michael was four years younger than that,” Laura said recently. “We didn’t know anything about the music business.” Their responsibilities include looking over royalty statements (Joplin is big in Argentina and Brazil) and condoning such projects as “A Night with Janis Joplin,” a bio-concert that has just opened on Broadway, starring Mary Bridget Davies, who sings the bejesus out of “Cry Baby” and “Piece of My Heart” and has the unkempt hair to match.