The New Yorker

Goings On About Town: Venues: Museum of the City of New York ...
Open daily, 10 to 6, and Saturday evenings until 8:30.
Fifth Ave. at 103rd St., New York , N.Y. 10029
212-534-1672
Wyatt Mason: Adam Johnson’s novel of North Korea, “The Orphan Master’s Son.” ... Late in Adam Johnson’s second novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son” (Random House), a husband and wife sit down to dinner in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang with their little son and daughter. The children are telling stories. The son mentions a laborer who . . . (Subscription required.)
T. Coraghessan Boyle: “Los Gigantes.” ... At first they kept us in cages like zoo animals, but that was too depressing. After a while, we began to lose interest in what we’d been brought there to do. We didn’t think about it, or not much, anyway. We were just depressed, that was . . . (Subscription required.)
Steve Coll: U.S. reactions to Iran’s nuclear threat. ... In the State of the Union address of 1954, which Dwight Eisenhower delivered less than a year after he had secretly ordered the C.I.A. to overthrow Tehran’s left-leaning government, he celebrated “the forces of stability and freedom” at work in Iran. In 1980, Jimmy Carter . . .
Sasha Frere-Jones: Jay-Z, at Carnegie Hall. ... On Feb. 6-7, Jay-Z will play Carnegie Hall, becoming the first hip-hop solo headliner. Ticket prices range from five hundred to twenty-five hundred dollars, though profits will go to the United Way of New York City and a scholarship fund Jay-Z created. I do, though, have . . . (Subscription required.)
Philip Schultz: “The Westerns.” ... Once again, Randolph Scott is thinking out loud on TV about the end of freedom, God, mercy, why barbed-wire fences no longer hold back old or new grudges, rabid squatters, the wagonloads of gruelling pilgrim faith in an ever-westward-expanding destiny, while once again I’m up . . . (Subscription required.)
Peter Schjeldahl: Ellsworth Kelly’s Albany studio. ... Ellsworth Kelly, the painter and sculptor of implacably beautiful abstractions, is, except for Jasper Johns, the last hero standing of the mighty American avant-garde that succeeded Abstract Expressionism. But, rather than rest on his laurels, Kelly, now eighty-eight, is reaping more of them. One cloudy morning not long . . . (Subscription required.)
Mark Singer: Stanley Tucci and Tom Rob Smith on German TV. ... Scene 1: Pravda, subterranean SoHo caviar bar, grottoesque, reddish-beige plaster, brown leather upholstery. Seated at small table are Tom Rob Smith, British novelist, author of trilogy of Cold War thrillers, most recently “Agent 6,” and Stanley Tucci, the lovable-enough actor-director. Smith and protagonist, Leo Stepanovich . . . (Subscription required.)
Lizzie Widdicombe: Young Professionals United for Change watch the State of the Union. ... Four years ago, the Young Professionals United for Change—three thousand black banker and lawyer types under the age of forty—held a formal gala in Washington to celebrate Barack Obama’s Inauguration. By contrast, the group’s State of the Union “watch party,” . . . (Subscription required.)
Leslie T. Chang: Zhang Bing, Lao Kang, and China’s workplace novels. ... Most of the officials in Qinglin spend their days playing mah-jongg and getting drunk, but Hou Weidong is determined to make something of himself. He sweeps the work team’s office every day. He organizes villagers to build a new road. Although he is drunk a fair amount . . . (Subscription required.)
John Lahr: Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” Daniel Talbott’s “Yosemite.” ... In 2008, nine years after Margaret Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for her rookie play, “Wit,” she addressed the graduating class of Smith College, her alma mater. She spoke about her lifelong passion for performing, which she called “a physical, breath-based eye-to-eye event.” . . . (Subscription required.)
Jeremy Denk: A classical pianist records Charles Ives’s Concord sonata. ... If you happen to be a classical pianist, you’re bound to feel a certain futility in the face of your stereo. Suppose you decide to play famous piece X. You can find fifty recordings of X, in which fifty august pianists have distilled fifty lifetimes of thought. A . . . (Subscription required.)
Jacob Sager Weinstein: “Before the Movie Begins.” ... Please note that the use of any recording equipment to capture this film is strictly forbidden, including: camcorders, cameras, cell phones, charcoal, ink, paint (oil or water-based), and the human brain. On leaving the theatre, you will be assaulted by baseball-bat-wielding ushers, who will pummel your skull . . .
Ian Parker: Tyler Clementi’s suicide and Dharun Ravi’s trial. ... Dharun Ravi grew up in Plainsboro, New Jersey, in a large, modern house with wide expanses of wood flooring and a swimming pool out back. Assertive and athletic, he used “DHARUNISAWESOME” as a computer password and played on an Ultimate Frisbee team. At the time of . . .
Ian Frazier: Stella D’oro, Private Equity, and American Factories. ... Mike Filippou is a Greek who looks like a Greek. If you imagine the bushy dark-brown mustache labelled “Greek” in the makeup man’s box, Filippou has the very one. It goes east and west under his nose and then turns southward past the corners of . . . (Subscription required.)
Hilton Als: Rachel Dratch’s “Celebrity Autobiography,” at the Triad. ... Rachel Dratch, one of the finest comedic talents going, has the eyes of a woman who can’t believe what just happened really happened, and it might happen again, so she prepares for it with a jittery smile and wide-awake eyes that always end up registering terror, anyway . . . (Subscription required.)
Hannah Goldfield: Nights and Weekends, in Greenpoint. ... There’s a certain type of New York establishment that eludes classification: is it a bar with a kitchen, or a restaurant that takes drinks very seriously? In the end, Nights and Weekends, in Greenpoint, falls squarely in the former category; only at a bar does a waitress tell . . .
Goings on About Town: The Theatre ... PageBreak -->OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. ASSISTANCE Playwrights Horizons presents a new play by Leslye Headland (“Bachelorette”), a satire in which two young assistants to a powerful magnate wonder if their jobs . . .
Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks ... goatTitle-->STRAND BOOK STORE The poet Billy Collins reads from his latest book, “Horoscopes for the Dead.” (Broadway at 12th St. 212-473-1452. Feb. 2 at 7.) “WORDTHEATRE VOICES” The Los Angeles-based nonprofit WordTheatre returns to Manhattan, with the actors Raviv Ullman, Malinda . . .
Goings on About Town: On the Horizon ... THE THEATRE OLD FRIENDS Feb. 8-19 City Center’s “Encores!” series presents lively concert versions of oft-forgotten and cult-favorite musicals. The season begins with Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” from 1981, starring Colin Donnell, Lin-Manuel Miranda . . .
Goings on About Town: Night Life ... PageBreak -->ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. “AMERICAN SONGBOOK” Feb. 1: Keren Ann, a singer-composer-musician who splits her time between Paris, New York, and Tel Aviv . . .
Goings on About Town: Movies ... PageBreak -->OPENING BAD FEVER Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening Feb. 3. (ReRun Gastropub Theatre.) BIG MIRACLE This adventure drama, directed by Ken Kwapis, is based on a true story about a journalist and a Greenpeace activist who work to save a pod of . . .
Goings on About Town: Dance ... goatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET “Russian Seasons” (2006), Alexei Ratmansky’s first ballet for the company, returns to the repertory after an absence of almost four years. Set to a song cycle by Leonid Desyatnikov, the piece is made up of scenes that are loosely based . . .
Goings on About Town: Classical Music ... PageBreak -->OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA In a set of circumstances that evoke the Met of Rudolf Bing more than the era of Peter Gelb, the two sopranos, each with their legions of fans, who shared the title role in last fall’s new production of “ . . .
Goings on About Town: Art ... PageBreak -->MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini.” Through March 18. | “Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965).” Through April 15. | “Photographic Treasures from the Collection . . .
Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond ... goatTitle-->“BRAINWAVE” The Rubin Museum of Art’s annual festival exploring the mind through art, music, and meditation returns for its fifth year. The theme this time around is memory: how the brain creates it and how the subject has been treated throughout history, a particularly . . .
David Orr: “The Chameleon.” ... Alone among the superheroes, He failed to keep his life in balance. Power Man, The Human Shark—they knew To hold their days and nights in counterpoise, Their twin selves divided together, As a coin bears with ease its two faces. Not so The Chameleon. He was Too many . . . (Subscription required.)
Dan Chiasson: Peter Gizzi’s “Threshold Songs,” D. A. Powell’s “Useless Landscape.” ... 8220;Threshold Songs” (Wesleyan), the fifth book by the experimental American poet Peter Gizzi, arrives after the hardest of hard periods, when Gizzi lost three of the people dearest to him: a close friend, his mother, and his brother, the poet Michael Gizzi. The book is dedicated to them . . . (Subscription required.)
Cartoons from the Issue ... A collection of cartoons from the issue, plus this week's Cartoon Caption Contest.
Books: “The Lives of Margaret Fuller” review. ... This psychologically rich biography traces the brief, quixotic life of the leading female figure of the transcendentalist movement. A child prodigy, Fuller was reared by a father who focussed on cultivating her intellect to the detriment of, as he later ruefully admitted, her “female propriety.” Arrogant and forceful . . . (Subscription required.)
Books: “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You” review. ... 8220;Literary criticism is an indispensable stethoscope in the biographer’s bag,” Leibowitz writes, in this sweeping biography of William Carlos Williams, a titan of modernist poetry who also treated patients as a family physician in northern New Jersey. Leibowitz combs the poems for clues to Williams’ . . . (Subscription required.)
Books: “Mr g” review. ... A note at the end of this concise but ambitious novel about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman . . . (Subscription required.)
Books: “Hope: A Tragedy” review. ... What’s the point of living if life ends in pain and fear? This cheerful thought preoccupies Solomon Kugel, a young family man who has recently moved his wife and toddler to a farmhouse in upstate New York. The meticulously absurd tale begins when Kugel climbs up to his . . . (Subscription required.)
Ben McGrath: Greg Gumucio’s lawsuit over Bikram Yoga. ... A yoga virgin—yes, really—phoned Greg Gumucio, the founder of the populist franchise Yoga to the People, the other day, in search of clarity on the question of yoga’s status along the sporting spectrum. That is: to what extent would you describe your favorite yoga . . .
Anthony Lane: “W.E.,” “Albert Nobbs” reviews. ... What drew Madonna to make a film about an ambitious, hard-lacquered American woman who sought to carve out a place in British society through pure steeliness of character we shall, of course, never know. But the result is “W.E.,” which joins the initials of Wallis Simpson (Andrea . . .
Sasha Frere-Jones: Lana Del Rey’s image on “Born to Die.” ... In 2008, Elizabeth Grant, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Lake Placid, recorded an album in Manhattan with the well-known producer David Kahne. It was released digitally in early 2010 as “Lana Del Rey aka Lizzy Grant,” but was pulled offline two months later. This week . . .
Steve Futterman: Paul Motian’s “Further Explorations.” ... With the unexpected death of the drummer Paul Motian, last November, “Further Explorations” (Concord), an album intended to be an homage to the pianist Bill Evans, has become a double tribute. Motian, an integral member of Evans’s landmark trio of the early sixties, joined the pianist . . . (Subscription required.)
Matthew Sweeney: “Booty.” ... Going down the hill in a striped French T-shirt, I met a thrush who was bashing a snail on the road, repeatedly, while cars whizzed past, then, as the road levelled, and the river arrived, I spied a heron, perched on a half-submerged supermarket trolley, just before the . . . (Subscription required.)
John Seabrook: Nolan Bushnell’s anti-aging video games. ... Nolan Bushnell stopped by the office the other day, to play an anti-aging video game. “It’s what I call a ‘looking forward by looking backward’ game,” he said, settling in at the keyboard and loosening up his shoulders. “Meaning that you have . . .
James Surowiecki: How private equity firms like Bain Capital earn profits. ... At this point, the people who run America’s private-equity funds must be ruing the day Mitt Romney decided to run for President. His fellow Republican candidates, of all people, have painted a vivid picture of private-equity firms—including Bain Capital, where he worked for fifteen . . .
Goings on About Town: The Theatre ... PageBreak -->OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. CARRIE MCC Theatre presents a reworking of the 1988 musical, with a book by Lawrence D. Cohen (who adapted Stephen King’s novel for the 1976 De . . .
Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks ... goatTitle-->“SELECTED SHORTS” Nathan Englander joins Nora Ephron to talk about Englander’s short story “The Twenty-seventh Man,” which is being adapted into a play at Ephron’s suggestion. The actor Michael Stuhlbarg will do the reading. (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th . . .
Goings on About Town: Night Life ... PageBreak -->ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. B. B. KING BLUES CLUB & GRILL 237 W. 42nd St. (212-997-4144)—Jan. 31: The classically trained guitar virtuoso Uli Jon Roth . . .
Goings on About Town: Movies ... PageBreak -->OPENING ALBERT NOBBS Rodrigo Garcia directed this drama, set in nineteenth-century Ireland, about a woman (Glenn Close) who pretends to be a man in order to preserve her independence. Co-starring Janet McTeer, Mia Wasikowska, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Opening Jan. 27. (In wide . . .
Goings on About Town: Art ... PageBreak -->MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini.” Through March 18. | “Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965).” Through April 15. | “Photographic Treasures from the Collection . . .
Eric Weinstein: “The View from Atlantis.” ... A tree takes root The night grows feathers & I do not grow feathers I carve my name in the sand A tooth takes root My body comprises satellites very minor electricities Birds scatter when I begin to speak A tree is deciduous Leaves turn and return I am taller . . . (Subscription required.)
David Denby: “Crazy Horse,” “Contraband,” “Haywire” reviews. ... In “Crazy Horse,” Frederick Wiseman’s documentary about the legendary Paris nude revue, all the women have the same body—tall, with small, high breasts, long waists, long legs, and full, rounded rumps. There’s a definite preference, bordering on fixation, at Le Crazy Horse . . . (Subscription required.)
Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review. ... In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)
Alice McDermott: “Someone.” ... On the sidewalk in front of St. Mary Star of the Sea, a Sunday morning in early June, 1937, when Marie was seventeen, Walter Hartnett said, “What’s wrong with your eye?” Their mothers were talking, purses over their arms and hats on their heads. The sunlight . . . (Subscription required.)
“Jack Holmes & His Friend” review. ... This story of two young men—one gay, the other straight—who come of age in literary New York in the sixties examines two unrequited passions: Jack’s love for Will, and Will’s literary ambitions, which end abruptly after a review disparages his first novel . . . (Subscription required.)